Doctor Who The American Adventures by various authors

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first of two novels I got from Net Galley as advance review copies, thinking they were graphic novels! WRONG! Rest assured I shall be very cautious about selecting anything from Net Galley that comes in a flyer advertising graphic novels from now on! Nevertheless I have to read these and see what happens. In this one, the answer was nothing much. I was very disappointed. Had the stories actually been in graphic format, I would still have been very disappointed, because for me the story is more important than the art.

The book consisted of six short stories, each one an adventure featuring the current Doctor (Peter Capaldi) who has been conspicuous by his complete absence this year for reasons the BBC has utterly failed to justify. However, on the bright side, there is a new Doctor Who spin-off titled Class which is set in Coal Hill Academy, and features the exploits of a teacher and five students, and in the first episode, a guest appearance by Capaldi.

But I digress! The stories in this book are as follows, with a brief review of each:

1. All that Glitters features an alien usurpation of a gold prospector in old California. The Doctor just happens to arrive on the scene to investigate and put things right. This story lacked any real oomph. Yes, you heard me right: oomph!
2. Off the trail is about a family traveling the Oregon trail in the old west, who are abducted by aliens. The Doctor just happens to arrive on the scene to investigate and put things right. Wait! Isn't that essentially what the previous story was about?
3. Ghosts of New York is about the discovery of a buried spacecraft under New York City during the excavation of the subway tunnels. The Doctor just happens to arrive on the scene to investigate and put things right. This story happened to be very reminiscent of the 1967 Hammer film, Quatermass and the Pit, which I liked better.
4. Taking the Plunge concerns a fun fair ride used by an alien to suck life-force out of human riders for later sale. The Doctor just happens to arrive on the scene to investigate and put things right. This story sounds very familiar to me, too, but I can't think of the Doctor Who story I saw it in. It's like the inverse of the episode The Unquiet Dead which featured Eve Myles before she became a Torchwood cast member.
5. Spectator Sport is the story of a robot assassin who tries to murder an alien spectator at the Battle of New Orleans. The Doctor just happens to arrive on the scene to investigate and put things right. This has elements of the episode A Town Called Mercy, but mostly reminded me of the movie Timescape, which was released on video as Grand Tour: Disaster in Time.
6. Base of Operations features aliens trying to take over Earth by emulating and replacing humans undercover of preparations for the D-Day invasion in World War 2. The Doctor just happens to arrive on the scene to investigate and put things right.

The problem with all these episodes is that they were predictable and boring. There was no companion, no humor, no risk that something might go wrong. This is quite literally how it happened - evil alien causes problems, Doctor shows up miraculously and fixes it, Doctor leaves. Rinse. Repeat. It was that monotonous. The stories were simply not entertaining. There was nothing really new or original here, and they failed comprehensively to exhibit the Doctor in a lovable light. The Doctor was boring and essentially a will o' the wisp; he had no real presence and so what;s the point of a Doctor Who story which feels like the Doctor isn't in it for all realistic purposes?

What's the point, for that matter of setting these in the USA? There wasn't anything in any of the stories that really solidly tied the story to the US. The gold rush story had really nothing to do with the gold rush. The Oregon Trail story could have been any road trip horror story in any country. The New York subway story could have been told of any underground railroad excavation anywhere there's an underground. The funfair story could have been any funfair. The spectator sport story could have been told of literally any battle anywhere at any time. The World war two story could have been set in England or anywhere in Europe for that matter, and not have lost a thing. I didn't get the US connection unless it was solely to try and sell copies of this this book in the US.

You can say what you like about Steven Moffat, but one thing he was not, was boring. He produced some of the most amazing Doctor Who episodes ever, he wove the old series into the new often and expertly, he had a great sense of humor, a great way with words, and I will miss him when he's gone. These stories are not a patch on the TV show. I'm hoping that Chris Chibnall will be able to not only carry this heavy mantle but to run with it. These stories didn't cut it for me and I cannot recommend this collection.

Level The Playing Field by Kristina Rutherford

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Note also that this is going to be a lot longer review than I usually give to a book of this short length, because this is an important topic and I don't think it was covered adequately or ironically, equitably here!

The overall impression I had of this book was not that of a reasoned and cogent argument, or of anything that went into any depth. It felt much more like a rant, and as such it failed to make a case. This is the kind of subject which all too often becomes emotional, but that serves no purpose in trying to get a the roots of a discrepancy like this, to properly understand the issues, and to determine how best to set them right - or even if they can be set right.

What disappointed me most of all was that the author seemed unable to recognize the issues even when she described them. For instance, I read:

Every PGA Tour event is televised and some tournaments draw more than 10 million viewers. Only select LPGA Tour events are televised, and even major tournaments draw fewer than 1 million viewers.

I don't get her point here. It seems to me that she's elucidated the problem perfectly: the viewership of the female tournament is one tenth that of the male tournament, meaning that the advertisers are not going to show-up in droves, meaning the money is going to be significantly less, meaning that the winner's purse is going to be dramatically reduced. The the root of the discrepancy, and therefore the problem to be resolved here is why the viewership is so much less, but the author evidently wasn't interested in pursuing this question, preferring instead to wave a hand at media coverage and mark it down as explained. Well, they had media coverage here, but the viewership was far less. Why is the author not asking why that's the case? I'll talk more about this later.

On the one hand the book makes some good arguments for equity in how women are treated when it comes to sports and it definitely highlights the discrepancy between how male and female athletes are viewed (and paid), but on the other hand it came across as rather whiny and preachy, and it seemed far more focused on money and celebrity than ever it was in trying to understand why there's such a massive discrepancy between how athletes of each gender (regardless of whether they're celebrities or not) are viewed.

The author never did distinguish between equality in how athletes are treated, and equality in how athletes garner for themselves a fan base. You can legislate equality, as the US did when Democrat Senator Birch Bayh introduced what became known as Title IX in June 1972 (a year before Roe v. Wade made huge strides in another direction related tomember of Congressr who co-authored it, but it's most commonly referred to as Title IX. Patsy Mink was the first Asian American woman elected to Congress

At the beginning of this book we're asked, of two basketball stars, "Why aren't athletes like LeBron and Maya valued and recognized equally for their talent?" There are reasons for that which we'll go into shortly, and I would have been much more impressed had the book gone after real answers like this instead of the route it took. I would have been more impressed still had it approached the subject as fairly as it expects male and female athletes to be treated! The only 'solution' on offer here seemed to be that if women are given the same media exposure as men, then everything will magically balance-out, but nothing was put forward to support this claim, and frankly I have a hard time seeing that happening for a variety of reasons, and especially not in the US.

The first issue is the question of whether sports really represents the same kind of workplace that other occupations, say in the medical profession or in businesses not tied to professional sports offer. Frankly it doesn't. No one in their right mind would argue that two people, regardless of gender, who were doing the same job to the same degree of skill should get equal treatment including pay, in any ordinary endeavor, but the question of how you resolve whether two people are doing the same job in sports went totally unexamined. There were some random potshots taken at it, but nothing substantial.

Instead, we were treated to a distinctly monocular view: that of men v. women, without any attempt to look at the issue using any other lens. In particular, the fact that sports is one occupation which is conducted in the full glare of media, and with huge audiences in attendance and dramatic financial considerations in play wasn't addressed at all. This is one reason why, at the risk of a pun, it's a different ball game when compared with other occupations.

The book opens with a mention of several female athletes, including Danica Patrick, a NASCAR driver, who is gushingly described as "the most successful female race car driver in history" yet this driver has never won a race on US soil, and as of this writing has had only a single win to my knowledge. So how is her 'success' being calculated? By the fact that she earned thirteen million dollars last year? What does that have to do with being an athlete per se, or with being successful at her chosen sport? Nothing! It pretty much has to do with her having a monopoly in being a high-profile female on one hand, and her not being a complete disaster at what she does on the other.

While I would not deny Danica Patrick, or anyone else the success she's had, however it's measured, I would balk at trying to use this as an argument for equality and the author strangely seems to agree with this because whenever she talks about other female athletes, none of those are championed as successful for having no wins! On the contrary, they're put on a pedestal as being very successful in terms of winning things.

So we immediately have a disconnect in what constitutes success, which then means we have a problem in determining how that success should be rewarded. Do we value a high earner who is not successful at least insofar as garnering wins goes, or do we value success in terms of wins even when remuneration is poor? What's the goal here?! It cannot be the double standard the author seems to have set up. This is important.

I also have to wonder why this book doesn't reference other people who are sports professionals, but who do not earn the big bucks. There are thousands of people in sports, men and women, and only the so-called top-tier ones get the big bucks. Most of the others are entirely unpaid or only part-timers, or full-time professionals earning only the lowest level of financial remuneration for athletes in their field.

Admittedly this can be significant pay, and much higher than most of us can hope for, but I think it would have served a useful purpose to ask why they - both men and women - are not as highly paid as the ones featured in the book, and to ask: does the reason for their inequality offer any clues to the reason for the inequality between men and women - and I'm not talking in terms of performance. This is sports, remember, and individual performance is only one factor - and a relatively small one as it happens, because this isn't your regular everyday occupation, especially not in team sports.

The natural response to what I've said here might be that this book was talking only about high achievers, matching high-achieving males with similar females, but if we apply the 'logic' employed here, but in this direction, can we argue that those people, too, would magically get pay raises and achieve equality if only they could get the same media exposure? You really can't, so I'm wondering how it is that we think increased exposure alone would magically improve women's lot in sports?

If you think I'm trying to make an argument here that female sports professionals are really only lower-tier, or poorer-grade, or second-rate performers, then you're misunderstanding. The argument I am making here is that it's really not as simple or as straight-forward as this author seems to be trying to argue. You can't make a case for equal pay without supporting it, just as you can't make a case for those lower-tier athletes (of any gender) to be on par with the top-tier athletes without supporting that in some way, too.

You can't argue that it has to be done purely from a bald claim that person B ought really to be remunerated at the same level as person A, regardless. You have to ask what is being contributed, because professional sports is about exposure and audiences, not just about personal performance. This is an aspect of the endeavor which the book doesn't explore. Yes, it complains about poor exposure for female athletes, but it doesn't offer any suggestions or real examination of root causes! It merely blames the media and leaves it at that.

The only argument the author seems to be able to make is along the lines of "Hey! Fair's fair!" but the way this system works, and has worked for far too long, really has nothing to do with how well a given athlete performs. The most widely-followed sports really aren't about that, notwithstanding all of the individual achievement awards and post-game MVP appellations. It's about blind team solidarity, sheep-like (or perhaps more accurately, wolf-like) adherence to pack mentality, and in-your-face aggression towards every team and every supporter who isn't "us". Individual players have no part to play in that aspect of team 'sports' especially given that at some point the individual will move on or retire, while the team continues on largely unaffected by the loss of any one individual.

It's not that women can't give attitude or be aggressive, or assertive as over-hyped TV cameras love. They can. It's just that women in general are not as overt as men are in this regard and this applies whether the male or female in question is a player or a spectator. Women are not as combative (that's not to be read as 'not as competitive', which would be a huge lie) as men, and while this is perfectly fine - in fact, I personally prefer it - it doesn't play well given the juvenile frat-boy sports mentality which is rife in today's male-soaked sports media, where it's entirely given over to a combative attitude.

The mentality is 'destroy or be destroyed', 'win at all costs', losers are useless, and so on. The Queen song, We Are the Champions sums it up: "We are the champions! No time for losers 'cause we are the champions of the world!" This is how it's seen. The US football Super Bowl winners are hailed as champions of the world even though no other nations competed!

Again, it's a winner takes all mentality, and it has nothing to do with how well individual athletes perform per se. It's that very psychosis: aggression, combativeness, posing, strutting, in-your-face rudeness, and asinine attitude, which completely turns me off sports, but it is this which appeals to the cave-man mentality that far too many team sports and media outlets seem dedicated to embracing, promoting, and perpetuating. There is no more room for equity and fairness here that there was in the Roman Colosseum.

Before we go any further let's be clear that there are inequalities. According to the Women's Sports Foundation:

• Female students comprise 57% of student populations, but female athletes received only 43% of participation opportunities at NCAA schools.
• Male athletes get 55% of NCAA college athletic scholarship dollars. Guess how much women then get!
• Women's teams receive only 40% of college sport operating dollars and 36% of college athletic team recruitment spending.
• Median head coaches' salaries at NCAA Division I-FBS schools are $3,430,000 for men's teams and $1,172,400 for women's teams.

These telling stats are not ones you'll read in this book, because the book isn't about making that kind of a case. It's all about individuals, and I think that approach was a mistake. I think that very approach played into the media status quo rather than challenged it, which is what is actually needed here. There is a real problem, almost half a century on, in Title IX providing true equality for females in sports. This is a fact, but whether, if there were true and complete equality, this would translate into the same thing at the professional and media level, is another issue entirely. Given the result of over forty years of Title IX, the answer seems to be that it would not make enough of a difference.

The problem with the stats just quoted is that all we get is the bald fact of inequality. There's no exploration of why it's so or why it's being allowed to perpetuate and exacerbate in the professional world. This disparity is nowhere more pronounced than in professional soccer as is highlighted in Newsweek. The US women's team has won three world cups whereas the men's team has never advanced beyond the quarter-finals, yet male players routinely "earn" three times what female players do! To earn their relatively meager compensation, the women must win all twenty of the season games whereas the men could lose all twenty and still get full pay. Is this fair? Not even close. This is exactly the disparity that Title IX sought to set right, so how is it that it fails so badly when these athletes actually get to the professional level?

On this score (at the risk of another pun!) I was sorry to see some sleight-of-hand in this author's reporting. Consider this statement regarding remuneration in the National Women's Soccer League: "The average salary in the U.S. based NWSL is between $6,000 and $30,000 for a six-month season. A top-tier player on the men's pro side makes more than the high-end of that average - in a single week" Note how we went from an "average" to a top-tier performer? The average isn't even an average, it's a range. Is the actual average halfway between the two values? How does that compare with the men's average? We're not told, but comparing an "average" to a top-tier man's pay isn't comparing apples to apples. That said, the two would still be discrepant, but when the numbers are twisted and mismatched like that, it's really hard to get a good picture. We can't begin to figure out how to narrow a gap when we don't even get to know what the gap is or why it really exists!

One assertion from the author, referencing what someone else has said on the topic, is that "the key to closing this gap is simple: People just need to see us play. When increased exposure leads to interest from advertisers, the amount of money involved can rise pretty quickly," but this is not borne-out by experience. According to Newsweek, the Women's World Cup final of 2015 was the most watched soccer match - male or female - ever in the US, but this garnered nothing for women's sports, not even for women's soccer in the year that followed.

It's been almost twenty years since the US women's team won the World Cup soccer final in front of a sold-out Rose Bowl holding some 90,000 fans. It was a stunning game every bit the equal of a men's game - in truth leagues better than a men's game. The US men's soccer team has never done this! Whenever there's such a win, and there have been three, it's all "we're world class" and "women's sports are on the upsurge," but the day after it's always "ho-hum! What's next?" You cannot blame female athletes for asking "What do we have to do to get recognition? You cannot blame the US Olympic women who carried home 61 medals to the men's 55 from Rio for asking the same question. The author apparently isn't interested in asking this kind of question or pursuing it as far as it needs to go.

There are important aspects to these discrepancies which the author doesn't touch upon too, and which in fact relate directly to her calling an unfair play on pay. Look at US basketball, for example: while fifty or so top NBA players earn more than the entire WNBA teams roster combined, the NBA brings in five billion dollars, whereas the Women's National Basketball Association is lucky to break even. This is a question which ought to have been explored, but was not. Why does the WNBA fare so poorly? Is it because the media is shunning it, or because it simply doesn't attract as many fans and global sponsorship as the men's games do, and if that's the case, then why is that so? The author seems content to blame media bias, offer no support for the claim, and leave it at that.

We'll get back to that in a second, but let's take a moment and ask why the author never addresses the fact of women being segregated in sports as they are in no other profession, not even in the military these days. She simply accepts this segregation as a given, and I have to wonder why that inequality isn't addressed. If the leagues were white players on one side and black players on the other, then I'm sure she would have found that worth questioning, so why no questions about gender segregation? The black basketball league would then be the one making the big bucks and the white league would be in the position the women's league is, more than likely, in terms of garnering coverage! It's not an inapt comparison!

I further have to wonder if this segregation is part of the problem: if women, instead of playing in the WNBA, played in the NBA, how would they fare? This isn't to try and set up an argument for saying that women can't compete on equal terms and therefore shouldn't get equal treatment. Women have proven repeatedly that they can compete on equal terms. This is to point out that this book really doesn't delve very deep. It makes a superficial argument that everything ought to be equal, but it never makes a case for why, and it never wonders whether this particular aspect also ought to be equal and if so, would it improve matters? It avoids that altogether. It also avoids dress code, which we shall look at shortly.

Back to the segregation. It's a fact the women tend to be smaller and less muscular than men, but is this a problem? Maybe. Women would be typically shorter and lighter than the men they played against were the basketball leagues to be combined. In the NBA, the average height is six feet eight inches, whereas the average height in the WNBA is six feet. Would this be a disadvantage given that half the NBA players are necessarily six feet or less, and basketball is in theory at least, a non-contact sport? Would the advantage that a tall woman has among less tall-women in her league translate to poor performance if she became a medium-sized person among many taller persons in a male league? It's an interesting question, but it went unexplored and ignoring this made the author's case feel more like special pleading than it did a call for fair play.

Dd you know that the ball is also different between the male and female game in basketball? It's slightly smaller and lighter. Why is that and why does the author not address it? Why do female basketball players use a smaller ball while female soccer players do not? There's no answer because the author didn't ask the question. These differences in equipment translate across many other sports - the women's javelin and the women's discus are both smaller and lighter than the men's, the shot is lighter in the shotput, LPGA courses are shorter than PGA courses, and so on. In basketball, while women shoot free throws on par with men, their 3 pointers from the field average lower even in their own league. So what does equality mean? What does parity have to hinge upon? Again, we get not a word on this from the author who seems to be arguing for parity in pay but not in anything else.

As a Washington Post article puts it,

As Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, told me: "The reason we have females separated in sports is because in many sports, the best female athletes can't compete with the best male athletes. And everybody knows that, but nobody wants to say it. Females are structured like a disabled class for all sorts of, I think, good reasons."

This is something else the author did not explore in this book. Is the problem that simple or is there more to it? She didn't ask. According to the NY times, "There has yet to be a financially viable women's mainstream sports league in the United States." The author would undoubtedly argue that this is because of poor media coverage, but although she argues that, she fails to support any such argument.

And take a look at the crowd in the image accompanying the article. That says it all right there. Women are not sports attenders in general - not on the level at which men are - or even at which women are when it comes to men's games. The attendance by gender at all of the major sports in the US shows males turning up at literally twice the rate of female attendees. We read a lot in this book about women who play the sports, but nothing about those who attend and thereby help pay the salaries of the participants.

It bothers me that the author doesn't explore these aspects as a reason for disparity and inequality, asking why the attendance is so poor. Advertisers are not going to want to pay much to have an ad at a game with seven thousand people when they can have one at a game which will be seen by twice that number of people (not even including the viewers at home), and without extra advertising revenue, there's less cash to pay the players. The author doesn't explore, either, whether men really ought to get more if they play eighty games in a basketball season, which is twice what female players play.

There's an interesting, and sad, article here about this disparity in attendance related to Syracuse University's performance in the 2016 basketball season (and on the topic of inequality do compare the men's basketball page for Syracuse in Wikipedia with the women's! This makes a better argument about inequality than this book did, in my opinion!). Women had a far better season than the men (losing in the final whereas the men lost in the quarterfinals) yet their attendance was averaging less than a thousand, while the men's was almost twenty-two times as high.

Keep in mind that roughly thirty percent of the attendance at the men's games - that would be 6,000 to 7,000 people - was women. Where were these women when it came to games played by their own gender? ESPN is on record as saying that men accounted for 66% of its WNBA audience in 2013. Where were the women? Why are they viewing women's games at roughly the same percentage as they're viewing men's games? Why are so few men viewing women's games?

None of this is explored in the book, yet all of it is relevant to the case the author thought she was making. Is the lack of interest in women's sports not just from the media and from men, but also from women themselves? Apparently so, and this is one thing Title IX cannot legislate. They can compel equal opportunity (to more or less success as we've seen), but they cannot compel fans and supporters into existence or into attendance.

There are sports where women compete on perfectly equal terms with men, but where women are highly underrepresented. The author never explored this. For example, Danica Patrick has extremely high visibility and is highly rewarded for racing in NASCAR, but as mentioned, she has never won a race (as of this writing) on US soil, and has had only one win elsewhere. The author mentions Danica Patrick but never explores the details. Patrick earned about thirteen million in 2015, whereas Dale Earnhardt earned almost twice that, with no wins! Kyle Busch, who won at least five races earned less than Patrick did! There is no justice or parity anywhere in this particular story, yet no one seems to complain about that!

What do TV advertisers advertise at women's games? At men's games it seems to be cars, beer, power tools, and financial and retirement opportunities. What do advertisers want to offer to women, and do they have the same advertising budget to offer it with that the car and beer advertisers do? Again, this is unexplored, but it does have a bearing on the subject. More to the point is what happens in comparable situations.

For example, a new TV show is very much like a sports event. Because of the intensely capitalistic system the USA operates in, the show needs viewers to survive. If viewership goes down, the show is cancelled. We've lost a lot of quality shows because of this, while crappy so-called "reality' shows thrive. Why? Because this is what idiots watch on the idiot's lantern. It's that simple. Quality often fails were the lowest common denominator wins every time, and this is the issue: it all comes down to what makes money for the media. It has nothing to do with parity or equality, fairness or gender rights. If the female sports events don't attract viewers and sustain the attraction beyond world cup events, then advertisers are not going to be interested and the media is not going to cover them, yet this author doesn't ask why attendance is so poor. She just blames the media for it.

Let's talk about equality some more - in this case, equality of dress. Has anyone given any thought to how male athletes dress as compared to female ones? Probably not, but I think it's part of the problem. Take a look at your average male track athlete in the last Olympics and note how they dress for the track. On men, the shorts may be tight or loose fitting, and the shirt may be sleeveless or not, but they are wearing a shirt and shorts. Now take a look at the women who are, for all practical purposes, dressed in bikinis. Shotput? The same. Javelin? The same. Why is that? For beach volleyball, they wear even less! The men don't though. Why is that?

Consider this: swimming is the only event I can think of in the Olympics in which men wear less than women. Maybe it is literally for all practical purposes that women dress so skimpily, but if that's the case, then why are men not emulating them in terms of wearing an abbreviated top and bikini shorts? Now look at soccer or basketball. What do women wear? Very much the same as men do! Why is that? It seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously as an athlete, you might want to reconsider wearing bikinis for every event! Is this a valid argument? We don't know, because once again, this is a highly visible aspect to sports which this author completely ignores.

I didn't like this author's overall attitude either, quite frankly! At one point, she says, "But it's female athletes who most consistently give us representations of women who embody qualities like toughness and power and tenacity." How disrespectful is that to women who work in other professions? Are female firefighters not tough? Are female law enforcement disempowered? Are female soldiers, sailors, air personnel, and the Coast Guard lacking tenacity? Are female industry leaders powerless? Are teachers not tenacious? Are female nurses not tough?! The single-minded focus on athletes here, notwithstanding this was the main purpose of the book, was an insult to women working in other fields.

In conclusion, this book felt far more like a cult of personality than an honest exploration on gender inequity in sports. The bottom line, though would seem to be popularity: does the media really shun women's sports or does the media simply show what's most popular because it's from this that advertising revenue will derive, regardless of what gender is involved in the sport?

This question should have been one to explore, but we don't get that here: who attends? Who pays to watch? Is the female game perceived, by those who pay the entrance fees, just as worthy of admission price as the men's game is? As reported in late 2016, "The WNBA registered its highest attendance (1,561,530) since 2011 and the highest average attendance (7,655). For comparison, the average attendance at NBA games is over twice that, at around 17,000.

Are people simply voting with their feet not for which gender is worth supporting, but for which game is worth viewing with their limited budget? Which has the best atmosphere? Which one their friends will be going to and talking about the next day? Maybe it's just that simple, maybe it isn't, but we won't know the answer to that from reading this book, and I cannot recommend it because not only does it not achieve what it claims to aim at, it doesn't even pursue what it claims to be chasing! If you want to write a book about leveling the playing field, you need to be on the level in what you write.

Tigers for Kids by Kim Chase, John Davidson

Rating: WARTY!

This book was a free special on Barnes and Noble, and I can see why. It was not very well written and rather sloppily edited in places. It read more like fan-fiction than any serious attempt to interest young children in tigers. A lot of it was repetitive and felt, at least, like it had been taken from some online source and the rest made-up. A lot of it actually read like it was a middle-grade essay. It was free, so you can't complain too much, but caveat emptor! Or in this case, cave-cat emptor?!

While the book gets a lot right, it's also a fount of misinformation. For example, on page 7 (the page number on my tablet in the Nook reader - the book itself has no page numbers), we're told the modern tiger is a descendant of the "saber tooth tiger" but that's not true. Tigers and their closest relatives, snow leopards, broke away from other cat species some three million years ago and are not closely-related to saber-toothed cats (not tigers!) at all - no modern cat is.

One of the things the introduction promises, is to explain why tigers have stripes, and it comes up with the obvious answer that tigers are better camouflaged with stripes than if they were all orange or all black or white. What this book doesn't tell you is that the basic reason for the coloration is that the tiger's skin is that color! If a tiger were shaved, it would not look as pretty, but it would still have the same stripes, and probably would be a lot cooler in the daytime heat!

But the thing which isn't addressed at all is that the tiger tends to be a crepuscular and nocturnal hunter, plus, it sees prey and prey sees it in ways it is hard for us to imagine with our sight, so the tiger's camouflage and hunting habits have to be pictured in a world of poorer daytime vision, better nighttime vision (be it greyscale), and a world inhabited by odors which we cannot even begin to imagine with our amateur and dysfunctional noses!

It's not true to say the tiger can see as well as a human during daytime. It can see as well as it needs to, but it doesn't have the acuity humans have for the simple reason it never evolved in tigers: it wasn't necessary for them to be able to conduct their business, which is hunting, and which is conducted at twilight or at night. During those times of day the tiger can capture six times more light (not "six time greater" as the book has it) than humans because they have six times the number of receptor rods in their retinas - just like your domestic cat does. They also have, like a domestic cat, a tapetum lucidum - essentially a mirror behind the retina which reflects light back onto the retina so they can 'double-dip' as it were. The cost of this is that they have poorer daylight vision - both domestic cats and tigers - and see color poorly if at all as compared with humans.

The "six time greater" spelling/grammar error is repeated in other places in the book in different ways, such as when I read on page 15 that "their black strips...hide them", when it should clearly have read 'black stripes'. There are awkward constructions such as "One form of verbal communication used by tigers is roaring. Other tigers from as far away as two miles can hear the roaring of other tigers." Another instance was "It is not uncommon for there to be a dominant or leader among the cubs."

Contrary to what the book tells us, that "Our current day tigers evolved into a subspecies that existed 25 million years ago," modern tigers have existed for less than two million years. About three million years ago they existed only as an ancestor species that eventually split into snow leopards on the one hand and tigers on the other, so I have no idea where the '25 million' figure comes from, and the book offers no references whatsoever to check.

In conclusion, if your kids absolutely adore tigers and can't get enough of them, and you can get this book free, then go for it, but I can't in good faith recommend it as a useful book on the topic. You should read my other non-fiction review posted today to see how a book on animals should be done.

Birds of Prey Vol 2 Your Kiss Might Kill by Duane Swierczynski, Travel Foreman

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second of two disappointing Birds of Prey graphic novels I got from the library. This volume comes much alter than the previous one, and I have to say that the artwork was all-around better, but the story just as dissatisfying and even confusing. The cover art was just as bad as in the previous volume, with black canary shown emitting her "sonic scream" (what kind of a scream wouldn't be sonic?! LOL! That there's sound is implied in the noun itself. Only paintings by Edvard Munch are silent!) and in effect looking like she's put on many pounds in doing it! Again, this is one reason why covers don't mean a heck of a lot to me, not even in graphic novels.

This story features Batgirl, Katana, Poison Ivy, and Starling (not Clarice, unfortunately). Despite Poison Ivy getting the bigger picture on the cover, this story is about Black Canary aka Dinah lance, whose life is threatened. During the course of the story the team has to transport Poison ivy to the Amazon to save her life, and that's where the creepy people attack them. No really, people made from creepers. Really.

For me the story was poor and further undermined by various characters disporting themselves in fishnet, and bustiers and bikini-underwear, so it really wasn't entertaining at all. It made me sorry I'd even considered reading about the Birds of Prey in comic books at all, and it also made me want to get back to watch the TV series again to get clean! I cannot recommend this one, either.

Birds of Prey Vol 4 Sensei & Student by Gail Simone and various artists

Rating: WARTY!

Since 1996, DC comics has published several series in the Birds of Prey category which is why it's so hard to keep track of which was published when and in what order - a failing of which comic books seem inexplicably proud. The two I read, I came across by accident at the local library. One of them actually did the courtesy of announcing that it was volume two on the cover, but volume two of which series was left to guesswork. That it also called "The New 52" offer a clue, but not much of one. The other volume, typically for comics, offered no clues at all which series the story was in, if any.

I first came to Birds of Prey via the short-lived, and slightly limp, but nonetheless enjoyable TV series which came out in 2002, but which I didn't watch until quite recently. This is why I was interested in picking up these comic books when I saw them at the library. I was drawn to the TV series by two of the cast, Dina Meyer, who I've adored ever since I saw her in the movie Johnny Mnemonic based on a William Gibson novel, and Rachel Skarsten who, as later, as Tamsin in the TV show Lost Girl provided endless entertainment for me.

The TV show featured only Oracle, Black Canary (the two founders of Birds of Prey), along with Huntress and Harley Quinn and in main roles. Black Canary wasn't part of the inception of Birds of Prey in the TV series. She came along in the first episode after the organization was up and running, evidently founded by Oracle and Huntress and already with some back story. The graphic novels did not feature Harley Quinn in any kind of leading role, but did feature the other three in main roles, along with Lady Hawk.

The first of the two graphic novels I read featured specifically Oracle, Black Canary, Huntress, Lady Shiva Cheshire, and Savant, although Oracle was largely sidelined from being imprisoned inexplicably and to little purpose either on her part or on the part of her captors who were purportedly Homeland Security or some such government agency. Homeland security never made any sense to me because, fool that I am, I'd always thought that's what the FBI was supposed to be, but I seriously underestimated the power of a bureaucracy to proliferate and perpetuate itself.

This story, from the first Gail Simone era, was very disappointing, especially from a series with a female writer. Catwoman (or someone I assumed was Catwoman) is featured prominently in the lower right quadrant of the cover yet makes no appearance (not that I noticed) in the story. A half-dressed Batgirl also occupies a quadrant of the cover, hilariously catty-cornered to Catwoman, but her appearance is also limited and un-entertaining, like she's on a leash. Huntress disports herself at one point in fishnet hose as part of her costume. Seriously? I don't believe I've ever read a graphic novel wherein the artists have less respect for women than I saw in this one, and the art wasn't even that great to make a pretense of "justifying" it.

I got the impression that the cover illustrations were nothing more than a salacious come-on, and had nothing whatsoever to do with what happens inside, which is a very good reason not to pay any attention to the cover, not even on a graphic novel. Unfortunately, a glance through the interior had made it look like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out to be. In the end all it managed to be was an exploitative montage of "hot" female super hero body parts - an open crotch here, a pair of legs or breasts there. The art was less than satisfactory and very bland, so I guess it needed the titivation aspect in order to survive. If comics want to grow beyond the shadow of superannuated adolescence with which they're oft tarred, they need to grow beyond, way beyond, this schoolboy pointing and tittering mentality when it comes to artwork.

The main story, which is what had caught my eye, was about an uneasy alliance between Huntress, Lady Shiva, and Cheshire. This part wasn't awfully bad, but these women were far too well-behaved and polite to be the real characters they were supposed to be, and in the end, this blandness killed all joy of that part of the story for me. I don't want to read about a tame Huntress, a restrained Cheshire, and a Lady Shiva who is on her best behavior. Thus for me killed the story and I cannot recommend this one unless you like looking at highly sexualized cartoon characters who seem to have little to offer beyond unnecessarily exposed body parts.

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

Rating: WARTY!

I think there are good stories to be told from roots in African folklore and mythology, but this one disappointed me by not being one of them. It began unpromisingly; then it picked up and got me interested, but too soon after that, it went downhill into tedium, confusion, and blandness. On top of that, it was a bit too whimsical for my taste.

The story is of Paama (Pah-ma) and her glutton husband Asige (Ass -ee-gay, whose name I had thought was Asike from listening only to the narration). The two are living apart, and Asige comes to join Paama in the community where she now resides. He proceeds to embarrass her endlessly with his constant need for food and the bizarre circumstances he gets himself into in the pursuit of one more mouthful. It turns out that there's a reason for this gluttony in the end, but that comes only after a long tedious separation between these two again. It was this part (the disorderly eater) which had started to recoup my interest, but it was a bit too silly and was over before I really started to think I might enjoy it.

I really didn't get this constant separation of Paama and Asige, although I could understand why she wouldn't want to be around him. I was like, "Get a divorce already!" The biggest problem for me was that when Paama wasn't looking stupid, she was looking like a doormat or a coward, running away instead of taking charge and dealing with these issues. There were African "bad spirits" taking human form and interfering with people. Paama was given a magic pestle and then some spirit came after her seeking to recover it, and the whole thing dissolved into a hot mess, and I lost all interest. In the end I found I was skimming more and more of it just to get to the end and see if anything happened. It really didn't, so I can't recommend this one at all. Robin Miles's reading and characterizations were so-so, some good and some annoying, so that didn't help. Audio books tend to be a more experimental form of reading for me than other formats, so I expect more of them to fail to capture my interest. This one was one of the failures, and I can't recommend it as a worthy read.

Change of Life by Samantha Bryant

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"the flange of a Ouija board"? The planchette, not the flange!
"experimenting on the populous" Populace, not populous!

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

This is the sequel to Going Through the Change by Samantha Bryant, which I reviewed very favorably back in August of 2015.. I have to say up front that I was much less pleased with this one for a variety of reasons which I shall discuss shortly. The story is that of some mature women who undergo changes which equip them with superpowers when all they expected was menopause or a quiet retirement. I enjoyed reading a story about more mature women for once. Such stories are rare, and well-told and engaging ones rarer still. In the first book, Patricia O'Neill grows scales on her skin. Jessica Roark discovers that she can fly - or at least float. Helen Braeburn learns that she can create fire - and survive it - and she becomes the villain of the piece. Linda Alvarez changes, rather abruptly, into a man with very unusual strength.

This novel picks up not long after the first one finishes, with the girls moving on with their lives as best they can now their secret is out. Sort of. The story begins with Linda Alvarez, now officially renamed Leonel - although why that name rather than say, 'Lyndon', is not explained. Neither is it explained why she adopts a man's name given that her thought processes are very much a woman's at this point, since she's literally a woman occupying a male body. She apparently never heard of a boy named Sue! 'Lyndon' is a boy's name with a similar sound, although it doesn't mean the same as 'Linda' does (Spanish for beautiful).

Most names which mean 'beautiful' are female names, so Linda would need to be named something like Hermoso or Bonito, neither of which have quite the same feel. How about Bo, short for Beauregard? It's just a suggestion. Fortunately, Leonel still has the love of her husband who is conveniently bisexual (at least she hopes she still has his love), and meanwhile she's training to be an agent with the government, along with Jessica, and trying to track down the villain of the previous volume.

This volume introduces a new villain, but for me, the problems with the tale too many to really enjoy it. This volume did not have the original and inventive feel of the first; there was very little action in it; it was overly long for the story it told, and it consequently moved very slowly. On top of that, we learned nothing about how or why the women changed the way they did, so there was no more depth added there. Worse, the ending was very dissatisfying, with the villain escaping, so now it's become like an annoying episodic TV series with a seasonal arc. In short, the novel embodied what I like least about series and why I do not favor them, except for a very few rare and treasured instances.

Some parts were very entertaining. I particularly liked Jessica in this one whereas I think I preferred Linda in the first. Jessica was bouncy and energetic and I enjoyed her scenes, but these were the only ones I really enjoyed. The problem as that Jessica never got to show her stuff. She was always on a leash and neither did Linda nor Patricia get let-off the leash for that matter. It was like they were being held back, and this is fine in order to build expectations in the beginning of the story, but at some point you have to let your super heroes loose, and when they're held back for the entire story, all you do is engender disappointment and irritation. At least that's how it is with me.

Overall, the pace in this volume was lethargic, and the contrast between this volume and the last, and between Jessica's scenes here and the chapters featuring other characters was very noticeable. Talking of bouncing, there was a lot of bouncing around between characters too. I felt a bit like a pinball! While the novel is commendably not told in first person, for which I thank the author, the short chapters got me invested in one character's story only to find I was quickly ripped away from that into another character's world, where I would start to get settled only to be ripped away again. It made for a choppy and unpleasant read for me.

There was a lot of telling here rather than showing as well, and some of the characters I couldn't get invested in because reading about them felt more like this was a daytime TV show than ever it was a super-hero story. I'm very much in favor of writers who offer a different take on a given genre, in this case super powers and the people imbued with them. This is why I liked the first book in this series so much, but I don't like soap operas, and this had that feel to it, and it cropped up far too often for my taste.

The story was also rather deceitful in some regards, because all these internal monologues gave the superficial appearance of delving into a character's feelings and relationships, yet in the final analysis, we never really got to see those relationships in action. Linda, for example, was fretting about her husband, who had been the dominant stereotypical male (which makes me wonder what Linda saw in him in the first place).

In this story, we learn that he's not dealing with this role-reversal, as Linda takes up a career and he feels like he's being nudged into a back seat. The problem is that all we ever get is Linda's take on it. We never get her husband's views except through Linda's mind. It's like men have no role to play in this story unless they're a problem, or a character who seems to be there solely as a love or flirtation interest. Frankly, it felt genderist to me.

The ending was the biggest disappointment because the whole story had these two women, Jessica and Leonel, training like they were building towards some big showdown with evil, yet in the end, the story fizzled and the villain escaped not though any great villainous power or devious plan, but through sheer incompetence on the part of the very operatives who had been training supposedly so diligently and capably!

Leonel was sidelined completely at the end, and Jessica and Patricia were effectively hobbled, so there really was no showdown and no real super hero moment, let alone a real team effort. I was truly disappointed having gone through a very long build-up for an ending that was significantly less than thrilling. I wish the author all the best with this series but it's not one I want to continue following, and I can't in good faith recommend this as a worthy read. I think I would have enjoyed it more had the first story been complete in itself, and this second novel been set in a new location with a totally different group of characters who underwent, perhaps, something similar to the first set. Instead we have a second volume that felt less than the sum of the first.

The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

Rating: WARTY!

This is purportedly a continuation of the Millennium trilogy written by Stieg Larsson, but it contains none of Larsson's material which is being held in contention between Larsson's surviving girlfriend of longstanding and his family. This "authorized" version (that is authorized by everyone but Larsson who is dead, and his girlfriend who has possession of his material) was written independently by David Lagercrantz. Once again the title has been changed from the Swedish original, which was Det som inte dödar oss or, That which does not kill us.

The volume runs to some 400 pages, but is so full of fluff and padding that, had the extraneous detail been removed, I would have read the whole thing. As it was, I read only half of it before I gave up out of boredom and disgust. If I had to read the word 'gatan' one more time in any form, I would have honestly puked. I seriously do not need to know every detail of a city in which the characters live and move, and have their being. Indeed, I don't need to know any details of it unless the details are somehow important to the story. A bit of filler I don't mind, but what amounts to paragraphs of it stuffed between the actual interesting bits is just annoying and pretentious. And there really were not any interesting bits here.

The front cover tells us this is "A Lisbeth Salander Novel" but in those two hundred pages I read - the entire first half of the novel - she barely put in an appearance, was absent for most of the early chapters, and hardly even garnered a mention for that matter, let alone actually showed up. How a novel can be deemed to be about a specific character when she not only fails to appear for more than fifty percent of it, but isn't even a topic worth bringing up, is a bigger and more intriguing mystery than the one the novel itself is supposed to relate.

The first nine chapters don't even get us beyond the first day. I know this because the author tediously labeled every chapter November 20th. I care. Any author worth their salt would have made this clear from the writing instead of having to use it as a chapter heading. Hell, put it in 'Part 1' (or part 'November 20') if you have to be that pedantic. Quit hitting me over the head with it every few pages. If I wanted to get 'being hit over the head lessons', I'd contact Terry Jones....

In short, I can't recommend this at all. If you insist on reading it for yourself, I'd suggest you skip the first 120 pages, because literally nothing worth reading about happens before then. Not much happens afterwards, but at least something distantly resembling a thriller begins around there. Unfortunately by that time, I'd lost all interest in pursuing this. I simply didn't care and had no faith whatsoever that this author could replicate what Larsson did without actually cloning what Larsson did. This novel seemed to be every bit as much of a brand new episode in the Millennium universe as the execrable The Force Awakens was a "new" episode in the Star Wars universe.

I saw the movie based on this novel - based on, but barely resembling it. If I had thought it followed the novel I would never have gone to see it, but from preview, it looked like it might be worth watching and I was curious to see how Claire Foy did. She did the best she could with the lousy material, I guess, but the movie castrated Salander and rendered her, as one reviewer put it, into a Goth James Bond. I wouldn't have been that kind. It wasn't a Lisbeth Salander movie in any meaningful sense.

I have to admit I lost some respect for Foy in that she actually chose to do this movie. It was far too Hollywood-ized and neither she nor the writers understand Salander at all. Consequently, it had none of her soul and was essentially nothing more than an attempt at a purse snatch (your purse) by the surviving family of Stieg Larsson in my opinion. In truth it's an insult to Larsson and to his memory as was the novel. I actively dis-recommend both.

November Fox by Esther Bertram

Rating: WARTY!

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

I had to DNF this novel because it made no sense and was not well-written in my judgment. It employs two voices, one of which was first person which I typically detest. Why authors do this I do not know, because very few of them do it well. I can see no rational for it here, when two third person voices would have been better. The ending (which I skipped to in order to confirm I had correctly divined it) isn't original and is telegraphed pretty well from very early in the novel so it comes as no surprise. When the ending is known, there needs to be an interesting journey toward it, but here there was not. I was bored and found myself skipping sections in order to find an interesting bit. The problem was that those became increasingly scarce the further I progressed.

The story felt like it was being told by a stalker in some regards which did not sit well with me. Erica, the narrator, is watching November Fox, a pop diva, on what appear to be TV monitors spread across a city. This was another annoyance to me, because there was zero world-building here, so I found myself very confused most of the time about what exactly, was happening, and where, and how! I started losing interest and lost it altogether when a talking elephant arrived in the cast. The elephant spoke German, so we got bits and pieces of German which was then tediously translated for us. I hate that in novels. I think if you're going to have a character speak a foreign language you need to have the character speak English and indicate the foreign nature of the tongue with a brief description up front and then an occasional reminder through the rest of the text in some form or another.

The way it was done here made it seem like we had a condescending Disney character, and it was truly annoying and felt insulting to Germans. German is an intriguing language with a fascinating (at least to me) mix of harshly masculine and endearingly feminine tones to it, and it can be beautiful to hear, but that's not how it came across in this novel. I didn't get at all why German was its language! Elephants do not hail from Germany. If it had spoken some Indian or African dialect, it would have made more sense to me.

I concede that it's certainly possible for an elephant to be born in Germany, but to have one simply show up speaking German with no explanation for it was far more of an annoyance than ever it was of interest to me. Its frequent spitting out of "Ja ja!" actually did jar and made it sound like a yahoo in terms of how brutal it was on the senses. I felt it demeaned the language, and I really didn't like this character. It was this that constituted the final straw for me, and I quickly lost all interest in trying to plod on through this book.

I wish the author, who is evidently a composer, a musician, and a producer as well as a novelist, all the best in her endeavors, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one at all based on what I read of it.

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

Rating: WARTY!

This one sounded from the blurb like it might make for an interesting read, but all that ultimately means is that the blurb writer did their job. It doesn't mean that the writer did! This was a fail for me. It started out gamely enough as a steampunk story, but then it did a sidestep into high fantasy with gnomes, dwarfs, and trolls, and I was wondering if I'd entered some other universe. Apparently I had, This is Terry Pratchett's 40th Discworld novel, and I now have zero interest in learning any more about Discworld!

It came back to the steam punk story after too long of a while, but by the time it did, I'd lost all interest in pursuing this. I don't mind mixing up genres, but I have no time for trolls and dwarfs, I really don't. On top of this, the novel reminded me very much of Douglas Adams. I like Adams, but I don't like his fiction! I never knew him personally, but I did go to one of his talks one time and I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed, and favorably reviewed his non-fiction book, Last Chance to See about endangered species, but if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a Brit writer babbling on and on humorously and in an annoyingly self-satisfied manner. It reminds me too much of my own inane parodies!

No one in their right mind should take those seriously, and I honestly could not take this seriously. I certainly can't recommend it based on the ten percent I could stand to listen to. There's no point in stoically plodding on to the bitter end in a novel that quite simply doesn't get your heart beating, when you can ditch it and be off and running with the next one that will get your pulse up. Life's too short!

Out On Good Behavior by Dahlia Adler

Rating: WARTY!

This is a LGBTQIA story set on a college campus, where Francesca Annamaria Bellisario (who naturally goes by 'Frankie', because she's queer, of course), a self-described pansexual (which does not mean she only has sex with cooking pots), is leading a dangerously promiscuous life. While 'sex' is clearly in her sexicon in bold letters, 'safe' certainly is not. Why anyone would become involved with her is a mystery, but college students are not necessarily the smartest rats in the maze - which is why they're at a learning institution, after all, isn't it? The question is, are they going to get the education they expect, or something else entirely? The target of her lust, as she dallies with everything in between, is Samara Kazarian who rooms with one of her friends. This is the story of their "courtship" and it was a huge fail for me.

I know college students are supposed to have an improbably over-sized libido according to MTV and other jock mentalities, but only half of this couple was that kind of person, The other was supposedly a smart, conservative, closet lesbian who you would think would show a lot more common sense than she does. That was one of the problems, We were frequently told how things were, but never shown.

The story was, essentially, a lesbian wet-dream with zero characterization. If we're to go by these lights, all that queers in college ever think of is sex, sex, and more sex, and that's the entirety of it! They never think of homework, or coursework, or hobbies or interests. They never expend any time in conversation which doesn't involve going to sports games or having sex. For me it was completely ridiculous and wholly unrealistic.

Frankie is purportedly an artist and truly dedicated, yet we get none of that here. The closest we come is Sam's examination of one of Frankie's pictures at an exhibition, but then it's gone and we get nothing more. Why make her an art student at all? There is of course no reason except that if she's an artist or an actor, we can stereotype her more? The story felt inauthentic from top to bottom, especially with the inverse slut-shaming (what would you call that? Slut championing?!) that's indulged in with Frankie, who can do nothing wrong. Slut championing is equally as bad as slut-shaming itself is, especially when it seems to be dedicatedly mischaracterizing all queers as promiscuous and shameless. And the idea that a retiring virgin and a slut-champion can find common ground and do it so quickly and effortlessly had to be a joke.

The only relationship Frankie and Sam had was sex. The only value Sam offered for Frankie was, judged by the writing here, a sexual one. She was better than masturbating, it seems. Frankie cared only about the depth of Sam's skin, and her ass and legs, and how beautiful she was. We never got anything which suggested that she liked Sam as a person, much less as a companion, or truly valued her for anything other than lust. That's what turned me off, paradoxically, because that's all there was to this relationship. If that's all the consenting parties are looking for, then it's fine, but I don't particularly want to read about those people, and I certainly don't want to read a bait-and-switch-hitter novel which pretends it's offering a great romance, yet delivers only carnality and literally nothing else but trope.

The saddest thing is that for all her supposed smarts, Sam never once considered discussing venereal disease with Frankie, despite knowing full-well that Frankie would quite literally screw anything on two legs and human (although despite her proudly self-proclaimed pansexualism, all Frankie ever really did was go after or lust after girls). I didn't expect a pages-long dialog about sexual responsibility by any means, that would have been boring, but the fact that not once was it ever so much as even mentioned in the 60% of this novel that I read, was shamefully irresponsible.

There was literally no exposition either. The entire novel was pretty much conversation, all of which centered on Frankie's adulterated lust for Sam. It was truly sickening, and I could not continue reading it when I fully-realized that this story was never going to mature or change. I sure as hell cannot recommend it. If you want a dumb sex romp, then this might be for you, but don't go into this thinking there's anything loving or romantic about it, or that there's a great relationship story here. There isn't.

The Frog Prince by Jenni James

Rating: WARTY!

Jenni James (not to be confused with English actor Jennifer James despite Jenni's use of words like "bum" and other 'British-isms'!) has made a career out of retelling fairy tales (think of Disney titles and you'll pretty much have half her oeuvre). She's moving on to pillaging Jane Austen next, but what the heck - if it works, then best of luck with it. She also has a series of videos on her blog (here on Blogspot) and on You Tube, purportedly telling people how to write novels.

I watched parts of some of them and they didn't seem very helpful to me. The fact is that any time you spend not writing is not helpful to your writing career, because you can attend all the lectures you want - in person or online, it doesn't matter - and you can read all the writing-advice books you want, but unless you are actually writing, you're not a writer and you're going nowhere. Have you noticed that those books on 'how to write a best-seller' are almost always written by "writers" you've never heard of, who've never had a successful novel, let alone a best seller? That ought to tell you exactly how useless those books truly are. They're like those books telling you how to get rich quick, written by people whose only wealth has come from selling those very books!

The videos are each about twelve minutes long, and one of them for example, was about sticking it out with writing and making it to the end of your novel. This is an important topic, but the video missed the mark for me. Instead of offering writing tips for making it through the long haul, the author talked about how long her hair was and what it took to grow it out so long and to take care of it.

I could see where she was trying to go with that, but it offered really nothing (unless it was crammed into the last third of the video, which I didn't watch) to help a writer get to the end, and overcome writing blocks. Full disclosure (or given that this is October, maybe it's Fall disclosure?!): the only way to do that is to write. It's really that simple. In the short term it doesn't matter if you are writing crap. It doesn't matter if it's the worst writing you (or anyone) ever did. Write on. Write to the end. Get the thing finished and then you can go back and edit it.

For me, editing is a lot easier than getting to the end in the first place, so the temptation is to keep going back over what you wrote, whether it be one chapter, or fifteen, or one paragraph, primping and teasing, and perking and polishing, but this will never, ever get your novel finished! Quite the contrary. It will prevent you from ever finishing. There is nothing in this world that can compare with putting that final period to the final sentence in your completed novel even if it's only the first draft! At least, at last, you have it done (after a fashion)!

It feels good, even if the novel isn't perfect. Once it's done, then is the time to go back over it and perk and primp and polish. But don't get lost in that. At some point you need to have a go/no-go decision which will determine if that novel is going to be submitted (or better yet published by yourself), or if it goes on the shelf and you start on your second novel instead, because the first just isn't getting it done. There's no shame in this and it does not mean you're a lousy writer. It actually means you're very smart to know the difference, and to make a wise decision about whether it works!

So if my two cents is worth anything (and it's probably worth about two cents!), then all you need to know is that if you want to be a writer, you have to write lots - and lots. And then some more. Lots more. And you have to read all kinds of books and not necessarily only novels. You have the read the genre(s) in which you're interested to see how others do it and learn from their mistakes.

No one in their right mind likes to be stuck in traffic unless they have a really good audio book to listen to, so if you get stuck at a roadblock (I'm talking about writing here!), you need to jump over it and continue on. You can come back and fix that issue later. Even if your hero is in an impossible fix and all you can offer is "and magic happens and he/she gets away," it's far better to do that and move on, and finish that novel than it is to sit for weeks stuck there not going anywhere because of this one issue.

If you don't like what you're writing, then write something different. If you're not looking forward to hacking the next chapter, write a different chapter or make something different happen. Listen to your characters! Let them tell you how to get out of a fix and where to go next. I promise you it's what your characters will do for you if you have done them the favor of writing them well.

But I digress. Majorly! You're the writer. Take what advice you think helps, ignore the rest, including this if it doesn't help. But write! Write! Write!

This novel didn't get it done for me either because it felt inauthentic and I had to DNF it. It's like the author wanted to get a traditional fairy tale told, but didn't want to write it traditionally, and rather than go determinedly one way or the other, she got stuck somewhere in between, and it didn't work. What it delivered instead was some truly jarring writing, so in the space of three lines, for example, I read three different forms of "maybe":

Mayhap her thoughts and ideals and dreams and all those things she longed for and loved—all of it—perhaps they were too simple for handsome princes to care about. Maybe....

It just did not read easily. I have to confess a personal hatred of 'mayhap' here. I think authors use it as a lazy way to try and put some authentic antiquity into their tales and it almost never works. There were some other writing errors, such as the author using "crumbled" when she ought to have used "crumpled", but those aside, the writing was not awful. It just didn't feel right to me.

On top of this the attempts humor fell flat, and the writing level seemed aimed at middle-grade even though the main characters were young adult. The amusing thing about this to me, is that in and around the era when this story supposedly took place, young children were routinely married off at a very young age, and I'm forced to wonder why so few authors have the courage to write it like it was? that would offer some historical authenticity and do a lot better than tossing in a 'mayhap' here and there, or mixing modern English idiom with antique ones and making the reading a jarring roller-coaster experience, instead of a pleasant read.

For me, the worst thing was the two main characters, because I didn't like either of them. The way they were written made then both look like idiots, in which case they probably deserved each other, but I quickly came to feel like my time would be better spent reading something else, or better yet, writing something! The problem with fairy tales is that they're pretty much all tapped out now. If you want to do this, don't, unless your take on it is going to break seriously new ground and put a truly new spin on the tale. Instead of chasing the vogue, you should try to plough your own furrow: find something new to tap and start your own trend! I wish the author all the best but I cannot recommend this one.

The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

Rating: WARTY!

I don't normally review covers, because they have zero to do with the author (unless they self-publish), and my blog is all about writing, not pretty wrapping and pretension. The problem with this cover though, was glaring. There is a white woman on the front (actually, half a woman) and a half a white man on the back, yet the indication from the text, in the case of the "aliens" is completely unambiguous: they're brown. It was less obvious with the woman, whose only description (in the portion of this I could stand to read) was that she had brown eyes, but given the author, I took a leap here and guessed that the woman was also brown, yet the cover depicts her as white.

A review I read (the only one I saw which actually mentioned skin color) indicated that the text later confirms that she isn't white, so this is yet another in a huge and depressing list of books where the cover artist didn't even bother to read the novel. How pathetic is this? This is why I refuse to run with Big Publishing™. They're so profligate, and if that means I never have a publishing career, then so be it. It's a price I'm perfectly prepared to pay. This cover is racist, period. In some ways I wanted to ditch the novel right there, but then again, as I said, the author has nothing to do with the cover.

This author's debut novel won some literary award or other and that should have warned me off this book, but I didn't know that until I already had it home from the library! The blurb had made it sound like it might be interesting, which means only that the blurb did the job it was supposed to do, and lured me in. Congratulations to the blurb writer. You fooled me again. You should have won the award!

The problem is that this kind of writing is a bit suspect for something so prestigious as a literary award in my amateur opinion.
It's a sci-fi novel about a threatened culture, and it's told (unfortunately in first person, the weakest voice in all of literature) by character Grace Delarua, who is a liaison with a guy from the culture that's at risk of becoming extinct. The author admits how weak her voice is when she finds herself forced into third person at one or more points elsewhere in the story beyond the twenty-five percent that I read. For goodness sake find the courage to admit to how pretentious and useless first person is, and have the good sense to write in third person! Enough with this I² crap!

I could not tell from the writing if these threatened people were actual aliens, as in space aliens, or merely a distant branch of the human tree; that's how bad the writing was, and for someone who seems to have the aim of integration, the author sure spends a heck of a lot of time talking about how divided everyone is. The blurb describes them as aliens and if that's the case, then the 'romance" is doomed from the off because there's no way in hell they could even reproduce - which is Grace's purpose, as she's frequently reminded. This author may garner literary awards but she'd never earn a common-sense science award; however, to be fair, she's not alone among sci-fi writers in that regard. On the other hand if the term 'alien' is being used merely to mean estranged humans, then reproduction is a possibility.

The next problem was that this novel was really a romance novel with a gossamer-thin veneer of sci-fi sprayed on it. It's not really a sci-fi novel at all. Exactly same tale could have been told of two travelers in the American West right around the time that the natives were starting to become forcibly extinct. Even were we to grant that it might conceivably be allowed under the wire as a sci-fi story, the sci-fi is of such generic trope quality that it really doesn't count. There's nothing new or inventive here.

Where, exactly, did this cliché of calling people from Earth "Terrans" arise? It's never used in our language today so where would it evolve from? I know it ultimately comes from Latin, but no one uses it except in the form of terra firma, so I don't get the rationale for its appearance in so many sci-fi novels. It's like everyone blindly signed on for it without a second thought. I think I'd rather read about Earthlings than Terrans which sounds like some species of aquatic reptile! 'Earthlings' is of course as awful as it is antiquated. I don't know who conjured that one up, either. Earthites isn't any better, although perhaps technically more accurate, and Earthens sounds like some sort of pottery. I don't get why sci-fi writers don't simply use the word Human to describe people from Earth. It's not exactly rocket science.

A second trope is absurd spellings and pronunciation for alien names. This problem also extends into fantasy stories. Unless the aliens use the same alphabet we English speakers do, then what's with the spelling of the alien's name: Dllenahkh? We're told it has a Zulu 'dl' to start with and a throaty, hacking 'ch' at the end, but since I don't speak Zulu, I have no idea what a Zulu 'dl' sounds like! Maybe 'tl'? If that's the case, then spell the fricking name starting with a 'Tl'! Seriously. Could we not simply have a phonetic spelling with a bit of plain English tosse din to help with the sound?

The trope aliens are called Sadiri, but they're really Vulcans from Star Trek under a different name, so this was simply sad. The tyranny of trope and cliché continues, but not here. I cannot recommend this novel based on what I read of it. It was boring, plainly and simply. Which means it's probably due for a literary award of some sort.

Go To Sleep Mom by Mary Eakin

Rating: WARTY!

I don't negatively review many children's books because I tend to pick them carefully than others, and I use a little more, shall I say, relaxed criteria for them than I do more mature reading material, for an assortment of reasons. In this case I can't recommend this because it just didn't seem to get the job done.

The premise here is that the kid is put to bed, but gets up and discovers a list of chores his mom has to do before she goes to bed. he decides to "help." The first oddity is that he's woken by his mom running the vacuum cleaner around, which seems like an odd thing to do when you've just put your young kid to bed. Seriously? No! You run that in the morning to help wake them up for school or daycare or whatever! Or you get a Roomba to do it while you're out.

So the kid reads the list of chores: Vacuum, pack lunches, wash dishes, do laundry, bathe babies, wash dog. The list seemed a bit much. Who does lunches the night before? Who washes the dog and does laundry on a weeknight? I get that the idea here is to convey to kids a list of things mom does, and to educate children, but this list seemed more contrived to educate us to see how dumb mom is than anything else. She doesn't make a fresh lunch in the morning? She doesn't put a load of laundry in before she starts vacuuming so she's multi-tasking? She doesn't do another load before she bathes the babies, and another before she bathes the dog? These things have to be done sequentially all on one night? Every night?! Mom is so forgetful that she needs a list with check-boxes? It didn't seem realistic and it sure didn't seem intelligent.

I know kids are far less picky about things than I am, but kids are typically a lot sharper than too many people are willing to credit them, and I'm sure some will see this list as bizarre. Besides, the point here is to educate kids about all the things that mom (and dad - who I note is highly conspicuous by his absence here) does, and it seems to me there are much better ways to do it than the one this book explores.

The kid isn't represented as being too sharp either, because he's assuming that mom has never done any parental chores before this night, and that she can't handle her "mom job." That's neither smart nor kind. And he simply makes her job ten times harder. The artwork is pretty decent, but there's more to a good children's book than pretty pictures - or at least there should be. For me there ought to be a strong educational component, and I was sorry to see what was potentially a good idea go waste via poor execution. I wish the author all the best with her young children's books, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one. But at least I can check it off my reading list!

Girl Band: A Lesbian Adventure by Rory Hitch

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb reads: "Meet cute Holly, curvy Penny, passionate Roxy, cool Anna and teen Jade. Five beautiful girls, making music and making love. When young lovers Holly and Penny decide to form a band it's the beginning of a lesbian adventure full of fun flirtation, sexy seductions and erotic encounters!" Wrong! There is no love, no eroticism, no flirtation, and no seduction here. And certainly no safe sex! Not in the part I read, but note that this is a short (which I could not finish, it was so bad) introduction to a full-length novel. Maybe it gets better, but I can't believe it ever will. It does give a classic expository example of why I never read introductions...forewords...author's notes...prefaces...et al.

This is the second of two "lesbian" stories I read recently. They were both awful and for the same reason: they read like they were written by an inept male author, and the sad thing is that only one of them actually was. It's all juvenile, crude sex here. Eroticism plays no part, and neither does seduction, love or romance. Neither does music for that matter, not based on what I read. You'll be better off reading my novel about a girl band, which I was hoping to have out this year, but since there are two novels lined up before that, only one of which I'm near to completing at this point, I think a more realistic estimate is around Valentine's day next year! This one here though, I cannot recommend based on what I read. It just doesn't get it done.

One Night In Venice by Bella Donnis

Rating: WARTY!

This begins a pair of (very negative) reviews of short, appallingly badly-written "lesbian" stories!

I was having a little bit of trouble deciding on a good ebook to get into, which is sad, given how many are available to me! In fact, it's downright pathetic. We're spoiled rotten these days with the riptide of ebooks out there. But the plenitude is also the penury given how sorry some of these books are. Yet despite the rising tide of ebooks promising a bounty to anyone who casts a wide enough net, I still managed to haul in two really awful (or is that offal?) ones. This was the first.

This one, fortunately given how things turned out, was free on Amazon (and available on B&N which is where I got it - I always check alternates before I buy from Amazon). So I opened it to find it was only twenty eight pages! This was actually its best feature, but truth be told, I couldn't even finish that much, it was so bad! It felt more like it was one of those book teasers, which isn't a bad idea and which is eminently suited to ebooks. You know, one of those shorties that lures you in and persuades you to buy the full length version? I don't do that, but you can't blame an author for that when competition is so tough. This though, it turns out, is the whole thing - not an intro, but the entire "novel" (as far as I could tell).

It's about this woman whose boyfriend dumps her via a text message when she's in Venice, waiting for him to come out to join her. It was this idea - that she finds herself cruelly ditched and somehow falls into a relationship with a woman - which intrigued me and persuaded me to take a look. The trip was supposed to be a foursome; now it's a three's-a-crowd situation. She only became acquainted with this couple through her AWOL ex, so the other woman is someone she hardly knows, but she's kind to her, even though the guy - a friend of her ex - is ham-fistedly cruel.

The problem is that the writing is so clunky and the interpersonal dynamics so lacking in credibility that I quickly became convinced that I would not even be able to make it through twenty-eight pages of this. I was right! I quit on page twenty because it was awful. 'Subtle' and 'leisurely' are two words which have quite obviously been struck from this author's lexicon (always assuming they were ever present in the first place).

The unsuspecting reader is smashed brutally and repeatedly over the head with a hyper-sexed woman who seems to harbor absolutely zero grief for the demise of her relationship, and who is ogling the other girl like a dog in heat. I'm surprised there wasn't a description of her tongue lolling out dripping saliva. She's all-but humping her friend's leg. If a guy behaved like this it would be sen as entirely inappropriate and the guy would be rightfully termed a dick. So what does that make this woman? A clit? Somehow that doesn't seem to carry the same deprecative weight. Why is that? Because guys can be dicks but women can't be clits?! If that's not sexist, what is?!

Abandon hope (and seek hops!) all ye who enter here looking for romance! There is none to be found in these pages. Yes, we're seeing the friend be kind to the main character, but what she gets in return is pure, adulterated lust. It's all about how beautiful she is, how hot she is, how perfect her "tits" are, how sexy she is, how great her hair is. There's not a single solitary word about what's beneath that depth of skin. We really hear nothing of the kind of friend she is or might be, about whether she's reliable or trustworthy, or whether she has integrity, and would make a decent companion. Nope, it's all sex and only sex, which is nowhere near enough for me to want to read a novel, or even a short story such as this.

The blurb says, "Warning: This lesbian erotic romance story contains extreme graphic and sexual content, specifically lesbian sex and should not be read by those under the age of 18." Seriously? Lesbian sex is extreme? LOL! Like no young adult has ever has such thoughts - and even activities?! Besides, if it's aimed at adults, then why is it written at the level of young adult or even middle-grade in parts? And I take exception to the word "erotic"! There's no eroticism here; it's all crude, juvenile sexcapades and that's all there is. If that's your cup of tea, then by all means quaff deeply, but with lines like "I scrutinised her firm buttocks," it sure as hell ain't mine.

The real problem with this when you get right down to it, is that it's not a novel. It most closely resembles an old telegram, because everything is telegraphed. Everything is so glaringly obvious. There is no subtlety here. Obvious, that is, to everyone but the main character, who is so profoundly stupid that despite her leering, salivating, Shylock-like obsession with pounding the flesh of the only other female character in the entire book, she completely fails to realize that she's bisexual. I'm not a fan of novel in which the author goes out of her way to demonstrate how stupid her main character is. And yes, there's a difference between lesbian and bisexual which this author doesn't seem to get. However, since sexuality it not a binary scale but a sliding one, I'll let that...slide!

This stupidity and crudity is what turned me off the novel completely. What had attracted me was that this was a Brit language novel, which may cause some readers a headache or two unless they are British or at least an Anglophile, but that was nowhere near enough to offset the shabby writing. The panting, tongue-lolling dog into which the main character morphed was more reminiscent of a lame rip-off of Kafka than ever it was of Austen. There was nothing romantic, sensual or subtle here at all. I cannot recommend this. It read like a "lesbian" novel written by an inept male author, and I'm truly sorry if that's insulting, but I gotta call it like I read it!