Pugs of the Frozen North by Philip Reeve, Sarah McIntyre

Rating: WORTHY!

The Chinese claim that this is the year of the pig (kick-off February 5^th, 2019), but I hereby declare it the year of the pug! It's only a vowel away!

How could I, of all people, not want to pick this up and read it with a title like that? I couldn't resist it, and I was rewarded by an inventive and amusing middle-grade story which I have to say bears some resemblance at one point to the Homeric Odyssey Book 9, wherein Odysseus, having been blown about by the wind for over a week, finally makes it to an island. He discovers that the locals feed on the Lotus (which is often taken to be a flower, but more likely referenced the fruit of a tree). This bears a soporific fruit causing them to abandon all aspiration and industry, and from which he must rescue his men.

So in this novel, having become shipwrecked and abandoned, accidentally or otherwise by the crew, cabin boy Shen finds himself alone with sixty-six pugs, all of whom are shivering. Fortunately, the ship was carrying a cargo of small, woolly sweaters, with which Shen outfits each of the pugs, before embarking on an excursion to explore and find help. He comes across a small native village where he meets a girl named Sika, who curiously is in need of dogs to pull her sled in the local sled race to the top of the world, the winner of which has any wish granted.

The two embark upon the race pulled by the pugs and have several adventures, including meeting a large kraken, and being lured into the Yeti Noodle shack where they become prisoners. This is the Lotus-Eater phase. Yes, the noodles are dreamily good - they're made from special snow, so why wouldn't they be? But the imprisonment is to do the chore of washing dishes to pay for the noodles they ate! Of course they escape.

And after another adventure or two they meet the wish-granter. I thought this was great fun. They completely snowed me with it, and I'm going to see if I can get my icy hands on some of the other books Reeve and collaborator McIntyre have created together.

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook that didn't start out well. It was first person which is typically not a good idea, but I would have been willing to put up with that had the story engaged me. It did not. It clearly had no intention of entering into an engagement, and was evidently just leading me on! Again, it wasn't aimed at me, but I've read many middle-grade stories that entertained. My current print book is one aimed at young middle grade and it's completely engaging.

The problem with this book was the complete disconnect between events and the main character's relation of them. Willow Chance (yes, that's her name) is returning from some sort of school trip when she sees a police car in her drive. It transpires that her parents have expired. You would think there would be some sort of an emotional reaction, but if you're expecting one from Willow, you're barking up the wrong tree. She barely reacts.

Instead, she starts rambling mindlessly and tediously about her life history. I had to DNF this book at about ten percent in due to projectile vomiting. Yes, I was vomiting actual projectiles in the form of uncouth language. Robin Miles's reading of the novel didn't help. It wasn't appallingly bad, but it did nothing to contribute to easing the discomfort, either. I cannot commend this based on my experience of the opening few chapters.

Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins

Rating: WARTY!

This was sitting on the library shelves and it was by the author of The Hunger Games, which I loved and favorably reviewed, so it seemed like it might make for an interesting read. If I had known it was part of 'The Underland Chronicles' I would never have picked it up. I make it a policy never to read anything with the word 'chronicles' (or 'cycle' or 'saga') associated with it, but once again the idiot publishers failed to put a warning on the cover that this was part of a series, much less a chronic one! Personally I think they ought to have a warning affixed similar to that one attached to packs of cigarettes, worded o the effect that it was written by an unimaginative, or washed-up, or outright lazy author who can't do original work anymore, but that's just me.

I began listening to it before I knew any of this. It was poorly read by Paul Boehmer and the story was poorly written for my taste, so I quickly gave up on it. It was too young for me. According to Wikipedia, the story begins thus: "Eleven-year-old Gregor is left home alone in his family's New York City apartment to watch his sisters and grandmother. When Gregor's baby sister Boots falls through an old air duct grate in the building's basement, he dives in after her. The two fall miles below into the Underland: a subterranean world home to humans with near-translucent skin; giant sentient bats, rodents, and insects; and an escalating conflict between the human city of Regalia and the rats' King Gorger."

So maybe this will appeal to a younger audience, but based on my admittedly limited experience, I cannot commend it.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Rating: WARTY!

I've enjoyed several of this author's works, but I could not get with him on this one. I positively reviewed The Elephant's Child in February 2018, and his Just So Stories in December of 2014, and I even enjoyed the Jungle Book stories related to Mowgli, which admittedly I did as research for a novel, but nevertheless! This one was boring, I'm sorry to report.

Set in the late nineteenth century, this story has a great plot to begin with: Kim is Kimball O'Hara, an orphan whose Irish father and mother are both dead. He continues to live in poverty as did his parents, and earns a living (if you can call it that) from begging and running errands on the streets of Lahore, which nowadays is a major city in Pakistan in the Punjab pradesh. Kipling's story was set before the partition. Kim is so much a part of the local culture that he is routinely mistaken for a native. He sometimes does jobs for Mahbub Ali, who is a Pashtun horse dealer, but who also works for the British secret service.

Kim attaches himself to a Tibetan lama and begins traveling with him as the lama seeks to free himself from the never-ending wheel of life and achieve enlightenment, For some reason this necessitates a quest to find a certain body of water, but Kim is separated from the lama and sent to school when it's discovered that he is a British subject. Somehow this impoverished lama-beggar funds his education, and after he is done with school, he rejoins the lama on a trip, the lama still traveling, Kim now spying for the British government.

I never made it that far though, because the story bored the salwar off me. I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Love Ruby Lavender by Deborah Wiles

Rating: WARTY!

Read obnoxiously by Judith Ivey, this book was a fail from the off.

This audiobook sounded like fun from the blurb: Ruby Lavender and Miss End User License Agreement, aka Miss Eula, rescue chickens which are destined for the slaughterhouse in Halleluia, Mississippi. We're informed that they (Ruby and Eula, not the chickens) live in a house painted pink, although I fail to see how that makes them special, and they "operate their own personal secret-letter post office." Ruby is depressed by Miss Eula's impeding visit to Hawaii to see her grand-baby.

I never made it that far because the entire first quarter or so of this novel was obsessively and endlessly going on about chickens laying eggs and it was read in such an awful, nausea-inducing southern voice that I honestly couldn't stand to listen to it - not the voice nor the tediously harping story, so I ditched it and felt great relief at doing so. Obviously it's not aimed at me, but I cannot commend it based on what I suffered through. I would definitely not want a child to have to relive this!

Lumberjanes Unicron Power by Mariko Tamaki

Rating: WORTHY!

My sometimes stretched love affair with Mariko Tamaki remains intact after this audiobook version of what was initially purely a graphic novel.

Despite this being aimed at a much younger age group than ever I can claim membership of, it was highly amusing, very cute, entertaining, and told a good solid story. It turns out that unicorns aren't what you thought they were. They never were what I thought they were, not after reading (and positively reviewing) Rampant by Diana Peterfreund back in 2013, but here they're altogether different again.

Lumberjanes are a topic over which I evidently have mixed feelings. I love the idea of them, but the graphic novel (Lumberjanes Vol 2 by Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Brooke Allen, Maarta Laiho) I picked up and negatively reviewed back in 2016 did not impress me at all. I found it boring and DNF'd it, so perhaps it's testimony to Mariko Tamaki's writing skills that I enjoyed this one so much. One small problem I had with that earlier work was that I could not understand how the title came about. These girls are not the female equivalent of Lumberjacks, not even remotely, so the name is misleading in many regards, but it is amusing.

The title just refers to a series of girl-centric comics, and is set in a summer camp (Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp for Hardcore Lady Types if you must know). In process of enjoying a field trip, the girls encounter the unicorns and also get stuck on a cloud mountain later. The camp hands out badges, rather like the scouts do, but other than that, nothing much seems to happen except when the girls end up in trouble in one way or another from their own various activities, not all of which are camp sanctioned.

FYI, the Lumberjanes are:

• Jo, a transgender girl who tends to be a leader and who has the most badges
• April who is the princess of puns and who takes notes. She's very strong despite her apparently small frame.
• Molly is an archer of Katniss skills, and is a great puzzle-solver. She wears a pet raccoon named Bubbles as a hat and is right behind Jo in number of badges earned.
• Mal looks like some rebel girl, but isn't actually like that. She's a great maker of plans.
• Ripley is young and fearless

On the camp staff are Rosie, the camp master, and Jen, who is the leader of Roanoke cabin, which is the lumberjane's cabin

I enjoyed this listen very much and I commend it as a great introduction to the lumberjanes even though it's not the first story in line.

Nancy Drew Girl Detective #13 Doggone Town by Stefan Petrucha, Sarah Kinney, Sho Murase, Carlos Jose Guzman

Rating: WARTY!

I can only give pretty much the same review for this one that I did for the previous volume out of three I read recently. I never read any of the original Nancy Drews (and I'm starting to be glad about that!) although in July of 2017, I did positively review a book which told the interesting story of how the Nancy Drew books came about.

My only experience of her prior to these graphic novels was via two widely disparate movies, one an old one, and one a much more recent version which actually wasn't too bad. None of the three graphic novels were particularly interesting to me, although younger readers might enjoy them. This particular one was nothing to write home about. The color by Guzman, the art by Murase, and the writing by Petrucha and Kinney were all workman-like and nothing special, and the story was unsurprisingly predictable.

Nancy Sue and the absurdly-named Ned Nickerson, who sounds like a character out of the Monty Python sketch 'Election Night Special' are out and about when they encounter an apparently lost dog. They drive out to a remote village and return it to its owner only to discover the entire village is deserted except for the owner, who is absurdly mean. Of course, she did it! Boring.

These books never explain why it is that Nancy doesn't simply call the police. You'd think the writer would at least offer a token explanation for why she cannot, but no - that's too much to ask for. And what? And entire village goes missing and no one notices? Not the police, not relatives, not delivery people? No one?

Nancy Drew Girl Detective #11 Monkey Wrench Blues by Stefan Petrucha, Sarah Kinney, Sho Murase, Carlos Jose Guzman

Rating: WARTY!

This was one of three Nancy Drew graphic novels which I decided to take a look at, having never read any of the original Nancy Drews and having seen her in only two widely disparate movies. None were particularly interesting to me, although younger readers might enjoy them. This particular one was nothing to write home about. The color by Guzman, the art by Murase, and the writing by Petrucha and Kinney were all workman-like and nothing special, and the story was quite predictable.

Nancy and her mechanic, Bess, drive a car in a race of supposedly environmentally-friendly vehicles. Naturally someone is trying to run Nancy off the road and naturally Mary Drew (or is it Nancy-Sue?) escapes scot-free and solves the 'puzzle'. Boring. Can't commend this one.

Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi

Rating: WARTY!

I negatively reviewed The Gilded Wolves by this same author in early November 2018 after starting out really liking that one. It was badly let down by the ending. I didn't have to wait that long in this audiobook by the same author, but aimed at a middle-grade rather than an adult, audience to have the same feelign engendered fortunately.

The story is about an irresponsible young girl whose mother works for a museum of Indian artefacts. The girl, Aru Shah, stops time by giving in to a bitchy dare from a rival schoolgirl, and then has to fix it. The plot idea isn't a bad one, but the execution sucked. Once the story started bringing in huffy pets (supposedly Indian gods in animal form), it lost all hope of retaining my affection. I'm so tired of cutesy animals in these stories, especially ones which exhibit a 'tude. I DNF'd this after about a quarter of it, and I can safely say I'm done with this author now.

Spellbound by Blake Charlton

Rating: WARTY!

There's not much to say about this that I didn't cover in the negative review of volume one of this trilogy. In volume two we abandoned Nicodemus altogether at least as far as I read, which was not very far because, despite a really quite engaging beginning, it rapidly descended into one of those love-hate romances which I despise.

It's set ten tears after the first volume, which struck me as very strange, and Nicodemus, the boy wizard who lived from the first volume, was barely mentioned, much less actually appeared in the part I read. After a great start, the story began obsessing on this healer woman named Francesca DeVega, who had interested me to begin with, but who then became involved in this 'roguish' pilot who reappeared in her life, and I couldn't stand to read this anymore. Based on my short acquaintanceship, I cannot recommend this, and I'm done with this dreary and unimaginative author.

Spellwright by Blake Charlton

Rating: WARTY!

I picked up the sequel to this without realizing it was a sequel - once again Big Publishing™ failed to disclose on the front cover that it was volume two of a trilogy. Despite this dishonesty, I started reading it and enjoyed the opening chapter, so I decided to get the previous volume - this volume - from the library and read that one first. I ended up enjoying it sufficiently to want to go back to volume two and continue reading that, although the entire story was rather ponderous and overall left a bad taste.

In this volume we're introduced to Nicodemus who is the usual hobbled wizard in this kind of story. In his case though it has a twist in that spells (for reasons which went unexplained) are wrought in the muscles of the body and involve words which then migrate to the hands where they can be used. Bizarre, yes, but that's how it was. So Nicodemus's problem was that he was dyslexic, and therefore could not cast spells reliably - and sometimes cast them dangerously. He was the Seamus Finnigan of this story. Harry Potter's Finnigan may well have been named after Seamus Finnegan, an Irish playwright, but Nicodemus was initially interesting to me because of this twist.

As is the case in most every wizarding story, Nicodemus was the savior of the world because of his 'defective' condition. He'd been rendered this way because some other wizard was sucking the magic out of him. Albus Dumbledore - er, the aging wizard - who has taken a special interest in Harry - er Nicodemus - of course keeps him in the dark, so when all hell breaks loose, Nicodemus doesn't have a clue and has to figure it out himself with the aid of his male and female companions, one of whom is a powerful wizard herself, and just like in Harry Potter, friends are being murdered, and Nicodemus has to go on the run. Unlike with the Rowling stories, this all happens in book one.

here's something I've warned about before. The problem with pronouncing the word 'shone' as 'shown' instead of pronouncing it like you'd pronounce 'one' ('shonn'), as many Americans do, is that sometimes it bites back. On one page, I believe in this volume, but perhaps in volume one, I read, "A wall of silvery text shown down from the other side of the door..." Clearly this was intended to be 'shone down'. Not 'shown', but when pronounced incompetently, leads to a different word and a different meaning! Beware the language, fellow writers! Rein it in before it rains on you (or at least that's what it will tell you is falling on your back...).

So apart from the dyslexia which I found interesting, there really was nothing new here that we haven't seen before. I was able to read all of this and get back to volume two, but things continued to go downhill, only more rapidly. On that basis, I'm going to rate this negatively because it really didn't live up to its potential, it was boring in parts and brought to the table very little that was fresh. I cannot commend it, especially in light of how volume two went.

Polaris by Michael Northrop

Rating: WARTY!

This sounds like a sci-fi novel from the title, but it isn't. It's a middle-grade scare novel a la Goosebumps, but not. I picked it up because I thought it was sci-fi, but even when I realized it wasn't, it still sounded like an interesting premise when I first looked at it at the library: "The proud sailing ship Polaris is on a mission to explore new lands, and its crew is eager to bring their discoveries back home. But when half the landing party fails to return from the Amazon jungle, the tensions lead to a bloody mutiny. The remaining adults abandon ship, leaving behind a cabin boy, a botanist's assistant, and a handful of deckhands -- none of them older than twelve."

I think as a writer you need to bring your reader in pretty quickly (of course this rule doesn't apply to established writers how seem to think they can ramble on endlessly and still keep all their readers entranced. Stephen King I'm looking at you...). The problem is that for different readers this type of entrance means different things. It's hard to write a generic opening that will draw everyone in, and in this case, the writing just did not welcome me at all. Right from when I first started listening to it, I couldn't get into it at all and I DNF'd it pretty quickly.

I think the problem was the mesmerizingly rapid, if not rabid switch of viewpoints as the story opened so I wasn't ever quite sure where the hell I was. Maybe if I'd been sitting in a room listening to this it would have been different, but I listen to audiobooks pretty much exclusively when I'm driving, and when I am driving, I'm all about driving, and will ditch attention to a novel rapidly if something demands extra attention on the other side of the windshield. That's not to say I ignore traffic if a story is really engrossing, by any means, but I know that if my mind is wandering onto other matters - such as my own writing, then the audiobook just ain't cutting it. So, other than that, I don't have anything to add about this except that based on my experience I can't commend it.

Unhappy Medium by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

Rating: WARTY!

Evidently part of a "Suddenly Supernatural" series, this audiobook was a disaster from my perspective. First of all it's number three in an ongoing series, which I couldn't tell from the book cover because Big Publishing™ seems to be in an orchestrated campaign to consistently deny this knowledge to readers. Why they would want this, I do not know, but it's yet another reason I have no time for Big Publishing™. Consequently it was a story in progress before I ever got there. This might have been manageable if other things hadn't tripped it up.

Worse than joining it in the middle as it were, it's worst-person voice, aka first-person voice. Worse than that even, the main character Kat Roberts appears to be a complete moron. Why female authors make their female main characters idiots so often remains a mystery to me. I don't mind if they start out somewhat dumb and wise up during the course of the story but to portray your female as an idiot doesn't do anyone any good. Women have enough to contend with from men without their own gender turning on them like this.

On top of that, the reader, Allyson Ryan, seemed like she wanted to make Kat's best friend as irritating as possible. Typically I find I like the side-kick better than I like the main character in far too many novels of this nature, but here the reader makes "Jac's" voice nauseatingly scratchy (she sounded like that clown from the Simpsons cartoons). She was so bad she almost made the main character seem worth my time. Almost. But I honestly couldn't stand to listen to it. This and the fact that the story was written so badly it was uninteresting to me, made me ditch this DNF. I can't commend it.

My Brigadista Year by Katherine Paterson

Rating: WORTHY!

Read charmingly and beautifully by Frankie Corzo, this was a very short audiobook (written by the author of Bridge to Terabithia) that I picked up on a whim at the local library. It turned out to be an inspired whim because I really enjoyed it. It tells an interesting story based on actual Cuban history.

Evidently at Ernesto Guevara's suggestion, Fidel Castro launched the Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización en Cuba, known as a year of education, which occupied almost the entire length of 1961. Literacy brigades (the Brigadistas of the title) were trained and then sent out into the countryside to build schools, train new teachers, and teach the illiterate to read and write. The campaign taught almost three-quarters of a million farmers and their families, and succeeded in raising the national literacy rate from around seventy percent to almost one hundred. There's a short documentary titled Maestra about the campaign, but I have not yet seen that.

This novel tells a fictional story of one such teacher named Lora, a girl in her mid-teens, who lived on a small farm while teaching the family and nearby families the alphabet and reading and writing skills. It was at no small risk to her life, since there was an orchestrated campaign against the literacy project because it was viewed as a political effort to indoctrinate those people, and there were attacks on the Brigadistas, including murders.

The story is told very actively, always moving forward, with little time for reflection, but which is nonetheless included in appropriately brief and organic moments. There is tragedy and joy and humor and moving times, and there were times I laughed out loud at the Brigadista's observations particularly towards the end about her friend's poetry (how many times can you write in the same poem that your heart was broken into a million tiny pieces?!). I commend this novel as a worthy, educational, and fun read.

The Losers Club by Andrew Clements

Rating: WARTY!

Read quite well by Christopher Gebauer, this audiobook was a story about these young kids who are in an after-school book-reading club. The guy who started the club deliberately called it the Loser's Club because he figured few people would want to join such a club, and it would give him the opportunity to sit and read uninterrupted by others, which is all he ever wanted to do. In fact, he'd been getting into trouble for reading and day-dreaming in class, and this was his last chance to show he could apply himself and not screw-up.

This sounds like it ought to be a good idea - a novel about reading, but for me it fell short. Admittedly it's not aimed at me, but not being a twelve-year-old I can't judge it from that perspective. I can reference my own youth, but that's a while ago and probably had little to do with youth today who have so many more distractions than I had. Plus I didn't get into reading seriously until I was around fourteen. This leaves me with my current perspective and I have no problem with that!

I gave up on this because of three things. The first of these was the bullying. The kid - whose name is Alec - has to recruit at least one more person to his club, so his first choice is old friend Dave, who is talked out of it by bully Kent, who used to be a close friend of Alec's way back. Now he's a complete jerk. Here's the thing. This novel was published in 2017. That year, the author was in his late sixties and I am by no means convinced he understands the school system any more, nor did he seem interested in doing any research, apparently. I mean, did bullies in 2017 really call a kid who likes to read 'a bookworm'? I doubt it.

Since this author was in middle school at the beginning of the sixties, there have been great strides taken to eject bullying from schools by means of zero tolerance policies. Schools are not the same as they were when he was in school! This doesn't mean that the policies always work, or that bullying is totally absent by any means, but the type of unrestrained, uncontrolled, rife and overt bullying going on here is completely ridiculous and made the story unbelievable. It was like everything that Bully Kent did was unconstrained and went without notice, much less censure, but everything Alec did, though it wasn't remotely connected with bullying, the teachers came down on him like a ton of mortar. It was too absurd.

The second thing was about the books. Alec is passionately into reading, but the only books he's ever heard of are what are considered (for reasons which all-too-often escape me) as classics. There was nary a truly modern novel mentioned in the entire book. It's like the author considered only his own preferences - either that or he blindly pulled up a list of classics and used that. The name-dropping of the same tired-old titles in novels like this is nauseating - even for a book which is about reading. It's worth noting that none of these books was read on any electronic device - it's like those hadn't been invented in this author's world.

Connected with this was another nauseating habit: that of referencing Star Wars - and not the new garbage, but the old garbage! I grew out of Star Wars a long time ago, and I look upon those tediously uninventive and repetitive movies with distaste these days. I can understand others' enjoyment of it, yet for all the references to it here, Alec had read not a single Star Wars novel (at least as measured by a complete lack of reference to them in this book). Instead Alec was all classics all the time. It made no sense and was entirely unrealistic.

This leads me to the third issue with this so-called reading passion of his: he actually had no reading passion. At least not as would be determined from his devouring of books. Instead, it seemed he re-read the same limited selection over and over and over again. This rather convinced me that he was not a book lover. He merely had a fixation on certain books and he showed no interest in moving on to other stories or in advancing to more mature material. Instead he was stuck inside a reading time-loop of juvenile 'classics'.

Now if Kent had taunted Alec on that, it would have made sense. It would still have been bullying, but not anything a teacher could have really called him on. He would have got away with it and called out Alec realistically. Why the author never thought of that is a mystery to me. I guess his imagination is lacking.

That's not the worst part. Alec can't start his club until he has at least one other person signed on, and he manages to get a girl by the name of Nina. Later another younger girl by the name of Layla joins, but despite his supposed passion for books, Alec quickly abandons all interest in books and begins focusing solely on Nina. What she's thinking, is she attracted to Kent, what's she doing, and on and on. It felt like a complete betrayal of everything the book had supposedly been about up to that point, and there was no lead-in to this at all; it just happened out of the blue.

So overall I consider this book a very amateur attempt to tell a story which could have been written in much better way. I can't commend it for these reasons.

The Magic Misfits by Neil Patrick Harris

Rating: WARTY!

Neil Patrick Harris is an actor known for Doogie Howser, MD and How I Met Your Mother neither of which show I ever watched. He's also supposedly a magician, but I've never seen him perform. Maybe that latter interest is what made him write this novel aimed at middle-graders, but for me it wasn't very good. Read by the author, it was full of clichéd stereotypes and average writing as well as nonsensical events - that is, they made no sense even within the context of the novel.

The basic plot is about the adventures of a group of misfit kids who have various talents - like one girl is an escape artist and lock picker, and the main kid is a magician. So while I must give kudos to having a handicapped kid as a main character and having prominent, self-motivated female characters (I particularly liked Ridley), the story never rose above its poor to average roots. The villains, for example, including the main kid's uncle (I forget the names of these characters, but make no apology for that - they were very forgettable) were made villainous not through any real villainy, but by having 'greasy hair' or bad breath, or by being overweight. No. I'm sorry, but no.

The story was unrealistic in that there were opportunities for the kids to get the police involved, yet they never did. Obviously in a story like this you want the kids to resolve things without calling in the adult cavalry to the rescue, but if you're going to do that, you need to do the work to make it happen. You can't just lazily have it happen contrary to all logic and sense. For example, the main scheme in this story was this one guy's attempt to steal this huge diamond which for inexplicable reasons was going to be exhibited at this villain's funfair. There he would replace it with a well-crafted fake and Robert's your aunt's husband.

These kids had two golden opportunities to derail this scheme and they ignored both of them. The first came when they broke into the villain's hotel room and discovered the fake diamond. If they had stolen that, right then and there, his scheme would have been thwarted, but they don't even consider it. This tells me they're profoundly stupid.

The guy's bathtub was full of stolen property - wallets and jewelry, etc. They could have called the police on him there, got him arrested, and thereby saved the diamond, but they failed to do so. This tells me they're profoundly stupid. Later, at the show where the switch is to take place, they were all in attendance and could have called out that the guy had surreptitiously switched the diamond since, as budding magicians, they knew exactly how he'd done it. There were police right there, but never once did they utter a word. This tells me they're profoundly stupid.

The main character is an orphan who runs away from his evil uncle, and he knows hardship and hunger, yet later in the story, these misfits douse the main villain in breakfasts - lots of eggs, syrup and pancakes, I don't know where they got this from, (I guess I tuned-out on that part), but the fact that not one of these kids thought of what a waste this was when there were hungry kids who could have eaten it, turned me off the whole story. If they'd used food that was spoiled and tossed out by some restaurant, that would have fixed this issue, but the author was too thoughtless or careless to make that happen, evidently thinking solely of slapstick instead of how real kids in this situation would have thought or felt.

In short it was really poor, amateur writing, and because of this, I can't commend this one. It's also, I have to say, really annoying that celebrities get a free pass with Big Publishing™ for no other reason than that they're celebrities, even though as writers, they suck. Meanwhile there are perfectly good, well-written, original, inventive, novels from unknowns which are routinely rejected by these same publishers. Clearly they aren't interested in good books, only in fast bucks. That's why I will have no truck with Big Publishing™.

We Are Not Eaten by Yaks by C Alexander London

Rating: WARTY!

This novel for middle-graders sounded like it might be interesting. It certainly seemed like it promised to be different. Instead of having children chomping at the bit for an adventure with their explorer parents, these children wanted nothing more than to be left alone to watch TV, but somehow end up on adventures anyway.

I discovered after starting reading this one that this isn't the first book in the series, but once again there's is absolutely nothing whatever on the cover to warn the reader that this is a story already in progress. It's like buying a book which has the first five chapters missing. This is why I do not have a lot of time for series or for Big Publishing who quite obviously simply do not care about the reader.

That I might have been willing to overlook had the story been worthwhile, but while it did have its moments, it had far too many boring sections to make it a worthwhile read, and I DNF'd it. The point I did this was when the father and his son and daughter, on an adventure trying to find their missing mother, were expelled from a plane in mid-air (without a single person on board objecting) over a snowy mountain range, and they ripped a page quite literally straight out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, by managing to escape with a life raft. Barf! Let's forget that at thirty thousand feet they would suffocate before they ever landed, so what they had to land in was irrelevant.

I cannot support a novel which when it's not boring is ridiculous and the ridicule is unleavened by plagiarizing a movie for an escape.

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, Jillian Tamaki

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a passable story of Rose, a girl beginning to venture into womanhood, told in graphic novel form by the Tamaki cousins.

Rose has been vacationing in a rented seaside cottage with her parents every summer since childhood, and each year she hangs out with her friend, Windy, who also vacations there. The two of them have fun, chat idly about all kinds of things, begin to notice boys, and realize they're much more observant of adult drama now than ever they were before, and much less able to discern any sort of role model in those grown-ups they see. And there seems to be a lot of drama in this particular vacation spot.

I've become a bit of a fan of the Tamakis lately, but their work can be very patchy. This was a cut above the patchwork and while the artwork was nothing spectacular, it was perfectly serviceable. The story wasn't exactly glittering, but it was enjoyable for a one-time read, and so I commend this as a worthy read.

Charlie Franks is A-OK by Cecily Anne Paterson

Rating: WARTY!

I didn't realize when I began this that it was volume 2 of the 'Coco and Charlie Franks' series, otherwise I probably would have skipped it altogether, but there is, once again, nothing on the cover to indicate to a poor unsuspecting reader that this is part of a series. This book won the CALEB writing prize in 2017 (this is a competition that authors pay to enter) and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I guess the competition was poor?

The book isn't god-awfully bad, and the reason I decided to read it was because I thought it might be different. It's set in Australia for one thing, and doesn't involve an only child or a child who is an orphan or who has only one parent. Aside from that, it hit every trope you can find in a book about girls and horses - the evil girl competitor, the competition you must win no matter what, the girl getting all the credit and the poor horse none; problems with her horse that threaten to derail her overriding ambition, lack of parental support (although both parents are present, they're really absent); resentment of a new addition to the family that becomes unrestrained joy later, trope overreaction to 'necessary' guy to validate the main female character, and so on.

After a year of home-schooling, the twins are going back to public school. Why they were home-schooled and why they're now going back goes unexplained. Maybe it's from something in volume one? It's at school where Coco fits in to the alpha girl pack and of course Charlie doesn't because she's nothing like her twin. Maybe this was something else that was gone into in the first novel, because it's not mentioned here as to whether they're identical or fraternal (can girls be fraternal twins? LOL! Sororal?).

I'm not one who expects identical twins to be exactly alike in behaviors and desires etc. I prefer it if they're not, but that said, they are quite literally clones and therefore have the same genes which often express in the same ways when it comes to preferences, tastes (not testes which is what I first accidentally typed! LOL!), lifestyle, etc. These two showed none of that whatsoever, so the point of twinning them was lost on me.

The worst problem for me though, was that the main character wasn't AOK. She wasn't even likeable. She had a one-track (or maybe in this case one-tack?) mind which revolved solely around her own selfish and self-absorbed desires, and really had no time for anything or anyone else, not even her sister who loaned Charlie her own horse after Charlie's wasn't able to compete. Charlie didn't strike me as having an over-abundance of smarts, either, as this quote indicates:

While I was at school, I put in enough effort to show I was actually present in the class, and at least vaguely interested in most subjects (I think I mostly just looked vague in Ancient History) but as soon as the bell went and I was on the bus, school was forgotten. Horses were the only things that were important....

The only other thing - quite literally - that she had her mind on was this guy with the asinine name of 'Jake' who seemed to have super powers since Charlie literally felt electric shocks when she so much as looked at him. I'm sorry, but no. How shallow can you make her? Well, this author paradoxically plumbed the depths of shallowness.

With regard to the baby her mother was expecting, this is Charlie's Take On it: " I didn't want to say 'she'. That baby was an 'it', forcing its way into our lives, and making my mum sick" Don't sugar-coat it like that, Charlie. Just plan on trampling the 'it' under your horse's hooves why don't you?!

I'm guessing that the author's plan was to turn this around, but by this point it was too late! I was slightly over halfway through, at the end of Chapter 13 (or 13 Chapter 13 as this book insisted on labeling its chapters!) and I was so sick of this character's attitude that I simply didn't care what happened to her. I refused to read about her any more. She was a dick, and you can't turn that around with simple homespun remedies.

Charlie boasts that she's never fallen from her horse, but even if this is what the author has planned, you can't turned around that obnoxious arrogance, and selfishness with a fall from a horse. You can't do it with mom having a miscarriage, because Charlie selfishly hates the baby. You can't change it by her mom having a cute baby because Charlie selfishly hates the baby. You can't do it by winning the championship, because she's already convinced that a win is inevitable. You can't change it by having her lose the championship because she'll simply blame it on having to ride her sister's horse, for the use of which she's never even properly thanked her sister. She's a big jerk, period and I refuse to commend a novel that makes virtues out of vices in one so young and then seeks to fix all these problems with a magical redemption.

Magic Beneath the Huckleberries by Kristy Tate

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
“She’d and hand Annie a sack lunch” (omit 'and')
“he’d by her a prettier one” ('buy', not 'by')

This was a really short story (less than ten pages) about a young girl, Annie, whose mother is dying of cancer. Annie is a book addict who would sneak reads of children's books at the library that her mother probably wouldn't approve of (maybe some of those are the 'banned' books I'm reviewing this month!). She also reads her mom's romance novels that a friend brings by, sneaking them into her own room when her mom is sleeping. Mom doesn’t have long left to live and Annie realizes that praying won’t do any good. The ridiculous idea that a benign god would make a person beg for something that the god could grant effortlessly were it not actually a malign and cruel god, says it all.

Annie wonders if the school witch coven can help, but discovers there's more sauciness than ever there is sorcery going on in that 'coven' in the woods, sitting around camp fires with boyfriends. On her way back from her pointless excursion Annie discovers some magic of her own, hiding in the huckleberries! This was very short, but sweet and I recommend it for a fast and entertaining read for anyone who likes a warm fuzzy story.