I Am Malala: by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

Rating: WORTHY!

If I have to relate Malala Yousafzai's story here, then clearly you're not going to get it at all. This is a story which should be known already so this review talks about issues related tot he book, not the book itself, which I consider to be a worthy read. I've been wanting to read this book for a while, so when I saw it in the library I snatched it up at once. I'm so glad I did.

This book isn't perfect, nor should it be. It's a young woman's account of a very personal and tragic story of oppression and attempted assassination. After I had read it and was ready to review it favorably, I went onto Goodreads and looked at the negative reviews, curious to see an opposing PoV. Initially I was surprised that there were so many, but then I found myself asking, "Why am I surprised?" This girl's entire life has consisted of one awful wall of suppression and oppression by religious elements, so why would it be a surprise that these very same elements seek to treat her the same way as she continues to speak out against that oppression?

In truth, I think the real surprise came from the ignorance of the negative reviews, and not only from religious elements. There were were many negative reviews from those who had no religious ax to grind, but which instead sought to blame her youth, or her co-author, for a bad book, claiming things were lost in translation, or whatever. There was no translation! Did these people not read the same book I read? Malala Yousafzai was and is fluent in not only her native Pashto, but also in the commonly spoken Urdu, and in English. She has better English than a lot of adult Americans. She's a straight-A student in an English school in Birmingham, (love the Brum dialect!), and it's demeaning and insulting to talk about language difficulties or about things being lost in translation, or about her youth and 'inexperience'. She had no problem putting her thoughts down in English or in writing this book, and it's ignorant at best, and downright mean and petty at worst to suggest otherwise.

I am not usually complementary about co-authors and ghost writers, but I think the only contribution Christine Lamb made was in helping to set Yousafzai's thoughts and views into a cogent narrative, and also in setting her personal story into an intelligible historical framework. I think she did an admirable job, but Yousafzai's story was her story - no one else's. Lamb is the foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times, but her credentials are, as wikipedia has it, that "Her first major interview was with Benazir Bhutto in London in 1987 where subsequently she was then invited to her wedding in Pakistan later that year. From here, she began her life as a foreign correspondent in Pakistan, journeying through Kashmir and along the frontiers of neighbouring Afghanistan..." In short, she knows her stuff, and she knows the region.

There are those who claim that Yousafzai is dissing Pakistan, but they obviously read this book with blinkers on. There are others who claim Islam is not as harsh on women as Yousafzai portrays it (although she actually doesn't cast it in a bad light - merely those who would use their religion as a means to suppress and control others). The facts argue otherwise. UNICEF notes that out of 24 nations with less than 60% female primary enrolment rates, 17 were Islamic nations; more than half the adult population is illiterate in several Islamic countries, and the proportion reaches 70% among Muslim women. This is not an exaggeration, it is a fact.

Yousafzai was a Muslim child who was shot because she refused to bow down before the false god of the Taliban. She did not revile Pakistan. She did revile those people who sought to destroy the country she loved and to oppress people in general and women in particular, based on nothing more than a self-serving and absurdly narrow view of Islam. The Koran wishes women to be educated about religion, not educated in general. The Prophet Muhammad praised the women of Medina for their pursuit of knowledge: "How splendid were the women of the Ansar; shame did not prevent them from becoming learned in the faith." Not learned as such, only learned in the faith, but the fact remains that there's more to education than just religion. This misbegotten desire to suppress women and keep them in the back seat will fail. People like Malala Yousafzai, Hala Alsalman, Asma Jahangir, Baroness Uddin, Lira Bajramaj, Arfa Karim, Mishal Husain, Aliya Mustafina, Adeeba Malik, Razia Sultan, Hassiba Boulmerka, Azadeh Moaveni, Al-Malika al-Ḥurra Arwa al-Sulayhi, Samera Ibrahim Islam, Hayat Sindi, Raha Moharrak, Sayeeda Warsi, Durriya Shafiq, Shazia Mirza and hundreds of others, far too many to list, in all walks of life, have and will push Muslim women to the forefront of nations, Islamic or otherwise, whether men like it or not.

I recommend this book as part of an ongoing education into tragedies caused in this modern world by organized religion.

American Virgin: Around the World by Steven T Seagle

Rating: WORTHY!

The last volume, though titled "Around the World" also incorporated the final arc, titled "69". It follows Vanessa and Adam on their "world tour", beginning in Rio de Janeiro. Adam is dramatically brought almost literally face to breast with topless beaches, and is shocked initially to see Vanessa topless, but she educates him - the start of a long, slow process.

When Adam calls Cyndi, as he does frequently, now she has become his reality touch-stone, he interrupts her int he middle of her and Mel having sex. Why Cyndi would even answer the phone is a mystery! Why Mel isn't insulted that she does is an equal mystery.

From Rio, the couple travel to Japan and attend a penis festival. By this time you would think Adam has learned a few things, but evidently he has not. Initially he's shocked by the giant penis statues, but all too quickly turns his feelings around, so this part seemed completely fake to me, first his shock, and then his almost immediate acceptance.

Next up is Bangkok, where Adam books a hotel room for the two of them and it's Vanessa's turn to go overboard, but why she does is even less intelligible. In the end, she storms off to a hostel, abandoning Adam. Later, equally unintelligibly, they make up rather speedily, and all is well. Again this rang false for me. What saved this story for me, despite all this patchiness and falsity, was the other interactions between this couple, which were truly well-written and realistic, and which were endearing and engrossing. Adam gets a tatoo and while he's having that, he hallucinates a sexual encounter with Cass, which somehow convinces him that Vanessa is the one for him. This signifies the end of the Around the World Arc.

The 69 arc begins with Adam returning home with Vanessa and announcing, out of the blue, that they're married, but, we shortly learn, the marriage has not been consummated. At first I thought that this just meant that they were married spiritually, but not officially, but it quickly becomes clear that between this and the last arc, they did actually get officially married. Adam's mom reveals what a truly racist piece of work she is, ordering Adam to annul the marriage.

Meanwhile, fulfilling the last clause of their unofficial contract with Adam, his low-life, but evidently industrious step brothers announce they've found his real father in Cuba, so the entire family debarks, including Adam, Vanessa, Mel, and Cyndi, and manages to enter Cuba through some arrangements Mel has made. Reydel, it turns out, is now a priest who inexplicably still thinks the obnoxious Mamie is a beauty, and kisses her, giving her a heart attack, which Mel fixes by jolting her from the local power supply.

While she's recovering in hospital - availing herself of the free health care in Cuba - Mel kidnaps Adam and hustles him off to the Dominican Republic where the architect of his wife's murder now resides for reasons unexplained. Rather than shoot the bastard, Adam tries to make friends with the fiend. Inexplicably, the terrorist tells Adam there is a video of his fiancée in a nearby suitcase, which Adam dutifully opens. Why he would want such a video is a mystery, but when he opens the case, a bomb explodes yet Adam escapes without a scratch, other than a bloody nose. He isn't even deafened, yet we're expected to believe he's badly injured! The rescuers ask him his name and the last page shows him laying in their arms and a translucent version of him standing over his unconscious form. Whether this means he died or what, simply isn't explained.

So, this last arc was perhaps the weirdest of the entire series, and perhaps we would have learned more had the series not been canceled, but this was a truly odd way to finish it. Did he die? Who knows! It was ridiculous to artificially keep him virginal without any good reason, just so he could die in that state. It would have been more in keeping with the rather black-humored tone of the series to have had one more issue showing him being raped as one of the 79 virgins of the terrorist who died with him! Based just on the ending, I would rate this negatively, but based on this entire volume I have to rate this positively because until the very end, the story was really good in these last two arcs, and the art work was excellent, particularly some of the photo realistic filler pages between issues and the one full page image of Cyndi (which on reflection I think might have been in the previous volume). Overall, I rate this who series a worthy read. Be prepared for some potholes along the journey though!

American Virgin Wet by Steven T Seagle

Rating: WORTHY!

It's in this volume that Adam finally realizes he may have made a mistake in believing that Cass was his one true love. Ghost Cass says something that sets him off searching for the other five contestants in the beauty pageant where he first met Cass. IMO his mistake was looking there in the first place - at a pageant that's so obsessed with skin-deep appearance instead of looking a lot deeper, but that issue is one which isn't touched upon in this comic series at all, I'm sorry to say.

He hires his low-life step bothers at a thousand dollar a pop for each of the girls in that pageant that they turn up for him, and he visits them one by one. How he can, as a Christian, justify this squandering of money which could have helped the poor and fed the hungry is also not touched upon. For all his bluster, Adam is truly a piss-poor Christian in the romanticized and idealistic sense of the word, but he's a very good blind believer in the vengeful Old Testament style.

He meets on girl at one of his uncle's sex parties, and another who is pregnant and who starts to deliver the baby as he talks to her. That was amusing, and made a truly refreshing change from the stereotypical birth scenes, especially those on TV, where the guy panics and his wife is screaming in pain. Yes, there are some deliveries like that, but not every single delivery is like that by any means!

The extent of Cyndi's past is revealed in this arc, and also it becomes more and more clear that Mel and Cyndi are going to become an item, although there is still a surprise in store there. Adam finally meets one of the pageant girls, Vanessa Upton, who he honestly believes could be his soul-mate. On a whim, he takes off after her as she starts off on an impromptu low-budget tour of the world.

It was nice to read this volume because it was such a change from the previous one. The artwork was a joy -brighter and far more positive, far less tediously menacing than the previous volume, and more importantly, for me, the text took a turn for the better: all of the scenes where Adam and Vanessa interacted were a joy to read, and I was to discover that this joy only increased in the next volume. Definitely a worthy read!

American Virgin: Going Down by Steven T Seagle

Rating: WORTHY!

In the collected volume two of this series, and after their wild African adventure, Adam and Cyndi return home. In this story arc, I quit thinking Cass was still alive, and started thinking two other things: that there was something odd about Mel, their mercenary guide, and that Cyndi and Adam were going to end up an item by the end of the series. I was right about one of those two, but it turned out to be a double-blind, so there were two revelations, the second of which didn't make a heck of a lot of sense.

It's in this arc that we learn that Cyndi is even more interesting than she's already proven herself to be. She has a dark past and two sadly stereotypical thugs catch up with her, but fortunately Mel is there to save the day. I have to say that the depiction of these two guys struck me as rather racist and turned me off this volume somewhat. Also it felt like the story tried to hard to be controversial, so I didn't like this volume as well as I liked the first.

The highlight of this volume for me was Adam humping his dead girlfriend's coffin in a scene that could have come straight from Clerks (The Missing Scene), as depicted in a graphic novel I favorably reviewed back in November 2014.

At the funeral, Adam is proposition by a red-headed girl who wants to lose her virginity to him. I don't get what it is with this artist's obsession with red-headed girls in this series. Almost every significant female Adam meets is a red head in the first two volumes, although I admit that they thin-out rather more in later volumes. Shortly after the graveyard encounter, he another one redhead - a news reporter who gives no indication that she's really a biological male, yet Adam somehow picks up on this and incorporates it into a speech he gives later. I didn't get this either. It felt like this particular arc was simply trying extra hard to incorporate every known gender queer permutation just for the sake of it, rather like my idiosyncratic (2AABCGHILOPQSTU) category does!

The story quickly moves to Australia as Mel informs Adam this is where the actual beheader of his fiancée now is. There, they meet Clauda, a lesbian lush, and her brother Deacon, who is gay. Given that they're on the clock for this "mission" it makes no sense that they're dawdling on the beach catching rays except, of course, that it gives the authors a chance to bring in two more gender queer "types". This is and example of what I meant about the story going out of its way.

Adam in increasingly having visions of a naked Cass who seems to be alternately telling him to move on and to remain faithful to her, which makes no sense at all. It makes even less sense for Adam to go "undercover" and a flaming queer, dressed outrageously, in order to make contact with the beheader they seek. Adam is of course photographed leaving the place and the photo makes news headlines. It felt like this ought to have gone somewhere in the next issue, but it never did, so again it felt like it was included for no other reason than to check off one more gender "type" from the list rather than to contribute to or to serve the story.

The first part of Mel's secret is outed: he has a bone to pick with the terrorists over a dead loved one, but this makes the story even less sensible because it begs the question as to why Mel hasn't already dealt with this himself. Why does he need Adam? There was a feeble attempt at an explanation, but it didn't hold water. It relied on Mel needing Adam to track down where these guys were, but all the tracking is done by Mel, so this weak explanation failed.

On the flight home, the plane carrying Adam and Cyndi skis off the runway - for no apparent reason - and drops into a swampy lagoon - hence this arc's title! This is where this arc ends. Despite a lot of issues, I still rate this positively. The artwork was less pleasant than the first volume and the script nowhere near as entertaining, but as part of Adam's sexual education, it did a passable job, so I consider it a worthy read as an integral part of this complete series.

American Virgin: Head by Steven T Seagle

Rating: WORTHY!

How strange to read a novel with the word 'virgin' in the title and discover that, for once, it's not a completely boring waste of my time! American Virgin is a series that looks at sex from the PoV of a Christian virginity pledger named Adam Chamberlain who is the unlikely spawn of two TV evangelists. He has a younger brother Kyle, and a sister Cyndi. How those two got such un-Biblical names is an unexplained mystery. Somewhat less of a mystery is that these two are as far from Kyle as it gets when it comes to liberal attitudes towards drugs (Kyle) and sex (Cyndi).

The entire series, before it was cancelled, follows five story arcs, and is a fast and easy read. The first collected volume is Head, and this is followed by Going Down, Wet, Around the World and finally, Sixty-Nine. I shall be reviewing at least the first four of these.

Kyle is kidnapped and subject to a lap-dance as part of his unexpected Bachelor party, but he escapes before anything untoward happens. Adam is saving himself for Cassandra, another pledger, who is evidently having a hard time refraining judged by his last phone conversation with her. The next he hears of Cass is on the news - she has evidently been kidnapped and beheaded by some rebel tribesmen. Adam loses it and flies to Africa with Cyndi pretty much accidentally in tow, to bring her body back, but all the time he's really looking for some payback. Not a very Christian outlook on life, is it?! Yes, thy have the "eye for an eye" Old Testament rule, but there is also the contradictory "turn the other cheek" New Testament rule, so what gives?! Sanity, probably.

I have to say right up front, that I didn't quite buy the claim that Cass is dead. There is a headless body of a white female, yes, but there's nothing else offered - such as fingerprints or DNA - to certify that this is indeed Cass's body. Admittedly it's not like headless white females commonly show up in Africa, but coupled with her suspicious comments on the phone to Adam earlier, I'm wondering if something else is going on here.

Adam's slow, slippery, seductive slide from his high horse to being an ass is a pleasure to watch. As the hypocrisy of the Biblical texts is highlighted starkly, Adam finds himself in possession of a men's "girlie" magazine, and exposed to an entirely different approach to life as he travels through various nations in Africa in search of the guy who killed his beloved.

I have to say that the number of African breasts on display here seems excessive to me. It makes the continent look like it's sooo last century. OTOH, Swaziland, a highly Christian nation, seems extraordinarily enlightened when it comes to topless women (that's not too be confused with beheaded women, BTW).

I liked this comic because although it went over the top somewhat, it did tell some important truths about the hypocrisy of religion. This is the third graphic novel I've read where Becky Cloonan did the art work (in this case the penciling), and she's batting 666 at this point. The work wasn't brilliant, but it was serviceable and the coloring was a fine job too. Your mileage may differ, but I consider this a worthy read.

Molly of Mars and the Alien Syndicate by Wyatt Davenport

Rating: WARTY!

This book is described as being for "ages 10+, written to a Harry Potter level of reading". Harry Potter is a standard measure now?! This book has nothing to do with Harry Potter, so why they would mention that, I don't know. To me it felt like a middle grade novel masquerading as YA. The children are described as teenagers but behave like middle-graders. There are four books in the series so far. I believe that this one is the first, but I'm not sure. The others are: Molly of Mars and the Alien Nebula, Molly of Mars and her Alien Sister, and Molly of Mars and the Alien Creatures.

Molly Lennox lives on Mars. She's been adopted by Naomi, who is on the Mars governing council. As I said, I don't know why anyone would draw parallels with Harry Potter, but if you want to, Molly struck me as being like Tonks when she was a kid - but a lot less endearing. Despite quite an extensive history together, Molly treats Naomi like dirt and vice versa. I didn't like any of the characters this novel offered, which is bad, because it's a also worst person PoV story, which is obnoxious unless done right.

Molly has an adopted sister, Pirra, an alien who looks ridiculously, impossibly human, and who is a year older, we're told, but we're not told how that year is measured - by Earth years? By Mars years which are twice as long? Or by the years as measured on Pirra's home planet? The author sets this on Mars but makes absolutely no allowances for the setting whatsoever, other than to mention that it's cold once in a wile.

Pirra used to be a "warrior" for her own people, fighting in a war against humans, but that's all in the past. Despite their best efforts, peace broke out and now, without explanation, Pirra has somehow lost her powers, whatever they were. Why? No explanation. Maybe they only arise under conditions of war. Pirra is now pretty much humanized in all respects, even to the point where she is obsessed with fashion. She also appears to be Naomi's favorite adoptee. This favoritism doesn't seem to cause any friction with Molly, however.

Molly has two other friends she hangs with. Vicky Valentine and Luke, and her only interest in life, evidently, is in "hover-boarding" at the local outdoor skate park. I guess you could draw another parallel here with Harry Potter and the bizarre obsession with broomsticks, since Molly is always wanting a newer hover board. Yes the park is outdoors. Mars has an atmosphere, but it's thin and evidently losing oxygen. It's also cold, so outdoors, people tend to wear thermal suits and carry spare oxygen. More on this atmosphere anon.

Why Naomi would invite her least-favorite, most trouble-making daughter to a function is a mystery, but Molly is there and during the event she sees - or thinks she sees - two men being kidnapped in stasis boxes and removed from the house. Later she discovers two scientists are missing and goes looking for them at the space port where she gets into trouble with the police.

I think the author missed a gorgeous educational opportunity, and in doing so screwed-up the story. Whether the bulk of ten-year-olds will notice this is a good question, but I have no doubt that a lot of them will. The biggest problem is that Martian gravity is only one third that of Earth, and this would make a noticeable difference in how people moved. To the people living there, it would be normal if they had lived there for a long time, and it would not be remarkable, but the author conveys none of this gravity difference to us. It's never mentioned or demonstrated! The story may as well take place on Earth.

He screws up badly on two occasions because of this inattention to how Mars truly is. Molly falls off some rocks early in the story and breaks her arm, but given the low gravity and the short distance she fell, there was no way in hell she would break her arm. On another occasion, Molly drops a power converter off a cliff to keep it out of a bully's hands. The power converter evidently weighed very little since Molly was able to run easily while carrying it, but when she dropped it off the cliff she got into trouble with the police because someone below could have been hurt or killed, so we're told!

The thing is though, given the information available to us here, that it more than likely would not have caused any serious injury given how light it was and how low gravity on Mars actually is, yet this issue is never even raised. This could have been a teaching opportunity - to subtly compare life on Mars with life on Earth, but it was wasted.

Another issue I had with this was that the air on Mars (and the author uses 'air' and 'oxygen' interchangeably, which I think is a mistake) is thin and oxygen low, yet they appear to allow all manner of internal combustion engines from hover boards to motorbikes to rocket ships, all of which will pollute the air and burn up oxygen. This is never addressed - this laxity never explained! That's another serious mistake and a wasted chance to educate children about pollution and wise use of resources!

There are other issues that make little sense, too. The author talks of a spaceship's afterburners when he really means rocket motors. He talks of "silver racing strip" when he really means racing stripes. He says "The Sephians had stunners when they invaded to round up the girls" which is downright weird. Why would the aliens want to round up all the Mars girls?! Are they alien pedophiles? Molly's claim to fame as a 'war hero' was that she led the girls to freedom, but she gets zero credit for that.

Molly isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. She doesn't seem to grasp that Neptune is more like four billion kilometers from Mars even when they're at their closest. She claims when she goes to the academy there, she will be a billion kilometers from Naomi. I guess she still has a lot to learn in school!

This wouldn't have been too bad of a story if there had no been so many glaring errors or mismatched assertions in the text, and if Molly hadn't been such a "super hero" type blundering into things without thinking and without calling for aid from the authorities, or from her mother who was an important figure on Mars, even though she was a jerk. This endless acting without thinking makes Molly look really stupid.

Within a few paragraphs of demonstrating to Pirra that Molly is stronger, and therefore Pirra shouldn't try to maintain her warrior ways, Molly insists that Pirra boost her up on this machine they're trying to tinker with because Pirra is strong! She's either strong or she's not. In this same section, the author has Pirra sprinting shortly after her leg has been injured, and then later has her limping because her leg is weak from the very injury which didn't prevent her sprinting! You can't have it all ways! These were two examples in in a long line of things in this story which made no sense and which turned me off it.

On a museum trip, Pirra shows Molly skins of animals from Sephia, her home planet, but there is no rational explanation as to how these skins came to be present on Mars. Yes, the Martian ships evidently brought some animals with them, but how they would have ended up as museum specimens when those ships were destroyed is left unanswered. More problematic is this one creature which Pirra evidently killed on Sephia when she was undergoing her warrior training. How did that end up on Mars? It makes zero sense. On top of this, there are really poorly written lines, such as: “Who’re you?” I asked, rather terrified. Rather terrified? You're either terrified or you're not. If you're rather terrified, you're really just frightened.

After we hear (and witness more than once) how ineffectual ex-warrior Pirra is these days, Molly is dumb enough to think "Pirra would've fought harder than anyone I knew if someone had grabbed her. This place should be a mess if an attack happened." Again, it makes no sense except to once more highlight how dumb she is and how little thought she processes. Because of her name, Pirra kept reminding me of Perry the Platypus from the Phineas and Ferb cartoon series, although that Perry was more effectual than this Pirra.

The story itself was engaging enough if you closed down most of your brain, but the basic plot about the Martian atmosphere owed a lot to the Arnold Schwarzeneggar movie Total Recall. Molly's stepmom's blind tyranny made zero sense. At first I thought it was to get Molly off Mars and to the academy orbiting Neptune, where I suspected the real action was, but this wasn't the case, which made the tyranny even less explicable. Even that wasn't as inexplicable as why they built an academy out at Neptune. Why it had to be an orbiting academy, when it could have been built on the ground on Mars is a complete mystery. The extreme cost of space transportation seems to have gone completely over this author's head as it does over most every sci-fi-writer's head.

One thing which really turned me off this story is that Molly quite literally always gets the blame - no matter what happens and how unlikely it is that she had anything to do with it, she's automatically blamed for anything which goes wrong when she's in the vicinity - by the police, by her mom, and by her school teachers. It's entirely unrealistic. That was the rotten root of this story: everything was black and white. There were no shades of gray and it made the story tedious in the extreme. On top of this, Molly is an obnoxious and self-centered little tyke, so there is no impulse to sympathize with her; she's not a likeable person, and makes one stupid decision after another, never learning from her mistakes. I do not like stupid protagonists, and she's quite literally the red-headed child here. This also turned me off the story. I cannot recommend this at all.

AD New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld

Rating: WORTHY!

Ostensibly, this graphic novel isn't anything very special. The rather rudimentary art work is black and white line drawings with colored overtones to the page, but it tells a very human story about a horrible tragedy that never should have happened and once it did happen, never should have been neglected as it was.

The novel tells a general story of the hurricane, which was bad, and its aftermath, which was worse, but it starkly highlights the tale with personal stories of five people, and from reading this book, I can't tell if these were real people, or based on real people, or were simply made up. The sure seem like they were real. Why they were nearly all male stories, I don't know. Only one was female-centric.

Just when everyone thought the worst was over, and the hurricane blown out, the levee burst and flooded 80% of New Orleans to a depth, in some parts, of some fifteen or sixteen feet. Over 700 bodies were recovered. This story tells it all, pulling no punches and sparing no important detail. It's a fast, easy read, depressing as it is, but it's an important reminder that either we learn well from this and fix these problems now, or we can ignore them, and put off the necessary, and simply go through all of this again in the unpredictable, climate-changed future. There is no other option. I recommend this graphic novel as a worthy read.

Raven Girl by Audrey Niffeneggar

Rating: WORTHY!

Raven Girl is described as a graphic novel and was in the graphic novel section of my local library, but it doesn't fit any reasonable definition of a graphic novel. It isn't presented in comic strip form in a preponderantly graphic format with supplemental text. This is a short story with some illustrative full page pictures interleaved, just so you know! These are beautiful line drawings in sepia and green overtones executed by the author herself.

The story is about a mail carrier who falls in love with a raven - except that it's set in Britain, so he's really a postman. The two of them marry and have a raven girl child (how this is consummated is wisely left unaddressed by the author!) who grows up unable to speak anything but raven, although she can communicate in English by means of written notes. She looks just like a human, but has bird bones and so is extraordinarily light for her size.

Throughout her life, she feels out of place, but when she's in college, she meets a scientist who is doing physical augmentation on humans - giving them horns or a tail, or whatever they want. This is like an answered prayer for Raven Girl because she wants wings, so he kits her out with a functioning pair, and she learns to fly and eventually marries the Raven Prince. It's a weird story, but it was a real delight to read. Apparently Niffeneggar wrote it as a modern fairy tale for a dance company to perform.

The hardback version I got from my local library (in the graphic novel section!) was gorgeous, with grey silvery edging to the pages and a dark grey cover which in a way tells the whole story, but it seems to me that the cover tells the inverse version: the child is shown within the raven on the cover, whereas in the story, it is the raven which lurks within the child. I recommend this as a worthy read.

Uncaged by John Sandford and Michele Cook

Rating: WARTY!

I normally avoid prologues, introductions, prefaces, etc., like the plague, but it's hard to bypass them in an audio book. I only realized I had listened to the prologue when the next thing the narrator announced was "Chapter One". The prologue contained the classic trope of having a character description delivered by way of character Shay Renby looking into a mirror. It's so clichéd and lazy to write that way., and the prologue destroyed any of the tension the novel might have had over the question of whether or not the main character gets away. She does - it's right there in the prologue!

The author does have a bit of an excuse here because this red-headed girl is on the run and is changing her appearance, but still! She has a dog with her which she's also disguising. The weird thing was that chapter one describes the liberation of what is evidently this selfsame dog from an animal experimentation lab, so this was more of an epilogue than a prologue, which was weird. The end of the story arrives before the beginning. You have to have a truly great story to get away with hat, and this one wasn't.

It struck me that chapter one is the real prologue, because it takes place before the actual prologue (how screwed-up is that?!). Chapter one describes some young animal activists breaking into a lab. It's engaging enough, if improbable. The author has them breaking into the facility not so much to free the animals per se, but to unlock all the cages, so the experimental subjects become completely mixed-up and thereby ruin the experiment, so far, so good.

We're told as they first break in, that they have three minutes and fifty seconds, but the first room they enter, where they free rats and mice, would have eaten up nearly all of that time. Despite this, they then enter a second room where they free the macaque monkeys which are apparently undergoing some kind of brain experimentation. Some of the frightened macaques bite. One of the activists gets a cut on her hand from breaking open cages. Apparently this group of activists isn't smart enough to wear gloves or to grasp the essential elements of epidemiology, which I found hard to believe.

They enter an office where they rifle the file cabinets and steal USB drives which have experimental data on them. There's also a fourth room where there's a dog chained up, having evidently had some sort of medical procedure performed on it. One of them frees the dog. Even if we assume that the group splits up and does all of this simultaneously, less than four minutes doesn't seem anywhere near enough time for all of this activity to be completed, but I was willing to let that slide for the sake of a good story. I should have known better!

So the story then became, "What's the deal with this dog, and how did it end up in the company of the red-haired girl?" What we know from the blurb is that Shay's brother, a hacker who goes by "Odin" was the one who took the dog, which is how it ended up in her care, and the corporation, evidently named Singular, wanted it back with a vengeance. Shay is supposed to be more vengeful than Singular ever could be. This is what drew me to this novel. Unfortunately, nothing had happened by the half-way point.

My initial feelings were that the dog has somehow had its smarts amped up. So far so good. This sadly went to hell in a hand-basket when we reached the area around chapter six. From six through ten I was skipping tracks on the audio disks with abandon, because the story had screeched to a dead halt and became boring as hell. Eventually it picked up again, but now I was not inclined favorably towards it as I had been for the first five chapters. The narrator, Tara Sands's voice had become truly irritating, too, and sounded as pedantic as the writing. The voice was way too old for the age of the characters. I couldn't stand to listen to it any more - the narration or the boring story by the half-way point.

On the topic of writing, as I said, it had been fine to begin with, then grew really tedious. One issue I had was that evidently either Sandford or Cook, or both, don't understand that the word 'another' is a conjoining of 'an' with 'other', not a conjoining of 'a' with 'nother', so they wrote "a whole nother" rather than "a whole other". This is a relatively minor point but on top of everything else it was too much.

For me this is fine when it's part of a character's speech, because people really do say things like that, but it's not fine as part of the narration, unless you already set up the narration to be non-standard, or unless it's a first person PoV novel, neither of which holds here. Sometimes I weep for the English language. On the other hand, it's things like this which make English the most bad-ass language on the world!

But here we were, about half way through the novel, and this bad-ass female character we had been promised in the book blurb had failed to materialize. We all know book blurbs lie - that's their job after all - but to misrepresent the book so badly takes some real disrespect for your readers. I know that author's have as little to do with the back cover as they do with the front, so this is on Big Publishing&Trade; (again!), but I would flat ditch a publisher who screwed me over Publishers don't own writers anymore and if we get less than the best, it's time to recognize that, and move on.

Move on is what I did. This story should have been a fast-paced thriller and it was ponderous. It went into early retirement when Shay got to the hotel for the homeless or whatever it was, and never picked up again - at least not by the half-way mark. I was bored to tears and cannot recommend this as a worthy read.

The Hungry Fox by Kitty Barry

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one weird story. It's more along the lines of the Grimm fairy tales - which were pretty grim - and most people tend to forget how evil some of them were, either that or they managed to get by without even knowing it in the first place.

In this story, the fox, evidently not a very smart fox, is wandering around eating all kinds of inappropriate and downright crazy food. At first I thought the story was trying to make some sort of a point about pollution and destruction of the environment, but that's not the way it goes.

Eventually, a friendly rabbit tries to suggest some things the fox might eat, and it's only at that point that the fox has a bright idea about what real fox food should look like.

The book is nicely illustrated by Robyn Crawford, and the tale capably told, but whether you want your kids to discover what the fox ate is a choice you will have to make! I think this is an odd story and decided to rate it worthy because in the end it does show the true nature of the fox. Consider it an antidote to the story of the fox and the scorpion which wants to cross the river!

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Rating: WORTHY!

Hill House had stood for eighty years and might have stood for eighty more, and whatever walked there, walked alone, we're told in this 1959 classic, as four people arrive to investigate this deserted and isolated house's reputation. It's haunted, even if only by a tragic history of a strict old man, three wives, and two daughters, one of whom committed suicide by hanging herself inside the gothic tower which the house boasts.

John Montague is the one who has rented the house for three summer months. He has invited two women who have had psychic experiences, Theodora - just Theodora - who is an artistic woman who had a fight with her roommate and took off without making up, and Eleanor Vance, a highly-strung woman who has recently been freed from the oppressive demands of her mother by the latter's death. The fourth in their party is Luke Sanderson, who stands to inherit the creepy house. Designed by original owner Hugh Crain, this residence has no regular angles: everything is very slightly off, and no door remains open, although the grounds are beautiful.

Shortly before the end of the story, and for reasons unknown, these four are joined by Montague's obnoxious high-maintenance wife and her companion Arthur, who is evidently a heavy-handed school principal. While I've seen people comment on Theodora's possible lesbian persuasion, I've never seen anyone else comment on the possible relationship between Mrs Montague and Arthur Parker until I read a review today. What's good for the loose is good for the propaganda!

Mrs Montague has no first name that we learn and Arthur no last (aside from one very brief mention). She's always Mrs Montague and he is always Arthur, and so they make a perfect couple. Neither of them experiences anything in the house except for a brief spell of automatic writing which she generates when hidden away in the library alone with Arthur playing with his planchette. This writing also mentions Eleanor, now calling her Nell, and a need for her to come home - but which is her home now?

Nothing happens on that first night with just the four of them, and Eleanor wakes up refreshed after the best night's sleep she's ever had, but slowly, over the next few days, they begin hearing noises in the house at night - things, maybe animals, moving along the hallways; there's banging on the doors, low murmurings, hysterical laughter, and children's voices. The odd thing is that it is always the two girls who hear noises, or the two guys who chase an unknown animal through the house and out of the front door. The guys didn't hear the noises, the girls didn't hear the animal. It's only later, as they bond as a team, that they start to share experiences.

Mrs Dudley is the housekeeper, a minor character who is almost robotic in her behavior and habits, and who provides some unintended comic relief. She refuses to stay there at night, and only visits during daylight to clean and prepare meals for the guests. Her husband is an obnoxious lecher, but appears only at the beginning of the story, as Eleanor arrives.

Eleanor slowly becomes unhinged (or more unhinged) as the nights pass. There appears chalked writing on the walls mentioning her by name one night and shortly after, writing in red paint or blood also referring to her and talking of home. Eleanor thinks that journeys end when lovers meet, and starts to see the house as her lover, as her journey's end, as home.

Despite all of the noise and disturbance, no one is injured, only scared. The worst scare Eleanor has is in the dark one night when she's sharing a room with Theo, and the lights go out and they hold hands in the darkness, but when the light comes back on, Theo is too far away and was sleeping, so Eleanor doesn't know whose bony hand she had held. In the night, In the dark.

After the other residents discover Eleanor climbing the dangerously decrepit iron helical staircase in the tower library, they decide she's becoming overwhelmed by the house, and bid her goodbye, but when she drives down the twisting lane to exit the house, she loses control of the car and has an accident. The novel curiously doesn't expressly say she died. Wikipedia has her crashing into an oak tree but the novel doesn't actually specify what tree it is, only that it's a large one.

I recommend this novel despite the fact that it's a bit too drawn-out and tedious in places, most notably at the beginning, because it is really well written (and very avant-garde, fifties-style in places) and masterfully done with regard to the creepy events. This is not your cheesy B picture horror story. It also leaves questions unanswered. Was there really a haunting? Wikipedia and others argue that maybe the events were caused by Eleanor, but this "explanation" fails to account for the fact that Hill House had a haunted reputation before Eleanor ever came onto the scene. I recommend this novel and both movies, the earlier one being much more faithful to the novel than the more recent one.

The author died over half a century ago and isn't going to receive a penny from any more sales of this novel. Shirley Jackson stood by herself, holding darkness within; she stood for forty-eight years and might have lived for forty-eight more had the smoking and colitis not got her. Within her, ideas continued upright, plots met neatly, stories were firm, and characters were sensibly warped; now in silence she lays steadily against the vase containing her ashes, and when she died, she died alone.

A Horse Called September by Anne Digby

Rating: WARTY!

This debut novel is now forty years old, so it has to be read in that context with an eye on whether modern readers of the middle-grade age group would appreciate it. That said, it's actually quite timeless in general terms, so you can read it and imagine it's happening today, if you ignore that the girls communicate via hand-written letters rather than through email, and have no ubiquitous cell phones/p>

It's set in Britain and features Mary, who is friends with Anna, a relatively well-off farmer's daughter who is attending boarding school in the hope of pursuing her show-jumping dreams. While Anna is off with her hoity-toity friends, becoming, in Mary's eyes, a different person, Mary is left behind to take care of Anna's horse, named September.

The author writes in very simplistic, overly dramatic, black and white terms, and anthropomorphizes the titular horse shamelessly. I know horses are smart, and any intelligent animal can sense moods and emotions in others - not through any telepathy or human-like quality, but through simple observation of how we hold and carry ourselves, and probably through facial expressions, too. The problem is that the author almost turns this horse into a four-legged human in its purported prescience, and it gets worse as the story progresses.

At boarding school, Anna encounters another horse, named King of Prussia, and she starts riding it exclusively, and winning several competitions with it - and evidently drawing away from Mary into a world of new and rich friends. After Anna returns home for the summer holidays and her over-bearing and domineering father demands that she jump September over a particularly hard jump, the horse becomes injured on the dreaded Demon's Dyke fence. Suddenly it's a question of whether he's worth saving or whether the knacker's yard can make better use of him - a question that seems to be answered when Anna's parents decide to sell their luxury car to buy King of Prussia for their daughter.

This deadeningly predictable story continued downhill from there with an ridiculously absurd everyone wins ending which just about made me puke, it was so very perfect. A very young, very un-discriminating child may enjoy this, but in 2015, I think it's below most middle grade readers' credibility level.

Here's to You Rachel Robinson by Judy Blume

Rating: WARTY!

Move along now there's no story here! That's how this book which lacks not only an ending but also a middle and a beginning (the beginning is in a different volume), felt to me.

This is another classic example of how thoroughly stupid and inept Big Publishing&Trade; truly is. Once again we have proof that the cover designer is utterly clueless as to the content of the book they're supposedly designing for. The model on the cover of the copy I read was supposed to be twelve and have curly auburn air. Shah, right! She looks like she's in her early twenties. Her hair is very dark, not auburn, and completely straight.

I know that when you sell out to Big Publishing&Trade; you give up your rights to the cover, but you'd think a quarter century into her career, an author like Judy Blume would have some clout, or at least be competent enough to point out to the publisher that they got it so wrong that it's more of an abuse than a joke.

The story here is part of an unfinished trilogy, and it sounded interesting from the blurb, which means nothing more than that the blurb did its job in tricking a reader into picking up the book. I haven't read the other book in the series. By all accounts it's far better than this one, but after this, I have no desire to read any more of this stuffy nonsense.

Rachel Robinson is a wreck. She's supposedly very smart and something of a prodigy, but she's also highly strung and tends to fret and worry over everything. She's a neatness freak who feels compelled to volunteer for anything and everything at school because her mother - a lawyer, of course - pressures her to excel. She's also the babysitter of choice (not that she has any choice) for babysitting Tarren's infant son Roddy. Yes, he's named Roddy. I don't think any of that excuses her pronounced superiority complex and thoroughly self-centered view of life.

Rachel's dad got his life right: he gave up his lawyer job and changed his profession to teaching history - at Rachel's school. Rachel's older sister Jess has a really bad acne problem which extends beyond the mere condition of her skin, of course, but the real problem with this family is Charles - the oldest brother who was just kicked out of boarding school, and who is in such a constant state of acting-out that you want to seriously kick him in the balls pretty much every time he opens his mouth. The saddest thing is that his parents let him get away with it, and so his sisters suffer. This book is about him. It's not about his sister at all. She's merely the narrator.

Rachel's entire extended family and friends are all having issues. Her cousin Tarren, a single mom who is trying to finish college, is having an affair with one of her professors, who happens to be married. Her friend Steph's single mom is starting to date a guy who Steph dislikes on sight. Rachel's mom is the only one who seems to have it all, since she's just been recommended for a judgeship (which will mean a cut in pay), and she's on the verge of losing it.

The writing overall isn't bad. It's a very fast and simple read. One issue I noticed is that on page 102, there's a conversation between Rachel and cousin Tarren which makes no sense. Rachel comes up with the word 'obstacle' which wasn't in anything Tarren had said, so what this felt like to me was that some lines of the exchange between them went missing during the editing stage and no one noticed! It's not unimportant, either, since the word 'obstacle' is employed as a euphemism a lot in conversations pertaining to Tarren's love life afterwards.

That said, the book is utter nonsense and the ending (so-called) is quite honestly nothing more than a deus ex rectum wherein all these snapping vicious, angry, spitting family members are magically hunky dory. It's complete crap!

The Whole Lesbian Sex Book by Felice Newman

Here's a book I'm not going to rate because it's dealing with a very personal topic, and it's not fiction. A rating is inappropriate. I do have some observations on it, though, the first of which is that this is not a book for guys unless they really want to learn something about women. If you come into this looking for cheap thrills, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. If you come into it looking for a dedicated lesbian book you may be disappointed too, because it seems like it tries to cover every facet of the queer world rather than focus upon the relatively narrow one intimated in the title.

The next observation is that this is not a book for the timid unless it's a subset of the timid who are looking to lose some of their timidity. The author pulls no punches, and boldly and liberally employs four-letter words for body parts. This didn't bother me, but it may put others off, which leads me to a third observation and a serious question: who is this book for? That seems like a dumb question, but the simplistic answer: "It's for lesbians stupid!" doesn't get it done. It's not just for lesbians; it's for anyone who is seriously and honestly interested in female sexuality, but I kept asking myself if this was the best approach to reach the widest audience.

A lot of what's in here is so obvious that you'd have to be pretty dumb, sheltered, stupid, or some tragic combination of all three to not know this stuff. On the other hand, if you are none of the above and do not know this stuff yet, then you may well be so off-put by the abrasive and aggressive language used here that you give up on the book before you learn anything of value! The tone employed in the book didn't strike me as the most conducive to reaching out to the widest segment of female society including those who might most need to know what's in here. It felt too narrowly addressed to be of broad benefit.

One final issue which I had was with the promotion of herbal remedies for anything and everything. A lot of the plants most commonly repeated in this book can be very dangerous if not used wisely, and may be of little benefit even used wisely. Yohimbine can increase blood pressure, while large amounts can dangerously lower blood pressure. Ginko biloba brings a risk of bleeding and gastrointestinal discomfort - not a wise choice for someone who may experience that every month as it is. Ginseng can cause irritability, tremor, palpitations, blurred vision, headache, insomnia, increased body temperature, increased blood pressure, edema, decreased appetite, dizziness, itching, eczema, early morning diarrhea, bleeding, and fatigue. St John's Wort should not be taken by women on contraceptive pills. It's associated with aggravating psychosis in people who have schizophrenia. I got this from wikipedia, but you will not read it anywhere in this book.

That's not to say that you will automatically be struck down should you taste one or more of these herbs but it is to say that anecdotal "evidence" for the efficacy of any non-medical "medication" should be taken with a pinch of salt (assuming you don't have high blood pressure!). The only truly smart choice is to approach your doctor with your problems. If you do not feel comfortable going to your doctor about these topics, then it's high time to find a doctor you do feel comfortable with. In addition tot his, some of the information given here is a bit outdated. That doesn't mean it's not true or not close enough to true, but I'd have been happier with more recent references, and references to primary rather than secondary sources, than older ones (some as much as a decade or more out of date) which felt to me more like sensationalism or scare tactics than a sincere effort to relate an accurate picture.

Note that a lot of this book was very repetitious, and this made for a tedious read in places, but amidst all of this other stuff is some interesting information, including an extensive set of references and URLs, and some nuggets of good advice, so read or read not; there is no try! And good luck and best wishes to anyone who is taking their sexuality into their own hands instead of letting society or the church do it for them!

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D Schmidt

Rating: WORTHY!

For a Newbery/Printz book, which I normally avoid like the plague, this one started out surprisingly well. Whether it would remain that way then became the question because Newbery books have been pretty much universally rotten in my experience. It was a surprise therefore, to discover that this one was different.

The basic material is of great interest. This fiction is rooted in yet another shameful example of abusive treatment visited upon "minorities" by US governmental agencies and supposedly god-fearing locals who despite their Christian platitudes, behaved unforgivably and abominably.

This book is pure fiction, but the facts are these: in 1912, the US state of Maine, after initially seeming to behave reasonably towards the island community, suddenly evicted the residents and razed their homes. They even went to the trouble of digging up 17 graves, dumping the bones in five coffins, and reburying those at the School for the Feeble-Minded in Pownal, Maine. Eight of the residents were also deemed to be feeble-minded, when it was actually the governor of the state who was retarded. The rest of the forty or so residents of mixed race, were gone by then, taking their shacks with them. This happened in the summer, not in the winter as is misleadingly depicted in this novel.

Them's the facts. It's known quite well who was on the island, and photographs of some of the residents can be found on the Internet. Some of their descendants are living today. The fiction is that Lizzie Bright Griffin is one of the black residents on Malaga Island, which is located at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine. She eventually meets the son, Turner, of the new pastor in Phippsburg, Reverend Buckminster (who's rather 'Fuller' himself LOL!) which is located close by, on the mainland (the Maine land?!).

Turner is not at all happy with life in this penny-ante town after having lived in Boston. They have a weird way of playing baseball here, and the other kids seem like they want to embarrass him, or even bring him to harm when they go 'swimming' with him. Swimming to these kids involves jumping forty feet into the waves above the rocks on the shore, where if you misjudged your jump and don't catch the wave, you're very likely to end up as gull fodder splattered on the rocks. Turner isn't happy and can't seem to do anything right.

He strikes up a friendship with Lizzie, and the adventures the two have are unexpected. About two-thirds the way through, I started to get the feeling that this atrocity was starting to get whitewashed, and some of that feeling still lingers, but the ending turned it around sufficiently, shamelessly fabricated though it was, for me to rate this as a worthy read - or more accurately a worthy start to learning more about an awful pogrom. To the best of my knowledge, there was no Lizzie Bright or anyone like her, and there was no Turner Buckminster or anyone like him. Had there been a Lizzie Bright just like this one she would not have suffered the fate she did, so that rang a bit false for me, but it did make a solid point, and for that I can forgive it. I'll never forgive the jerks who stained human history with these events.

There is an odd undercurrent to the writing: that reading Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species..." was what put fire in Turner's veins - not what was happening to the people on Malaga! but evolution? It made no sense. I've read On the Origin... and despite the revolution is engendered, frankly, it's tedious! It's far more likely to put tire than fire into anyone's veins. Why the author didn't have Turner read Thomas Paine's Age of Reason instead, is a mystery. I did appreciate the sentiment that hard science, and not blind faith is what's actually going to save us - if blind believers such as the creationists will quit trying to trip it up and disembowel it, but the author really didn't get that part right. That aside, I felt this was, overall, a worthy read.

The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a first person PoV novel which for me is usually worst person PoV. I don't like the person because it's usually done badly and gets in the way of telling a good story. Here's the author explaining what a poor choice of voice it was, at the start of a later chapter:

** Note: Since I was not present for Krystal's experience after she was taken from my apartment, she has requested to tell this part of the story in her own words, rather than have it relayed. Therefore, the next two chapters will recount a part of the tale I cannot vouch for, as I did not witness it firsthand.**

As it happens, the voice wasn't completely nauseating so obviously this author can write it, although first hand is two words, not one. If in doubt, dash it out: first-hand!

It takes chutzpah to try to hawk a novel which has the words "utterly uninteresting" embedded in the very title. Fred is an accountant. He's lackluster, timid, and was alternately bullied and ignored in high school, yet he elects to attend the ten-year reunion. He's fortunate that it's at night, because as a vampire, he cannot go out in daylight.

Despite enjoying eternal youth, endless longevity, and vampire 'super powers" such as strength and night vision, Fred is still retiring and intimidated by the school jocks and the school hotties. He does take satisfaction in knowing that as they age and wrinkle, and spread around the middle, he will continue to be slim, strong, and youthful. He contemplates a future where he could visit his nemesis in his retirement home just to make fun of him, but quickly decides he should probably just confine himself to dancing on his grave instead.

He doesn't expect to see any of his nerd acquaintances at the reunion - not friends, even, just acquaintances - so he's rather surprised when Krystal sits down beside him at his lonely table. He asks her about her work, and she promptly makes an excuse to go to the bathroom. He doesn't expect to see her again, but when the lights go out in the gym and he discovers the doors are locked, he makes his way up to the commentator's box high in the rafters to hide out, and he's surprised to find her trussed to a table up there.

He's even more surprised when she finally reveals that she works for a secret government agency which keeps paranormals under control, and he's more than disturbed to discover that the school reunion has been targeted by a hungry pack of werewolves.

This is the start of not so much a story, but a series of chronologically-ordered vignettes which are amusing, engrossing, inventive, original and self contained, although linked to one another. It was interesting to me to read this not only because it's original and offers a really interesting alternative take on vampires, but also because I reviewed a book containing a similar arrangement of stories recently. That book was so repetitive and uninventive that it was boring and not a worthy read. This one, even though it used a similar format, was quite the opposite.

That's not to say there were no issues with it. There are nearly always issues! The question is whether the author can offer you enough of a solid story to make the issues relatively unimportant when it comes to overall enjoyment. This author has an interesting way with words, and often that's fine, but in some cases I was wondering what he meant. "...[T]hat was not a burden with which I had been shouldered" is not good phraseology! "That was not a burden I was used to shouldering" would have made more sense.

In another case, I read, "Ah, the crux of vanity." I can see what he means, but shuddered to read it rendered like that. There were other cases where too many words were used. This is a case of using non-words like 'irregardless' when 'regardless' does perfectly fine. In this case, the author wrote: "...formerly abandoned church..." He meant an abandoned church. A formerly abandoned church is one which is now back in service (pun intended!). There was only one out-and-out spelling error that I noticed, which was "damndest", and which is missing an 'e', and one case of using the wrong word: "...which clearing wasn't feeding." I think he meant "which clearly wasn't feeding." One final one was "We tread slowly across the plush red carpet" when the author obviously meant "we trod".

A spell checker would have caught only a couple of these errors. You need a good editor or beta readers to catch the others. It wasn't all bad though, by any means. The writing in general was commendable and I enjoyed reading this. We get an object lesson in how to avoid using 'inch' as a verb, for example: "She pulled it inward inch by inch" (as opposed to "she inched it in" which is what a writer who loves English less than this author does might have fed their readers).

I was nonetheless disturbed to see yet another writer who is evidently convinced that you can't say 'female character' in your novel without qualifying it by adding "beautiful". We got: "I didn't have a lot of experience with beautiful women asking me out..." and "... it had certainly made her beautiful."

This was the main female character who had been some other sort of persona non grata in high school, and who had been evidently over-weight. How she managed to evidently slim down and turn beautiful post-high-school isn't explained, but the explanation I really wanted was why? Why could she not still be the nerd (or whatever she was) from school? Why did she have to be rendered "beautiful" to make her acceptable, thereby loudly instructing all the real girls who had high school experiences like hers, that they're really still losers because they're are not now slim and beautiful? It's an insult to women everywhere regardless of who they are and how they look. I wish writers wouldn't do this so routinely that it's become very nearly a rule.

That complaint aside, I did, as I've indicated, really warm to this story and to the characters. It moved quickly, told interesting and original stories, and was an engrossing read, so I rate it worthy regardless of the issues I've raised, while hooping for better in the next outing with this author!

I Love Baby Animals by David Chuka

Rating: WORTHY!

Who doesn't love baby animals? The author requests a review if the reader liked the book, and I'm happy to oblige with a positive one for this picture book, but he says such reviews will encourage him to write some more great stories. My only problem with that - while I do hope he does write some great stories for children - is that this isn't a story. It's a picture book of baby animals, and there's nothing wrong with that. Kids will love it. I did.

The animals are adorable. Even the pink snakelet looks charming, no matter what it might grow into - which reminds me that it would have been nice to know which snake this was. Most of the other animals get identified pretty well, but some are referred to in rather vague terms: the snakelet without identifying the specific snake; the tadpole without identifying which frog it is.

There's obviously some class-warfare going on here, with the mammals being identified down to the species, pretty much, but reptiles and amphibians being described in much more generic terms. Naturally in a young children's picture book, you don't really want to get deeply into scientific data down to the Latin genus and species name (although it might have been nice for adults, especially if they wanted to look up the species and teach their children more about it), but giving the common name of the species is reasonable, especially if it's a really fun name. In that way children understand that nature is complex, and that there isn't just one generic snake, or one frog.

That quibble aside, though, I was impressed that the author didn't take the easy way out and show only cuddly mammals, as all too many children's book authors do. We start with the lion, but we get an alligator next, and then a duckling, so that's three of the five major vertebrate classes right there. Later we get the frog, covering a fourth, but fish are omitted. We get a dog and a cat, which are pretty much required in a book like this(!), but we also get an insect (butterfly), which is commendable. It would have been nice to have a fish and a representative of the invertebrates (other than the insects).

My favorite, I think, is the hedgehog featured on the cover. I had pet hedgehogs when I was a kid, but there are so many cute-looking babies here that it's hard to be sure the llama or the gorilla isn't edging into first place. I recommend this book for the adorable pictures and the diversity depicted.

Blackbird Fly by Erin Entrada Kelly

Rating: WORTHY!

Analyn Pearl Yengko, aka Apple, is a Filipino girl who has moved to the USA, and is living in fictional Chapel Spring, Louisiana. She's very conscious of her appearance and doesn't consider herself "American". She learns what losers her "friends" are one day when jerk Jake makes a jackass "joke" about all Asians eating dogs, and how Analyn is on the Dog Log - a virtual list of ugliest girls in school that some boys create each year.

Given that the author is a Filipino and hates carrots, it seems to me that this novel might be very much autobiographical, at least in its roots, although that's just a guess. The biggest problem for me with it was that it's first person PoV, which is actually Worst Person PoV. That said, this effort actually didn't nauseate me. Some authors can make it work, and this is evidently one of those!

Analyn wants to become a rock star. Improbably, her favorite band is the Beatles because all she left the Philippines with was a tape from her deceased dad. The tape was Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together, although not the last to be released. Now Analyn has a whole set of Beatles albums of her own, although how she managed to get those if her mom is as stingy as we're led to believe is a mystery.

Analyn wants to buy a guitar she's seen in a store, but her mother is very negative on pretty much anything Analyn wants to do, except that in a fit, Analyn finally gets her mom to quit calling her Apple. My prediction at that point was that, given her love of The Beatles and her desire to play guitar, Analyn will be proud to be Apple by the end of this novel. It felt that predictable. But it is a middle grade novel, so I tried not to down-grade it too much for the trite factor!

The author does make the classic debut novel mistake, however, of having the character look at herself in the mirror so we can get a description of what she looks like. I think it was even a bigger mistake in this case because it's not necessary to know exactly what she looks like. In fact, I think the novel would have been better had we had no idea (other than that she's Filipino, of course) what she looks like.

On the subject of cliché, the new cool guy in school has his hair in his eyes, but on the other side of this coin, he's improbably not actually the new cool kid. The A-list girls take an immediate dislike to him because he's not fawning over them, and he almost gets into a fight with one of the A-list boys at the dance over them making fun of one of the dog list girls - one who is trope-ish-ly overweight.

I think she had the new boy hail from California because there's perhaps a Filipino population there, so he's got an 'in' with our main characters and doesn't think she's ugly. That said, the author offered no explanation for why he and his mom moved from California to a penny-ante little town in the middle of Louisiana. His mom is an artist, so it's not like she had to move there for her work. She paints abstracts, but why she wouldn't want to live by the sea, or in the forests, or in the mountains, for pure inspiration is unexplained.

For that matter, why did Analyn's mom move there? Yes, we're told there's a nurse shortage and so she got in on that, but is there really a huge nurse shortage in that little town? It would have made more sense had they moved to a large city where a shortage might be expected. And why would the US hospitals be looking to hire nurses from the Philippines given how picky they are about what schooling nurses have had? This wasn't well thought through, and it makes little sense to adults, but I guess the author thought it wouldn't matter for a middle grade novel.

On the up-side, the novel did make for an interesting and engaging read. There's a subtle undercurrent of humor running through the text which I appreciated even as I cringed at some of the clichés: school bullies, cliques, the overweight girl, the snotty cheerleader type, mean boys, the derided teacher, the beloved teacher, and so on.

The bottom line is that this story, for the grade it's written, isn't bad at all. It's a very fast read: the lines are widely spaced, so despite it being ostensibly almost three hundred pages long, it would probably be only half that if it were single-spaced and in a slightly smaller font size.

The situations Analyn gets into are reasonable and realistic, and her behavior, for her age, is understandable, so for me, overall, this rates as a worthy read.

Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been to Durham, but never to Sunderland, so why read this? Well, I loved the title. I'm a real sucker for a good play on words, and every time I passed it in the library, I picked it up and took a quick look and put it back. In the end I realized it would haunt me forever if I didn't so something about it, so I finally checked it out, and I loved it.

The more I read of this the more fascinating it became. I can’t pretend every word engrossed me, but I was really surprised by how much was interesting, and by how much stuff was connected in one way or another with Sunderland. Of course, if you're looking for connections and coincidences, it's not hard to find them (six degrees of separation bullshit aside), but this didn't look like the author was stretching very much - it was all right there!

Note that this is not an Alice in Wonderland story. It's a history of the city of Sunderland in NE England - a history of the greater Sunderland area which is replete with fascinating facts and tidbits, including some strange and wonderful stuff that you wouldn’t expect. There are a lot of tie-ins with Alice and Lewis Carroll, but why this was in a library in Texas is a mystery to me, since you really have to be English or extremely well versed in England to get the best out of this; however, the graphic novel is a tour de force of graphic style and creativity, so maybe you will appreciate it just for that.

There’s a horrible side to this history, too. The death of almost two hundred children. The Victorian slums. The death tolls taken by cholera, which arrived by ship in 1831, and typhus which followed almost literally in its wake seven short years later. Both are the reward of having a huge shipping industry. By 1850, Sunderland was the biggest shipbuilding port in the world. The famous “liberty’ ship was invented here. And you may be surprised to learn that the light bulb was invented by a Sunderland native - not by Thomas Edison!

Sunderland was also a huge coal mining town for a long time. At one point having the world’s deepest coal mine (for the time) at almost two thousand feet. Those mines also went out up to five miles under the sea. It’s not surprising, because of this, that it also was among the first places to get a railway. It has links to Lewis Carroll (lots!), to Thomas Paine (unexpected), to Isambard kingdom Brunel, to George Stephenson, through his son Robert, to Sid James(!), and on the macabre side, to Burke and Hare, the infamous Scots grave robbers.

The city has been the host to many celebrities over the years, primarily in the old music halls and variety theater where acts like legend George Formby, Charles Hawtrey, Frankie Howerd, Sid James (who pretty much died on stage in Sunderland, and not metaphorically), Morecambe and Wise, and Vera Tilley. Doctor Who even gets a mention here. The blue police box that is the outward appearance of his venerable TARDIS time and space travel machine was first manufactured in Sunderland in 1923. Here's a fact you don't hear often enough. The incandescent light bulb was not invented by Thomas Edison, but by Sunderland's Joseph Swan - and a year earlier. Edison purloined Swan's design and patented it in the USA. Amusingly, it's the Edison company which made the first movie version of Alice in Wonderland!

It's close by in Whitby that Bram Stoker received some of the inspiration for his little story about Dracula. He read of the shipwrecked Dmitry in the Whitby gazette, and changed it into the doomed ship Demeter, which ran aground in Whitby. Sunderland was once a ship-building and shipping juggernaut but now all that has gone and the area overwritten with an outdoor sculpture garden which grew slowly from roots buried deeply in the past, but with an eye on the future.

The artwork was superb. And it was not monotonous. This guy really knows how to lay out a spread, and how to change it up, incorporating a host of different styles from the photorealistic to the cartoonish, and everything in between. I loved this book and highly recommend it, especially for those who may have an interest in Sunderland, in Alice, or in how to push the boundaries of graphic novel creation.

X111 by Jean Van Hamme, William Vance

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first volume of a graphic novel series that I picked up as much as a joke as through interest in reading it (I'm not a fan of employing antiquated Roman numerals for anything!). I figured, though, since I’ve reviewed 21, so why not review 13?! Maybe I should be looking for other graphic novels with odd numbers as the title, too? Do a whole series?! Unfortunately, this one did not engage me like 21 Down did.

Some people have drawn comparisons between this and The Bourne Identity. I never read the novel for that; I've seen only the movie, so the parallels did not strike me as much as others, although they do have a good point. For me, this story was rather too clichéd: a stranger waking up with no memory of who he was, and suddenly there’s a government conspiracy and he’s supposedly an assassin, and people are out to kill him. Then he’s apparently rescued by friendlies, but it turns out they’re not so friendly after all. They think he’s part of a conspiracy and want to know who is at the head of it. They don’t seem to believe that he’s lost his memory.

The artwork wasn’t bad per se, but it was curiously dated - like it had been drawn by artists in the thirties and forties. That might have been fine in the right context, but here it felt wooden and static to me – out of keeping with the action story it illustrated. The story itself was trite and the characters flat and uninteresting, so I quickly grew bored with it and have no interest in pursuing this at all.

Going Through the Change by Samantha Bryant

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is different! Four women who are going through menopause discover that they've developed super powers! Is it the menopause, or is it the alternative medication they've been taking - all of which comes from the same source? Or is it a combination of both? Or neither?!

This novel was original, gorgeous, and a true joy to read. It's the kind of novel which makes you comfortable with going through all the crappy novels that Amazon unloads cheaply, because you know that if you persevere, you'll find one like this once in a while - a diamond in the rough as they say - and it makes it worth reading the crap just to get to it.

Patricia O'Neill, who is a lifelong friend of the herbalist, Cindy Liu, seems to be growing scales on her skin. Jessica Roark discovers that she can fly - or at least float. Helen Braeburn learns, uncomfortably, that she can create fire - and survive it. Linda Alvarez changes, rather abruptly, into a man - although how that's considered a super-power is a mystery This man does have unusual strength, but what kind of message is this sending - you can only be strong if you're a man?

That's about the only negative thing I have to say about this novel. That should have been re-thought. Aside from that, and other than that it needed a final spell-checker run through before letting it loose on Amazon, I have no complaints at all. Waiting is not spelled "waitign" and every spell-checker knows that! And it should have been "while the early birds were still sleeping", not "before the early birds were still sleeping," but those are all I noticed and they're relatively minor quibbles.

Some might find the build-up a little slow, but for me, the story moved intelligently and at a fair clip - not too fast, not too slow. People behaved like people - not super-heroes(!) and not like dumb movie action "heroes". These girls grew into their powers as you might expect someone would and as we grew to know them. The whole story was smartly plotted and written. I'm fully behind it! If the author wants a beta reader for volume two, I'm right here and available! I recommend this story for originality, freshness, good writing, and realistic female characters (within the super hero context!), who live and breathe. I'm not a big fan of series, but once in a while one comes along and I can say, honestly, that it's great work, and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

The Valhalla Prophecy by Andy McDermott

Rating: WARTY!

I'm glad they added "A novel"! to the front cover of this. I was ready to believe it was an authentic historical, if not hysterical, document! Some years ago I read several of Andy McDermott's Eddie Chase/Nina Wilde cheap-thrill franchise. I soon grew tired of them because each was more improbable than the last, and every novel was pretty much exactly the same. The only thing which really changed was the myth being exploited. I never did review any of them, so when I saw his latest one (published in 2014) on clearance sale at the local library for just a dollar, I decided this was a good time to revisit and review. I have to say the news isn't good.

This novel is some five hundred pages, but it would have been half that length had it not been for a tedious, extended, interleaved flashback to Eddie Chase's time in Vietnam as a hostage-rescuing mercenary. That was so amateurish and boring that I quit reading those and simply skipped them to get back to the contemporary action which it turned out, wasn't much better. Instead of wasting your time on that tedious detour, you can wait until the beginning of chapter twenty three where the entire thing is summarized in a paragraph.

Eight years ago, Eddie was a mercenary tramping through the Vietnamese jungle at night in a raging storm. He and his group were approaching known hostiles and yet when they hear a noise, the author tells us they "drew their guns". They're carrying rifles! You don't draw rifles, and in hostile territory these trained and seasoned mercenaries didn't have their guns at the ready at all times? It's nonsensical!

Contemporary descriptions aren't any better. At one point the author seems to be confused between a JetRanger (aka a Bell 206) and a "Eurocopter" (by which I assume he means something like the European Heavy Lift Helicopter, but this isn't going to be available for another two or three years!). The JetRanger is a light observation helicopter which isn't going to be airlifting a granite obelisk. Eurocopter as a corporation doesn't exist and hasn't done so since the beginning of 2014. I guess the author didn't recheck this before he published, but Eurocopter isn't the name of a model, it was the name of the corporation (now Airbus).

The contemporary story moved at a fair clip, but it was the standard story: Eddie and Nina are all lovey-dovey. Something suddenly comes up out of the blue, and they're plunged into a mystery. One person is kidnapped or a kidnap is attempted and Eddie foils it. There is a deadly car chase through public streets wreaking havoc. Eddie is part of it and not only escapes unscathed, there is never, ever, ever any penalty for him to pay with the local authorities.

Not only did the authorities drop all charges, but also the hotel through which he drove a vehicle didn't pursue any civil case against him! It was completely absurd. This is the kind of story children write. It's the kind of story you end up with when you write it as a B-movie screenplay instead of a coherent, intelligent thriller. So what if he had diplomatic immunity from prosecution (although how that works is a mystery)? They can expel diplomats, yet nothing happens to Eddie. Ever.

Despite knowing that killers are looking for this obelisk, they go out to Norway to unearth it from the bed of a lake where it was buried when the dam was built. They take absolutely no precautions whatsoever to provide for security; thus the obelisk is stolen. These people are morons. It's at this point that Nina learns that Eddie has outright lied to her and sought to undermine the expedition, and even destroy the obelisk they seek. When she grills him about it, all he will tell her is that he made a promise and he can't tell her what it's all about., but a short time later, Nina learns that Eddie has known what was on the obelisk all along. Why didn't he tell her? he forgot that he knew - yeah, forgot until ti was a convenient ruse for the author to get them all back on a trail that has gone cold. This is writing at it's most amateurish and pathetic./p>

It's at this precise point that she should ditch him. He's betrayed her and worse, he's actively been working to undermine everything she was striving for risking her life, but of course she doesn't exact any price, and Eddie gets off scot-free again. He could quite simply have told Nina what his conflict was without necessarily going into any of the supposedly secret details, yet he sought to deceive her rather than come clean, adhering to a promise he made a decade ago, rather than to the promise he made to her when he married her. It's clear where his priorities lie. Dump the jerk, Nina; you deserve better. She's an idiot if she ever trusts him again after this. He has no excuse whatsoever for behaving the way he did, showing clearly that his loyalty is not to Nina at all.

It was at this point that I decided I'd read enough of this nonsense, and fully realized what a smart decision I'd made all that time ago to quit reading this amateur trash and find something better.