The Telomere Effect by Elizabeth Blackburn, Elissa Epel

Rating: WARTY!

I'm always suspicious of books where the author adds some sort of lettered credential after their name. You never see authors like Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking doing that. They just list their name. Usually when the author's name is followed by a raft of letters, it's some fringe or new-age publication full of woo medicine and nonsense.

In this case, I picked this one up because I'd already heard about telomeres and cell longevity, so I knew this wasn't rooted in pseudoscience at least. My interest was whether the authors could really deliver what the book cover promised: "A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer." The short answer is no, they cannot, because there is nothing on offer here that's revolutionary. It's nothing that a score of other books have not offered before, so the cover blurb is a lie. The only difference here is the telomere angle.

I've read before about telomeres, which are like the twist ties on the end of your DNA. They start out very long, but shorten quite disturbingly rapidly as you age, and once the length is down to a nub, the cell ceases to divide and is essentially useless. The idea behind the book is that if you take care of your telomeres, they will take care of you, helping to keep your cells healthy and viable, but it's really not very useful in offering advice about how to do this except to give the same advice all other health books do: reduce stress, get exercise, think positively, and eat healthily, so it begs the question as to what is the point of this book, when even coming from a genetics and science angle, all it can tell us is what we know already?

There is no magic shot you can get, like Botox, to tighten up your DNA. There is no 'Telox'! There is telomerase, which helps maintain and repair telomeres, but you can't get a shot of that and have it fix your short telomeres. On top of that, and for a science-based book, this felt a bit elitist. There seems to be a connection between a healthy diet and a stress-free life and the length of your telomeres, and there is a lot of talk here about stress affecting your biochemistry, and this in turn affecting your telomeres. There seems to be evidence supporting that, but it still all seemed a bit vague to me, and not everyone can avail themselves of some of the things they discuss.

The authors soon got on to talking about how to reduce stress, and this led into talking about meditation and mindfulness and all that. One of the things they were talking about was going easy on yourself, and avoiding ruminating over perceived failures or worrying overmuch about potentially bad things that have not happened yet, but they're talking like every person has complete control over every aspect of their lives, and very many people do not, especially if they're in a lousy job or they're living from paycheck to paycheck. In one case they talked about being less of a critic of yourself, and they likened it to you being an office manager and learning to take input from the busybody assistant and filter it appropriately, but not everyone is an office manager! In fact, most people are not!

This was where the elitism was rife. I became concerned that their perceived audience felt like it was a certain kind of person in a certain sort of socio-economic group, and how their approach might be perceived by someone reading this book who worked in a factory or who was a janitor, or a miner or car mechanic - something less academic than they were. Maybe a lot of those people would never read a book like this. I don't know, but the authors' attitude seemed like it didn't even know such people existed, let alone care about how this book might apply to them or how they might benefit from it.

Everyone experiences stress to some level or another, but there's a lot more stress on poorly-paid people at the lower end of the social scale than there is on those who are comfortably well-off and not worrying about how they're going to pay rent or buy food or medicine, or who don't live in dangerous neighborhoods.

It's not that wealthy people automatically have no stress, but I'd have liked to have seen the results of one of their telomere surveys in comparing financially secure people to poor people, and maybe homeless people to a more secure group of people. They don't seem to have done that, and they don't seem to have a plan for how these people can benefit from this knowledge, apart from telling themselves 'don't worry, be happy!' which is really all this book seems to be advising. You know what? That doesn't always work, and even if it does, it's nothing we haven't heard before, so what does this book really contribute? Nothing! That's why I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Maria Montessori by Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Raquel Martín

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was another in a series of which I've read and reviewed several, nearly all of them positively. This is about a woman who brought a fresh perspective to education, starting with children who had some sort of mental impairment. Back in her day (her real work began at the turn of the century) these children were not well-cared-for and were written-off in terms of assessing their capabilities and futures. Montessori changed this and showed that with the right stimuli, these children had capacity far beyond what they were typically consigned to in life.

The book doesn't cover everything. Notably missing is Montessori's own child which she had 'out of wedlock' as it used to be called. She chose to remain a single mom because had she married the father, she would have been expected to give up her work, which she refused to do. Is this something that very young children need to know? I guess that's up to the parent/guardian and what they think their child can handle, but it's not necessary to include it in a book like this, although her son did end-up assisting her in her work when he grew older.

The book was informative, well-illustrated, and told a good - and true! - story. I commend it as a worthy read.

Heavy Flow: Breaking the Curse of Menstruation by Amanda Laird

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I've long been glad I have only one X chromosome to deal with, and this book rubber-stamped that for me! The author takes on the myths and nonsense surrounding menstruation, and straight-talks her way through it, setting a few things to rights as she goes. I could have done without the more fringe elements of the book, which fortunately were rare. The author references naturopathy a lot, and that, as far as I'm concerned is pseudo-medicine, as Britt Marie Hermes's website will confirm https://www.naturopathicdiaries.com" (or any competent doctor!), but that was a small part and I had no problem with her observations and recommendations elsewhere.

The book discusses, in depth, the menstrual cycle and the body parts it affects, down to biochemistry and hormones. It spares no important detail, and it explains everything in clear language, discussing every aspect and dispelling any vestige of perceived shame, embarrassment, negativity or any other bad feeling about a perfectly natural event that is in fact not a curse, but a vital sign which can help a woman to understand her body and get the best out of it including, unless you're sadly unlucky, an improved outlook and experience during "that time of the month".

I watched a short documentary on Netflix recently, titled Period. End Of Sentence and directed by Rayka Zehtabchi. This was before it went on to win best short documentary in this year's Oscars so I wasn't just jumping on the paddy wagon! It highlighted yet another aspect of how badly women are done to when it comes to ordinary - although fortunately in this case not quite everyday - experiences that women undergo, and for me it highlighted why books like this one are important and ought to be read by anyone, regardless of how many X's they carry or how they perceive themselves regardless of the X factor in their chromosomes. An enterprising woman in India, Aditi Gupta, used crowdfunding to create a comic book talking to young girls about menstruation. "Menstrupedia" has now been translated in multiple languages. It's another step toward breaking this ridiculous taboo over a perfectly natural bodily function.

This was a Kindle edition and also an advance review copy, so hopefully the technical problems I found in it will be fixed before it's 'out there', but just in passing I should mention that once again, Amazon's crappy Kindle process turned yet another book into kindling in places. In the section, "THE PHASES OF THE MENSTRUAL CYCLE" a table showing follicular and luteal phases was completely mangled by Amazon's conversion process. You absolutely cannot have anything fancy in a book or novel if you're going to put it through the Kindle mangle, because Kindle will slice, dice, shred and julienne it, I promise you.

In addition to this, I also noted, about 30% in, this random text that didn't seem to be connected to anything else: "years to be different from the period that you have in your twenties or after childbirth." Much later in the book, there was the partial sentence "...prioritize food over supplements. Fresh," which ended right there, abruptly and was then followed by two screens of another mangled table which I assume in the print book is an inserted box. This was followed by the rest of the beginning sentence, "healthy food should be the first source...." Again mangled courtesy of Kindle.

There was another case, which I saw several times, where the page header became incorporated into the text, again courtesy of Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process, so the text looked like this:

when a Chinese medical textbook
Managing Your Period Pain 177
recommended cannabis flowers to ease symptoms during menstruation.

Again if you're submitting the book to Amazon, you need to strip it of anything fancy or even remotely fancy. No page headers, no page numbering, no inset boxes, no plethora of fancy fonts. Just plain vanilla all the way is the only thing Kindle can handle in my experience, and it sometimes has isses with that, too. This is one of several reasons why I will have no truck with that mega-corporation any more.

There may have been other quirky instances of text mangling that I did not notice or that I forgot to record because I was engrossed in the reading! There was at least one instance of a misunderstanding. Around 80% in I read, "...it's only going to increase that inflammation, which in turn may increase pain and discomfort. It's like rubbing salt into the wound." But the reason salt was rubbed into a wound wasn't to increase pain or to torture, it was to sterilize the wound, so I'm not sure this metaphor is apt. On the other hand, it is used commonly to mean, 'make things worse', quite contrary to when it's used to compliment someone as in 'you're the salt of the Earth'. English language is totally screwed-up; that's part of the joy of being a writer who uses it!

But technical issues aside, I really enjoyed this book and consider it not only a worthy read, but an essential one. It made for fascinating, sometimes disturbing, but always educational reading.

What Do Machines Do All Day? by Jo Nelson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

The title of this book amused the heck out of me so I had to request it and see what was up. The book is about various scenarios (the farm, the building site, the mine, the mall, and so on), and in each section we learn about several machines you might find there and what these machines do.

I have to say the initial picture, introducing the scenario and showing all the machines, was a bit busy and hard to take in at first glance, but perhaps this was intentional because there is a breakdown after that page which shows the individual machines and vehicles and explains what they do (in first person voice!), then you're challenged to go back and find them in the big picture. I imagine young children will have fun with this and enhance their seek and find skills to boot, which is never a bad thing.

The text was simple and straight-forward, and the drawings were somewhat stylized to keep them simple too. They were very colorful. It would have been nice had there been a word about safety here and there, and oddly, my ebook ARC version of this (I don't merit a print book!) was doubled - so when I got to the end of the book, it started over again, and was therefore twice as long as it needed to be. Presumably that will be fixed in the final edition.

Overall I thought this was a fun book and a worthy read for young children.

Wish by Chris Saunders

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a fun story about sharing, written for young kids. The artwork is spectacular and really caught my eye. The story itself is poetic and brings a reader right into the unfolding tale.

The cute rabbit on the cover manages to end up with three wishes and doesn’t quite know what to do with them, and so seeks advice from friends who relate what their own wish would have been. In the end, each of them gets their wish through a very generous lagomorphic donation and they, in turn, share their dream with their friend, so everyone is rewarded. It’s a short, easy read, a fun story, and it’s a story with a message that’s beautifully illustrated by the author. I commend it as a worthy read.

Black Light Express by Philip Reeve

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume two of a trilogy and has a very cool title, I thought. It sounds like the kind of title William Gibson would use. Maybe that's how Gibson makes his money these days in an era of him being much less relevant than he used to be? Maybe he cooks up cool titles and sells them to other authors? LOL!

But I digress. I'm not a series person as anyone who has followed my reviews will know. Apart from my The Little Rattuses&trade children's series I'm in the middle of, I will never write one myself. As to reading them, I'm not steadfastly against it, but I've encountered very few that were worth all the volumes. To me, series too often represent laziness and a lack of imagination on the part of the author.

This one was a rare surprise in that the story was, in a sense, very much completed in volume one, but there was an organic option available for the next episode, so it felt very natural to me. On top of that, volume one was really good and I enjoyed it. The ending was reminiscent of the first volume of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials." In that case and this one, the ending/opening for volume two were strikingly similar.

Volume two began engagingly, although I ran into an issue that bothered me and got me thinking, which is always dangerous! In volume one, the main antagonist, Raven, had orchestrated a scheme to get the main protagonist, Zen Starling, infiltrated into the Noon family by having him pose as a distant relative. In order to do this, he had to sequester that relative, and he employed a young girl to do it. She got caught afterwards and sent to jail.

On this world, crimes are punished by the perp being frozen for a period of time. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how that exactly is a punishment or what it's supposed to achieve, but that's the way it is. I guess if you're put into it for a decade, as she was the first time she was caught, it changes things because fashions change and friends grow older or die, so she comes out feeling literally out of things and having no friends. The world has moved on without her. Maybe that's the real punishment rather than the actual cryo-sleep, but for short sentences, zero degrees makes zero sense.

So this brings us to where the author describes this girl being taken out of her cryo-sleep prematurely. She's a repeat offender, so despite Chandni having been alive for 96 years, she's actually only nineteen years old, physically speaking. Apparently when they put people into the freezer, they shave their head and tattoo a prison number on it. Why, I do not know - it's not explained here. So we have the author describing her coming out of sleep, and he says, "She would have been quite pretty if they hadn't shaved her head." That struck me as a mean thing to say. If the author had had a character say that, then that would have been one thing. People can be mean and thoughtless, but for the author himself to make such a declaration is mean in itself.

There are women who have no hair because of a medical condition, or because of, to mention a well-known example, a cancer treatment regimen. To describe a shaved head of itself as not pretty isn't fair at all. Personally I don't think it makes a woman look less than she did before. I like hair, but I don't find it lessens a woman's attractiveness any more than it lessens a man's purely because they're missing hair for whatever reason. It can often enhance it in my opinion. Just google Budz McKenzie, or Sharon Blynn, or Marielle McKenna, or Rae Ann Reyna or a host of others. It's one thing to write that "she didn't look pretty, but then she never had, even with hair," but to hang it all on her hair (so to speak!), or lack of it, felt like very ill-advised writing, to me.

Anyway, I read on hoping there wouldn't be any more of that nonsense, and while the book took a brief dip into boring me, during which I wondered if I was going to finish this or DNF it, it very quickly turned things around by going off in an unexpected direction which (while in some ways predictable) definitely stirred things up significantly, so I was back onboard. And it avoided more faux pas, so I ended up happy with it and I'm looking for volume 3 next! I commend this one as a worthy read.

The Cave by Rob Hodgson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was an entertaining story about a persistent wolf and an anonymous denizen of a cave. The amusing wolf is hungry and quite sneaky. He tries several schemes to lure out whoever is in the cave, but without success. He ought to wish the success would forever evade him because when it doesn't, he discovers he really didn't want to meet this cave-dweller! It was nicely-drawn and colored, and the story carries a valuable lesson to the effect of being careful what you wish for! I commend it as a fun story for young children, especially if they like surprises!

Catwoman Vol 1 Copycats by Joëlle Jones, Fernando Blanco, Laura Allread, John Kalisz

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a nicely done comic, written and illustrated by Jones in partnership with fellow artist Fernando Blanco, and colorists Laura Allread and John Kalisz. I liked this version of Selina Kyle: perky, confident, realistic, and not overblown into some pneumatic caricature. The writing was sensible and fun, and the artwork excellent.

She would pre-fur to live in relative obscurity at her new scratching-post away from Gotham, but unfortunately Catwoman cannot find the peace she seeks because of a cat nipping at her heels - or rather, several of them. There seems to be a veritable plethora of cat-women here. Why? Is it some sort of Meow-Too movement? Will the real Selina please stand and arch her back?

Making a feline for the answer, the real Catwoman stray-cat-struts her way boldly into the fray to tear down this caterwaul and see what's on the other side of it. I commend this as a worthy read.

Bright Start - Feel Better Daddy by Nancy Loewen; Hazel Michelle Quintanilla

Rating: WARTY!

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

After the bad experience I had with a companion book in the "Bright Start" series, I really thought this one was misnamed. Bright start is exactly the opposite of what I had, and this volume was no better: there was an appallingly long opening time for the book to even come up on the screen at all, and then a comprehensive inability to swipe from the cover to page one. As before, this was this was on a new iPad using Adobe's Digital Editions reader.

I'd beee looking forward to this having been sick myself a couple of weekends ago, but after my experience with the companion volume, I was not about to waste any time on this, so after trying to swipe to page one several times with no effect, I DNF'd this one just as I had done with the companion volume. I cannot commend a book, clearly designed for a print version, and to which zero thought has quite evidently been given for the electronic version. It's impossible to read, much less enjoy as an ebook.

Bright Start - A Thank You Walk by Nancy Loewen,Hazel Michelle Quintanilla

Rating: WARTY!

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

I am sorry to report that this book was a disaster. I could not get it to open past the double-spread cover illustration. No amount of swiping would bring up the first page, and this was after I had waited for nearly twenty seconds for the thing to open at all. And this was on a new iPad.

Clearly this is yet another print book designed without an ounce of thought given to the electronic version. Amateur reviewer that I am, I do not merit the print version of books, so the e-version is all I can comment on and my comment here is: avoid this like the plague. I rarely have problems with ebooks, even ones consisting entirely of images, but this one was a doozy. When I killed the application (Adobe Digital Editions reader) and reopened it, I was able - after the statutory wait of twenty seconds for it to open so I could to swipe to page one - after multiple tries, but then it locked again, and I killed it again, since it would not let me recover or return to the library.

On the third try, when it took even longer to open (close to a minute). I managed to get to page two, whereupon it locked up again. I gave up on it at that point. I cannot commend a book that is so badly-designed that it won't let you actually read it!

The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond by Brenda Woods

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook and while it might work for the intended audience which is younger than I am, it was too slow-moving for my taste, too religiously-oriented, and not well-written, so I can't commend it.

The story was about a biracial child coming into her own and while the approach that it seemed to want to take was commendable, the actual path it did take was less than advisable in my opinion, and the tale came off more as a lecture hitting on a list of bullet points the author had prepared than it did a real story.

It felt like a political campaign in many regards, and while no one in their right mind should countenance the execrable treatment of people of color in the past (and still ongoing in too many facets of life), a book like this is in danger of trying to swing the pendulum back too far and instead of settling it in an amicable middle, and risks running into its own racism by pushing it too aggressively in the other direction. I think this book managed to avoid that extreme, but everything in it seemed colored by race in a way that people of color have far too often experienced in everyday life, and this seemed to me to be the wrong way to go about redressing that imbalance.

If that had been the only problem I think I might have been inclined to let it slide, history being what it isn't, but there were several other issues, not least of which is the mistake too many writers make, and not just in children's books, of using the lazy substitution that a person who reads books equals a person who is smart, instead of actually doing the work to make them read as a smart character. While a person who reads books can be smart, such a person can instead be dumb, and a person who doesn't read much can be smart, so the two things are not equivalent. Just because Violet can recite things from books, such as which countries in Africa speak Swahili, does not mean she is smart. It just means she's a parrot. And an annoying one at that. More on Swahili anon.

As I mentioned the story moved very slowly and even though it was not a long story, I grew bored with it taking forever to get anywhere. I also found this use of juvenile names for grandparents to be obnoxious. This girl Violet is not four years old, yet her grandparents are 'Poppy' and 'Gam'. Given that her name was Violet and her sister's name was Daisy, having a grandfather referred to as Poppy was way the hell too much. Can we not have a children's book where the grandparents are called grandma and grandpa? Seriously? I don't doubt that there are kids who use idiotic names for their grandparents, but I sure don't have to read about them!

Later there was another grandparent in the story who insisted on being called Bibi, which on the face of it is just as bad, but it turns out that Bibi is the Swahili name for grandmother. Now you might be willing to grant that a bye, but I wasn't because what's up with that? Where did this Swahili come from out of the blue? It had never been mentioned before. It wasn't like we'd learned that Violet's father was a native born African from one of the nations there which boasts Swahili as its native tongue. So WTF?! Given what I'd already been through it with the asinine names for grandparents, adding Bibi to the mix, out of the blue was once again ill-advised. This is what I mean about poorly written.

If the kids names, Daisy and Violet, had been derived from Swahili, and the family had a historical connection with the language, that would be one thing, but Daisy is from an old English phrase meaning 'day's eye', and Violet is from the Latin word for violet, which is believe it or not, Viola. No connection here. And the author can't spell Ahmed. She gets the M and H the wrong way around! I don't know if that was intentional but it looked sloppy.

This is why it's important for authors to really think about what they're writing. Names are important. If the girls had been named Nyasi and Ua, for example, the Swahili words for grass and flower, or some similarly-derived name, then that would have given a lead directly to Bibi, but there was nothing, and for the author to pull this straight out of her ass, smelled of desperation and poor choices to put it politely. It sure didn't smell of violets and daisies. I can't commend lazy writing like that. I made it a little over halfway through this book before I gave up on it. I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Captain Marvel Down by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

The last, thankfully, of the four Captain marvel graphic novels I foolishly thought to read. All four were DNFs, and as of this one I am off Marvel comics altogether until and unless they offer me a seriously good reason why I should read even one more. DC isn't any better, just FYI. This one at least wasn't set on a dumb space station, but it was still as bad.

In the airless vacuum of space, Captain Marvel apparently has no trouble breathing or at least holding her breath, and no trouble speaking out loud - and being heard by others! Yet in this story, set under water, she needs a breathing apparatus? WTF???

So, underwater and of course she has to be set upon by sharks which as you know are hungry 100% of the time and always for humans. Barf. The artist needs to learn to draw shark teeth.

On that topic, the artwork was, as usual indifferent, that is until chapter two when it went seriously down the crapper. I never used to think I was artist enough to do a graphic novel, but now I'm of the opinion that anyone can do one if this level of "artistry' is acceptable. This was written by Kelly Sue Deconnick and Christopher Sebela, and illustrated by Dexter Soy and Filipe Andrade, and none of it was up to snuff.

The plot was a tired, retreaded Bermuda Triangle story with bizarre robots (which were absent on the space station you may recall), now resurrecting themselves and which of course required Captain Marvel to turn all Dwayne Johnson (barf) instead of being Captain Marvel. It sucked royally. Captain Marvel is rendered repeatedly by these female writers into a pair of fists, no brain required. No woman required either, since there is nothing in these stories that would have to be changed if the female were erased and a male character substituted in her stead.

I don't normally do covers because the author typically has nothing to do with the cover unless they self-publish, but in this case I have to ask, if this is set in the ocean, why does the cover show Captain Marvel in space??? This had to be one of the poorest, dumbest comics I have ever partially red, and I refuse to remotely commend it.

It was awful, as were the other three of this quartet I happily didn't pay for, since I had them from my excellent local library for a preview of Captain marvel. Fortunately, I have more faith in the artists who write and otherwise create Marvel movies, otherwise I would have been turned-off the Marvel Cinematic Universe permanently by this trash. If I might borrow the words of Blue October: into the ocean end it all, into the ocean end it all, into the ocean end...all, good bye! Captain Marvel deserves better.

Captain Marvel Rise of Alpha Flight by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

Well at this point I think I am done reading Marvel graphic novels. They are nowhere near as entertaining as the movies, in fact not well written at all and illustrated accordingly. I was very disappointed. The first problem being that Earth's Mightiest Her" is onfined to commanding a space station. WHY??? It's like having your prize race horse pulling a plow, or your best performing race car working for Uber.

I thought that with these four graphic novels being written, at least in part, by female authors (in this case, Tara Butters, along with Michele Fazekas, with art by Kris Anka), they might have something new and different to offer, but these were no better than the male ones. Again, a grave disappointment.

Despite being set in the future, there isn't a sign of robotics or AI in sight. What happened? Was there a technology apocalypse? Evidently not since these people are on an advanced space station - one shaped like a spinning top. Why people show stations designed like that in books and movies escapes me since there's no explanation offered for why it had to be designed this way!

I almost forgot what this one was about, but then, unfortunately, I remembered. There is an alien workforce on the station, taking charge of waste management. Why? Did we forget how to recycle? We've known that since Apollo days! And if there needs to be waste management, why are aliens from scores of light years away doing it instead of robots or humans on this station in close Earth orbit? Any why did an alien race which is starkly divided (as we later learn) into alphas and slaves, get hired in the first place? Did no one do due diligence? If Marvel had been doing her job as station commander instead of getting her fingers into every pie she could, maybe she would have noted this and prevented all that came later.<.p>

I'm sorry, but stupid characters, dumb-ass plots and indifferent artwork do not a great story make. This is garbage, manage that! I'm done reading Marvel superhero comic books until and unless I feel a huge compulsion to pick up another one.

The Mighty Captain Marvel Band of Sisters by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

My next foray into the world of Captain Marvel should have been a good one since it was both written and drawn by women, but this made no difference to the asinine portrayal of a female character, to her sexploitation in the form of improbable hourglass physiques, open crotch shots and leading with the breasts shots, and to the moronic storyline. What the hell is wrong with these female comic book creators??? If a renaissance in how women are portrayed in graphic novels isn't going to start with them when and where the hell will it start?

Margaret Stohl (lousy writing) and Michele Bandini (sexploitative art) are the guilty parties here. The story is nothing but one long fight - and in space, where a startling number of super heroes are able to breathe unaided. There's no reason a woman shouldn't be able to kick ass, but if all you're going to do with your female super heroes is have them behave exactly like the male super heroes traditionally do, then what the hell is the point in fussing about whether females are represented in comics or on the silver screen???!!! They're just men with tits! And thereby hangs a tale!

The hilarious thing about being in space wasn't the fact that they could breathe as though there is air out there. It was the fact that there was no physics out there. At one point Captain Marvel punches this villainous dude and he shoots off backwards, but she remains in place, unmoving. Apparently one of her super powers is to suspend Newton's third law of motion. That's fine, but what I had a hard time trying to figure out was how Captain Marvel managed to maneuver in space where gravity isn't a fact in free-fall, friction is essentially non-existent, and she has no rocket assistance! Then I figured it out! The answer was revelatory!

There are no page numbers of course - it's a graphic novel after all so why would anyone want to reference a page? But counting each leaf as one page, this scene took place after page nineteen. There was a full page spread on the left and on the lower right, a full breast spread as Captain Marvel's Mammaries took pride of place in the center of the panel. They were huge. Now turn that leaf and six more, and on the left there's another full-page spread, but this time Captain Marvel has no mammaries at all! Do you see? She is really flat chested, and her 'boobs' carry compressed air, which is how she maneuvers in space! The air shoots out through her nipples allowing her to jet around, Clearly that second frame caught her when she was in need of a refill! Now it all made sense to me!

Not.

So hopefully it's needless to say, even if it needles to say, that I was out of there. Captain Marvel DNF'd again. I have two more to go through, and I am hoping - but have little faith - that they will offer me something to marvel at. This one is warty, period.

Captain Marvel Civil War II by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

Because of the impending advent of Captain Marvel on the silver screen, to which I'm very much looking forward despite its shamefully long-overdue portrayal of a lead female Marvel superhero, I decided to pick up some graphic novels on the subject from the library to read ahead (after a fashion!)! I was sorely disappointed. I got four of them and the first two were complete duds. I'm glad I didn't read the Marvel graphic novels before I saw any of the movies because I would never have gone to see the movies had I imagined they would be as roundly dissatisfying asa the novels.

This one was a series following Captain Marvel's involvement in Civil War from which she was omitted completely in Phase 3 of the Marvel movie universe. Unfortunately it wasn't the first in the series, but that doesn't matter because I'm judging it only on the quality of this particular volume, not the whole series, and the quality sucked. It was poorly written by Ruth Fletcher Gage, Christos Gage, and the average to indifferent art was by Kris Anka, Marco Failla, Thony Silas, and Andy Owens, which might explain the patchy quality.

Apparently Carol Danvers was romantically involved with Colonel Rhodes of Iron Man associations, and he's either dead or severely wounded. it was hard to tell with the poor writing. Captain Marvel - billed as Earth's mightiest hero - is somehow under the thumb of a bunch of asshole guys dictating to her - to Captain Marvel - what to do. Never once did she flare up at these condescending and patronizing jackasses. The story was only this all the way through - and the occasional fight. It was boring as hell, and a waste of my time. I should bill Marvel for my reading time since I took no pleasure in it.

Queen Bee by Chynna Clugston

Rating: WARTY!

Why a female author would want to denigrate women by creating a graphic novel about two high-school girls being outright bitches to one another is an utter mystery to me. I thought there might be some wising-up and resolution here, but the only resolution was to continue this garbage into a second volume. Even the teachers are painted clueless which is an outright insult to teachers. It's stinking trash. My opinion and advice is to treat it as such. I'm done with this author.

Let's Celebrate Valentine's Day

Rating: WORTHY!

A day late, for which I apologize, but this apparently authorless book is full of interesting things for kids to make and do on Valentine's Day. It's full of of greetings and best wishes you can exchange with friends, parents, grandparents on this day, as well as hosting a few puzzles which curiously have nothing to do with Valentine's Day!

Of course you should express your love for your loved one(s) every day in one way or another, but there's nothing wrong with having a special day dedicated to it. I commend this book as a fun read for children who might wonder about this day and what to do on it!

A Kid's Guide to Global Warming by Glen Murphy

Rating: WORTHY!

This large format, illustrated-book is full of facts and observations about climate change - and no, contrary to the clueless comments of an appallingly and willfully ignorant president, it didn't get renamed because global warming is a lie. Global warming and climate extremes are all part of climate change and anyone who cannot see that is blind, period. People need to be educated, especially our children and grandchildren who are the ones who are unfortunately going to have to live with the worst of what we have done to this planet. This book is a good start.

There are four sections: What is global warming?; What does it mean for us?; What are we doing?; and What can you do? The book goes into some detail, with great illustrations, about the fact that the planet's atmosphere and oceans are heating up, about fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses, about melting ice and rising sea levels, spreading disease vectors, extreme weather and pollution, all of which we're already seeing. The book also talks about carbon footprints, saving energy and water, and reducing waste. In short it has everything a kid needs to know to arm themselves against what's coming, and I commend it as a worthy and essential read.

Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword by Henry Lien

Rating: WARTY!

The title of this audiobook amused the heck out of me and since I've had some success with oddly-titled middle-grade books recently, I thought this might make for a great read - or rather listen. The reader's voice wasn't bad at all, although a bit mature-sounding for the character.

The book started out decently, but rapidly went downhill. It's set in a pseudo-Asian world which is obviously China versus Japan, in which Peasprout Chen is coming in from China (called Shin here) to attend the prestigious Pearl Academy in Japan, where skating is available all year due to the fact that pearl is made from this slippery pearlescent material upon which ice skates work, so everyone skates everywhere, year-round.

That made for some interesting world-building, but even that ultimately fell short, and when the bullying began on day one, it was irritating to me. I stuck with it because I was interested in this martial art of Wu Liu - martial arts on skates! That sounded cool, but the descriptions of it given here aren't very evocative, and the endless competition was boring and absurdly dangerous from the young girls' perspective. It was too much, and had nothing to do with martial arts. It was merely performing ridiculous stunts, so there was little joy to be had there.

Peasprout and her kid brother Cricket - who isn't interested in Wu Liu at all, but in architecture - begin settling in and competing in the various tests they're given. For an academy, there appears to be precious little teaching going on. Everything is wrapped around this series of contests instead, so the story devolved into a series of girls bitching at each other and then competing in bizarre stunts which had nothing to do with learning and practicing martial arts. It was boring.

It was at this point that I began to realize that I really didn't like Peasprout at all. She was shallow and completely insensitive to her kid brother's needs. She was so focused on rivalry between her and other kids that it was pathetic.

At one point she breaks this special shock-absorbing dragon design on one of her skates (which is nowhere to be seen on the idiotic book covers), causing her problems, but despite the fact that she observes other kids tossing their blades into the trash after using then only once, it never occurs to her to grab a pair of those and use them on her own skates to replace the broken blade.

At one point she injures her knee, but instead of taking care of it, she allows herself to be goaded into a show of one-upmanship with some of her rivals and ends up injuring her knee further. In short, Peasprout is a moron. I don't mind if a character starts out dumb and wises up, but when they grow progressively dumber, I'm outta there. I DNF'd this one and cannot commend it as a worthy read.

The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl by Stacy McAnulty

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook aimed at middle graders which didn't appeal to me. It started out well enough, but the more I read, the more I realized the author really didn't have any idea what she was talking about, and the plot was so inconstant as to be irritating. The reader's voice was way too mature for the character, and it was in first person too, which made it sound worse.

Lightning Girl isn't a super hero, although it would be a great name for one. When Lucy Calahan is struck by lightning at age eight, something in her brain is changed, and she suddenly becomes a math whiz. To my knowledge, no one who has been struck by lightning has ever become an autistic savant.

Lightning strikes are second in line behind flooding as causes of death by natural catastrophe, resulting in something like a death per week on average in the US. Survivors, far from having increased mental agility are likely to have it reduced, and math skills impaired. Victims who survive are more likely to experience problems with hearing and vision, and the myelin which sheathes nerves can also be damaged, leading to death long after the strike.

But this is pure fiction, and Lucy miraculous has no adverse physical effects whatsoever except for this math brilliance, but the author seems to confuse autistic savant syndrome with OCD, so Lucy has a series of oddball behaviors - normal for OCD sufferers, but seemingly out of line with the cause of her math skills. It made little sense to me. The outcome is that people perceive her as odd and she cannot make friends. Moving to a new school gives her a chance to hide her math brilliance and try to appear 'normal'.

Her grandmother is called 'Nana' here. Do kids in these books never ever, ever, ever call their grandparents grandpa and grandma? I just started another audiobook where grandfather is Poppy. Seriously? I know there must be some kids who use baby-names for their grandparents, but not everyone does! I guess authors of children's books never got that memo, huh, and kids never grow out of childish habits?

But I digress! Nana fails her granddaughter miserably by not telling anyone at the school about her condition. This results in all kinds of grief for Lucy, which means to me that Nana is guilty of a form of child abuse. The truth is that this book may as well not have adults in it for as little role as they play. Teachers are shown as bullies or uncaring about their kids which is frankly insulting and abusive of teachers, and parents have very little involvement in their kids' lives, evidently, in this author's world.

Far from celebrating her granddaughter's abilities, Nana plays along with hiding them, which is entirely inappropriate. It's one thing to exploit and abuse a gifted child by selfishly promoting them, but it's equally abusive to force, or at least enable, them into pretending they're something they're not.

The book involves a dog, too, which was just sickly sentimental and annoying to me. The dog is doomed, but not one grown-up ever sits down with Lucy and takes the time to explain to her why things are the way they are, which irritated the hell out of me. These adults were morons and abusive to this child. It's at that point that I DNF'd it.

Lucy gets on this team of three doing a school project, and the one girl, named Windy - not Wendy, but Windy - is a blabbermouth, and the boy, Levi, is simply a jerk. The trio were unprepossessing at best and uninteresting and laughable at worst. The story just lost me, and I gave up on it. Consequently I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Erratum:
“The more I learnt into trying to hide it, the more it hurt.”
I'm not sure what she was trying to convey with that! I wonder if the 'R' in 'learnt' ought to have been omitted so that it read 'leant' which is Brit-speak for 'leaned'. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what’s being said there.

This made for a difficult read because of what that author went through, but it was a worthwhile read, and I commend it for that. It was well-written, informative, educational, and important. It felt like a sick joke how much was piled onto this author's plate: mtf transgendered woman who is queer and on the autism spectrum which poor understanding by those closest to her and a late diagnosis of both the ASD and the transgender circumstances did nothing to help. This is precisely why we need understanding and education, so that this doesn’t happen to other people undergoing these same realizations and discoveries.

If either experience (the transgender or the autism) had been the only one this writer endured, it still would have been difficult, but it might also have made for a better outcome. Having both of these to deal with together not only served to confuse things, but also seemed that one would sometimes to feed off the other, obscuring what ideally ought to have been early recognition and a smooth treatment to help both the ASD and the transition to what was to become, if unfortunately belatedly, her natural gender.

The book is divided into three sections: before, during, and after, and each has its own story to tell and difficulties to relate, particularly the last section. For me, who didn't have to go through this, that last one sounded the most painful, but the middle one gave it a close run for its money. The first section as sad, but in some ways very cute and endearing. The whole is a heart-warming story with a happy ending, and a useful tool for others in similar circumstances. I highly commend this as a worthy read, and an essential one for anyone who wishes to understand and learn.

Hyacinth by Jacob Sager Weinstein

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook, read decently by Jessica Almasy, was nonetheless not to my taste. I started in on it a bit unsure, grew to like it somewhat, and then got put off by the first person voice and the really annoying lisp these characters had who came into the story a bit later. Plus the story moved a bit too slowly for my taste.

Tapping heavily into clichés about the British, the book weaves a story about London's many underground 'rivers', which used to be above ground, but which have slowly been culverted and then covered over as London grew. They're more like rivulets than rivers, truth be told. The story premise is that these rivers are magical and dangerous if not treated carefully. Even one lone drop of water can cause havoc, which the main character learns when she gets annoyed with the fact that the water coming from the cold faucet is too cold and the water in the hot one is way too hot.

She apparently isn't smart enough to consider running them both into the sink and getting the temperature just right there, so she gets this tool from somewhere and tinkers with the plumbing until the incoming water is mixed. This of course creates a problem since the water was apparently separated for a good reason. I was driving when I was listening to this and missed a bit here and there during this sequence.

The result of her actions is that she has to tool around in the London sewerage system and recover an escaped magical drop of water. This is where the story became tedious for me and I lost interest. While your mileage may well differ, and I would hope it does, I can't commend it based on my experience, although I confess I found Jessica Almasy's accents amusing.

Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer by Emily Arnold McCully

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I really enjoyed this short biography of Ada Lovelace, a near contemporary of Jane Austen, who is commonly described as the world's first computer programmer. It goes into sufficient detail to give you a good picture of her life, but not so much that it gets bogged down. There are images of some of the main characters involved in her life to provide a visual, and the text is a swift and informative read.

Lovelace was beset by a matching pair of bad parents in that one was way too loose and the other way too strict - to puritanical levels. She never knew her father in any meaningful sense because she never really met him. Her mother took her from him at a very early age, got custody - which was unusual for a mother back then, and she never let Ada know who her father was until after he had died, by which time Ada had sort of figured it out for herself. That said her mother was very liberal in terms of getting her daughter an education, which was extremely unusual back then.

Ada had some flighty impulses, but constantly either had them reined in or reined them in of her own accord. She was an avid scholar of many disciplines and excelled at math, which brought her into Babbage's sphere when she became interested in his difference engine at the tender age of seventeen. The rest is quite literally history. Ada died quite young. I commend this story as a very worthy read about a strong female character who happens to have been real, not fictional!

Woman 99 by Greer Macallister

Rating: WARTY!

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

This story initially sounded interesting, but far from being a thriller as the blurb claims, it was slow-moving and had endless, tedious flashbacks which I took to skipping in short order because they were so boring and pointless. They had, from what I could see before I began skipping them, no bearing on the actual story, and served only to interrupt it with annoying regularity.

So, every few screens I would read how this girl would reassert her need to focus on finding her sister Phoebe and rescuing her from the asylum, but then she would predictably meander back to the la-la land of asylum minutiae, behaviors, and politics, rather than focus on how to find which ward Phoebe was in so she could contact her. When she wasn't lost in that, she was lost in the past. It quickly became tediously repetitive. Had Yoda been a doctor there he would have diagnosed her as "Never her mind on where she was; what she was doing."

Flashbacks, in my experience, are rarely contributory. I just think they represent poor writing and they also unnecessarily interrupt the story. There are better ways of referencing past events than simply stopping the story and irritating the reader with yet another info dump, especially if it's irrelevant which, in this case, was consistently true. The flashbacks did not relate to the current story at all. All they 'contributed' was to tell an irrelevant backstory of this girl's relationship with her sister and her fiancé and this other guy she had the hots for, so clichéd love triangle. Barf. And this wasn't the story that was advertised! It was certainly not the story I wanted to read.

Sometimes it began to sound like this girl was herself an unreliable narrator because in the current story she was dissing her fiancé, whereas in the backstory she seemed less antagonistic, but it was b-o-r-i-n-g, which is why I quit reading them. I never felt like I needed to go back and read any of the flashbacks to understand what was happening in the present so what was the point? The current story and the flashbacks seemed to be completely separate stories, and at no time in the current story did she ever refer back to anything that happened in the past.

In another instance of her schizophrenia, I read that on the one hand that "If I confessed the whole truth, I’d be sent back to my parents quick as a wink," and on the other, a mere few lines later she claims, "And if I didn’t do something drastic, all my days would be like this, for all the time to come." I'm sorry? Either she can get out of the asylum by confessing or she's stuck there no matter what! It can't simultaneously be both. The fact that she thinks it can be calls her own sanity into question!

There was another point where I began to think she truly was insane and this story about her going there to rescue her sister was something she made up to 'rationalize' her presence in the asylum. It crossed my mind is that her understanding of why her older sister was there was in error - that her sister had been put there because her fiancé had been having a relationship with her or something. But I honestly didn't care enough at that point about either of these possibilities to continue reading, and I DNF'd it at around the fifty percent mark.

The reason for this was that the current story wasn't much better than the flashbacks, quite honestly. When she found the room her sister was supposedly in, and snuck in to visit, the woman in there was not her sister, but some Russian woman who was using her sister's name. After an agonizing few pages with flashbacks, she finally figured out that her sister and this woman had swapped places. Then - and how she made this insane leap I do not know - she decided this woman had to be one of the Romanov family, so the story further descended into inanity and I gave up on it, having zero confidence that it would ever go anywhere interesting.

I wish the author all the best in her career, but I cannot in good faith commend this one based on the fifty percent of it I could stand to read. And BTW, the Romanovs are all accounted for: they all died in the end.

A Love Haunting by Suzi Albracht

Rating: WARTY!

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

I thought this might make for an interesting read, but I could not get into it at all. The haunting husband came off to me as a very selfish person, stalking his wife for his own needs and not expending an ounce of thought for her, and the writing style felt juvenile to me, like the kind of thing I would have written in my teens. It did not appeal to me at all.

The story is of Jordan, who is in a deadly car accident with his wife Emily, who was pregnant. Jordan is a doctor. Emily was planning on being a nurse. Jordan discovers he is still 'alive' after the accident and he doesn't present as being too smart at this point because it takes him forever to discover he's a ghost. From that point on, the story goes downhill. Everyone and their uncle can apparently see ghosts in this world, yet it takes an age before Jordan himself actually sees another ghost. When Luke comes along, he's unbearable. At least he was for me.

Luke is a skateboarder and his language simply nauseated me. Here's how Luke addresses Jordan when the two have barely met: "Jords, my man, the world is our oyster." No! Just no. That was when I quit reading this because I simply could not bear the thought of reading another word of Luke's dialog at all. Luke reminded me of that idiot guy Harry Ellis in the movie Die Hard who snorts coke and tries to negotiate with the terrorists - and is summarily shot by Hans Gruber. I was simultaneously wondering if this is how Luke met his end and begging for Gruber's ghost to show up and shoot Luke. He was obnoxious.

I'd been turned off the story prior to that though. Authors routinely dis nurses in stories where hospitals are featured as part of the story because it's all about the doctor, isn't it? As it happens, this appears to be the very theme of this story: Jordan's needs. So this novel went down that sewer when I read this grotesque insult: "I wanted to convince Allie to shoot bigger and become a doctor." Yes! The take-home message here is that nurses are substandard and contribute nothing compared with the doctor gods! Barf.

So I am sorry. I started out hoping for the best, but was more and more turned off by the story the further I read, and in the end I DNF'd it. I can't commend it as a worthy read based on my experience.