Emily The Strange: This Cover Got Lost by Jessica Gruner, Rob Reger, Buffy Visick, Brian Brooks, Buzz Parker

Rating: WARTY!

This is volume two of a disappointing four comic series I requested from the library and the only thing to distinguish it, apart from the admittedly amusing title, is the delightfully named Buffy Visick joining the writing team (along with Brian Brooks). How four writers can come up with so little in the way of entertainment is the real entertainment here.

After enjoying a previous graphic novel which was my first introduction to Emily, and then all four of the novels written about her, I was really looking forward to these, but they were not at all what I had hoped for, and nothing like the previous material I'd read in terms of quality, inventiveness, or entertainment value. I was sorry to leave this character on such a sour note, but glad I read these last, because if I'd have read these first, I would likely never have read anything else and would have been poorer for it.

For me the problem was that this set doesn't really tell a story like the others do. Instead they consist of mediocre red and black illustrations (which could be called media ocher, I guess! LOL! as long as we're about to talk of bad punning), which tell mini tales all of which seem to often revolve around poor puns which really can't be stretched into a longer story. The title of the volume sets the theme for the content, and I found it amusing on this occasion especially since graphic novel cover artist has such a big (an unwarranted) deal made over it, but a lot of the references are to the pop culture of yesteryear, many of them antiques now, so the appeal is very limited. I recognized most of the names of the rocks stars of yesteryear featured in one story, but only one of the album covers, so that entire two page spread was lost on me. Lost is what I was in this, often, so again the title works if in a way unintended by the creators.

The stories in this volume were:
The Lost Art of was an empty frame.
Lost in Vision - blind pursuit of anything like entertainment value.
Lostco This was genuinely funny and entertaining, but the sad thing is that this is the only article out of all four comics that was worth reading.
Beauty is Lost Ugly.
Lost City Should have been included in the boring first volume.
Lost in Space Too spaced out.
Scarytale Theater Bring down the curtain.
Lost my Mind Agreed. Don't write anything else until you get it back!

Emily The Strange: Chairman of the Bored by Rob Reger, Brian Brooks, Jessica Gruner, Buzz Parker

Rating: WARTY!

This is volume one of a disappointing four comic series I requested from the library. After enjoying a previous graphic novel which was my first introduction to Emily, and then all four of the novels written about her, Emily, I was really looking forward to these, but they were not at all what I had hoped for and nothing like the previous material in terms of quality, inventiveness, or entertainment value. I was sorry to leave this character on such a sour note, but glad I read these last, because if I'd have read these first, I would likely never have read anything else and would have been poorer for it.

For me the problem was that this set doesn't really tell a story like the others do. Instead they consist of mediocre red and black illustrations (which could be called media ochre, I guess! LOL!), which tell mini tales all of which seem to revolve around bad puns which really don't make the transition to a longer story. The title of the volume sets the theme for the content, but a lot of the references are to the pop culture of yesteryear, many of them antiques now, so the appeal is very limited. I recognized most of the names of the rocks stars of yester year featured in one story, but only one of the album covers, so that entire two page spread was lost on me. Bored is what I was, so the title works, if in a way unintended by the creators.

It was written by Reger, Brooks, and Gruner, and largely illustrated poorly by Parker. The main stories in this volume were:
Strange sauce, where Emily flavors cafeteria food with a concoction o her own and turns everyone into monsters. Boring.
Thirteen other uses for wire hangers Lame.
head in the clouds Thin.
Bored to death Stuffing nonsense.
Croquet with the damned Laughable, and not in a good way.
Grow'n Up vegetative.

That was pretty much it. A complete bust. I do not recommend this. By all means do read the other works on Emily, but nothing from this series is worth your time.

Emily the Strange: Piece of Mind written by Rob Reger and Jessica Gruner, illustrated by Rob Reger and Buzz Parker

Rating: WORTHY!

After having fallen in love with Emily The Strange from a graphic novel I serendipitously happened upon at the worshipful local library, I discovered that there was a series of four novels on this same charming deviant, and I requested all four. This is the last of those.

Once again Emily is on a road trip. This seems to be her thing. She returns to the same town she visited in the 1790s, this time with all her cats, because she wishes to reclaim her inheritance: the power of Black Rock, which her arch nemesis is also seeking. Legend has it that this battle takes place every thirteenth generation, and Emily is not about to A. Lose and B. Let this power fall into the hands of her evil nemesis where it will stay for the next thirteen generations. With her golem, Raven at her side, and her four cats (Miles, Mystery, Neechee, and Sabbath) along for the trip, she heads out to do battle.

The problem is that Emily has no idea how to reclaim her inheritance, and neither does her arch nemesis. Worse than this, the town has changed rather a lot since she was last there (in 1790) so she has a hard time even figuring out where things are, particularly underground. Even worse, Her nemesis has a girl, Dottie, working for him and she can pull people's thoughts right out of their head just by touching them, leaving them at best, with holes in their memory, or at worst, with a mind almost as blank as Raven's is.

Emily steps up her game though, and of course she wins through as we knew she would. Another great story, the only bad part of which is that it was the last. I'm not a series fan generally speaking, but once in a while I'm lucky enough to happen upon one which breaks the mold in any sense of that word, and stands out above all others, and this is definitely one such series. "Are you there, black rock? It's Me, Emily" was one of many classic lines throughout the series that made this a joy to read.

Emily the Strange: Dark Times written by Rob Reger, illustrated by Rob Reger and Buzz Parker

Rating: WORTHY!

After having fallen in love with Emily The Strange from a graphic novel I serendipitously happened upon at the worshipful local library, I discovered that there was a series of four novels on this same charming deviant, and I requested all four.

In this, the third volume, which was the first I read in order, Emily perfects her Time Out Machine and is able to travel back to 1790 to investigate the demise of a distant relative, Lily, who apparently dies at the tender age of thirteen, at the hands of a 'Dark Girl'. Emily herself is a Dark Girl as was Lily, and so Emily is rather curious as to why one of them would kill one of her own, and wondering if she can somehow change history by preventing the death, and whether such a change would backfire and change Emily's own future so much that she would regret this intervention.

Once again she runs into her nemesis in the form of one of his ancestors, who are just as designing as he is in Emily's own time. She has to figure out why the supply of Black Rock (curiously the name of a location near my home town!) has dried up, and how it can be be set free again. Meanwhile the villain is holding Emily's ancestors prisoner to force them to confess the secret of the Black Rock so they can take it over. Apparently this fight for control of the substance takes place every thirteen generations - which happens to be Emily's favorite number.

And once again Emily is victorious. Those primitive 1790's locks cannot hold her in! Despite a few hair-raising scrapes which actually don't raise Emily's thick, dark locks, and despite at one point thinking she is trapped in the past, she wins through and all is well. A great story!

Emily the Strange: Stranger and Stranger written by Rob Reger and Jessica Gruner, illustrated by Rob Reger and Buzz Parker

Rating: WORTHY!

After having fallen in love with Emily The Strange from a graphic novel I serendipitously happened upon at the worshipful local library, I discovered that there was a series of four novels on this same charming deviant, and I requested all four, which was the maximum I could, given that I had one request pending already for something else. I wasn't sure what order the novels followed at first, so I ended-up reading this, the second book, first, before the first one was seconded.

In this book, Emily is bemoaning the need to move to yet another new town. The reason(s) for this move is or are obscure, but the cause is evidently tied to Emily's strange and often anti-social behavior eventually pissing-off the citizenry to the point where mobs and pitchforks might be called for. The first big clue to this is Emily's dire need to prank the whole town before she leaves. In her new home, Emily wastes no time in exploring everywhere, particular dumpsters and sewers, both of which figure large in her legend, and already considering a prank plan.

At one point early in the novel, Emily accidentally duplicates herself, and then discovers that her other self is actually the evil side of her, so it's really a riff on Jekyll and Hide, but is also hilarious as the two Emilys try to get along, and then slowly set about trying to sabotage each other. In the end, they have become mortal enemies, the only solution to which problem, seems to be Emily having to sew their bodies together, and then try to re-integrate their minds. In the end she succeeds, leaving only an empty husk of her alter ego, like a dried-up snakeskin, but the journey there is the real story.

The slow-burn of this perfectly titled adventure, filled with fear, suspicion, doubt, and paranoia, was magnificent to experience, and I highly recommend it.

Emily the Strange: The Lost Days written by Rob Reger and Jessica Gruner, illustrated by Rob Reger and Buzz Parker

Rating: WORTHY!

After having fallen in love with Emily The Strange from a graphic novel which I serendipitously happened upon at the worshipful local library, I discovered that there was a series of four novels on this same charming deviant, and I requested all four, which was the maximum I could, given that I had one request pending already for something else. I wasn't sure what order the novels followed at first, so I ended-up reading this, the first book out of those I requested, second, and the second one first.

This first one is about Emily giving herself amnesia because she has to go back to her ancestral town of Blackrock and fix a problem with her family arch-enemy, so it starts with her waking up on a park bench on this tiny town, and she has no idea who she is or how she got there. Always a great way to start a story if you can follow through, and this one certainly did. In some ways it was spoiled for me because I'd read the graphic novel first, which gave away secrets I would not have known had I read this without any introduction, but it was still a mystery and a great read, filled with fascinating characters and characteristically bizarre behaviors.

Emily is only thirteen, so her story is highly improbable, but it is funny. The scrapes she gets into and the thoughts and ideas she has running through her transom are deliciously warped. At some point prior to this story she had constructed what she refers to as a golem, but which is more like a Frankensteinian creature-cum-cyborg. Golems are Judaic mythical creatures, which are animated from clay figures. This character is flesh (with some electronics), and Emily put the finishing touch to her with the heart of a dying raven, so the golem is called Raven and can talk to birds. She's very strong and very pretty, but isn't very smart or communicative. She often answers with "Iono" which I found peculiarly endearing. She tends to take instructions very literally, so Emily has to be careful what she asks of Raven.

Not that she knows this, in this particular story, or that Raven is the one who drove her to the town in the first place prior to getting a job working as a barista at the podunk town's only café. For herself, Emily has to work out who she is and why she's there. In process of this, she encounters a host of locals, most of whom seem to spend inordinate amounts of time in the café when they're not working for the town's only real business - the junk mail factory. The totally corrupt police are a trip (Emily racks up $243 in fines without even trying, due to the local wacky bye-laws), as is the visiting circus of the weird, which seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time camped outside a town this small.

The map of the town which Emily conveniently draws for us in her diary (which is suspiciously missing pages) shows the junk mail factory issuing flames, but this never happens in the story (unless I missed it, I did read parts of it late at night!), so what that was all about, Iono. The story was awesome, fascinating, and lovable, as was Emily. There was an intriguing character named Molly who could almost be a clone of Emily's, but was not, and there were four cats which seemed much more intelligent than you'd normally expect. All in all, a great story which made me want only to read more about Emily.

A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson

Rating: WARTY!

In yet another audiobook experiment, I decided to explore a novel by Ibbotson, whom I've never read before, and doubt I will again after this! It began a little shakily (I skipped the prologue, which isn't always easy to do in an audiobook, so I consider myself quite accomplished on that score!), but the book began growing on me. That lasted to twenty-five percent in, but the next ten percent was so boring and unnecessary, and irrelevant to the theme (assuming the theme is to get the countess below the stairs and the earl above them together), that I DNF'd the whole thing.

At first I thought that the young lord of the manor, Rupert, would immediately fall for the Russian countess, who is forced into work as a maid, but he's actually fallen for the nurse, Muriel, who took care of him when he was wounded during the closing overs of World War One. I was convinced that would change, though. The nurse, I decided, would probably end up being a gold-digger. In the end, I became more interested in her, and began to think that this story would have been a vastly-improved romance had it been about Muriel and Rupert, and Anna the countess left out of it altogether. She was tedious.

Why this countess is a maid rather than say, a governess or a lady's companion, or even keeps her title, is conveniently bypassed by the author, presumably the only reason being that it wouldn't work in getting her and the earl into close proximity. Anna is a young Russian Countess forced to flee Russia after the revolution. Now she's impoverished, and inexplicably forced into menial work to get by. The Earl of Westerholme's household takes her on temporarily, and she works hard, determined to do her best. Rupert was not destined to become the next earl until his older brother was killed in the war whence, in line with the British custom of Primogeniture, everything passed to the oldest remaining male.

But rather than take off when Rupert arrived, this story dissipated into endless rambling asides about an odd assortment of characters and the so-called romance never got started - not in the first third, which was all I could stand to hear. I dislike instadore, but this went in completely the opposite direction, offering no reason at all to imagine that these two would get together! On top of that, the author has the countess (as the maid) behaving so inappropriately that she would have been summarily dismissed without references had this really been England in the inter-war years. The author's approach misfires even more than Rupert's aeroplane engine, and that crashed and burned!

Igraine the Brave written and illustrated by Cornelia Funke

Rating: WORTHY!

Written and illustrated by Cornelia Funke, this tells the story of Igraine, who is the younger of the two children of Sir Lamorak (which sounds a bit like caramel backwards!) and Lady Melisande. The parents are fine magicians and are proudly raising their magician-in-training son, Igraine's older brother, Albert. Igraine though, has no interest in magic. Enamored of the life lead by one of her grandfathers, Igraine longs to be a knight. It's soon to be her birthday and her parents are working long and hard on a magical gift for her - a magical, lightweight suit of armor - which she longs to see, but is not allowed.

As her patience wears thin, doing her chores around the aged and slightly crumbling castle, such as feeding the water snakes and cleaning the stone lions and gargoyles which help protect her home, Igraine learns of unexpected developments in their neighborhood, namely: the disappearance of their neighbor, and the usurpation of her power by her unscrupulous nephew, who now has designs on the magical singing (and talking) books owned by Igraine's parents. These cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy, but Igraine's parents are confident they can repel any attack from Osmond the Greedy.

This all turns around when, in process of adding a finishing flourish to Igraine's armor, the parents accidentally turn themselves into pigs. Worse, they are out of giant's hair, which is essential to turning them back into humans. Since Albert must remain to guard the castle, being in the only functional magician left, it falls upon Igraine to go get the giant hairs. Why these hairs could not be summoned by magic is. I think, a good question, and one the author didn't see fit to address!

Igraine sets off alone, and eventually finds the giant, Garleff, who happily gives some hairs because Igraine's parents were very kind to him. On her way back, she visits the Sorrowful Knight, aka Sir Urban of Wintergreen, who is pretty much in an isolated sulk because he failed to beat the evil "Hedgehog," Osmand's henchman, in a joust. Somehow, this sulker is the guy who teaches Igraine about chivalry! Go figure!

He decides to accompany Igraine back to the castle to make sure she get home safely and ends up challenging Rowan Heartless (aka the Iron Hedgehog because of his spikey armor). On the way back they encounter a three-headed dragon. I am not at all sure why this bit was put in. I thought the dragon might be connected with the disappearance of three princesses, or that it might come help them fight the usurper, but it just disappeared. Maybe the author forgot about this plan? Maybe there was no such plan.

Likewise, I'm not sure why such a big deal was made of Igraine's desire to be a knight, and her special armor, because at no point does she enter into a fight of any kind, or put the armor to any test other than getting it wet (and it doesn't rust). Maybe the author has some plan she forgot as she wrote this, or maybe her plan changed. It just seemed odd; however, Igraine was strong in other ways, and so this is why I liked her. To me a strong female character isn't necessarily one who can kick your ass, she just has to be kick ass, and Igraine was.

Obviously Igraine wins-through in the end. I liked the story and I recommend it, despite it being somewhat bland. I had hoped for more. I'm not sure why this was so lacking in some respects, but it was amusing and entertaining, and this is why I consider it a worthy read.

It's worth noting that this story is bears some references to Arthurian tradition. Igraine was supposedly the name of King Arthur's mom. Maybe this Igraine grew-up and married, and her offspring became England's legendary king? (or a Welsh hill tribesman, depending on how much legend you swallow!)? Who knows?! Melisande is a Germanic name, also found in other languages, meaning strength, and was the name (in the form of Melisende) of the Queen of Jerusalem in the mid-twelfth century. Sir Lamorak was a knight of Arthur's purported 'Round Table', and Albert was, of course, the name of the German who married Queen Victoria!

The Relic of Perilous Falls by Raymond Arroyo

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook I experimented with. It's read by the author, who sounds a bit like Phil Hartman, the American comedy actor who was shot by his mentally-ill girlfriend in 1998 while he was sleeping, and I can't say that the author does an absolutely disastrous job, but after listening to about an hour of this I soon found myself being irritated by his voice, particularly when he was doing this young female character, and making her sound like she was mentally deficient rather than just young. In principle, it's nice to have an author read their own work. That's the only way you can really tell how they meant it to sound, but in this case it was eventually annoying and not pleasant.

Will Wilder is a 12-year-old boy who deserves his last name. He's irresponsible and has way too much energy. In his defense, he's gifted, or plagued, with the ability to see otherworldly 'shade' creatures, and his stupidity ends up unleashing them. No wonder the town is called Perilous Falls. Now it's Will's job to fix things. So far so good, but this novel carried a quite heavy religious agenda - so it seemed to me, and I disliked the preachy tone. It's tied to the remains of the Saint Thomas, who supposedly had so little faith that he didn't believe Jesus had risen.

If you ask me he was the smartest of the twelve! The burial place is supposedly one of only three of the apostles: the Basilica in Rome, of Peter, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, of James, and the National Shrine of Thomas in Chennai, India, yet not a one of these can offer evidence that what they contain really is what they claim to contain. Will Wilder's village, though, supposedly has the very finger (among other body parts) that was plunged into the wound! This is what keeps the evil away. The skeleton came from Italy in World War Two. How it got there as opposed to being in India remains a mystery.

Not only does Will screw up and break his kid brother's arm, he also screws up further and steals the relic from the church, thereby removing the town's protection, and unleashing evil. Why all the evil is there, waiting to be loosed is yet another unanswered question. I never did get this demon thingy. And what's the deal with demons? There are none in the Bible - just angels, of which Lucifer is one.

Given that Thomas is supposedly buried in India, how this GI brought the relic home from Italy is a mystery which goes unexplained, but then I DNF'd this so maybe I missed something. Obviously the book isn't aimed at me, but I've enjoyed many such books which were not. I have no interest in pursuing a series like this, though, and I can't recommend it based on what I heard of it.

Two! by Tia Perkin

Rating: WORTHY!

While this book was adorable from the brief simple rhymes to the character illustrations featuring banana-fingers, a reviewer has to wonder about the advisability of subjecting a young, impressionable mind to mischievous and potentially problematic behaviors such as these! The book was so enjoyable though, that I'd advise parents to get this only after their child has exhibited most of the behaviors depicted here, to limit the risk of how many new ones they'll be able to learn from it! Alternately, maybe my diagnosis is wrong and it's aimed at parents, not young kids!

The 'terrible twos' are named that for a good reason. This is the age (give or take many months since it can begin any time from the first through the fourth birthday!) when children are starting to feel a certain independence from parents which will continue to grow and become increasingly necessary throughout their life. Couple that with a human's natural curiosity about everything, especially when that human is a child, and you have a recipe for, if not a disaster, then an extended period of trial and tribulation.

This is a time when they grow to hate hearing "No!" because they're starting to hear it so often, so maybe "No!" shouldn't be your knee-jerk reaction? Maybe a more roundabout way of employing dissuasion as well as a little less diligent policing (while still watching and keeping them safe, of course) won't turn them into hellions and will help improve relations? Obviously the more things you can find to distract them or keep them distracted, the less they will be inclined to pursue their own diversions, too.

The kid shown in this story is no different from the norm, climbing, hiding, sampling everything, running on hyper-drive, exhibiting vacillating and contradictory desires, and though it's a boy here, gender makes no difference either. Sugar and spice can be just as big of a tornado as snails and puppy-dog tails any day of the week. Sleep helps (yours and theirs!), so if you can get them down for at least half the day, with at least two hours during the day and the rest overnight, it might help.

The trick - although it can be a difficult one, is to appear calm and keep offering redirection. And remember it's not about you! It's about your progeny growing up. Even so, and with the best will in the world, kids will very effectively be kids and get up to the activities depicted here: getting into everything, climbing dangerously, picking everything up from the floor, putting everything picked-up into the mouth!

Kids are not endlessly resilient, but they are resilient and a bit of dirt here and there, even ingested, isn't going to harm them. Neither will small falls, since young bones are so pliable, and they do have to learn - somehow - that risky behaviors can be painful even if it's only a scraped knee! Of course that's not the same as letting them run riot! Curiosity can be helped with games, and even simple, home-made toys: paper bags, cardboard boxes, study plastic bottles with the lid removed or screwed very tightly on; soft toys, especially if they have zippers or pockets to explore, and so on. Even an old hoodie or a shoe (no laces!) will do for a distraction.

That's why I think this book will serve better as a retrospective; a trip down memory lane, congratulating your child on good lessons learned, and on how well they've grown, maybe how much they cried that time they didn't listen and got an injury, and how wise they've been to have avoided that since. A nice ego massage over how much their behavior has improved (even if you have to tell a stretcher here and there!) is wonderful. Positive reinforcement is always a bigger winner than negative - assuming you can even remember this when your last nerve frays!

On those grounds I recommend this as a worthy read and I'm now wondering whether this author plans on a "Three!" and a "Four!" and so on! What's going to be in the "Thirteen!", the "Twenty-One!", the Ninety-Four!"?! (Three is reviewed in August 2017, FYI)

Girl Undone by Marla Madison

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with A Girl Undone by Catherine Linka, or Girl, Undone by Kendall Aimee Kennedy, or JJ Girl Undone by the amazingly-named Nicole Crankfield-Hamilton, this is volume three in a series of which I have read neither of the previous volumes, but it seems you do not have to have read those in order to make take-up this one. I was going to phrase that as 'make sense of this one', but decided that was being too generous!

The main characters are TJ Peacock, a security consultant (read private eye wannabe), and Lisa Rayburn, a clinical psychologist. Didn't like the first. Not interested in the second. They're hired by a woman who has a shady mob-related past, and whose niece was kidnapped for three-days and then let go, but who has no recollection of what happened. The only clues are the fact that she was dating an older guy, who then dumped her for his wife, claiming that they were reconciling, and a shady roommate who subsequently disappears.

In addition to this, there is a blogger who is being threatened apparently by a serial killer. Since he's had bad things to say about police competence, the detective who is assigned to his case is not all that enthusiastic about it. This detective is married to TJ. This was a pleasant surprise because it's unusual for a PI (which is what TJ obviously is, despite her career title) to have a relationship worth the name, but other than that, I wasn't moved by this story, and saw no reason to pursue a whole series.

It didn't begin well, with a kidnap victim showing up in a shopping a mall, yet no one thinks to check the security video? She's discovered and identified by a security consultant, who is evidently too stupid to think of doing basic detective work to see if anyone can be tied to this girl. She was wearing a hospital gown, and someone must have seen something out of place somewhere!, but TJ is too stupid to follow up, so the story started off lacking any credibility as a professional work. The problem as that it never improved.

It did pick up for me when I learned that a possible motive for the kidnapping was harvesting eggs, but that wasn't sufficient to turn it around, because it started going downhill after that, and the harvesting rationale was mundane and didn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. I really didn't like these characters, not TJ, not Lisa very much, and not TJ's husband, nor did I find myself really caring about Kelsey, the kidnapped girl.

One issue was the derisory tone of the writing. I read irksome things like, "Her posture carried her tall frame with nearly military precision although there was nothing remotely masculine about her." Excuse me? You can't be feminine and in the military? What an awful thing for a female author to say about her gender!

It got worse. Later I read, "The man's voice hinted at homosexuality, with a soft lisp that almost sounded deliberate." What? This kind of thing really dropped me out of the story and made me not want to read any more. Note there's a difference between an author's character saying things like those: people are dicks at times, after all. Some people make a full time job of it, but when it's the author including these comments in the narrative, as was done here, then it's highly unlikely I'm going to ever be much of a fan of that author's writing.

Another oddball one was "The inside of the house definitely lacked a woman's touch," which is on oddly genderist thing to say whichever way you look at it: every home needs a woman? Not necessarily! Every home that has a woman ought to evidence a distinctly feminine touch? Again, no!

Some of the police procedural behavior here was laughable, too. I don't mind that, if the author's intent is to show a bad or sloppy cop, but this is TJ's husband investigating this crime, and I assume we're not supposed to consider that he's inept, but he is, and appallingly so.

There's a blogger in the story who is being harassed by someone who appears to be a serial killer. At one point, the killer breaks into the blogger's place when he's not home and steals a couple of his rare potted plants. The blogger discovers the killer left a note for him on his computer. It's never explained how the guy got past the blogger's password, but the problem here isn't so much that, as the fact that there's no talk whatsoever of the machine being fingerprinted! Yes, the intruder probably wore gloves, but here, with the keyboard, and elsewhere, with maybe a hair sample or something, was a chance to potentially get forensic evidence of a killer, and the cop is completely lackadaisical about it.

The killer was in that very room and may have left other evidence, but the cop doesn't care. Later, this same psycho sends the blogger an email, but nothing is done to follow up on it because, we're told, the email was sent from "... a big-box appliance store south of Milwaukee that sold electronics." This detective never once considers going to the store and looking at security video to see if they can identify the killer! Maybe there was no such video, but to not even consider pursuing the possibility is bad writing that makes cops look like idiots. Trust me, they're not. Well, okay, some are, but not a large number! This one, unfortunately, is, which makes him a joke that's not funny, and certainly not someone worth reading about.

The author is using this big-box store as an excuse to not be able to track the guy down via email, but stores don't simply let you use free email. The guy would have had to have accessed some email account in order to send the message, even if he was sending it from a random computer, yet there is no follow up on this, either! This struck me as appallingly bad writing, with the author so focused on pursuing this step-by-step plot she's worked out, that she either didn't care or never noticed that some of it made no logical sense.

All of this was by a only one third of the way through this, so it didn't feel at all promising, I pursued it a bit further, but finally lost patience and DNF'd it once I realized the egg harvest was no real mystery, the young girl was an idiot, and the identity of the serial killer was obvious to everyone except the people looking for the killer! Maybe I'm wrong on that score since I didn't finish the novel, but it seemed to me that for Bart, the blogger, the wolf was in the kitchen.

As I said, I'm usually bad about figuring these things out, so I probably am wrong, but the thing is at that point, I really didn't care who the killer was or what happened next. Life's too short for books that don't grab me by the entrails, and my reading list is long! I can't recommend this based on what I read.

Genesis by Bernard Beckett

Rating: WARTY!

This was another experimental audiobook read not badly, yet not inspiringly by Becky Wright in her first audiobook reading evidently. Bernard Beckett is a New Zealander who seems to think that because he shares a famous last name, he must have writing chops somewhere in his genome. Maybe he does, but it's not evident through the lens he lends us here with which to examine it. All we get is a poor reproduction of Orwell's 1984.

This story was amateur at the level of fan fiction. It was trite, boring, and framed in the mind-numbing tedium of student defending her thesis. The title is entirely wrong. Instead of Genesis, meaning 'beginning', the author should have gone with Akharith, meaning 'ending' because the main character, in her fruitless pursuit of academic excellence here, is about to meet her mocker.

As is all-too-often the case with this kind of story, we find ourselves in a dystopia which has no logical origin, and which is hilarious when you think about it, because this society is supposedly founded on Greek principles. Many of the characters, such as the main female character, have Greek names from antiquity. Hers is Anaximander, though she goes by Anax, and it really ought to be Anthrax, so diseased is her story.

The thesis-challenge idea is a good one, but it fails in this case because all it is, in the end (and the beginning and the middle) is nothing more than a massive info-dump, which is dull in the extreme, with vacuous, cardboard-thin characters and motivations, and a transparent and done-to-death plot. All it did was make me detest Anax and her hero, Adam, about whom her thesis was written. Their fates were just deserts, appropriate rewards for vacuity.

The predictably inaccurate blurb on Goodreads claims that Anax endures a "grueling all-day Examination" but it last only five hours, with lots of breaks, and most of it is spent watching endless, tedious holographic movies, about which she occasionally is asked a question. Grueling? No! All-day? No! Unless the day on her planet is about a quarter the length of ours! I think someone is greatly exaggerating for dramatic effect.

This tired business of reviewing the video record is nonsensical because it's so unrealistic, especially when done on television or in the movies, where the actors are clearly playing to the camera rather than realistically experiencing an event. It's just as bad here. At one point towards the end, the author has a character ask, "What good are stories?" and I say that's a valid question. If they're like this story, then the answer is: no good at all.

We're offered absolutely no rationale whatsoever (not that I consider worth its salt, anyway) for why this island society should drop everything else, and turn to Greek philosophy and principles, much less why everyone suddenly adopts Greek names. Nothing is that extreme, and no group of people are that uniformly conformist. It makes as little sense as the asinine 'five factions' in the execrable Divergent series, which, after a strong start, completely tanked at the box office thereby proving it had no legs outside the YA crowd, whose tastes, let's face it, are starved for clues far more often than they are a hunger game.

It makes a little more sense that the islanders are hostile to foreigners given that there's your trope deadly plague loose in the world, but even that makes zero sense in the grand scheme of things, and for them to be so inexcusably hostile to all foreigners is ridiculous.

A " brilliant novel of dazzling ingenuity"? I don't know what the writer of this blurb was on (a stipend maybe?), but I want some! The story is purported to examine what consciousness is, and what makes us human, but it really examines what stupidity is, and what a juvenile, whiney little brat Anax's hero is, and it can give us no answers.

This obsession of Anax's (with Adam Forde) is bullshit, and the fact that in a mindlessly ruthless society like this, he is apparently the only "rebel" yet gets cut so many breaks makes zero sense. If you want my opinion, then please don't waste your time on this bloated exercise in self-indulgence and pointless fawning over ancient Greek civilization. The only thing you'll find in ancient grease is ancient fries, and they're neither edible nor edifying! If you don't want my opinion, that's fine, but then why are you reading this?!

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson

Rating: WORTHY!

As was the wont back then, Robert Louis Stephenson began publishing his novel in serial form, at the beginning of the same month that the Earps and Doc Holiday were to confront the Cowboys over the latter's disregard for the city ordinance - a dispute that was resolved with ordnance, as are so many in this novel! It was published in book form about two years later.

All the well-known names are here: Jim Hawkins, Billy Bones, Long John Silver, Blind Pew, Black Dog, Israel Hands, Ben Gunn, and so on. All the stock phrases are here, too: swabs, lubbers, shiver me timbers, avast, and so on! This is the source-book for all things piratical, including the parrot on the shoulder and the peg-leg! It's also the source of some unintentional humor given how much phrases have changed in the century-and-a-quarter since Stephenson wrote this. "I'll lay you" and "I had my way with him" were never more misunderstood, but at least I discovered from whence the British term "quid" - meaning a pound (money) - originated!

This, the original pirate story, is told in six parts. I was fortunate enough to have it read to me by Alfred Molina, who does a damned fine job of it. I could have done without the pain-in-the-stern squeeze-box sea-shanty music! Why do audiobook publishers feel this insane compulsion to add irrelevant and trite music to the story? What an insult to the author! "Oh, your story lacks a little something! Let me punch it up with this irritating music! It'll keep your readers awake I'll lay! Have my way with them I will." That aside, it was one of the best narrated stories I've listened to, and it begins with the slightly mysterious Billy Bones, who is known as "The Captain" at the Admiral Benbow inn where Jim helps his mother, his father having very recently died.

Billy Bones is a secretive man, and it's only when he dies that Jim discovers that he was in possession of the feared Captain Flint's treasure map. Dr. Livesey, who had been treating The Captain, and the local district Squire Trelawny manage to get themselves a ship, the Hispaniola, and they go off questing for this treasure.

Somehow word got out about Billy Bones though, and both Black Dog and Blind Pew come looking for him. Just as Jim and his allies think they have escaped all that, they discover that pretty much their entire ship's crew is pirates, who signed on for the voyage under the leadership of the ship's cook, who is really a pirate himself - Long John Silver, who even Flint was reputed to fear. The odds are three to one against Jim and his associates. Long John Silver proves how ruthless she is on the island, and Jim manages to escape his clutches only to run into Ben Gunn, who had been three years stranded on the island. He throws his lot in with Jim in return for a cut of the treasure, and safe passage home.

Retreating to an old stockade built by Flint, Jim and his allies hold out against the pirates, and an attempt at parlay breaks down. Silver loses patience and promises an attack. The attack is repelled, but Jim goes off on an adventure of his own, leading to his cutting the stolen ship adrift which in turn leads to his confrontation with Hands. Returning proudly to the stockade to report his triumph in recapturing the ship, Jim is rather perturbed to discover he has now become the prisoner of Silver and five of the mutineers, who evidently have taken over the stockade while he was gone!

As if this wasn't twist enough, his friends and Silver are now apparently entreated with each other, and are going to recover the treasure together - but the treasure burial site is empty! Gunn has secreted it away. On the voyage home, they hire a new crew, and Silver escapes with a bag of gold forever. Given, as Jim says, there's still treasure on the island, you have to wonder if Silver didn't exploit his stolen treasure for a new ship and crew to go after what was left behind! This is a great story, the very bedrock of all pirate stories that followed, and I recommend it.

The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios

Rating: WARTY!

Dishonestly subtitled " A Math-Free Exploration of the Science That Made Our World", this book was a disappointment. There is math in this - a lot of it - and it starts right there in chapter one. It isn't at all well explained. That was the biggest problem here. This author simply is not one who can competently and clearly explain complex science to the lay person.

I didn't come into this completely ignorant, but I left it with little learned, which is why this is a fail. I have read quite a lot on Quantum Mechanics, which doesn't make me an expert by any means, but I do understand some of the principles and ideas. This author but this guy did nothing to enlighten me any further. His constant footnotes were far more annoying than ever they were edifying, and his frequent references to obscure antique comic books did nothing to help his case along.

For me, Lawrence M. Krauss started all this in 1995, when he published The Physics of Star Trek which was well-written, entertaining, and educational. It spawned many imitators, few of which have been as well done as his was. I think Kakalios believed he could turn his own obsession with old comics into a similar work, but whereas Krauss actually did reference a cultural icon which is well-known, Kakalios simply appears to have indulged himself in his own personal passion, which has little, if any, relevance to anyone else.

This book was dense, humorless, and unenlightened, the illustrations unillustrative, the explanations obscure and meandering when they were not outright obfuscating, and the frequent comic book and fifties 'B' movie references irritating and distracting. I can't recommend this at all.

March On! The Day My Brother Martin Changed the World by Christine King Farris, London Ladd

Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by the curiously-named London Ladd, this memoir is aimed at children and was written by MLK's sister, who wasn't there at the Lincoln Memorial rally in Washington DC that day he made his dream speech, but who had traveled with him on many other trips.

That day, she was home taking care of their parents, but she watched the story on TV, and it's clear from her writing how proud she felt of her brother and how much she loved him. It's depressing to think how she must have felt that day he was shot. There is now a stone marker at the Lincoln memorial identifying the place from which he delivered the speech. It's tragic that two people, one white, one black, and who were so influential in freeing people from slavery should both have been murdered, and are now memorialized in different ways at the same location.

The author writes passionately and very descriptively, bringing the stories to life, and the memories powerfully to mind. I thought it sad that the text of the speech wasn't included here, though, but it's easily found online, at places such as The Martin Luther King, Jr Research and Education Institute, and it's also available on You Tube I recommend this book for young children, to teach them an important piece of history in a struggle that sadly is still forced to continue to this day.

Platypuses by Megan Borgert-Spaniol

Rating: WORTHY!

I don't know of anyone who doesn't love a platypus, although the critters can be dangerous. The have poison spikes on their back legs that can do you up a treat if they stick you with one, although if you have one raised from infancy, it seems that it's not inclined to spike you, because I've seen people on TV handle platypuses without harm.

This book is part of a big series (Blastoff! Readers: Animal Safari) on different animals, but this same author and judged from this one, it looks like this is a fun and educational series. despite being quite short, it's full of informative text (although not too much!) and a bunch of photos of cute-looking platypuses. I recommend it for any kid who is interested in learning about a specific animal. Whether you'd want to get the whole series is another issue! That would be some investment.

How to Catch the Tooth Fairy by Adam Wallace, Andy Elkerton

Rating: WORTHY!

Gorgeously illustrated by Andy Elkerton, this was a riotous book about a cocky and adventurous little tyke who people are evidently trying to catch to take all her quarters, but she gives no quarter! She's too smart for them and knows all their tricks. It also dispenses sneaky teeth health advice along the way.

Written in rhyme, we learn of this pink haired tooth fairy who collects an average of 300,000 teeth in a night. She wears old time aviator clothes and rides a toothbrush! And she's very fast. I can't predict whether your kid will like this or not, but I loved it!

Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garett

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"After what felt like a millennia" should read either "a millennium" or omit the 'a' altogether. Millennia is plural.
"No I couldn't take let you do that." is confused!

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

I'm really sorry to post a negative review on this one because it had some good qualities and I think this writer is one to watch, but for me, this novel simply didn't make the grade. In the interests of full disclosure, this is the start of an intended series, and I am not typically a fan of series, especially not detective series. This one intrigued me, and while it started out interestingly and had some fun characters and a sense of humor, it quickly went downhill as the main character demonstrated an increasing level of stupidity and ineptitude. I don't mind a main character who starts out dumb and wises-up as the story progresses, but when it goes the other way, it's not a good sign.

The problem is that this main character, Dayna is going way above and beyond her initial purview and we're never offered any valid reasons for this. I do get that this is what these amateur detective stories do, and it wouldn't be so bad if we were offered even a half-assed justification for it, but we don't get any here. Her motivation was supposed to be that her father is at grave risk of foreclosure. There's a reward of fifteen thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest of the hit and run driver who killed this girl named Hayley, so Dayna starts thinking about how she can get that money. So far so good. This is perfectly sensible and reasonable, but it neither explains nor validates some of the ridiculous things she does.

Dayna is a little slow on the uptake in realizing that they have the offending vehicle on video, but this is forgivable, given that she was out partying with friends that night and wasn't exactly sober. Once she acquired the video though, she just needed to pass it on to the police and she was done, but she doesn't do this. She doesn't have to become a private detective, yet she does take this on in her own very amateur and bumbling way.

The problem here is that she ends up breaking the law and getting in the way of the investigation rather than helping move it along, blundering into situations where she's very likely to tip-off potential suspects and have them skip town or go into hiding rather than having them end-up being successfully fingered for the crime. This is where Le Stupide set in with a vengeance and I found myself cringing rather than laughing or being excited by the story, and it's where I began to lose interest in this character.

Whenever Dayna gets some information, she routinely fails to pass it on to the police - the very people whom she hopes will facilitate this reward so she can help out her dad. The police get it at best second-hand if at all, and this betrays her, because it makes her look less interested in helping dad than it does in being a busybody and a rubbernecker. She insists on following-up evidence herself without passing it on, or she withholds it from the police because in her very amateur opinion, it's never enough.

Because of this, by about sixty percent through the novel she's pretty much a bigger criminal than the one she's trying to track down - at least in terms of how many laws she's breaking. At one point she and some friends discover a robbery has taken place, and rather than inform the police right away, these idiots go trampling all over the crime scene, destroying any clues that the police might have found to help them track down the thieves.

In short, Dayna is moronic. She obsesses over leaving her prints on a baseball cap she finds, yet spares not a single thought for the entire crime scene she just destroyed, evidence-wise. She's thoroughly incompetent, yet never once did she get chewed-out by the police who in reality would have had this clown arrested for interfering with a crime scene, or perverting the course of justice, which she does repeatedly.

At one point Dayna comes into possession of security video tape which positively identifies one of the house burglars who is linked to the hit and run, yet instead of just passing it on to the police and letting them do their job, she takes off on another tangent on her own, all the time lying to her best friends that she's not pursuing this on her own. It was never explained how it was that these relatively amateur thieves knew there were no alarms at this particular house - which was in a very swanky neighborhood where alarms and high-level security were the norm, not the exception, so this robbery made very little sense to begin with except as a poorly-staged venue for Dayna to get a clue. Which she never really does in any meaningful sense, quite frankly.

Dayna herself was not a likable person, and she looked ever more dumb as the story unfolded. It's not surprising that the murderer targets her (so we;re told. I remain unconvinced, but this was around eighty percent in, when I had honestly lost interest altogether. I DNF'd this at ninety or so when the story, instead of smartly winding-up, devolved into an endless ramble. The novel was about a third too long and moved too slowly.

At that point I was wishing the near-miss traffic accident had not missed her. The driver would have done LA a service by getting this inept fool out of the way of the real police work. There are intelligent ways to write your character into places and situation she should not be -ways that don't make her look like a major buttinsky, but this story seemed bent on going the dingbat route every time, making Dayna look far more like dumbbell than some belle detective. Because this kind of thing was the norm rather than the exception in this novel, in the final analysis, I can't recommend this book as a worthy read and I will definitely not be following this series.

Emily and the Strangers Vol 1 by Rob Reger, Mariah Huehner, Emily Ivie

Rating: WARTY!

I must have slept through the nineties because I had never heard of "Emily The Strange" until I saw this graphic novel in my ever-adored local library. It called to me, but now I'm left lamenting what else is out there that I might never happen upon.

Emily, as represented in this short graphic novel, is completely lovable, from her 'tude, to the way she's drawn and colored. She's a perfect mix of Goth and Steamed-punk. I love her positive, if aggressive, attitude, her never-defeatist approach to life, and her very inventive G-Rated cussing, which was hilarious.

From reading around (yeah, I'm a shameless book slut!) Rob Reger's friend Nathan Carrico designed Emily in 1991 for a skateboard company(!). Reger created the designs, and he and Matt Reed brought them into the fashion world on T-shirts featuring this girl and 4 black cats (one of which no doubt had a ring-tailed lemur tail). Those cats have bred, because there are many in this story, and they're exquisitely depicted. I don't know anything about Emily Ivie, the evidently very talented artist, but co-writer (with Reger) Mariah (that's mar-eye-uh, not mar-ee-uh) Huehner describes herself as a "big old geeky nerd who loves talking about stories and storytelling." She lied! Her face isn't old and her eyes are very young which is probably why she can get inside Emily The Strange's head so readily.

This volume combines the first three issues of the Emily (and) the Strange(rs) mini-series in which her idol Professa Kraken dies, and she has the chance to win his octopod-inspired guitar - which is also conveniently haunted by his spirit. The story here is that Emily strives to win the guitar, and just as she is convinced she missed her chance, fate (and cats) conspire to put her in front. The odd thing, which I really didn't get, is that even though she won it, there's a condition attached to it: that in order to keep it, she must win the battle of the bands, for which the anti-social (if not sociopathic) Emily must put together an actual band.

The story then moralizes somewhat about team-work and 'can't we all just get along', so for me it lost some momentum at that point, but it was still enjoyable. I'd dispute that this is a young-adult story! It felt much more like middle-grade to me, but it was fun. The other characters in the band were interesting. There was the guy who factored into Emily's success in the guitar contest; I don't know what his angle is and I wasn't too fond of him. He's a fan, if not a stalker of Emily's, and he rather creepily named himself Evan Stranger (Even Stranger), but other than his weird addiction to Emily, he isn't strange at all.

There was also Winston and Willow, who are fraternal twins, but otherwise complete opposites, and there is Raven, who is a girl-bot which was made and then lost track of by Emily, and who is now working in a vinyl, record store where Emily encounters her again. She fascinated me, but got very little air-time. This band doesn't work until the final member turns up, the very orange Trilogy, and then they're winners all the way.

Now I'm interested in Emily. I'd like to read the story of her creating Raven, and also about her earlier history. I recommend this one.

Elvis and the Underdogs by Jenny Lee

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook experiment which failed! The story is about a rather sickly kid named Benji Wendell Barnsworth who is ten. He tells the story in first person, which is usually a problem for me at the best of times. It was not remotely helped in this case by the fact that a man with a rather croaky voice was reading this story. It. Simply. Did. Not. Work. The book was a DNF for me. Life is too short!

I can only conclude, from the number of trips we're told Benji makes to the hospital, that this mom is a world-class lousy mom. Or maybe it's the fact that the nurse at the hospital Dino, is practicing medicine without a license? This could account for at least some of those repeat visits.

These idiots think prescribing a therapy dog for Benji will cure him of his ills. He gets the president's puppy delivered by mistake and the president is such a bastard that he demands the dog be wrenched away from Benji, so the kid gets a different dog. This dog goes literally everywhere - including into the department store, and into the hospital. I somehow doubt that even a therapy dog would be allowed to get away with that, but who knows. Crazier things happen in this story.

Benji's two brothers, who happen to be twins, are complete dickheads and need to have their asses kicked (where's the trope school bully when you really need him?), but they get away with pretty much whatever they want to - due largely to the fact that mom is a lousy parent. It should be needless to say that I very quickly tired of this. even if it were not for the reader's annoying voice, the story was garbage. Maybe young kids will like it, but I don't really see how. I'm sure not about to recommend a children's story as flaccid and vacuous as this was.

Lady Mechanika Vol. 2: The Tablet of Destinies by Joe Benítez, MM Chen, Martin Montiel, Mike Garcia

Rating: WARTY!

This combines volumes one through six of the original comic books and was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

In a beautifully wrought steam-punk world, the young daughter of a friend of Lady Mechanika's is in need of assistance, and the Lady responds. Her father has disappeared on a quest in Africa, and Mechanika sets out to find out what happened. Her quest is lent added urgency when the young girl is kidnapped. Mechanika meets a mysterious guy in London, who offers air transportation to Germany, where the kidnap victim is, and where lies another clue pointing to a specific site in Africa, so they set off there, only to crash in the desert and be taken prisoner by slavers!

Meanwhile in interleaved portions, we get the view from the other end of this quest, where the professor and his assistant are under pressure to decipher ancient scripts and uncover what the villains believe is an unprecedentedly powerful weapon.

The adventure was well-written, fast-moving, and full of action and feisty characters, including the distressed young girl at the start. The artwork was beautifully done and colored. That alone would have been sufficient for me to rate this graphic novel as a worthy read, but what bothered me too much here was what I let slip by in volume one, and it was the sexualization of all the female characters. When the blurb says, "Lady Mechanika immediately drops everything" it really means her clothes, and for me, this is what brought this particular volume down.

I found it disturbing, because Mechanika is fine regardless of her physical appeal or lack of same! She doesn't need to be rendered in endlessly sexual ways to be an impressive character. It's sad that graphic novel creators seem so completely ignorant of this fact. It's like they have this phobia that their female characters are going to be useless and entirely unappealing unless their sexuality is exploited. I'm not sure if this failing says more about the creators or about their readership, but either way it's obnoxious and I sincerely wish they had more faith in women than they evidently do. Do we really want to be writing comics which only appeal to people who see women as sex objects and very little else? Do we really want to be perpetuating a message as clueless as it is antiquated, and which offers only the sleazy equation that girls = sex = girls? I hope not.

This abuse was bordering on being abused in the first volume, but it was nowhere near as rife as it was here, so why they went full metal lack-it in this one is a mystery. Unlike in the first volume, it was all-pervasive here, with full-page in-your-face images of scantily clad adventurers bursting at what few seams they had, entirely impractically dressed for their quest.

I guess I should be grateful that the African woman who joined Lady Mechanika wasn't bare-breasted, but what I most noticed about Akina (other than the fact that she at least had a Congolese name) was that she looked like your typically white-washed model from Ebony magazine, not like the Congolese woman she supposedly was, whose skin would have been darker, and her face broader and less Nordic-nosed-white-westerner than this woman's was.

Why are comic book artists so afraid of showing the real world? Do they think real Congolese women are unappealing? Or is it that they feel they cannot sell the sexuality of a black woman (as opposed to a pale brown one)? If this medium is to grow-up and maintain relevance and meaning, then this kind of bias needs to be dispensed with urgently, because it's bone-headed at best, and racist at worst.

So, despite the appeal of the art in general, and the entertainment value of the story, I can't condone these practices, and I cannot rate positively a graphic novel which is so brazenly perpetrating abuses like this one did.

Lady Mechanika, Vol.1: the Mystery of Mechanical Corpse by Joe Benítez, Peter Steigerwald

Rating: WORTHY!

This gathers volumes 1 through five of the single comic books and was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had a better experience with this one than I did with the second volume of the series, which I requested at the same time as this. The steam-punk world is rendered and colored beautifully, and the story was an intriguing and entertaining one, well told. Lady Mechanika is a cyborg - inasmuch as such things went in Edwardian times. I am by no means a fashion expert, not even in modern times, so I may have this wrong, but the styles didn't look Victorian to me, notwithstanding what the blurb says. That's not a problem, just an observation. I rather liked them as it happens. Joe Benítez and Peter Steigerwald could probably make a living as fashion designers if they ever tire of comic books!

Lady Mechanika is quite evidently someone's creation, but her memory is impaired, so her origins are as much of a mystery to her as they are to us. I am wondering if the guy she meets in volume two (reviewed separately) might have some knowledge of that, but it remains a mystery in that volume, too! Her mechanical parts are her limbs, and her 'title' was given to her by the tabloids. Her backstory isn't delivered here or in volume two, so we don't know how she came to be a private investigator and adventurer. I was interested in this story because of the upcoming (as of this writing) live-action remake of the Ghost in the Shell movie, which is a favorite of mine. I'm looking forward to the new one.

When the story opens, the Lady meets the 'Demon of Satan's Alley' which appears to be some sort of a human animal hybrid and which isn't a demon but which has been demonized by the public. Some crazy guys blunder in and kill it before Lady Mechanika can talk to it enough to maybe find out what it knows of its past - and maybe of hers, too. She's not best pleased by that. Soon she's off adventuring and trying to track down this creator of mechanical melanges. In this regard, the story has some resemblances to Ghost in the Shell, including the overt and unnecessary sexuality.

There were some technical issues with this as there are with all graphic novels which have not yet clued themselves in to the electronic age. In BlueFire Reader, which is what I use on the iPad, the pages are frequently enlarging themselves to fill the screen which means a portion of the page is curt off, since the iPad screen and the comic book page size are out of whack compared with each other, the comic book being a little too 'tall and slim' for the 'stouter' table format.

This is something I can work with, but whenever there's a double-page spread, it means turning the tablet from portrait view to landscape and back again for the next page. This isn't such a hassle except that the tablet is self-orienting, so the page is constantly swinging around like a loose yard-arm on a boat at sea.

One image was a portrait-oriented double-page spread, and it was so set-up that I could not orient this to view it since the image always swung to the wrong orientation no matter what i did! The only way to actually see it as intended by the creators was to orient it as a landscape, then carefully lay the pad flat and rotate it while it stayed flat; then the image was view-able in all its glory, but this only served to highlight one other problem - the minuscule text. It's far too small for comfortable reading. I know comics are all about imagery, but for me, unless there's also a decent story, all you really have, is a pretty coffee-table art book. It seems to me that artists and writers might consider collaborating a bit more closely on legibility!

This is going to become increasingly a problem as the old school comic fraternity struggles to repel all technology boarders. Personally, I prefer e-format to print format as a general rule, if only because it's kinder to trees, which are precious. The sentiment is especially poignant when we read horror stories to the effect that 80,000 copies of Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom had to be pulped because of typos. At 3 kg of carbon emissions per book, that's not a charmed system. You would need to read a hundred books for every one print book to balance the manufacturing pollution of an e-reader against that of the print version, but then your ebook comes over the wire at very little cost to the environment, whereas the print book has to be transported to you, even if only home from the store in your car.

But you can also argue the other side, which is that reading devices employ petrochemical products, and precious and toxic metals, and probably contains 'conflict' minerals which were mined in the Congo (curious given the location for volume two in this series!); however, you can argue that a multi-use device, such as a tablet or a smart phone, can be employed as an ebook reader without contributing to even more environmental carnage than it might already have caused. On the other page, you can also argue that a book never needs upgrading (as countless young-adult Jane Austen rip-offs have conclusively proven), will last for years, and can be recycled when done with. So you pays your greenbacks and you hopes you get the green back.

For this volume, I think it worth reading in any format, and I recommend it if you can overlook the sexploitation which is relatively restrained in this volume.

Wraithborn Redux by Marcia Chen, Joe Benitez, Joe Weems, Victor Llamas, Studio F, Mike Garcia

Rating: WARTY!

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

I should have paid more attention to the 'redux' portion of this title! It makes me wonder what went wrong with the first one that necessitated this one. For me, this one failed also, and there were multiple reasons for it. One was that it offered nothing new, and brought nothing original to this genre's table. Worse than this, we have a supposedly heroic female main character who is always in need of rescue. It was pretty sad.

Add to that the absurd over-sexualization of every single female character who appeared in this story - except of course the designated "Fat One" who actually only looked 'fat' because all other females in the story were anorexic everywhere except for their breasts. There was school-bullying running rife with no teachers in sight. There were trope cliques and not a single thing that was fresh or refreshing to read. Overall, it was a decidedly pathetic effort at redux-ing trope and cliché. And that was just the school. The demons and those which controlled them were no better and no more inventive.

Just how many warmed-over tropes were there here? Almost too many to count. We have the designated hero raised and trained by eastern monks. There was a twist to this: that the untrained unsuspecting girl gets the power he was trained for, and this is what attracted me to this story, but even that twist was a fail in the final analysis because this girl was so clueless and so helpless. Even when she began to warm up to her role, she was still completely lackluster and unappealing.

In her we had the semi-orphaned nondescript girl who's a nervous wreck, and who's bullied by cheerleaders! Seriously? Who can't kick a cheerleader's ass?! This girl, Melanie, has your standard quirky, supportive friend. There's a red under the bed (literally red-haired here), and demon dogs which came straight out of the Alien movie series. They were not the only movie rip-off. Kalin, the guy who was supposed to be the wraithborn dude, is a rip-off of Kylo Ren, right down to the first initial, the sword, the black robes, and the ridiculous and totally unnecessary face mask. Seriously?

These morons fight with swords when a machine gun would have done a better job on the Alien dogs in a tenth of the time. What the hell is wrong with these writers and artists? Sword-fighting dudes and pneumatic females? Please! Get a life! Get a clue. Come up with something truly original. Then you won't have to wonder why your comic isn't selling. This one was crap and I certainly do not recommend it. In fact it's comic books like this that make me think it's worth petitioning not for a maturity rating aimed at those who read the comic, but a maturity rating for those who write and illustrate the thing so I get some advance warning of what I'm getting into.

Little Tails in the Savannah by Frédéric Brrémaud, Federico Bertolucci

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I'd been a fan of the Brrémaud/Bertolucci graphic novel series titled 'Love', a text-free set of stories about life in the wild. For me that series went downhill, the stories no longer interesting, and even the art suffering, so I gave up on it. I gave the first in the Little Tails (not Tales!) series a try and I thought this was much better. Aimed at young children, adventurous and educational, this is a colorful series for young children that's worth the reading time.

Chipper and Squizzo are two little animal characters who take trips in their cardboard box airplane (something young children can readily emulate with any old cardboard box you have lying around). This part of the story is line drawings with a splash of monochrome color; it's refreshingly simple and will probably appeal to young readers, especially when its contrasted against the gorgeous full color images of the various animals they encounter.

The animals featured are biased toward mammals, and largely situated on land (we humans are a very class conscious society aren't we, even when it comes down to biological classes!), but there is the occasional foray into non-mammalian characters. Unfortunately the snake is described as poisonous when it ought to be described as venomous (you can withstand eating a snake because it's not poisonous, but you definitely don't want to be bitten by a venomous one!). Outside of the mammals, we get one beetle, two different birds, and two different reptiles, and that's it! There's nothing about plant life at all. I'd like to see that change. Since it's an airplane they have, why not a book on birds? Or how about a cardboard submarine next time, so we get to visit some ocean life?

Overall, though, the series is engaging and attractive, so I recommend this as a worthy read for young children.

Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Rating: WARTY!

I can't give you a full review of this one because I grew tired of it so quickly and simply didn't want to read on when I have so many other books calling to me. I read about a tenth of it and I simply couldn't get interested in it. It moved so slowly and was so self-obsessed that it was tedious to read.

The basic plot is that psychiatrists are using a new device to invade dreams to try to help people with mental issues, but are being overtaken by the dreams and driven insane. Well yeah, since dreams are essentially meaningless drivel, it would be a nightmare for even the dreamer to try to unravel them - assuming that's even possible - let alone some stranger try to figure out what it means, so the premise wasn't exactly a charmed one and in the end, it just didn't appeal to me at all.