Kris Longknife: Mutineer by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WORTHY!

I've read many of this series, which is a follow-on to an earlier series about a different generation of the Longknife family, and one which I haven't read. I fell in love with the Kris Longknife novels, and read them avidly, but this was before I blogged reviews. My plan this year is to read the entire series, including two or three volumes I've acquired more recently, but not yet read. I'll be doing at least one per month, and posting a review for each one. I'll probably blow through this series rather quickly if the time it took me to get through the first novel is any gauge! For me they're very readable, despite an issue or two I had with them. I think it helps to go into this thinking of it more as a movie than a novel, because it reads like a movie script that's been fleshed out into a novel more than it reads like a novel that's written in the hope it might make a movie someday.

The first volume introduces a new member of the Longknife family: Kristine, who has recently joined the navy, which of course in this case is the space navy. I have to say this makes little sense to me, although it is a trope which pervades virtually all space operas that have a significant military component. I was surprised to discover that there's rather more of the David Weber touch in the Longknife novels than I remember from the first time I read them - and I don't mean that in a complimentary way, although I was a fan of Weber for a while.

Like in Weber's novels, the space fleet is very much a branch of the navy, a tired cliché in which far too many sci-fi writers indulge. They have fleets of ships which seem constrained by the maneuvering capabilities of sail ships from Georgian times, cavorting on a two dimensional ocean, rather than powerful craft traversing a three dimensional vacuum. I know a lot of sci-fi readers love it when authors gaze into their naval, but I don't. To me this approach is short-sighted, uninventive, and rather a lazy way of writing. It's also very Americanized. It's the US (although in this case named United Sentients, which is really clunky!) navy, not any other navy, despite the supposed homogenization of assorted planets, including Earth. In this case it's not even Earth, but an entirely different planet, yet these are American writers who can't seem to avoid Americanisms, American bureaucracy, and American historical references. There's even a reference to radio Shack! That's like a contemporary novel referencing a store form medieval times. It's rather blinkered and too often smacks of jingoism.

In the sixties, and after a rocky start, the US became without question the leader in space travel and technology, but that impressive lead bled dry over the next four decades. Now it's the Russians and the Chinese who are, if not exactly blazing trails, at least riding them, while the US sits without any means to put people into space. Even private industry is taking over, and after filling the astronaut ranks with white male military personnel, the diversity amongst astronauts is increasing significantly. Satellites aside, there is no military presence in space, so whence this impetus to have space navies in the future? Whence the sad bureaucracy which accompanies it?

Out of curiosity, I looked up the original seven Mercury astronauts, thinking they were largely air force personnel. As it happens only three were air force per se. Another three were navy, and the final one was a marine, but with one exception, all of them were primarily aviators. Even the exception, while beginning his career as a regular Navy officer, moved into aviation, so none of them were traditional navy personnel in the old fashioned sense. This was primarily a flying exercise not a naval exercise, yet now we're awash with navy references in sci-fi space operas. How weird is that?

I know that David Weber deliberately set out to replicate the Horatio Hornblower novels, which provides a root cause at least, if not exactly an explanation for his tedious by-rote naval parallels, but why anyone else would choose to go that route is a mystery and a disappointment to me. I honestly wonder why spacecraft are referred to as ships rather than as some sort of flying machine? Naturally they're not airplanes, since there's no air in space, but there's no water either, so why ships? Is it for no other reason than that they're simply larger than any airplane? Ships were what we had before airplanes, so even the pilot is a captain, but he's still a pilot! I guess old habits are really hard to break, and people don't like to think of large aircraft as anything other than ships.

Even if we let that go, there's still the bureaucracy. Shepherd employs the same US bureaucratic and stagnated institutions which Weber uses: Bureau of Personnel, which he refers to as BuPer(s), just as David Weber does. There are other such bureaus. too, such as BuShips, and so on. It's tedious and unrealistic. I think Elizabeth Moon does a far more realistic job in her Vatta's War pentalogy, which I recommend, and will also get around to reviewing at some point. I have mixed feelings about the Star Trek universe, but I think they got it right - or at least closer to right than too many sci-fi authors manage. Yes, they still start with the captain and descend through all the other such naval ranks, but the ships are not primarily 'war ships' - not the ones featured in the series. They're spacecraft of exploration so we don't get the same bureaucratic tedium and military saber-rattling in which other stories wallow.

That said, let's set it aside and get on with a look at the story itself, because the nicest thing about this series is that it isn't a space-naval-opera. I understand in the early editions of this book there were misspellings and grammar issues galore. In the paperback I read there were very, very few. Kris is a navy ensign, and she's depicted in some scenes aboard the navy craft, but most of this first story finds her on the surface of one of three planets. We meet her as she's leading a mission to rescue a kidnapped girl, and the mission almost falls apart. It is Kris's expert flying skills which save the mission.

This brief introduction in the first few chapters puts her head above the radar when it comes to another mission - to go to a water-logged planet and distribute food. This occupies the bulk of the novel but by no means all of it, and some of it makes no sense. We're told that a huge volcanic eruption had clouded the sky, and continual torrential downpours are washing out crops and roads. We never do learn how it manages to be raining the entire time she's there. With that much rain, the ash and soot would be gone from the sky in short order and the rain would stop!

A better question is where is this rain coming from? If the rainfall is planet wide, then where is the water being evaporated to feed the continual rain? If there's a clear sky somewhere else, then why not move the people there? If they're moving equipment off planet because the acid rain damaging it, then it's going to be damaging the soil. People need to be evacuated off planet too!

I read a lot of negative reviews on this to see if I needed to take into account anything my positive outlook had not covered, and I failed to find any. A lot of the reviews mentioned inconsistencies and logic problems but not a single one of them detailed any! That's not a review it's just a complaint! Maybe these reviewers had a case, but if they did, they failed to make it. This is why I got into reviewing in the first place - to write more useful reviews and to discuss author technique and general writing style. Yes, there are problems with every book - plot inconsistencies and issues, which I highlight, but the issue isn't whether there are any (it's fiction, so there always are), but whether those problems and issues spoil the. For me they did not. This doesn't mean a book is perfect. None are, but the bottom line is whether the novel overall is worth reading. For me, it was. I enjoyed the story and the characters.

The book blurb is completely wrong in one regard. It says, "...she enlists in the marines" and she does not. She's in the navy. This is one excellent reason to ditch Big Publishing™ they're utterly clueless. The people who illustrate the cover and write the blurbs are usually in shameful ignorance of the actual content of the book since they've never read it. They're "just doing what they're told" which is pathetic and no excuse whatsoever.

I noted that some reviewers have chided this because it doesn't take place in space (at least not as much as they think it should), but it's not set in space per se. It's just a futuristic action-adventure story. I think those reviewers went into it after reading David Weber's Honor Harrington series. There is no rule that says this has to be a space opera, although in parts it read like one. I've also seen Mike Shepherd accused of trying to emulate David Weber, and while he does appear to mimic Weber for some of the space scenes and background military story, so does every author, as does Weber. To me, that stuff is boring, which is why I quit reading the Weber series. it started out well but went into the toilet.

Shepherd emulates him with regard to the space conflicts, but any story about a navy, on the ocean or in space, is going to be the same in many regards since most writers really aren't that original, but just because there are parallels doesn't mean the story is a copy. With regard to Weber v. Shepherd, Shepherd's background is the Navy, whereas Weber's is in games and sci-fi literature, so I'd give Shepherd precedence for knowing the navy! At least Shepherd isn't rooted in the nineteenth century as Weber is, which is patently absurd! That said, he could have done a lot better, because his "naval battles" are far too rooted in the same problems that Weber's are - battle ships in 2D on an ocean, not spacecraft in a 3D vacuum. he makes the same mistake that Weber does with regard to a complete lack of robots and drones. Any navy which sought to conduct itself as Weber's and Shepherd's navies do would get it's ass kicked royally by a realistic navy four hundred years into the future!

Kris is possibly an alcoholic. It's a mess and it's hard to decide if she really was one, or just a teen who drank too much. I suspect it was the latter, which excuses Shepherd in the way he addresses Kris's sobriety and her behavior around alcohol. On this same issue of Kris's personal problems, the stress on her tragically kidnapped brother is rather overdone. I can see it at the beginning, where she's in process of freeing a kidnapped child, but her feelings seem to be far too raw to be left from a decade or more ago. Military training doesn't seem to have helped. Novel might have done better had it skipped the large central section on Flooded planet, and instead follow Kris through basic training where she could have worked through her issues. That said, her Eddy fixation is really only dwelt on this rescue mission, so naturally her thoughts are with her brother then. Later, she's far less preoccupied by his, and this to me seemed realistic.

So none of this made sense, and the phrase "one of those Longknifes" is way-the-hell overused in this series, but the story wasn't so ridiculous that I could simply not stand to read it. I liked the story and went with the flow - literally in this section! I liked the way Kris was depicted here. She slowly grew into her shoes. She was no Mary Sue and she made mistakes, but she was smart and figured things out in her own way. She had a good attitude and a can-do sense of mission, and she sorted the place out in her own way. You'd think this part was the big story, but it was what happened after this which shows us why the novel is titled Kris Longknife: Mutineer, and again it's down to her smarts and quick thinking.

Despite some issues, the story was eminently readable because it was a good story. It held my interest, made me willing to overlook some issues, and it rather subtly laid some groundwork for a sequel, without hitting the reader over the head or leaving them in the slimy grip of a cliffhanger. Despite issues and personal preferences, I recommend this novel as a worthy read.

A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac

Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
"...take it to my Rob." should be "...take it to my Uncle Rob." maybe?

This novel was a roller-coaster of "Do I like it?" or "Do I not?" I started out liking it, started going sour on it around 40%, and then came back to it, so despite several issues (which are not easy to discuss without giving away too many spoilers) I decided, overall, that this is definitely a worthy read. Let's talk!

This was an advance review copy, for which I am grateful, and it’s in first person PoV which is typically horrible for me. 1Pov is so full of self-importance and self-aggrandizement, and it’s 'all me all the time', which can be sickening to read. It limits the story to the narrator's PoV, which is too restrictive, plus it gives a huge spoiler away - you know for a fact that no matter what happens, the narrator isn’t going to come to any serious harm because they're telling the story and they wouldn't be able to, had they died during it, so all suspense in that regard is lost. In this case, the author managed to carry this PoV without nauseating me, so I'm also grateful for that, but I felt that this caused a problem with the ending, which is rather hard to discuss without giving things away that I don’t want to spoil. I'll try to discuss it briefly later.

The basic story is told by Clare, who is living happily insulated (by the entire width of the continental USA!) from her family and the town in which she grew up on the east coast. The sudden shooting death of her parents drives her back. She is now the legal guardian of her brother Wes, who has some serious mental issues very much tied to Biblical matters, in particular, angels versus demons. This is not, however, a paranormal story; it's a sci-fi one with some elements of dystopia tossed into the mix.

This business of guardianship was my first issue because it made no sense. Clare is in her thirties (nice ot get a sotry abotu an older woman, so kudos for that!), and as such is a responsible adult, but Wes is also an adult, and he's being discharged and is planning on moving into his own apartment, so I don’t get why he has a guardian, and nothing in the text made this clear to me. He's either fit to live his own life or he isn’t. This was further confused by the fact that Wes's uncle lives right there in town, so why is he not the guardian? Clare has made it perfectly clear that she wants nothing to do with her hometown and hasn’t been back there in a decade or more. To me it made no sense, not even as a ploy to bring Clare back to town; she's coming back for the funeral anyway!

Yes, the funeral! Clare discovers that her mom and dad were shot by a family friend, who also then shot himself. When she flies back for the funeral, and to take charge of Wes, she encounters some bizarre behavior among the patients at the hospital and pretty soon it becomes clear what's going on. A prion disease hilariously named Gaspereau has sprung up, and is very dangerous. It makes people behave psychotically. Why Gaspereau? I have no idea. I found it hilarious because I kept thinking of The Tale of Despereaux, so I couldn’t take the name seriously. Couldn’t it have been named something else? Please?! This disease made little sense because it supposedly wasn't airborne (although prions can go that route), yet it was spreading ridiculously fast - too fast to be credible for the vector it took.

The real issue for Clare however (apart from her backstory secret which explained a lot), was that Wes appeared to be immune, and so his presence was forcefully demanded back at the hospital so they could use him to find a cure, or at least a vaccine. This was the second thing which made no sense to me. Clare shared the same genes that Wes did, yet absolutely no interest was shown in her. As desperate as these people were to get a quick fix for this epidemic, it made no sense that Clare would not have been considered. This leads me to my third problem, which is that Clare wasn't very smart, and was, frankly, a bit juvenile for her age and rather selfish. I did manage to explain away the latter two problems - to my satisfaction anyway! - when I learned her back-story, but the first was harder to excuse.

I don’t demand a genius in my female main character, but I do require that they're not painfully dumb, or if they start out dumb, that they smarten-up over the course of the story. Clare never really did, although she came through for me in other ways, which is one reason I am rating this positively. Clare wasn't the only dumb cluck. Not even the trained medical staff considered every option. I've worked with medical staff and this was a bit of a stretcher for me to swallow; however, I enjoyed the overall story so much that I was willing to overlook these issues, even the one with the 'fluffybunnies' password!

Yes, the password was hilarious, but Clare didn’t even ask if it had any capital letters or number substitutions for letters. When the password appears in print, you can see what it is, but when it’s merely spoken to you, you have no idea about punctuation or the fine details. Clare should have asked since she was not reading this novel! Or Kenneth ought to have explained it was "all one word, all lower case." It’s a minor point, but too many such points can spoil the credibility of a novel.

The ending was a bit abrupt. I would have liked more, but maybe short and to the point was better. I had ot read it twice to make sure I got it, and I gather i am not the only reviewer who was in this position. That said, I have to refer back to my problems with first person PoV. I think it was the wrong choice here. I freely admit that I typically think it's the wrong choice, but it can work. Here though, I think third person would have been a better approach, because a first person story-teller made little sense given the ending. That's all I'm going to say on that topic!

The funny thing about the ebook - which, by the way had no horrible formatting issues, thankfully - was that it announced on my phone's Kindle app that there were 4133 locations, but it would not let me swipe past location 4129. Wait - there are four secret locations? Is this evidence that there really is a government conspiracy? What are they keeping from me about this novel?! LOL! It was an amusing 'end' to a very readable story. When all is said and done, I recommend this as a worthy read.

Everybody Loves Valentines by Sally Huss

Rating: WORTHY!

It's early, perhaps, for a valentine-oriented book, but if the stores can bring out the Valentine's Day massacre of goods the day after New Year's, then surely I can review a couple of children's books on the theme in January, before I forget!

This and the other I review today are both by Sally Huss, and I've had good success with liking those. They're perky and light, colorful and entertaining for the age group. They're poetic (after a fashion, but in a way which children love) and most importantly, they carry always carry a positive message.

This one is dedicatedly about sending valentines, and it doesn't discriminate in any way as to who you should give one to. Everyone is eligible. The author spells out 'valentines', and offers a warm idea as to what each letter really means. I liked the way this was put together and the fact that it was longer than some children's books tend to be, so there's lots to see and read. It's really a valentine to valentines, and it's a worthy read.

Everything Has a Heart by Sally Huss

Rating: WORTHY!

It's early, perhaps, for a valentine-oriented book, but if the stores can bring out the Valentine's Day massacre of goods the day after New Year's, then surely I can review a couple of children's books on the theme in January, before I forget!

I've had good success with liking Sally Huss books. They're perky and light, colorful and entertaining for the age group. They're poetic (after a fashion, but in a way which children love) and most importantly, they carry always carry a positive message.

This one is a real heart-to-heart, from the hearts of people and animals, to the heart of an apple. even a butterfly, as Sally points out, has a heart - after a fashion. I liked it and think it's a great idea as long as you share it with your kid so you can both enjoy it and each other. it's what makes your heart beat.

Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with Nothing Lasts Forever by Sidney Sheldon, or a score of other similarly titled novels, this one, written in 1979, was the basis for the 1988 movie "Die Hard" featuring Bruce Willis. Even from the first two chapters, it's quite clear that the book and movie diverge considerably, which I guess is predictable. I hate to say this, but the movie was better!

In the move, NY cop John McClane is visiting LA to meet with his somewhat estranged wife. She had taken a big job opportunity, and John was unable to immediately move with her because of his unfinished police work, although that struck me as a poor excuse. There is resentment between them: that she would go ahead without him. that he would seemingly want to hold back her career. They have two children and this is the first time he has been to see them. Apparently Holly, his wife, who has taken back her single name of Gennaro, had either never seen fit or never had the time, to visit him in NY. For some reason on Christmas Eve, the Nakatomi corporation expected the entire staff to attend a party in celebration of a big deal that had just gone through.

The first two chapters of the novel is covered by the first two minutes of the movie, and the differences between it and the movie are evident right from the off. There is no John McClane here. The guy is Joe Leland, which to me has nowhere near the appeal of the movie character's name for a heroic figure. Leland isn't in his mid-thirties as Willis was when he first played McClane. Leland is in his fifties at least, and is gray-haired. He isn't married to Holly Gennaro, he's her father, and is simply visiting her for Christmas. There is a party where he first meets up with Holly, but this is the Klaxon corporation which is celebrating. In the novel we get no perspective other than Leland's (although it's thankfully not first person) and there is no masterful Hans Gruber as portrayed by Alan Rickman.

In general terms, the story is similar to the movie, with Leland wandering around the building, slowly bumping off the bad guys, causing mayhem, and so on. the problem with it is that unlike the movie, the action is constantly interrupted by angsty introspective roadblocks from Leland, which frankly annoyed the heck out of me. I can't recommend this novel at all. Watch the movie if you can stand that kind of a movie. It's better than this.

Crossroads by Sophie Slade

Rating: WARTY!

I picked up this book as an advance review copy from Net Galley. I'm not a fan of vampire stories, werewolf stories, or paranormal romances, but I've read one or two, and this one promised to be different in that the vampire was married to a human female (at least he was after the first few screens), and contemplating reverting to human if only his wife's concoction could be perfected. I should have known better than to trust a blurb! It's hard to believe that a series like this which depends upon the vampire character would actually cure him anyway. Now that would be a story, but I'm guessing, sadly, that it's not the plan for this series.

This was volume two in a series (and it has a prologue! wasn't volume one the prologue?!), and I have not read volume one, so it's possible that I was missing something from that, but having read ten percent of this, which was more than I honestly wanted to, I don't believe I've missed anything at all! Lance and Leila have a half-human, half-vampire child, and they get married in the beginning of this novel. Lance is the leader of one of the vampire clans in England, and ridiculously rich in addition to being, as Derek Zoolander might put it, really, really, ridiculously good looking. His wife was voluptuous and beautiful, because there cannot be ordinary, everyday people in these novels.

So much for hoping that this novel would eschew trope and venture onto new ground. Every single vampire trope save one was here. It was the typical centuries old vampire falling in love with the mortal human, which doesn't work and is frankly disgusting. It's the old vampires and werewolves don't get along trope. It's the old vampires are ageless and beautiful, which is tedious, trope. It's the old vampires are organized in hierarchies with leaders or queens or whatever, and the country is divided into organized territories, which is a tired cliché. It's the old vampires are inexplicably rich story. There was absolutely nothing that was original. There was nothing to set any atmosphere, and there wasn't a single piece of descriptive prose worth the name, not in the part I read. It was all talk and movement.

The one exception I mentioned was that despite all this vampire trope, they seem to have no trouble going to Aruba for their honeymoon, and being out in the bright sunlight. If you're using all the other tropes, why not that one? Who knows? The most serious problem as that if you removed the paranormal element, this same story could have been told about a rich businessman and his trophy wife. There was nothing her that really required vampires and werewolves. The guy could have simply had an ordinary illness. The entire Harlequin romance catalog could have one of the characters be a vampire, with nothing else changed, and republished! What would that give us? Nothing we didn't have before!

The novel is supposed to lean towards the erotic, but there was nothing erotic to be found here. Not that I find vampires erotic at all, but the love-making here was full of cliché and frankly, was boring. The funny thing is that at one point we're told that the sun was starting to set. The couple had sex three times, and then decided to sleep all afternoon. Wait, wasn't the afternoon already gone if the sun was setting?! Maybe the sex was so great that it turned back time? Wouldn't it be great to have sex like that?!

Part of eroticism is playing-out the love-making, making it last, teasing, slyly stimulating, being a playful bit mean by withholding and denying from time to time. There's an old joke that erotic is using a feather; kinky is using the whole chicken, but there was neither here. This sex chickened out. It was much more of the 'slam-bam thank you ma'am' style: an urgent drive to orgasm, avoiding the scenic route like the plague,, and offering no rest stops to appreciate the journey or the view along the way.

It really was just a determined rush to orgasm, and the saddest thing was that there was no love-making after the orgasm either. Here I mean love-making in the old-fashioned sense where endearments and warm touches are exchanged. There was no pillow-talk, no nuzzling, no gentle hands on the back or the hips, or wherever. There was no hugging, snuggling, or holding, no sweet teasing as an invitation to a future encounter. It was like these two couldn't wait to get out of bed, or to fall asleep. This betrayed all of the 'lovey-dovey' talk they spouted so tediously endlessly at each other the rest of the time.

I was actually glad that they slept, because if I'd had to read about Leila arching her back once more, or reading of her saying that she was "more than okay" one more time after having sex, I would have to arch my back and throw up before I was more than okay. Here's an example of the prose:

"More than okay," she said, grinning. "Here," I sad, biting into my wrist. A moment later, red crimson blood dripped from the wound. "Drink this," I gently cooed, knowing that I needed to heal her.

This is part of the problem. No, not the red crimson blood(!), nor the cooing, but the fact that Lance effectively owned Leila. She's "Mrs Lance Steel" (Lance Steel, really?! It sounds like the pseudonym of a porn actor!), and he's always putting his arm around her "protectively". He's hovering over her and worrying about her like she's his child, not his wife, and it was creepy. It was creepy how obsessively they were "in love" which actually felt fake in the extreme. There was creepily obsessive parenting, and it was creepy when they'd just become married and he kissed 'the bride' like so: "my tongue danced with hers before our family and friends." Seriously? In front of the guests they're tongue kissing?

The objectification of 'the bride' - especially given that this is a female author - was as sad as it was disturbing. I read phrases like "Leila was beyond beautiful in a white, spaghetti strapped wedding gown that accented her curves in all the right places," way too often. Nothing about her mind was said, like all she had to offer was this body and once that was gone, what use would she be to any man? This is upsetting. At least it was until I found myself contemplating how "her curves" could ever be accented in all the wrong places and managed a smile at last.

These two flew off on their honeymoon in Lance's private jet, but while it had sufficient range to fly them to Miami, it didn't have the range to get them just 200 miles further directly to Aruba? That was curious, but a minor issue. I think I really got to a point where I wanted to throw the book a the wall when Leila microwaved a bag of blood and stuck a straw in it to feed their child. Smart moms don't even heat breast milk in a microwave. The nutritional value of the blood would be destroyed if it was microwaved, but then since we get no vampire lore related here, perhaps not. Who knows?

That said, the thought of this happy, happy, joy, joy family sitting around with the kid sucking blood through a straw from a microwaved bag, and the husband hungrily gulping down his own blood bag, while the doting wife sits beaming at them both was simply too hilarious to take seriously. I had hoped, as I said, for something different, but all I got was more of the same tired ideas that have been staked to death long ago. There was nothing new here and nothing worth my time.

I had hoped to make it to at least 25%, but like a bag-o-blood, I honestly could not stomach it. The idea of a centuries-old vampire even remotely finding a twenty or thirty year old woman appealing as a partner carries the same creep factor as a ninety year old man marrying a nine year old child. What could they possibly have in common? Why would a normal woman find anything attractive about a man who drinks blood from hospital bags and sucks her blood when they make love, without even asking? Perhaps there's a market for this, but I could not take it seriously. Paranormal stories seem to do really well, but they're not for me when written so un-inventively. I wish the author the best of luck with this, but I can't in good faith recommend it.

The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George

Rating: WARTY!

This audio book came as one of a pair I picked up at the local library. Of course the blurbs made them sound interesting, so I figured if I like this, one will get me two. Naturally I began listening to the wrong one first, so the next day I started on the other one. The first had not been very impressive to start with, but it began to grow on me as I continued to listen. The second, which was actually the first volume of the pair, I liked right away, but then it began to grow off me, I'm sad to say. I think it's always sad when a book lets a reader down.

The main character, Becca, has the ability to catch people's thoughts, but in just the same way that mediums cannot ever give you anything concrete (because they're freaking frauds, of course!), Becca's thought-capture utility gives her only vague, fragmented snatches which made little sense. It did, however, drive her nuts when so many random thoughts invaded her mind, so her mom got her this thing which at first I thought was called the 'odd box', but which was actually called the "aud" box. I was saddened when I learned that, because I really liked the idea of them calling it an odd box. This is the price of audio books: no way to know the spelling of an odd word or a name, no ability to skip prologues reliably, and god-awful trashy music beginning and ending every disk.

What in the name of all that's inscribed is going through the mind of the audio book publishers that they feel they have lard-up the written word with mindless snatches of music that don't even disappear when the reader starts in on the text, but instead slowly fade away? I have no idea. Did the author write the music. NO! The music is entirely, completely, absolutely, fundamentally, and in every other way nothing to do with the story! It was absent from the novel as written by the author (which is all I care about), so what in the entire universe possessed these delusional deviants to add it? Are they so anal that they cannot get past the illusion that if it's a CD it has to have music? If it's audio it must have power chords and thrashing drums? These people are morons.

But I digress. The story begins interestingly enough when Becca catches thoughts from her stepdad that show he has murdered his business partner. Her dad, aware she can catch thoughts, knows that she knows, and this, finally, is evidently enough to motivate her mother to leave this jerk. Somehow Laurel, the mom, magically has the wherewithal to conjure up false identities for Becca and herself, and with hair color and makeup disguises, the two flee - to Whidbey island. Mom evidently has an old friend from high school who lives on the island, and who has agreed to take care of Becca. Mom herself, for reasons unexplained, does not stay with Becca, but disappears off somewhere else, leaving her daughter entirely alone.

The woman Becca is supposed to stay with dies before Becca gets to the house, and she has evidently told no one else that Becca is coming, so Becca is not only alone, she is without substantial money and has nowhere to stay. Then magic happens. Again. Becca gets a ride from a nice woman; she meets a nice young guy who directs her to another gruff but nice older woman, who magically runs a motel where Becca can stay for free in return for helping out around the place. You know this is what happens to all runaways right? They get everything on a plate and never have any difficulties. Happy, happy, joy, joy. This novel is Newbery material right there.

So this story that began with a great premise now descends rapidly into nothing more than high school rivalry and love triangles. The perky rockin' music was appropriate after all! Who knew?! Becca meets Derek, a slightly older student who is sweetness personified. She also meets Jen, one of the most obnoxious people it's possible to not avoid meeting. She immediately hates Becca and misses no opportunity to trash her in public and in front of Derek. Never once does Derek call Jen on it, or try to stop the insults flowing. Yet he's a nice guy, because we're told he is. He has a nice opinion of Jen, too, notwithstanding her disgraceful attitude and criminal behavior. (Note that I managed to stomach only about 30% of this novel, so when I say "never once" it refers only to that portion)

That's all the story offered at this point, and it was nowhere near enough. That and some vague mystery from the past which was so heavily and repeatedly foreshadowed that it became tedious to listen to. The reader, Amy McFadden, was way too perky and while not god-awfully bad, could not do a decent male voice to save her life, so that became a joke. Becca isn't very smart, either, which is another no-no in stories for me. When she gets a lift to go meet Derek, the driver sees him, and Becca catches certain foreboding thoughts. When she gets to Derek's side, she catches the other side of those thoughts, but never once does she suspect there's anything going on here. She's an idiot.

I was thoroughly disappointed in Becca that she had this ability to catch thoughts, yet did nothing with it: she did not practice, she tried no training of her ability, there was no exploration, no testing, no spying, nothing. Instead, she treated it like a mental illness, which was disappointing and short-sighted. I don't care if a girl starts out dumb and wises up, but I don't really want to read about female characters who have no sense of curiosity or ambition and never develop one.

There wasn't even any internal logic to the thought capture. She couldn't pick up thoughts from sentient animals such as dogs for example, and couldn't pick them up from an unconscious boy who'd had an accident, so it made no sense (unless maybe he was brain dead - I didn't read that far). She picked up no images, sounds, or smells, only words, and never once did she get a full sentence, again with no explanation as to why. In the case of the boy, Becca calls for an ambulance, and then refuses to give her name and hides her phone. What? I know she's trying to stay below the radar, but seriously is that the smartest way to do it?

My plan is, despite the disappointment here, to at least give volume two a shot, and see if it's any better, especially since I already started it. The problem with this plan is that the main character here appears to be Jen - at least in the beginning - and she was so nauseating in volume one that unless she underwent a marked improvement somewhere in volume one, then volume two isn't going to be enjoyable either! We'll see. As for this volume, I can't recommend it.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Rating: WARTY!

This advance review copy of an English translation from Korean ought, as other reviewers have pointed out, to have been titled "The Vegan" rather than The Vegetarian, but 'vegetarian' is a widely recognized word, and 'vegan' not so much, so I can see why a writer might make a technically incorrect choice of title. The bottom line is that it's a misnomer either way because it really has nothing to do with vegetarianism or veganism. The central character's act of choosing a new diet is really a symptom, and not even a symptom of her own problem, but a symptom of what really is a mentally-ill family circle.

Other reviewers defined it as being about the main character's mental health problem, and the question of Yeong-hye's sanity is one I wrestled with for the first two parts (of this three-part) novella. The bottom line is that I have no idea whether the author intended this to be unclear, or was commenting that the people outside the psychiatric institution were insane and those inside sane, or whether we were to understand that Yeong-hye's behavior was merely a reaction to the appallingly brutal treatment she received, and wasn't intended to signify insanity at all, or whether this really was nothing more than a savage depiction of a slow descent into insanity

In the first two parts, I was less ready to blame Yeong-hye's behavior on psychiatric causes. To me it seemed much more like a rebellion against oppression by a woman who had reached the end of her tether, and with very good reason. Her behavior there found its best parallel in the changes Yossarian underwent in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Only later, in part three, did she descend into readily identifiable mental illness, and by this time it was arguable that she'd been driven there by members of her own family and her husband, each of whom were quite frankly deranged. So maybe it was a comment that some people can get away with being mentally unstable, or at least exhibit it in a form which is socially acceptable.

The truly warped thing was not so much that these people were insane, but that the medical profession was in the beginning, all-too-ready to look the other way and later, chomping at the bit to condemn people to asylums with absolutely no grounds whatsoever. I've never lived in Korea and know little about how society functions there, but I dearly hope it is nowhere near as dire as it's depicted in this story.

One of the doctors actually said, "Today we'll try feeding her some gruel intravenously"! Seriously? Way to kill a patient! Inject gruel into their veins! It made me wonder wonder what the author actually said in Korean, and if it didn't say this, then why the translation was so bad. The doctor struck me as grossly incompetent anyway, so maybe the translation was accurate. The text actually said, "In fact, the doctor doubted whether Yeong-hye had been taking her medication at all." This is a patient in this doctor's own hospital, and he has no idea whether his orders are being carried out properly?! This is a psychiatric institution. Do they simply hand out the pills and leave the patient to determine what's best for themselves?

Just as bad was the willingness of the medical profession to commit two people to psychiatric institution when all they did was paint flowers on their skin and make love. This makes me never want to visit Korea. I thought South Korea was relatively enlightened, but this author paints a chronic picture of that nation. The entire youth of North America and Europe all would have been committed under these rules had they been applied in the sixties summer of love! LOL!

Vegetarianism is insulted rather gratuitously and ignorantly by the characters depicted here. It's widely derided as an unfortunate aberration or a disease rather than a conscious choice to live a better life, and to me this seemed to be one more way in which the author was showing how barbaric these people were, they who surround and seek to control the main character. I'm not going to pontificate about vegetarianism here except to say that there would be far fewer hungry people on the planet if the west quit this habit of dedicatedly feeding tons grain to artificial herds of animals, and instead fed it to those who are in far greater need of the sustenance. But if this is how Koreans feel about vegetarians in general, I definitely have no intention of ever going there.

Although the story is superficially about Yeong-hye, it felt much more like it was a commentary on societal attitudes towards women in Korea, and it was truly disturbing to read it, especially in part one. I sincerely hope the Korean people in general do not hold these attitudes, but I have no experience of Korea, so I can't comment. Yeong-hye suddenly decides, after an awful dream of bloody, raw meat and carnivorous behaviors, to give up eating dead animals and animal products (such as milk and eggs). She also quits wearing clothing derived from animal carcasses. In short, she becomes a full-frontal vegan. She does this 'cold turkey' as it were, and without trying to read-up anything about it to prepare herself for the change in lifestyle. Because of this, she starts to lose weight rather alarmingly.

She's not very communicative by nature, and her husband is disturbed by her behavior, but she seems perfectly rational as she explains to him that it will affect only his breakfast, since he eats other meals at work and can therefore choose to eat whatever he wants. In her sudden change, brought about without any preamble, she seems rather selfish, but she's nowhere near as selfish as her husband is in his behavior towards her. Initially he's tolerant, but his and her own family's treatment of Yeong-hye in the long run is nothing short of brutal, be warned.

Depending on your own sensitivities, the first part of this novel may nauseate you or make you want to drop it and read no further. I had a hard time with it, but I hoped this was going somewhere, so I could stand to read it in that hope and in the knowledge that there are, unfortunately, people like this in real life. It's not like the author is pulling these behaviors out of nowhere, and the story was short, but in the end, literally int he end, I had a hard time reading it because i could make no sense of it, and I took to skimming passages just to get it over with. But there is rape, more than once, and there are other forms of brutality directed at more than one female character.

Initially I'd thought this was actually three short stories, and I was ready to quit, so dissatisfied was I with the "ending" of the first part, but I realized that the second part was a continuation, so I continued, looking for some sort of resolution. It didn't come. I felt it would have been wiser had the author omitted the partitioning and simply told it as one continuous story, but this is the mess you get into when you start out in first person. You almost inevitably have to go to third person to convey some information, and your voice is lost.

It was lost again in part three where the voice changed once more to yet another third person perspective and suddenly the narrative was all over the place. We never do get Yeong-hye's perspective, and in many ways, I think this was the point of the novel. She's treated as a nonentity: an object or a problem rather than a person. It's hardly surprising, then, to see her react so negatively towards them and towards the life she had been forced to lead. Unfortunately, by that point, the story had been bouncing around like a pinball, and I cared no more about Yeong-hye than her family and husband did.

Yeong-hye's behavior leads to a complete alienation from those close to her. Her husband rapes her at one point, and her father hits her and tries to force-feed her at another. One of the worst acts of violence is committed by Yeong-hye upon herself in a dramatic and scarily defiant reaction to her father's brutality. At this point she appears to have divorced herself from all society, having no modesty, baring her body in public, and seemingly drifting through life with her eyes open but seeing nothing of interest.

The truly scary part, however, is that her husband and family are so callous that at no point does any one of them consider getting Yeong-hye the psychiatric medical treatment she appears to need right then. Even when she's temporarily in the hospital, there seems to be no health-care giver who's interested in her mental welfare. This is perhaps the most shocking part of the entire novel, and it's admirable how Yeong-hye bounces back despite the neglect of those who supposedly love her, but her reprieve is short-lived.

As I mentioned, the novella is translated from Korean, so I can't speak to the quality of the original. It's Brit English rather than American English too, but it's not unintelligible as long as you remember that a jumper is a sweater and training shoes (or trainers), are not for children but for athletes! There is a Korean measurement, the p-yong or pyeong, which is for reasons unknown, not translated. Nor is there a definition of it in the book. The p'yong appears to be a measure of internal space, such as in residences and offices, and it's about 35 square feet.

Overall, I was not impressed. The brutality and abuse depicted here demands some sort of explanation or preferably a resolution given how gratuitous and misogynistic it is, but the book offers none, and the third section is largely unintelligible due to the random jumping around of the voice, perspective, and story. I had a hard time following it, so for me the only really readable part, for one reason or another, was the middle section. This was supposed to be erotic and artistic, but it could not avoid rape and abuse either, so overall, what can this novel offer? For me it was nothing, and I cannot recommend it. I wish the author all the best in future endeavors, which I hope will be more harmonious than this was.

Parallel by Lauren Miller

Rating: WARTY!

Parallel is a young adult novel about a girl who is trapped between two parallel worlds, each containing a slightly different version of her life. This happened when these two world somehow came into contact, resulting in an earthquake in the one version, and inexplicable dull headache in the other. I'm not sure that the author really understands what a parallel universe means, although the science is not fringe, by any means. Parallel universes are the inevitable outcome of the physics we have which gives us our best understanding of how the universe came to be - to date! It's always 'to date' in the world of science because understanding can change with new information. The problem is that if two of these universes collided, you'd be probably more likely to end up with a brand new Big Bang and a third universe created than you would be to get an earthquake and a headache, but this is fiction, so go with it, right?

I don't mind it when authors play fast and loose with science if they can give me a good story, but for an author to shrink an event of this magnitude down to a teenage girl's love triangle is taking things way too far for my taste, and doing real science a disservice. The story is written like the only important thing this massive event affected is Abby Barnes's career plans, and no one else noticed! Say what?! In the entire universe, the only sentient being who is aware of what's going on is Abby? Doesn't that make her special! And rest assured she is very special. She has the perfect life and the perfect career path and the perfect friend and the perfect family and everything is laid out perfectly to perfection. Yep, this isn't Abby Barnes, it's Mary Sue!

I enjoyed the opening chapter, but by chapter two I was already having issues with this, and by a quarter the way through I was really feeling like this was going nowhere that had not been gone before by a thousand crappy YA novels replete with high school melodrama and love triangles. I mean, seriously, this girl is aware of an Earth shattering event (almost literally!), where two parallel universes have collided, and yet rather than focus on that, she's much more interested - forget that, she's much more obsessed - with some random guy she met that she's inexplicably head-over-heels in love with after one drunken date than ever she is with this incredible event! I lost all respect for her when she became a jellyfish if he so much as breathed in her direction (this spinelessness actually happened on one occasion, I kid you not).

Her behavior is that of a fourteen year old freaking over the latest music star than ever it is the behavior of a supposedly smart and together career path student in her late teens. I get that even though this has happened, she has to get on with her life, and that her life is rather more difficult to get on with than most, but seriously? It was laughable how shallow she was. Worse than that, she was not likable, nor was her snotty friend Caitlin who was not only runway model gorgeous (so-called), but has the brains of Einstein. Not that that can't happen (Marilyn vos Savant I'm looking at you!), but question here was: is there anywhere in this cozy little universe that perfection has not pervaded?

Abby's original plan had been to go to journalism school at Northwestern after which she would then get a job at a newspaper. This was set in 2009, admittedly, but newspapers were going down the toilet even then, and this is her career plan? Yes, they moved online, but who at Abby's age, even considers newspaper, print or online, a source of news these days? I don't doubt that some do, and that Abby should, but she never even talks about newspapers, keeping up with the news, reading web news sites or anything. She doesn't even blog! It's a total disconnect, but then this was written by a lawyer, so maybe that explains something.

The only fly in Abby's luxuriously creamy ointment isn't even technically in her ointment so why it's such a bother to her is a mystery. This fly is named Ilana (and I had the hardest time, because of the typeface used in the hardback, figuring out what the heck her name was. Was it LIANA? LLANA? ILANA?! Ilana (the latter version) was the most abused character in this universe, and for no good reason except that Caitlin and Abby simply spewed vitriol at her with far more dedication than even the most rabid skunk will try to get you.

They didn't even care that their purported best friend Tyler (can we get names any more down-home than these three: Abby, Caitlin, Tyler? really?) likes her and hangs with her. They abuse her anyway and Tyler never even gets pissed off with their attitude! Not that Ilana was exactly the most pleasant person on the planet, but it occurred to me that the reason she was that way, was because of the endless hate rays being beamed at her by the truculent twins. The only difference between these girls, as far as I could tell, was that the one actually had sex, while the other two were all but virginal, so obviously they had the moral high ground and Ilana was lower than snake vomit. Ri-ight! Got it. Is that the legal view? No wonder rape victims get nervous about reporting such crimes.

I honestly don't get why you would want to introduce a fascinating and cutting-edge sci-fi element into your YA novel, if all you're going to do then is tell a trope YA love triangle/high school melodrama story with it? What a chronic waste! The weird thing about it was that these two worlds which merged were not even at the same date. One was exactly a year out from the other, for no apparent reason. In what way was it parallel again? As the story bounced inexplicably back and forth between them, the younger Abby was seeing her carefully constructed baby blanket unravel in the present, and finding her life completely different from what she had planned.

We're told that the two worlds she is shown in are supposedly merging slowly, and she's afraid of losing herself, but she's losing herself in herself, so it's a bit weird and intriguing on that score. It's a bit like having schizophrenia, I suppose. In the future she can recall what happened in the past, but only bit by bit, just like she can only "recall" the new skills she has developed when it comes down to the wire. This made no sense to me, and it quickly became tedious, because Abby's perfect life only had the most minuscule of problems: like she didn't want to coxswain the boat for the rowing team.

Frankly she was pathetic, and not worth reading about.

One Night by Melanie Florence

Rating: WARTY!

This is a very short (~90 pages) novel/novella, which tackles the tired old story of an unexpected pregnancy during the last year of the main character's high school, but it brings nothing new to the table. While it began as an idea that was pregnant with possibility, in the end it was miscarried by caricature, trope, and writing that offered no sense of injustice or outrage, and an atmosphere which was too thin to breathe deeply. It felt like I was reading an anti-abortion flyer generated by some fundamentalist religious organization. The story is supposed to be one of a series aimed at reluctant readers and all I could think is that it made me reluctant to read this because it did nothing to draw me in and engage me. If it had not been so short, I would never have considered reading it to the end.

We're told, not shown, that main character Luna Begay is smart, but her every behavior contradicts this claim. Not that she does anything outright dumb like getting drunk, although she does accept a drink from a guy she doesn't know. But none of this matters regarding the rape. She is drugged and raped, period. The issues I had with her lack of smarts came afterwards, and while on the one hand it's her pregnancy and she's entitled to deal with it however she chooses (within reason!), I was disturbed to see that her course was seemingly mapped out in a smooth and straight line without any hiccups. This, to me, was entirely unrealistic. it felt like form day one, including the rape, she was on a smooth water slide right into the delivery room, and traveling at the same speed you would on a water slide, too.

For example, she never went through any trauma at all after the rape. No anger, no recriminations, no tears, no suicidal thoughts, no serious consideration of the implications of raising a child as young as she was, no crazy behavior. Any of this would have been realistic and perfectly understandable, but instead of any of this, she sailed through the whole thing with barely a hiccup. It simply didn't make for credible reading to me, and it felt like what was an horrific crime was simply swept under the rug.

Luna's robotic acceptance of the fact that she had been criminally assaulted was another issue. Her refusal not so much to bring charges, as to not even consider bringing them, was entirely unrealistic. If there had been, for example, even so much as a brief discussion about what it might cost other girls if this guy, who has all the hallmarks of a serial rapist, was allowed to get away with it, and then she had chosen not to go ahead with it, that would be one thing, but to not even seriously consider that was wrong in my opinion. It made her look selfish, thoughtless, and not very smart.

Another problem I had was the passage of time. It was unrealistic. It felt like one night she was raped, and very the next day at school she was experiencing morning sickness. Morning sickness can kick in disturbingly early - such as two weeks on, even - but there was no indication of the passage of any time. It honestly felt like the very next day she was throwing up already. Then she was suddenly fifteen weeks pregnant and in the next breath, six months pregnant! It was way too fast to even absorb, let alone have the character deal with it. Worse, she wasn't dealing with it. Again, we're expected to believe she's smart, but the last thing she considered was that the rapist had impregnated her.

When she finally visits the doctor for the first time, she's told she's put on twelve pounds. Seriously? This is her first visit! How does the doctor have any clue how much weight she's put on? This goes to how fast this story moves, which is way too fast for its own good. It moves irrationally and impractically fast. So fast, in fact that there's no time to set a scene, create an atmosphere, or even to have anything important happen! All we get is superficial and shallow, with a chat here and there, but no real discussion, and no attempt at education, no options on the table, and no description of anything that would affect the senses, which left me feeling robbed of a good story for a young woman who is undergoing her first pregnancy. Morning sickness isn't the only thing someone who is pregnant experiences!

Luna is native American, but she frequently described herself as aboriginal, which sounded really odd to me. it was only when I realized this novel was published in Canada that it clicked. This is a term used to describe Inuit and Métis people in Canada, but I'd had no indication from the novel that this was set in Canada. I commend the author for writing about a minority, but this only made things worse in practice. I know that native peoples have been and too-often still are treated abominably, and that Inuit and Métis alike have not been spared this, but the way this was presented here was that these people (Luna and her sister Issy) were openly and freely abused in their high school, and nothing was being done about it.

Frankly I'd be shocked if things were truly this bad in Canadian schools. Perhaps it's true, but I can't believe it's as bad as it was depicted here. This is one of the things which for me contributed to a lack of realism and turned the characters into caricatures rather than real people. it was just so egregious that it was laughable, and worse, it made what happened later - that one of the abusers suddenly turned around 180 degrees in her attitude - totally unbelievable. We were given a reason for the change, but I simply couldn't buy that someone who had been so viciously hateful would change so completely in the space of one short week.

This Canadian setting made the lack of descriptive writing all the more stark. No matter which month we start the story in, after six months has passed in Canada, you're going to be seeing some notable changes in weather, but we never got any indication of that here.

There was one more oddity! In the back of the novel is the copyright information, which dates the copyright to 2017. I'm not sure how you copyright something in a year which hasn't arrived yet! I want in on that. The page tells us the novel was originally published in 2017! Amazing! The publication date given at Net Galley is 1/9/2016, which is more realistic! But I want in on this copyrighting the future deal! Where do I sign up!

I appreciate the opportunity to see the advance review copy, and I wish the author and the publishers all the best with this series, but it wasn't for me. I can't in good faith recommend a story which for me fails a reader in so many important ways.

Starve Vol 1 by Brian Wood, Danijel Žeželj, Dave Stewart

Rating: WORTHY!

This was one of those advance review copies Net Galley offers as a 'read now', evidently because it isn't getting much attention. Unfortunately most of those are not very good, which is why they get little attention, but once in a while you can find one that is a worthy read, and I struck lucky on this occasion, because out of four such graphic novels I requested, three turned out to be pretty darned good, and this was one of them.

I was attracted to this one because of the unusual subject matter. This was a graphic novel about a chef, and it did not disappoint! Gavion Cruickshank was a TV chef, the owner and show-runner of the ironically-named Starve!, a TV ratings sensation, but he up and quit the show and disappeared for years. Eventually he was found hiding-out in Asia, and all-but blackmailed into coming back onto the show, where he finds himself now a competitor, under the direction of an old rival, and competing in a reckless, crazy, and sometimes literally brutal competition for top chef.

I'm a vegetarian, so I didn't appreciate the brutality of the show, but there really are things like that done in real life, and this was pure fiction, so I didn't let that get in the way of enjoying the inventiveness and break-neck pace of this story. I'm no relation to Brian Wood (to the best of my knowledge!), but I wouldn't mind being related to someone as creative as this.

While trying to reconnect with his grown-up daughter, and fend off his vicious ex-wife, Gavin has to create gourmet dishes from scratch which will charm the taste buds of the show's judges. And he has to do this in each of eight episodes. He manages to keep on top of things for the first three, depicted here, but the novel ends in a modest cliff-hanger. This ain't any TV chef you've seen!

The art work was sharply angular and darkly colored, and suited the story perfectly. it;s not the kind of artwork that is normally to my taste, but here it works and I appreciated that. I liked this one. I recommend it as a worthy read and wish the creative team the best of success with this series.

Shutter Vol 3 by Joe Keatinge, Leila del Duca, Owen Geini, John Workman

Rating: WORTHY!

This was one of those advance review copies Net Galley offers as a 'read now', evidently because it isn't getting much attention. Unfortunately most of those are not very good, which is why they get little attention, but once in a while you can find one that is a worthy read, and I struck lucky on this occasion, because out of four such graphic novels I requested, three turned out to be pretty darned good, and this was one of them.

I have to confess up front that I was a bit lost in this because it's part of a series and I haven't read any of the series prior to this one, but this looked interesting from the description, and it turned out to be so in the reading, even though ti took me a while to get up to speed. It would have been nice to have had a brief "story so far" at the start.

What really brought me on-board was the kick-ass female characters in it, who were also the main characters. I loved them. Note that when I describe a character as a strong female character, or as 'kick-ass' for short, this doesn't necessarily mean that she can literally kick ass, although the two here could. It simply means that I like her presence, and I like the way the story lights-up when she's involved, even if all she's doing is talking. It means she's interesting, passionate (in the broadest sense), has something to bring to the tale, has inner strength, and has depth and character.

The blurb on Goodreads describes this volume as "Kate Kristopher was a globally renowned explorer on an Earth fart more fantastic than our own." I can't imagine an Earth fart more fantastic than our own...! Obviously, someone mis-typed! In this volume, Kate Kristopher has lost her memory, but she has a lot of help regaining it.

My only real complaint is that the art work was very scrappy and didn't win my love (unlike the main character!). It was made worse in the advance review copy because it had been sent at low resolution, presumably to keep file size down. This was a mistake, because it looked grubby and blurry to an extent, with the lettering appearing rather muddy, although it was readable, and as I said, this was an ARC. I'm sure the actual published version is better, but the low quality of this copy prevented me from really being able to offer useful comments on the artwork, which isn't a good idea in a review copy for a graphic novel! Just sayin'!

This is a weird fantasy world which seems to be occupied by sentient cats, who behave exactly like humans (which is more of a weakness in the story than a strength IMO) and who share the word with humans. Of course, there is conflict, but not necessarily between humans and cats. I enjoyed how it was depicted, and I liked the cliffhanger ending. Overall, I liked this novel, and I recommend it as a worthy read.

Renée by Ludovic Debeurme

Rating: WARTY!

This was one of those advance review copies Net Galley offers as a 'read now', evidently because it isn't getting much attention. Unfortunately most of those are not very good, which is why they get little attention, but once in a while you can find one that is a worthy read. This wasn't one of them, I'm sorry to report. On the contrary, it was one of the most flaccid graphic novels I've read in a long time. it was disordered and confusing, offered little content, was wasteful of trees if it ever went to a long print run, which I don't forgive easily, and equally as bad, did not even tell a very engaging story. On top of that, the art work was average to poor, and the themes employed were tediously repetitive. The lettering was ridiculously small, too, for that matter, and for no good reason.

The story is one of relationships, which I tend to find boring unless the author really has something original to say, or something old to relate in a new way, but this story offered neither. Worse, it was told non-linearly, which is usually just annoying. Once in a rare while there's a valid reason to employ this technique (although off-hand I can't think of a story I've read which was actually better for it!), but most of the time author do this, it's because they have a poor story to tell, or they're simply being pretentious.

I read some 370 pages out of some 460, and I still didn't feel like I had a good handle on what was supposed to be going on here. I was ready to quit quite early, but I kept pushing on for two reasons. The first was that I was hoping this would lead somewhere interesting. It never did. The fact that I had decided early on that this probably wasn't going to do it for me, and plowed on for scores more pages with no change in my outlook, proves my case to my complete satisfaction.

The second reason is that sometimes when I quit a novel early because it's bad, and I review it negatively, there are those who whine that it's not possible to review a novel fairly unless you finish it. I'm so sorry but you people are completely wrong. I invite you to look up 'sunk cost fallacy' in wikipedia.

The short answer is that it doesn't matter how beautiful your back yard is if if you can't get people to stomach passing through your front door to come see it. Life is far too short to waste on uninteresting stories when there are scores out there that promise more and that we will never get to read if we waste our lives on those which do not thrill us from the off. The same applies to relationships, BTW, but if you fail to persuade your reader to keep reading, then that's a review right there - a resoundingly negative one.

The essence of this story is that there's this one guy, who was, to me, thoroughly unlikable, who was in prison, and one girl was supposedly waiting for him. This girl had no life whatsoever, which is why I didn't like her either. The tow did probably deserve each other, but that doesn't mean there was any sort of romance here, neither in the old-fashioned sense or the modern sense. The two had met through music, and he had started an affair with her even though he was married. This did not endear me to either of them

It turned particularly nauseating as she became predictably demanding that he leave his wife, and he was predictably reluctant to do so, and when he did, she was still not happy. it was all downhill all the way. The artwork was as lackluster as the story, and both dragged on and on going nowhere. It was the polar opposite of cinéma vérité: cinéma mensonge and not even amusing for that.

I can't recommend this as a worthy read. It wasn't.

The Misadventures of Grumpy Cat and Pokey Vol 1 by various writers and artists

Rating: WORTHY!

This was one of those advance review copies Net Galley offers as a 'read now', evidently because it isn't getting much attention. Unfortunately most of those are not very good, which is why they get little attention, but once in a while you can find one that is a worthy read, and I struck lucky on this occasion, because out of four such graphic novels I requested, three turned out to be pretty darned good, and this was one of them.

Written and illustrated by an assortment of creative people, the stories were somewhat spotty, but in general they were well illustrated and some of the tales were well-written. Others were unexceptional but readable. A couple were too trite to live. Overall though, I came away with a good feeling about this, so I was happy. It was not such a good feeling that I felt a huge compulsion to hunt down other volumes in this series, but this one was worth a look - unless you hate cats!

I'm not really a cat person, although I've owned cats. I'm much more in favor of dogs, and there was a dog in this series, which amused the hell out of me. The two cats were the main characters however. These were brother and sister, evidently. I had got the impression somehow, during my reading, that they were both females, but it was a refreshing change to have a female as a main character in a graphic novel, and that was another point in the graphic novel's favor as far as I was concerned. These siblings were the dour, cantankerous Grumpy, and her youthful and effervescent side-kick Pokey, who really needs a medicinal dose of Thorazine added to her feed STAT!

Pokey is typically the one who comes up with some crazy idea, such as: the cats should be detectives, or they should be super heroes. Grumpy is never on-board with the idea unless she can see some clear and present benefit to herself, which she often does, which is how she ends up falling in line with Pokeys ridiculous schemes - or at least falling only as far as she has to to make out like gangbusters from it. Grumpy tens to be lazy, but she actually cooks up one scheme to garner treats for herself at Pokey's expense.

Although, as I indicated, some stories (particularly the one page "stories") didn't impress me, there was enough to like and that's all I require from a novel graphic or otherwise. I liked this one, and recommend it as a worthy read.

Mini Mysteries by Rick Walton

Rating: WORTHY!

I had some really mixed feelings about whether this was a worthy or a warty read, but on balance, decided to rate it worthy. It's illustrated rather cartoonishly, but not badly, by Lauren Scheuer, and consists of twenty short mysteries, each just two or three pages long, combined together in a from which doesn't really have an overall story, but which ties the chapters together into one whole. The solution to each mystery can be found in the back, hidden under a lift-up door, rather like an advent calendar, so there's no chance of seeing the answer to the next mystery by accident.

The thing which made me feel that maybe this wasn't a worthy read was that the mysteries are for the most part rather simplistic, some ridiculously so, and many are also rather idiosyncratic: hinging on a misunderstood word, or on knowledge the reader is not explicitly given, but which they rather have to guess at. For example, one solution relied on the knowledge that the perp was left-handed, and nowhere in the story was this explicitly demonstrated, so the solution was only known for a fact to the girl who "solved" it. The reader simply had to guess at this answer, which is unsatisfactory. Some mysteries had more than one solution, unintentionally so, so they were a bit annoying.

On the other page, one or two of the mysteries were rather well done, and more than one made me consider kicking myself for not getting it, but then I'm really not very good at figuring these things out, which is why I like to read them. Plus, you never know where your next idea for a story will come from, and even this offers some food for thought if you're writing a detective story and need a muse to offer some ideas as to how to make this one scene work. It was for this purpose that I decided to rate this worthy: it makes the reader have to think, and in the case of middle-grade readers, that's never a bad thing. I don't plan on pursuing this series, but if you really like this one, there are at least two other volumes out there.

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential by Brian Ashcraft, Shoko Ueda

Rating: WORTHY!

Now this is girl power!

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool is a cool book in itself. It details, with great research, copious photographs, and a lot of historical and trivia information, the power of Japanese schoolgirls and their sailor outfits through the history of Japan and in particular since World War Two.

There is barely avenue of popular technology or cultural endeavor upon which Japanese schoolgirls haven't made some sort of mark. After a brief history of the uniform, the book takes off and explodes into discussions of how the schoolgirl sailor look became an icon, and transported these girls into whole genres of movies, and into pop music where the Japanese approach to creating a band was very different from western approaches.

This influence was felt in electronics, when these girls commandeered pagers and turned them into text machines, and then exploited cell phones when those came out, driving the development of the cell phone cameras which we take for granted today. They made their mark on fashion (and not just in the world of sailor suits!), on art, on magazine content, on manga, and on anime.

The story is told here with interviews, trivia, lots of illustrations, side bars, and lots of color - not all of which is pink by any means! It was a real education and a fascinating book for me. Your mileage may differ! Now my only problem is to figure out how to exploit this knowledge in my writing! I recommend this book as a worthy read!

Scrivener's Moon by Philip Reeve

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an oddball steampunk novel to which I took an initial liking, and that stayed with me apart from an unfortunate dip in the middle, but overall I consider it a worthy read. It's always nice to find a novel that gets you right from the start. It's read by Sarah Coombes who has a delightful British accent and does a nice range of voices, including a beautiful Scots accent too, but her voicing of male characters is a bit off, and rather grating. Apart from that I really liked it. I'm picky, I admit, so it was nice to have a reader who didn't irritate me.

Note that this is book 3 of a series (the Fever Crumb series) and I haven't read books one and two. Evidently it's also tied to Author Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series which I haven't read either. I wasn't even aware that there was a series when I picked this audio book up in the library, since the morons in Big Publishing™ seem to have a huge problem with actually putting the book series information on the cover or in the blurb. That said, I was able to get into it without any problem. Obviously I don't know what I'm missing from the first two, if anything, and whether or not that would improve my appreciation of this particular volume, but this one didn't start out like it was one of a continuing series, so perhaps I'm missing nothing.

Normally I skip prologues like the plague since I don't see the point. This book proved my case. The entire three volume set is a prologue to his Mortal engines series! But, it's hard to skip prologues in audio books, since you can't see where they are or be sure that the first thing you listen to actually is a prologue if it's not announced as such, nor can you see where to jump to in order to bypass it arrive at chapter one. So I ended up listening to this prologue, and as expected. it contributed nothing.

The hilarious thing was that this is book three! Were not books one and two the prologue to this volume? If so, why do we need a yet another prologue here in volume three, especially one which contributed zilch to reader information or appreciation?! I think authors put prologues in because they think they have to, or because they're simply pretentious or melodramatic. They just don't get it, so let me offer this newsflash: chapter one is the prologue, you hockey pucks! I've never read a book where I've had to go back and consult the prologue to get an understanding of what's going on in the novel. Not once. I rest my case. Prologues are a delusional waste of time and worse, a waste of trees in print books.

That said, the story itself is nicely done in the steampunk genre with a twist. There was a nice emphasis on engineering, which I like and admire. Where would we be without engineers? And we definitely need more female engineers. Victorian times were a wonderful era for some amazing feats of engineering. People talk of the Pyramids as great engineering efforts, but all those guys did was stack block on top of each other! The Romans were engineers. The Victorians were engineers. Today we have engineers!

This novel however, is not set in Victorian times, which is another reason it's different. This is set in a future where some catastrophe (known melodramatically as The Diminishing) has set back humanity and reduced our numbers catastrophically - an era which could still come down the pipe if we don't take care of climate change, fresh water shortage, and disease. In the novel, all of the technology of today has gone, and we have been set back to the age of steam in a world where populations have splintered, barbarian tribes threaten England, and an ice age seems to be encroaching more and more territory. How things became so bad that we reverted to a steam age is not explained in this volume. I don't know if the earlier volumes offer more details.

Mammoths, for reasons unspecified, seem to have been brought back from extinction big time, although they're really just bystanders in this volume, so I did't get the point. There are actually three projects attempting to achieve this in real life as it happens, though. The entire mammoth genome (at least for one species of mammoth) has been recreated, but that was the easy part. Getting a healthy and viable fetus from a genome is something only nature has perfected, and even it has problems at times. Human science is far behind, so while we will probably see a mammoth again, it's going to be a while. Given how scientific knowledge and technology have been so completely lost, Reeve fails (at least in this volume) to explain how it was that the mammoth genome was not only preserved, but the technology to recreate it also survived whatever disaster befell humanity. Maybe they had been created before the disaster fell.

These threatening circumstances are the reason an engineer has decided to put London on wheels - yes, the entire city - so it can move around on tank tracks, to keep it safe from encroaching ice and barbarian raids. Absurd, but where would we be without fiction like that to set us back on our heels and amaze and intrigue us? Talking of which, in this world there are three intriguing females. Wavy, who is a mystery, her daughter Fever Crumb, who is an engineer, and Cluny Morvish, a woman is who very much Fever's equal, but who is on the opposite side of a brewing war. Fever and her mom are of the scrivener bloodline, but it's unclear exactly what that is. Again, this may have been covered in earlier volumes, but it was unexplained here.

In addition to these is Charley Shallow, the designated mustache-twirling villain although he is clean-shaven. I found him uninteresting (right through to the end, as it happens, and quickly took to skipping tracks on which he appeared. At the end, I didn't feel like I had missed a thing.

The story kicks into gear - brass gear no doubt - when information comes to Wavy about a mysterious pyramid in the frozen north - one which has a reputation both for being haunted and for being impregnable. The information is that a crack has opened up in it. Wavy and her daughter head north on a land ship to investigate.

For me, this is where the story went south, paradoxically. This is a quest story in many ways, and the goal is this pyramid, but when Fever and Her mom get to it (and meet up with Cluny on the way) Reeve expends a pitiful few pages on the thing, reveals virtually nothing about it, and then it's destroyed. I didn't get that at all. What was the point? Well the point was that i was ready to give up on the nbvoel after that, and the only thing which kept me reaidng was Cluny and Fever's interactions, wihc far form being instadore were relaistic and captivating. These two were os much alike in ways it would spoil the sotry to relate, but they were laso on opposite sides, and the frictiona dn tension between them was palpable.

To me they were really the only thing worth reading about in this book, and it was far too little, but what there was, was pure gold, particularly the ending sequence, which is why I finally decided I could rate this novel as a worthy read. I noticed that some reviewers had described this relationship as insta-love (or instadore as I term it since no actual love is ever involved in these relationships, especially when written by female authors of young adult paranormal stories. Those reviewers missed the point.

Cluny and Fever had significant ties which went outside the normal range of interaction and which for me explained their attraction to and fascination with one another. One was something which happened to each of them in their respective childhoods. Another was their isolation from real family and friends. Another was their being so alike yet on opposite sides. Another was their desire to see justice. Another was that each in turn was the captive of the other and was rescued by the other from imminent death. I don't see how they could not have been drawn together and bonded.

So overall, I recommend this and while some of it was boring to me, it's well-worth reading for the relationship.

Brady Needs a Nightlight by Brian Barlics, Gregory Burgess Jones

Rating: WORTHY!

This story, part of the 'Fundamentales' written in poetic quatrains by Brian Barlics, and illustrated quaintly by Gregory Burgess Jones

This is scary tale to tell 'e, of Brady Bat, a nervous nellie. It matters not if dark or light, Brady is shut down with fright! What can he do, he has no clue! Then one dark and scary night, young Brady Bat, he sees the light! Renewed now is his constitution, because of Brady's bright solution! There. That's done me in for a week or two!

I really liked this story, although I would have liked it better if Brady had first approached someone else with his fears. I don't think it's a good idea to send any kind of message to a child that she is on her own, and that friends, parents, relatives, guardians, older siblings, teachers, and so on aren't really of any help. The story still could have had these people fail to come up with a remedy, and Brady could have gone on to find his own amusing solution. Here's a spoiler, to clue you in: luciferase, luciferin!

One thing about this that I thought was great fun was that the bats are often shown hanging upside down (of course! what self-respecting bat doesn't enjoy a good diurnal inversion?), so if you read this to your child and have the kids it opposite you, they will see the bats standing up. I don't know why, but for some reason that amuses the heck out of me!

One caveat is that the text is way small. I can't speak for a print version of this, but it was only just legible on an iPad, and completely useless on a phone. I don't recommend asking an older person to read this to your kids unless the have great eyesight or a really good pair of eyeglasses! Why so many writers make their text so small in children's books, I cannot fathom.

On the iPad the pages are less than four inches square, and yes, you can enlarge them, but that's a pain to have to keep dicking around with the page size to read small text and then view the whole image. Part of the problem was that the pages in the iPad were laid out end to end like a film strip rather than as pages, and sometimes they became "sticky" and wouldn't swipe. When I tried enlarging them to fit the screen size, they tended to scoot to one edge of the screen instead of staying centered. I don't know what's up with that. I do know that Amazon has created a really crappy ebook reader with its Kindle app, so I wouldn't blame the author or (for once!) the publisher for this snafu. I can say that if I were going to buy this for some kid, I'd get the print version, not the ebook - except not the one Amazon is asking almost eight hundred dollars for!

Despite these issues, I did like this little book, and I consider it a worthy read.