The Pants Project by Cat Clarke

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this is based on an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I really wanted to like this novel and rate it positively, because this genre is under-served and is nuanced with color and hue. These stories need to be told, but this one was so larded with flimsy black & white caricatures that ti could barely move without falling over itself, and it became impossible for me to continue reading it. I made it about halfway through and I could not bring myself to read on. I think middle graders need better and can handle a much more grown-up story than is presented here, and LGBTQIA deserves to be served better than a blue plate special.

The story is of Olivia, who insists upon being called Liv because for some considerable time she's felt like she's a boy, and not a girl. She's starting middle school and is offended by the fact that girls are not allowed to wear pants, but must wear skirts, and she rebels against it - hence the title. I found this to be unbelievable in a school that was purportedly as good and progressive as this one was supposed to be. It would have been far more rebellious had the main character been mtf transgender and wanted to wear a skirt, as The new Statesman pointed out back in March this year.

Liv had an important story to tell, but it was buried under the weight of caricature, cliché, and trope. The school is not populated with real students and teachers, but with cardboard stand-ins. There's the trope cool guy who befriends Liv; there's the caricature of a female school bully who was so far beyond belief as to be a joke. Not one of the teachers reins her in (once - it happened once in the half I read), which is absurd. The school principal is quite accurately described by the term "sexist pig." I find it incredible that he would be where he is and not one teacher has a problem with it. This is the twenty-teens not the 1950's.

The clichés run outside of school, too. Liv has to have two moms, one named Mom and the other named Mamma. Mamma is an Italian stereotype. The family dog not only has a pretentious name (Garibaldi) but also has three legs. In this brand of story, the moms will run either a bookstore or a delicatessen, and here it was the latter. I kept waiting to hear about the kitchen sink, because I knew that had to be in there somewhere.

This message is important, but here it was cheapened and ridiculed by the story and it deserved to thrive in a much more realistic milieu than ever it had here. I cannot in good faith recommend this.

Under the Ashes by Cindy Rankin

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was an amazing story about Elizabeth. Or is it LittleBeth? No, I think it’s just Beth. Anyway, she’s troublesome and then some, and she gets sent off to her maiden Aunt in San Francisco to become “refined”. She resents this with all her eleven-year old might, but she’s resigned to it. That is, she’s resigned to going. She’s not about to become refined if she can help it. There’s only one problem: this is San Francisco in mid-April 1906 and a couple of days away is a massive earthquake in which some three thousand people will die and eighty percent of this city of nearly half a million people will be destroyed. Severe damage and death also occurred outside of the SF metro area, too. The path of the Salinas River into the Pacific was diverted by six miles!

I had a hard time getting into this for a couple of chapters, but then it was like something clicked and I was completely on board. I don’t know what my problem was with the beginning. Maybe it’s my allergic reaction to first person PoV novels. I normally cannot stand them, and I can understand even less why authors are so OCD over them. I try to avoid them like the plague, but since none of these novels (except my own just published!) actually carry a mental health warning sticker on the cover, it’s hard to know what voice the novel is in until you request it and get to reading it.

This one, as it happens, turned out to be readable and the protagonist didn’t feel to me like she was self-obsessed or arrogantly demanding we look at her all the time. She has a way of deflecting attention from herself to what’s going on around her, and this was why, I think, the novel really opened up as it progressed to the train, and thereby to ‘Frisco.

The author made me feel like I was going through this with Beth: struggling to understand what was happening that morning as the world came literally crashing down around her. I felt what she felt, and I saw the eyesore. I felt the heat from the appalling, raging fires, and I smelled the smells. I felt her fear of losing her aunt even as she had such a prickly relationship with her. The writing is remarkable; it’s smart enough for an adult to appreciate, but juvenile enough for a kid Beth’s age to read, and to enjoy and engage with.

If I had a complaint it would be the usual one I have with children’s historical novels (and not a few adult ones for that matter, particularly time-travel ones) which is that of coopting historical figures and having them take part in the story. In this case it was Enrico Caruso - who was actually in SF when the quake hit. He left quickly and swore he would never return, and he never did. The story would have been perfectly fine had he not been in it, or had he merely been in it for the performance, and not actually hanging out with the girl after the quake, so I never did get the point of including him. He’s not the kind of person an eleven year old is likely to be interested in, or relate to.

But that’s a minor irritation, and it didn’t spoil the story overall, which was excellent. It was charming, funny, and sad. Beth was an awesome character, and I recommend her story highly.

Flood: Race Against Time by Aaron Rosenberg

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is the second 'STEM' novel I've reviewed, but unlike the first one, in this case I have to confess I'm very disappointed in it. It purports to be science-based, but in the end it's really sci-fi and I think this does the STEM objective a grave disservice by removing it from reality. Science is fantastic and engaging enough without seeking to 'amp it up' with unrealistic situations and exaggerated fiction.

This chapter book, augmented with a few images, features five kids who have transferred to a new school named after Einstein - as though he's the only scientist worth remembering. It couldn't have been named after a woman? But why would it be in a novel where genderism runs rampant? At one point I read, "or they’re manmade [sic]" Man-made? Why not simply say "manufactured"? Of course, that still contains 'man', but the root of that word is in reference to the hand, not to the gender.

This wasn't the only instance. At one point, I read, "Her dad commented from the head of the table." Dad gets to sit at the head of the table? Was this set in Victorian times? Even if he does, why stress it? Why not simply have him comment without specifying that he sits in the privileged position? At another point I read, "Anthropology is the study of man" No, it's the story of humans, male and female, boy and girl, and everyone in between.

Genderism wasn't the only problem. An improbably intelligent chimpanzee character which could have been ditched without loss was repeatedly referred to as a monkey, and this in a book purportedly aimed at improving science education? It's inexcusable. Also as inexplicable as it was inexcusable was the military teaching assistant. He was a disciplinary moron, had no place in a classroom and sure as hell didn't represent any military I'm familiar with.

Improbability was running high here, though. The children have their parents sign a blanket release form for field trips, then the teacher takes them on an experimental automated school bus - which has no driver? They almost get into an accident, but it's brushed-off as a science lesson! Even a capitalist corporation (or is it a person?) like Google doesn't let its robot vehicles out on the streets with no driver! And for good reason: we're a very long way from automated driving.

As if this wasn't bad enough, the children are taken to a field camp studying flooding, where there are unstable fissures in the ground, and the teacher leads the kids past police barriers warning that it's unsafe. Parents were given no information about the field trip, or about the use of the automated bus! This was not only a poor lesson in safety, it was ridiculous in the extreme. No wonder the author wasn't credited in the copyright (which was to the publisher, not to the author!). I wouldn't want to be credited for this kind of a book!

The point of the trip to the flood site wasn't made (unless it popped up after I quit reading). There seemed to be no point for the kids to be there other than putting them in danger, and indeed no point for the scientists and engineers to be there since there was literally nothing they could do, and no reason for them to be so close to danger, especially since they had by that time failed to take any action before the flood which might have prevented or ameliorated it, yet this tardiness in action was never raised as part of the problem!

There were other such issues, one of which included at least one poor definition, such as specifying that NASA is "the United States government agency responsible for space travel" - yes, it is, inter alia. It's not all that NASA does, hence the 'aeronautics' portion of the name. The definitions themselves were odd, in that they were (I assume) intended as footnotes, and were visible in the really crappy presentation in the Kindle app, but absent from the excellent presentation and formatting in Bluefire reader on the iPad. In the Kindle they were randomly mixed in with the text, rather than at the foot of the screen. I know this was an ARC, but this is really inexcusable in this day and age.

Be warned that the Kindle app is pretty much guaranteed to scramble anything containing images or special formatting like drop-caps, for example. In this case it scrambled that, the images, and the paragraph formatting so that some lines ended in the middle of the screen before continuing on the next line down. Even the Bluefire version, which is normally first class, suffered in that several sections were missing text. I only knew this because of the abrupt starting of sentences which did not follow from the previous sentence, and because the Kindle app had the missing text. This seemed to begin around page seventy. There was a section missing on p71, starting after "much fun and delicious?" And ending right before "103 and then headed down to the lab." Another instance was on p107 running from "engineer with the city" to "seep through". There were other such cases, but I gave up reading this novel at around eighty percent in because it was too stupid to live. I actively dis-recommend this as a STEM fiction book.

The Wishing World by Todd Fahnestock

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy from Net Galley, for which I thank the publisher.

This is an amazingly good middle-grade fantasy novel about eleven-year-old Lorelei (or is she really Loremaster?), a young girl who lost her brother and parents, all of whom she loved very much - yes, even her brother - and not only did no one believe her story of what happened, no one was able to find her family. She was considered delusional for merely telling the truth about what happened, and was referred to a rather sinister psychiatrist.

This explains why, as we begin the story, she's climbing up onto the roof of her old home to try to get inside to find the 'comet stone' which she believes will deliver answers. Instead, she discovers that she's somehow called a griffon out of the peculiar world of Veloran, and he refers to her as Doolivanti. Before long, she's inside the fantasy land, and searching for a princess who can help her defeat the Ink King and return her family to her!

I loved how fast those story moved. It was perfect in that regard, but it wasn't all plain sailing. Pip, the toucan was annoying because he insisted upon duplicating every sentence he spoke! Other than that I had no problem with, and took every joy in the writing until the princess showed up. The attempt to make her speak in a pseudo medieval language didn't work. Maybe middle-graders won't notice or be bothered by this, but it felt fake to me, especially when she said "Prithee, to whence have I come?"!

Whence is a 'from' word, and it incorporates 'from', so you can't use it with 'to'. It's used in the form: "Whence this bounty?" if you should happen across an unexpected pile of gold for example, or a table laden with food. "Whence do you hail?" might be used to ask where someone came from. It's one of those antique words like 'wherefore', which doesn't mean 'where'. It means 'why?' When Juliet says, "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", she's asking why is he a Montague - the family so at odds with her own Capulet family? If he went by any other name, they would not be enemies. But what's in a name? As I said, the rest of the novel was so good that these things became minor considerations.

Kindle isn't known for being a solid app, and often Amazon's process for converting a novel to Kindle format merely mangles it instead. This one wasn't awful, but the Kindle formatting resulted in random lines being truncated half way across the screen, only to resume on the next line down. Also, and quite frequently, the Kindle version took the last line of a page and encased it in a number one at the beginning and a zero at the end, like this:--1 King in the dark. -0. I think perhaps the Kindle conversion process got confused with what was a page number and what was the last line on the page. Hopefully that will be resolved when the final release is published. On my iPad, in Bluefire Reader, the book looked perfect.

Kindle also loves to mangle images, and it did so with gay abandon in this case. The images are at the start of each chapter, and in the Adobe Digital Editions reader on my desktop, the entire book was formatted perfectly. On my phone though, Amazon sliced and diced, and even Julienned the images. I've seen this in many ebooks, and it was the reason I abandoned all hope of migrating images and special text formatting from my book Poem y Granite. I stripped all of the images out and formatted all of the text with the same font for the Kindle version.

One thing I found my imagination running away with in this novel was how Christmas carols seemed to be woven into the story. I'm reasonably sure the author never planned it that way and this is just my over-active imagination at work, but this is the kind of story, like Neale Osbourne's Lydia's Enchanted Toffee which I praised back in November 2015, that stimulates imagination and is the major reason why I'm rating this one a worthy read.

Humans (and many animals, are predisposed to see patterns in things. It's what keeps us alive if we're paying attention, and is part of what law enforcement and the military call "situational awareness." The downside is that it's the kind of thing which also fuels conspiracy theories and inane beliefs in UFOs, the Loch Ness "monster" and sasquatch. On the other side of that coincidence, if people didn't hold such beliefs, I'd never have been able to get away with Saurus, so I can't complain!

But I digress. I was impressed by the mysterious Silent Knight in this novel, and this got me on the Christmas carol track. Silent Knight? So, were the three characters Lorelei first meets, the three ships that came sailing in, or the three kings of orient (it's always three, isn't it?!). When I started thinking of Lorelei and Ripple, the aqueous-addicted princess of the antique language, as the Holly and the Ivy, I realized my imagination was indeed running away! You can warp anything to fit your "conspiracy" if you're willing to shed rationale and logic and let your imagination run riot!

So, before I let my imagination run away any more, let me say that I loved this novel, despite a minor issue here and there, and I recommend it highly. It's fun, it's fast-paced, it's inventive, it's amusing, and it's well worth reading even if you're not middle-grade! I look forward to Todd Fahnestock's next work with warm anticipation!

Back Online by Laura Dower

Rating: WARTY!

I was offered a chance to read this because I'd apparently liked a previous volume in the series, but I honestly don't remember reading the earlier one and I cannot find a review for it on my blog or on Goodreads. I have nothing by this author on my blog, which may be on Google because their search engine sometimes fails to find things I know are there! But the story sounded interesting, so I decided to take a look even though I'm not a fan of series, except in a few rare cases.

The first third of this novel, featuring middle-grader Madison and her family and friends, was actually quite interesting and very readable, but starting in the middle third and continuing, it really went downhill. I reached ninety percent and gave it up out of sheer boredom and out of an increasingly strong conviction that I knew exactly how this was going to go down. It's the tired old story of the girl (in other stories it's the guy) who doesn't recognize that the best friend is 'the one'. It's been done to death. It speaks sadly of the blindness or stupidity of the main character and quite frankly, like Robert Frost, I yearn for the road not taken. I long for something a bit different, off the beaten track, with new or inventive things to say about people or relationships.

Madison too soon became a rather whiny one-trick pony with an annoying OCD centered around two boys. This then became virtually the only thing she had on her mind, the sole topic of her conversation, and the only thing she could focus on. It was not only annoying, it was boring! I don't have any daughters, I'm sorry to say, but I have sons in this age range and while they do tend to focus on things rather tightly, they also maintain a variety of other interests, and are nowhere near as blinkered as Madison is rendered here.

I can understand that girls and boys get hard and painful crushes on one gender or another, but to pigeon-hole them one as one-track minds, with nothing more there than their obsession is an insult. While I'm sure that there are girls who tightly focus on crushes, I am equally sure that all save the worst of these girls do not focus on them to the exclusion of very nearly everything else as Madison does. I can't speak for the age range this is aimed at, but for me, a girl who has more going on in her mind than this is far more interesting than Madison is. I think girls have enough to deal with without being painted as Madisons in every novel that comes out, and this is why I can't recommend this one as a worthy read.

City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, Dallas Middaugh, Niklas Asker

Rating: WORTHY!

I tried this novel in the form of an audiobook not long ago and was disappointed in it, which itself was a disappointment because the premise is an intriguing one. When I saw the graphic novel version on the shelf at my lovely loquacious local library, I decided this was the way to go, and I was not wrong. I really enjoyed the novel in this version. The story was adapted by Dallas Middaugh, who evidently hails from the Slash & Burn school of adaptation, because this was stripped right down to the bone. This might not appeal to everyone, but it appealed to me because my biggest problem with the audiobook was how much it ramble and meandered. The art work by Niklas Asker was fine.

The story is, I assume, aimed at middle-grade readers, since the main characters featured here were quite young. Whether they match the age as envisioned by the original author I can't say. The City of Ember is in perpetual darkness and relies on an increasingly unreliable electrical system to keep it lit during the "day." The citizens lead deprived and unhappy lives, constantly unhappy and often short of food. Corruption is rampant. They're assigned work at a young age, and have no choice in their occupation. Our two main characters, Lina and Doon (Lorna Doone anyone?!) however, buck the system and exchange jobs, both getting the one they preferred, but their collaboration doesn't end there.

The two of them start feeling like there are secrets being kept and that living this life in this city isn't all they and their fellow citizens were meant for. They pursue their suspicions and discover an amazing secret. Amazing to them, that is! It's pretty obvious to the reader by then what's going on. The 'ending' was beautiful. I put it in quotes because of course it's not an ending: it's the start of a series. Yet despite that awful and debilitating drawback, I recommend this graphic novel as a worthy read.

Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda

Rating: WARTY!

Yes, it's talking book Thursday and here's my third review of an audiobook today.

I really enjoyed Sarwat Chadda's The Devil's Kiss which I guess I read before I started blogging reviews, since I find it nowhere on my blog, but if I'd known this was the start of a series titled 'Ash Mistry Chronicles', I would have left this audiobook on the library shelf. I have sworn-off reading any book (single or series) which has 'chronicles' in the title (or 'saga' or 'cycle', and so on). The very name Ash Mistry is a warning. The novel turned out to be every bit as unappealing as I would have expected for a chronicle

Mistry and his daughter and Indian who have grown up in England, and are visiting the city of Varanasi here they run afoul of the evil Lord Savage (I kid you not with these character names). The main reason for this is that Ash is a petty thief. he damages an archaeological site and finds an arrow head made of gold. Instead of turning it in to the people running the dig, his first thought is that the can sell it and get some money. His selfish thoughtlessness directly leads to the death of an aunt and uncle, and he sheds not one tear nor offers a single expression of regret for them. Not in the part I could stand to listen to.

Worse than this, the novel is genderist. When Ash and his younger sister lucky are in hiding, someone offers to train them in the fight against the supernatural evil that Lord savage controls. One of the two gets to be a warrior - Ash. His sister gets to be a caregiver! Not that there's anything wrong with being a caregiver by any means, but why is the male the warrior and the girl the 'nurse'? Could they not both have been warriors? Or nurses? Could they not have chosen for themselves what they wanted to do rather than be assigned traditional gender roles? it was at this point that I quit reading.

The story was read rather melodramatically and breathlessly by Bruce Mann, which didn't help my stomaching of it. Also, if I'd known that this had been recommended by Kirkus reviews, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it at all. Kirkus pretty much ever met a book they didn't adore, so their reviews are utterly worthless. I cannot recommend it.

Return To Sender By Julia Alvarez

Rating: WARTY!

This one sounded interesting from the blurb, but it quickly turned into a clone of all the other stories of illegal immigrants in the American South - or in this case the Northeast. Eleven-year-old Tyler's family hires migrant Mexicans to work on their Vermont farm. They don't worry too much about whether the workers are legal. Tyler gets to know the migrants' oldest daughter until he learns that she's there illegally.

I got to about one third the way through this and quickly lost interest. This story is nothing more than a duplicate of every other such story, showing Mexicans as struggling, trying to build a better life for themselves, which no one can blame a family for, but just like all the other stories, it depicts the Mexicans as religious, family-centric, and it tosses in cozy Hispanic family words like Tio and Abuelita. But if every story of this nature depicts Mexicans as just like all the other Mexicans, isn't that racist? It sure seems that way to me. Why are these writers not interested in telling a different story: in stretching themselves and pushing the envelope instead of parroting the precise same thing all the other writers have already spewed ad nauseam?

I'm sorry but I'm not going to rate a novel as a worthy read when it's a Xerox of every other story and rather male-centric to boot. I do like it for the idea it gave me, but that's as far as I can compliment it!

One Came Home by Amy Timberlake

Rating: WARTY!

One Lame Tome.

Quite frankly I'm not sure why I picked this up at the library. I can only assume it was in haste. When I look at the blurb now, it sounds like it might be an interesting plot, but I honestly cannot remember my thought processes when I checked this out! I should have considered it more deeply. It turns out this is yet another Newbery award novel and I've already sworn off those because they've been almost one hundred per cent garbage in my experience. This one was no different.

Set in 1871, a young girl named Georgie Burkhardt is evidently responsible for her older sibling Agatha running away. Later a body is found wearing Agatha's ball gown (why she ran away in a ball gown is anyone's guess), and everyone is content to believe that Agatha is dead - except of course Georgie, who starts off on a quest: will the real Agatha Burkhardt please show up!

The biggest problem with this story is that it's way too damned 'down home' for my taste. If there is one thing which gets me irritated out of all proportion in novels, it's down-home country folk in stories of historical America spewing their catch-phrases and their home-spun wisdom. Yuk! I cannot stand them, and this is not only one of those stories; the reader of this audiobook, Tara Sands, reads it in the most nails-on-a-chalk-board voice imaginable. I literally could not stand to listen to it, and I doubt that even if I got the print book, I would want to actually read it. First of all it's a Newbery, and second of what's left, the writing is far too self-satisfied. The arrogance of that home-grown "country learnin'" is nauseating and just obnoxious. Y'all don't cuhm back nah!

Oliver Twist or The Parish Boy's Progress by Charles Dickens

Rating: WARTY!

This is actually my second attempt at this! I really did no better here than previously. I had much better luck with graphic novels: Fagin the Jew which I positively reviewed in October 2014, and Zombies Christmas carol which I favorably reviewed in December that same year, when I also posted negative results on a previous effort with this material!

A while ago I had an idea for a novel set in Oliver Twist's world, so I decided to go back to the source and listen in. Fortunately my excellent local library had this on audiobook format. The novel is also available for free from The Gutenberg Project as both downloadable text and audio books (but be warned, the audio version sounds like its read by Stephen Hawking. It's not - it just uses the same kind of text-to-speech engine. I think after this I'm just going to watch the movie!

I have to say that while the overall plot was convoluted, it was not awful, but the uninspired reading of Dickens's even more uninspired material was a deal-breaker for me, and I couldn't get past the first third of it. I know it was the style back then, but the incessant flowery speech and rambling diversions were too much. Plus, Dickens was rather preachy about conditions back then. This was commendable, but it was very intrusive, and it became annoying after a while.

Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, this novel was original published in installments which in this case ran monthly for a period of over two years starting in February 1837, so as an enterprise, it had more in common with our modern comic books than our modern novels. All the favorite characters were there of course, from the more commonly known Oliver, The Artful Dodger, and Fagin, to assorted prostitutes such as Bet, Charlotte, and Nancy, to the evil Monks and Sikes, to Mr Bumble, Old Sally, and the oddly-named Toby Crackit, right down to the even more unforgettably-named Master Bates (I kid you not).

Contrary to the story you might expect - of Oliver being a perennial down-and-out, he is actually a boy of extraordinarily good fortune. Ollie's mom died in childbirth and he ended-up at the parish poor house, where he was passively abused until he was of an age where they could get rid of him by pretty much literally selling him to an undertaker (Ol protested against being a sweep's assistant and got away with it!). There he was doing well until he ran afoul of the other boy who worked there, and he ran away. Right as he was heading into the territory of death and starvation, he was taken under the wing of Fagin's crew, but after a blundered robbery, Oliver ended up in jail.

His luck does not desert him however, and he's cleared of charges and semi-adopted by a book-seller where he flourishes (and blots!). For unexplained reasons, Fagin forcibly recruits him for a robbery, but once more it goes wrong, yet Ol's luck still does not desert him. Instead of being arrested, he's adopted by the family he tried to rob, who actually turn out to be related to him! This kid has four-leaf clovers growing out of his ass!

I know some people have down-graded this for racism, and by our standards it does sound a bit racist, but I don't believe we should judge a book written almost two hundred years ago by our standards. By all means comment on the standards in use, but judge them? What would be the point now? Let's consider this racism. From what I listened to, it consists entirely of identifying Fagin as "The Jew" throughout much of the book as opposed to simply naming him Fagin or, perhaps, "The Thief" (or "The Prig"!). The thing is that I got no sense that Dickens was actually using the term "The Jew" in a derogatory sense any more than he would have been had the character been Polish and he'd referred to him as "The Pole," or any more than Agatha Christie is abusing Poirot by referring to him as The Belgian. Yes it's derogatory to use today, but the way Dickens used it was simply a convenient (if inappropriate by our lights) short-hand and I don't think he saw it in any other light. At least I didn't get that impression.

Overall, the writing left a lot to be desired, and there were far too many fortunate coincidences. Plus, Ollie is a bit of a Mary Sue. I can't recommend this based on what I listened to. Hopefully my take on the life and times of this era will be better - assuming I ever do get down to cooking-up a decent plot and writing it!

Gertie's Leap to Greatness by Kate Beasley

Rating: WORTHY!

I don't know her, but in my opinion, Kate Beasley is a mischievous-looking author, so it was hardly surprising to me that that this came from her keyboard! It's a nicely-written middle-grade novel and is of course about Gertie, who is planning on being the best fifth-grader ever this year. She's well-on-track to kick-start it with her zombie frog, until Mary Sue Spivey shows up as a transfer student. Mary Sue is smart and her father is a movie director who happens to direct movies featuring Jessica Walsh, who is a hero of fifth graders everywhere, so Gertie's plans have to hop-it.

Her phase two decision to become a genius student and thereby overshadow Mary Sue also gets a D. It seems like every plan Gertie comes up with is effortlessly derailed by Mary Sue and now, looming on the horizon, is career day, wherein Mary Sue gets to have her movie director father show up maybe, and Gertie can't even bring her own father because he's gone for two weeks working on an oil-rig out in the ocean. Gertie decides she can handle this alone. She's a big girl now. The problem is that career day doesn't go anything like Gertie planned or even imagined it would, and now Mary Sue is more popular than ever and Gertie is looking more and more like the villain in this little drama they have going. Talking of which, the school play is auditioning next....

The story was a bit of a roller-coaster, and Gertie was in many ways her own worst enemy, but this state of affairs wasn't random. For reasons which go unexplained, Gertie's mom abandoned her and her dad, and married another guy, and Gertie has never come to terms with it. She grew up with her dad, who was absent periodically, and her great Aunt Rae, and an annoying little kid named Audrey who was often parked with Rae when her folks wanted a date night or day (both of which seem to be very often). Gertie doesn't suspect that her 'perfect' nemesis also has personal issues with which she wrestles, too.

Names of characters in my stories are important to me and (as they used to in years gone by) tend to carry a meaning behind the façade, which relates something of the character who carries them. In that context, I have to observe here that the popularity of the name Gertrude - which I personally don't like - fell steadily throughout the twentieth century, becoming very effectively non-existent since the mid-sixties, so why this name was chosen for this character, who I think deserved better, is a mystery explicable it seems to me, only as a rather forlorn attempt at alliteration, but I decided not to fret too much over that any more than I wondered why it was Kate Beasley and not Kat Beasley which to me is a kick-ass name! Not that Kate is awful; I have several nieces named in some variation on 'Kate'.

But I digress! I had some technical issues reading this in Adobe Digital Editions reader. The chapters were slow to load, taking about eighteen seconds for the screen to appear when turning the page to a chapter header, whereas pages with images on them (which often do load slowly in ADE) popped up right away! I don't know what that was all about. The only problem with the images was that some of them were truncated so it was impossible to see all of the image. In contrast, on the Kindle app on my phone, I had no problem with slow screen loading or with seeing the images (although the images were understandably small). The best of all, though, was on the Bluefire Reader app on my iPad, where it was picture (and text) perfect.

I had some minor issues with the writing, too. I felt the story ended a little too abruptly. There never did seem to be any resolution. It felt like it was left hanging a bit. Although the very brief epilogue (which I typically don't read since the epilogue ought to be the last chapter, not some appendix), was unexpectedly interesting, and peculiar in that it didn't wrap-up the story at all. In fact, it seemed like it was actually the prologue (which I don't read either) to another story! I felt that Mary Sue was portrayed as much more of a villain than she actually was, which was misleading given later revelations), but perhaps middle-graders won't be so picky.

Those gripes aside, I really liked the story and the general way in which it was unveiled. I liked the tone and the chapter headers and the excellent gray scale illustrations by Jillian Tamaki (now there's another great name to play with!), and taken overall, I recommend it as a worthy read for its intended age range and perhaps, beyond, too! Go read it if you don't believe me!

Above World by Jenn Reese

Rating: WORTHY!

Read excellently by Kate Rudd, this remarkable novel, which to be honest did have a couple of stagnant portions, came bouncing back from every dip, was inventive, amusing, adventurous, playful and fun. It's the start of a series, which I don't intend to pursue at this time but to which I may return when I've addressed other books in an ever-growing virtual pile which I am excited at the prospect of reading. That's the best feeling in the world, isn't it? A new novel?! Writing it, reading it - it doesn't matter!

Aluna is on the cusp of young adulthood, but despite her human roots, she's lived her whole life in the sea, with her people, the Coral Kampai in the City of Shifting Tides. When she incurs the disfavor of her stern father (rather like Ariel the mermaid!) she leaves with her best friend Hoku on a quest to free Willy. No, I;m kididng,. She;s on a quest to find a solution to the problem of the Kampaii's failing breathing apparatus. Yes, despite frequent denials, the Kampaii are humans who need an oxygen extraction device in order to breathe, and have to take a genetic pill at Aluna's age, in order ot exchange their legs for a tail - a sign they are now adults in the eyes of their people.

Aluna isn't there yet, and it's fortunate because she needs those legs to explore above world - on the alien dry land, where she has to track down the hydro-tech corporation which supplied them with their under water technology many years before. This is, inevitably, going to bring her into contention with Fathom, not remotely human any more, and the evil leader of a large band of misfits who have taken transhumanism to scary levels. Why? Because he can.

The book fell down in small ways, such as the world building. While it was great and glorious, some of it made no sense at all. Other parts of it were wonderful. I completely fell in love with Barko, the talking dog and Kate Rudd's representation of him was first class. Also, as at least one other reviewer has pointed out, the past tense of 'tread' is 'trod', not 'treaded'. Tires are treaded! Any decent spellchecker should have caught this. Those quibbles aside, I really liked this novel and I recommend it.

The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade

Rating: WORTHY!

Obviously rooted in the 1831 Victor Hugo novel, Notre-Dame de Paris ('Our Lady of Paris', and not 'Le Bossu de Notre-Dame' which would be a literal translation of the English title!) this one takes the idea into a fantasy world, where the 'hunchback', here called Modo, has the ability to change his appearance, but it's at some serious cost to his personal comfort. In this, the first of a series, Modo is a precocious, intelligent, and sensitive child who is raised from a very early age by the "mysterious Mr Socrates", who wants to recruit him to the British empire as a spy. Yes, I said it was fantasy. It sounded weird enough to tempt me anyway, even though it's really aimed at middle-grade readers, or perhaps the younger end of the YA age-range.

It started out well and held my interest for the first two-thirds, but I have to confess my enthusiasm waned somewhat towards the end. I really liked that Modo was not presented as a studly guy, or as someone to feel sorry for, nor was he given a magical cure for his maladies. He remained the same hunch-backed, stooped, odd-eyed character throughout, although he employed his shape-shifting abilities for his spy work, and later out of vanity when he met Olivia.

Olivia was another employee of Mr Socrates, and another reason why I liked this. Neither of the two main characters was shown as needing help or validation from the other. neither she nor Modo knew about the other until they met and it was some time after this that they realized they were on the same side, whereupon they began working together without need of direction, and succeeded admirably in the end, although their journey was perilous.

I recommend this story particularly for the appropriate age range(s). It's full of self-sufficiency, adventure, mystery, gadgets, mechanical beasts, and fun. As the name Modo suggests, he is far from a quasi-hero and is, instead, a really worthwhile character with a realistic view of the world. Olivia is a charmer, and I recommend this story.

The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff

Rating: WARTY!

This is an old (1980's) novel, but it tells what could have been an interesting story. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is on the school reading list this year, but some parents are objecting to the way it characterizes African Americans, and has a subtext of homosexuality (so they argue) if not pedophilia.

It's been so long since I read this book that I honestly can't even remember what it was about except in very general terms. I can say it left very little impression on me and I'd probably rate it 'warty' if I were to read and review it now. Quite frankly, I've never understood this American obsession with teaching the so-called classics when there are much better and far more engaging and relevant modern novels which can be brought into classrooms.

I did like that the author gave good arguments in favor of requesting the book removed, but it's not like the deck was loaded all on one side, which made for intelligent reading, which is a good thing in a novel aimed at middle-graders and young adults. The story is in many ways laid out like a court case - both sides give their evidence, and it's up to you, the jury to bring in a fair verdict, although there is a verdict returned in the story, too.

One thing I found very curious is that the author seems to insist upon using the full name - first and last - of all of the adult characters very nearly every single time he mentions them, at least in the first few chapters. This was very irritating. But I got even with him by playing with his name. I love names and I love playing with them. 'Nat' is short for Nathaniel, or Nathan, and this author's last name begins with Hen, so if you run the name together, you can get Nathen Toff out of it. I'm just weird that way!

My problem with this book was that there were some really good arguments which never got laid out, and the story itself felt rather antiquated. I think the author could have done a much better job and done it using a better example. That was really the problem. It was all black and white with no real grey areas. I can't recommend this novel and did not like the rather misleading title.

There is some interesting information online if you want to read more about real - and modern - censorship issues in schools:
American Library Association page on school censorship issues. Here's some recent news on censorship of a John Green novel which is fine by me - not for censoring it as inappropriate reading material for school kids, but for being a mind-numbing bunch of drivel! LOL! Here's another link to the National Association Against Censorship. There are lots more you can find online.

The Changelings by Christina Soontornvat

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an advance review copy which I was happy to read. It's aimed at middle grade (eight to twelve-year-olds) so it's not for me, and parts of it were not to my taste, but for the intended age group I think it's absolutely perfect. Isabella and younger sister Henriette have moved to a new home (why goes pretty much unexplained - yes, grandma died and left them her home, but they didn't have to move into it!). Izzy learns that the woman next door, through the woods, is a witch! is she? Maybe! Izzy and Hen go to spy on her and shortly afterwards, Izzy sees Hen disappear into the forest, hypnotized by flute music!

Feisty and capable Izzy chases after her and ends up in fairy-land with three outlaw changelings. What's going on here? Izzy has to find out and pursue her kid sister before the evil queen can...what is she going to do with the little girl? I have to say that these characters were beautifully drawn with words. Both Izzy and Hen were strong female characters, self-motivated, strong at heart, and independent. The thee changelings were fun, interesting, and complex. I was particularly intrigued by Dree. Lug (from the name on down) was a bit of a cliche, but even he wasn't all trope and no substance. The evil queen was delightful and also self-motivated. She was just on the wrong side, unfortunately, but nonetheless very real and believable. And the enigmatic Peter? Did he really deserve the title "Good"?

I loved this story overall, and I recommend it for middle grade readers who like a good adventure, and are too old for paper-thin Disney Princesses. If I had any complaints, they would be about the claim that King Arthur was just a made-up character. He's really not! Yes, the shining knights at the round table are fiction, but there really was a man beneath the legend. One of the characters said this, however, and there's no reason a fictional character could not be just as ill-informed as a real person! The other thing, and this really bothered me, was when one of the characters said "Just don't make me a goblin or a fat lady." It is unnecessarily cruel to put this idea into young children's minds: that overweight people, females in particular, are akin to goblins? Not a good idea. Fortunately that as the only distasteful part of this book. Even authors with awesome names shouldn't be allowed to get away with dissing people because of their weight! And yes, I know a character said this, but that doesn't make it go away. For the rest of it - it was great!

Anna The Girl Witch Vol 2 Wandering Witch by Max Candee

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second I have read of this series, and although I am not a fan of series, and this one is definitely outside of my age range, I found it to be as entertaining as the first, which I rated positively. There were a couple of portions where I became bored, notably when Anna spends so much time with her grandmother, Baba Yaga before she goes on her quest. This wasn't entertaining to me. I am not a fan of Baba Yaga stories at all, which was one reason this bored me. The time spent in this endeavor seemed to really drag and produce very little fruit, and there were, for me, far too many pages expended on Baba. The quest was much more fun, and really kicked the story back into high gear, but then we hit another tedious section where Anna is involved with this really annoying cat, and frankly I skipped most of that because it was even more boring than the time she was with Baba.

Those sections aside, I enjoyed the story very much and consider it a worthy read for the intended age range. Anna continues to be a strong young girl who wants to do good even as she fears that using magic is somehow allowing the same darkness into her heart which has overtaken and possessed her grandmother. It's a bit scary for Anna, who is trying to find where her father is and rescue him. Can Anna rebel against her grandmother - who is seeking to own her as she tried to own her father - without letting either that darkness or her grandmother take her over?

Anna learns a lot more about her family history in this volume and frankly, it was a bit too much for my taste. Maybe others will like the firehose of family history, but I would have preferred the same volume delivered as a trickle over the length of the story. It was interesting in some ways, but it rather deadened the mind when so much of it was unloaded all at once, and it really brought the story-flow to a bit of a halt.

There are moments of good humor, though, which helped to lighten the load, despite the rather oppressive tone of the volume as a whole, such as when I read "...the sound of an enraged tiger in the taiga." which made me laugh out loud. Anna is an impressive character who fears the consequences of her use of magic, but who also wants to do some good with it if she can. Besides there's a father to rescue, and a matching hand for her disembodied helper, Squire, to be found. I recommend this for the age range, but it's not a series I am interested in following for myself, especially when I have so much else to read!

Becoming Naomi Léon by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Rating: WORTHY!

Published in Spanish as Yo, Naomi León, and read rather nicely by Annie Kozuch, this short story is about Naomi, of course, who lives with her "special needs" brother Owen, and her grandmother, after her own mother pretty much left them in the lurch. And now she's back, from outer space, she shows up at the door with that dumb look upon her face. They should have changed their trailer park, they should have fled upon a whim, if they'd known for just one second she'd be back to bother them! She's returned with her new boyfriend Clive, and a new name, to reclaim her kids, but Clive, it seems, has an agenda which is more tightly aligned with claiming dependent benefits than it is with wanting to love and care for two young kids. In fact, Mom wants only Naomi, not Owen.

At several audiobook web sites, Naomi's name is given as Naomi Guadalupe Zamora Outlaw, but in the actual book (which I take as canon over the blurbs!), her name is actually Naomi Soledad Léon Outlaw, the last part being her grandmother's name, and one which has brought her grief at the hands (or more accurately at the lips) of some moronic kids in school. The ordered and structured life they have in Lemon Tree, California (a lemon tree, my dear Watson!), where they live in a small trailer nicknamed 'Baby Beluga', might end up as a rather reckless road trip to find their father, Santiago, who evidently now lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was run out of their lives by mom, who might just now be pushing them back into his arms.

The kids' names didn't seem to fit, of me. Would a Santiago name his kids Naomi and Owen? It seemed just as unlikely that their mom would do it, given that she's just pretentiously changed her name to Skyla. I'm not sure what Skyla's motive is. Maybe she's just going along with Clive's plan, but after she slaps Naomi across the face, Naomi decides where she wants to be, and it ain't by momma's side.

There was one unintentional amusing moment when the narrator said "syrupy glaze" and with the Mexican element and the religious element to this story, along with my warped mind, I couldn't help but think of this as 'syrup igles" - but igles isn't the word for church, as it happens, it's iglesia, so it didn't quite work but almost! it works a lot better in French: syrup église!

The novel slipped a bit for me. It was interesting right up until they went to Mexico and we got bogged down in the radish carving festival, but that didn't last long, and it picked up again when Santiago arrived on the scene. Overall I liked this and felt it to be a worthy read (despite the fact that it has won some medals and honors!), and I recommend it.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook started out well, but rapidly deteriorated into tedium maximum™! Seriously. The premise, of a young, purportedly intelligent orphan managing to get himself into a secret society, and discovering that this society is investigating subliminal messages being transmitted over the airwaves to come out into our minds through TV and radio isn't original, but it does make for a promising start to a middle-grade story. The problem was that once this set-up was put in place, nothing happened! I mean literally nothing happened. The story just rambled on and on and on and on with these kids whining and discussing, and arguing and contemplating, and cogitating and regurgitating, and NOTHING HAPPENED!

We're told that Mr Benedict has tried going to the authorities, but that they paid him no attention because the subliminal messaging is getting to the adults, too, because you know the only thing that all adults do is listen to TV and radio all the time. It was nonsensical. The question as to why Mr Benedict had not gone to the media or published his proof on the Internet was never even raised. No wonder this moron needed kids to help him. Any kid is smarter than he was, whether they had passed the weird-ass tests Reynard had to take or not! And let;s not even get into the evil twin trope which it takes these geniuses forever to figure out.

I quit it about forty percent in because I could not stand the dull story, and the voice of the reader was just awful. The guy who reads this, Del Roy, must have been in his eighties when he recorded it, and while that voice would have been great had the story been about political machinations or boardroom subterfuge, it was completely out of place here. There wasn't a paragraph went by where I wasn't yanked out of the story at some point because of the incongruity of this croaky voice trying to impersonate these kids. It didn't work, and neither did this story. I can't recommend it.

The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman

Rating: WARTY!

Read by Joshua Swanson, who doesn't do a bad job, this library audio book started out very intriguingly. I found myself wondering how useful obsidian would be for a blade. It's a material rather like glass, and so is readily shattered, but there are finds of obsidian being used historically for arrow heads. It can be chipped to a very sharp edge, so maybe an obsidian blade isn't such a stretch.

I have to say that the story caught my interest right off the bat. This kid Tucker is out in the yard and his father, who is a man of the church, is on the roof fixing a broken shingle. When Tucker hears a cry, he runs out thinking his dad fell off the roof, but dad is nowhere to be seen. What Tucker does see is what appears to be a shimmering disk hovering at the edge of the roof. Hmm!

His dad shows up later with a young girl in tow, whom he says he found in town. He denies all Tucker's suggestions that he fell off the roof, which is odd to Tucker, who is used to telling lies to get himself out of trouble, but who isn't used to his dad doing the same thing. Dad says that the girl, Lahlia is in need of adoption, but she seems rather strange and doesn't talk other than to say Tucker's name. His dad has also bizarrely lost his faith, now no longer believing there is a God. It turns out that Tucker's mom was also adopted, and it seems pretty obvious from the start that that both she and Lahlia, the new girl, come from a parallel dimension, which means that Tucker is half from this dimension and half from the other. Okay, I'm hooked!

So far so good, but the novel began to go downhill, and I had a few questions. Take the girl's name, for example. If she isn't talking, then how does anyone know her name, much less the spelling of it? I actually didn't know the spelling myself, which is one problem with audio books, but why is it Lahlia, instead of say, Laleah? Did she write it down for them?! The way the reader pronounces it makes it seem much more like the latter than the former to me. Obviously it's that way because the author chose it to be that way, but this is a writing issue worthy of some consideration for budding authors. To me, names are important in fiction.

Talking of writing issues, there was another curious one. When Tucker's parents disappear with an oddly uninformative note (obviously they've gone back to the other parallel world from which Tucker's mom hailed, but he doesn't know this and takes a tedious amount of time to figure out), Tucker learns that his uncle, who is known as Kosh, will take care of him in their absence. Shortly after they meet, I read this sentence: "He walked towards Tucker, stopped about eight feet away, and peered at him closely." I am trying to figure out how you peer at someone closely from eight feet away. I think I know what the writer was trying to convey, but to me he did it in a poor way. Just a thought from a writing perspective! Plus this 'initial' meeting makes little sense given what's coming later.

That "peering" reminded me of a character from the TV show, Heroes and the subsequent miniseries, which evidently failed to launch successfully. Character Matt Parkman can read minds, but the actor's portrayal of this made me laugh. When he was trying to catch someone's thoughts, he would frown and cock his head and push his head forwards, and it just looked ridiculous to me - as ridiculous as the head twist the 'wesen' characters do when changing faces in the TV show Grimm, which I think looks equally ridiculous, although I love that show. I call it the Sergeant Wu show because he's the most entertaining character in it, talking of facial expressions. But I digress! I imagined this Matt Parkman act when I read that sentence about Kosh, so it made me laugh too. This was probably not the effect the author was seeking!

These shimmering disks or lenses of air show up wherever Tucker goes, which seems to me to be too much unless he is somehow causing, triggering, or attracting them. That was a possibility, so I let that ride, but the first time Tucker travels through one, he ends up atop one of the twin towers in New York city right before the first jetliner hits. What are the odds of that? I have to say I have little time for uninventive time-travel stories which have their characters arrive at critical points in history (typically US history for US stories, and so on) or have them meet famous and influential characters. What are the odds of that? It seems to me to be a lazy way to write such a novels - picking an easy target rather than doing the work of writing a more realistic and more creative story with unknowns from history.

Worse than this though was how Tucker came to be there. How did the wormhole (or whatever it is), link the top of his uncle's barn to the top of the WTC? He was nowhere near NYC geographically, and nowhere near the elevation of the towers vertically, so how did this work? And why were the disks always up in the air - and conveniently next to a roof? Why were the spiritual beings known as Klaatu? Was that short for Klaatu barada nikto?! Maybe an explanation would be forthcoming. I had to keep on listening to find out, but I soon grew tired of unanswered questions and nonsensical rambling about the Klaatu and the wormholes. The story made less sense as it went on, rather than more sense, and I ditched it after a while as a DNF because I couldn't stand to listen to any more. I can't recommend this one. And I never did find out what the obsidian blade had to do with anything - doubtlessly because I dropped this one. Worse, though, is that this is a series, and I'm not a fan of series, especially not ones which start out so badly!

Interworld by Neil Gaiman, Michael Reeves

Rating: WARTY!

I'd like to like Neil Gaiman. I loved the Doctor Who episode he wrote a couple of seasons back, and I really liked his novel Stardust, and I liked his Underwhere graphic novel, but ever since those, it seems that he's determined to thwart my every effort to like what he writes. A few days ago I read a The Sandman Overture graphic novel and thought it was a nasty mess. I decided to try again with this middle-grade audiobook and I thought, finally, I'd found something I could listen to, but after enjoying the opening chapters, the novel went the same way that Sandman had: sideways, but in this case literally. It then devolved into nonsense and became just annoying. Maybe middle-graders will like this gobbledygook, but it sure doesn't leave anything but distaste in my reading mouth. I can't imagine my own kids finding it entertaining.

I say reading, but I mean listening since this was an audiobook, and to be fair ('cos I'm normally as unfair as I can get!), Christopher Evan Welch didn't do too bad of a job reading it. The story is about a kid named Joey. He makes a big deal about his lack of any sense of direction, which is not only irrelevant to the story, but it makes him look like a moron who doesn't even know where the sun rises. I don't know why any writer would do that to their main character.

The novel is first person PoV, which is sucky, and the authors admit how limiting it is by having "interlogs" told by another party. It's a clunker. Tell it in third and be done with it instead of performing these ridiculous acrobatics, for god's sakes. Get a clue.

Joey ends up wandering in a fog and no, it's not a metaphor. He comes out in a parallel world where his own mom, who has no son named Joey, but instead, a daughter named Josephine live. He's rescued from his ridiculously prolonged confusion by a guy named 'J', which is evidently 'Jay' - it's impossible to tell in an audiobook. In fact, everyone he meets thereafter - on the good guys side - seems to have a name beginning with a 'J'. No idea why. It was at this point that the story went downhill for me and never recovered.

Apparently there is an infinity of worlds which range on a scale from scientifically inclined at one end, which are inexplicably named binary worlds, and magically-inclined at the other end, inexplicably named HEX worlds. Earth - Joey's Earth that is - is of course in the middle. Despite this veritable plethora of worlds, there is a battle for control of them between various forces, and the "walkers" are charged with keeping a balance between them. Why? No idea. But you know there always has to be a balance even in a universe where the laws of physics are suspended, right? Because, well, it's the law. Either that or authors are either too dumb or lazy to think up something new and original. I'm sorry but no. None of this made any sense, and Gaiman's obsessive addiction to describing mathematical concepts in the Interworld, larding it up with geometrical ideas and paradoxes was just boring, and that's all it was. Like I said, maybe some middle graders will be mesmerized, but I was yawning. This was a DNF and I cannot recommend it.