Double Exposure by Bridget Birdsall

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
This novel was as bad as it was illiterate:
p75: "She's the youngest of six boys."? She is the youngest of six boys? How about "She's the youngest of seven; the other six are boys"?
"Fifty frames a minute and the shudder speed’s unbelievable" p174 Shudder speed? Maybe fifty frames a minute is what makes the shutter shudder?
P180 use of ‘you’re’ where ‘your’ should have been employed. This author teaches writing? No, she relies on auto-correct. Creative auto-correct!
P232 “His bicep bulges” That last 's' is in the wrong place! Once again YA authors the word is biceps Unless you are specifically referring to a single one of the attachments to the upper arm, one of which is the short head, the other of which is the long head, then what you're talking about - what we normally called the muscle that bulges when the arm is flexed as in strong-man posing - is the friggin' biceps, you ill-educated morons. But maybe she was writing creatively?
"Su rounding" p243 As in Su rounded by idiots? Okay I've given up on the author, but did this book not have any editors? Bueller? Anyone? There were enough people mentioned in the acknowledgements. What the hell did any of them do? Did none of them read it? Were they all so gushing that it was a LGBTQIA story that might have a chance of selling that no one cared if it was any good or even spelled correctly? Even a piece of lard like Microsoft Word will catch many of these things. Or was it creatively-written by hand and typeset ye olde fashioned way? It's leaden enough that it could be such a piece of fool's cap sheet.
The author can't do math. We learn that the team is averaging 2 games per week, but after three weeks they’re 10-0? Does the author teach creative writing or creative math! Creative writing! LOL! All writing is creative if it's done right!

This was, thankfully a book I did not pay money for, but borrowed from my excellent library. It began well enough, but at the time I didn't realize how bad it would become because I did not know that the author taught (guffaw) creative writing. Anyone who teaches creative writing or who has passed through a college creative writing course is guaranteed to write god-awful novels in my experience.

The first cliché was the bullying. Barf. I skipped that. Notice that I didn't say 'inexcusable cliché' because bullying of LGBTQIAs is rife, and that's what's inexcusable and needs to be stamped-out ruthlessly along with all other forms of bullying. But turning it into a trope high-school bullying story is not going to help because it cheapens the problem by making it blatantly, painfully (I'm talking about the reader, not the character) obvious. Like there's no other kind. Ever. And as if once were insufficient, our main character gets bullied twice, in two different states! Two for the price of one! Limited Offal! Buy into it now! Yawn. Barf.

Next up is the inexcusably clichéd fiery green-eyed (JEALOUS, get it?) redhead. Yawn. Barf squared. Wait, what is it you teach, Bridget Birdsall? I forget - was it clichéd writing or creative writing? There is a difference, you know.

Taught writing isn't taut writing; it's trope writing, which brings me to the trope boyfriend being telegraphed from twenty-thousand light years away. Barf. Yawn. Clichéd or creative? Clichéd or creative? Anyone?

Next up is the sport, because your student has to be sports or arts. You know there's nothing else in the entire school curriculum worth writing about, in "creative" writing, right? Sports includes the clichéd dancer, and arts includes the clichéd image maker. Oh, wait, we have both! The main character is a basketball player and her love interest is a photographer! But all Alyx wants to do is be a girl.

But wait - how can she be a girl? Yeah she's quite literally intersex, having one testicle and one ovary, and one penis and one vulva, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that, never having been a girl before - always living as a boy, despite feeling like a girl, Alyx, who happens to have a magically unisex name complete with totally weird spelling (this in a family which boasts an 'uncle grizzly'), magically transforms into perfectly ordinary girl in the short space of time it takes to travel from California to Milwaukee!

I-80 sure is educational isn't it? God Bless President Eisenhowitzer! Ike 80 provided her with a cute feminine wardrobe too, so she felt completely at ease among girls from day one at her new high-school! She has no issues or problems learning to be a girl among girls. She has only issues with PTSD from the bullying in her old school. Hmm!

It might not have been so bad had Alyx been likeable, but she was so self-obsessed and so selfish that she simply wasn't likeable. She was annoying at best. At one point, at a party, her fellow newbie and possibly best friend Roslyn is so out of it that it scares Alyx, but rather than watch over her friend or take her home to make sure she's not abused, Alyx is quite ready to abandon her and run home? Friends don't let friends get friendly drunk.

At Christmas, Alyx gets gets a brand new smartphone replacing the one which was damaged when she was beaten up in Cali-floor-ya. Almost immediately, she purposefully kicks it off her bed onto the floor because she doesn't have any friends! That's what a shrewish ingrate she is. Likeable she is not. This is called creative unfriending, in case you wondered.

I don't mind a weak female character who learns to be strong, but Alyx never does. She's a weak-assed wuss to the very end, caving again even in the last few pages to make a magical ending in which her mortal enemy who treated her like shit for the entire novel, and screwed her over every chance she got, is forgiven by means of Alyx rolling over one more time for a certifiably Disney-esque ending. And I do mean certifiable. Was the author embarrassed by this ending? Is that why it was flash-Frozen-over?

I'm sorry, but this story SUCKED. It was awful and was exactly what I would expect from a creative writing pogrom. Some might argue that this is better than nothing, but the intersex community deserves so much better than this creative nothing.

The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova

Rating: WARTY!

Another soured audiobook experiment. I typically avoid long novels because it means they're full of filler which ruins the story. Before I started blogging books I read this author's The Historian and quite liked it. I went looking for my review of that, to see what I said about it, but I must have read that before I began blogging so it's nowhere to be had! This story was far too rambling.

When I saw Kostova had out The Swan Thieves I took a look at it, but it didn't appeal to me, especially given what a fat tome it was, so I never read it. I thought it would be boring. This one sounded like it might be more interesting despite Kostova proving herself by this time to be a one-note author. I was wrong! It was rambling and boring. I listened to about an eighth of it (an eighth of a one note and I didn't quaver) and while the reader (Barrie Kreinik) was listenable, the story wasn't. Quite literally nothin happened.

I don't want twenty pages about a woman being driven to a monastery unless all of those twenty are relevant to the story, but that's what I got here (at least it felt like it), and in this case none of it was. Kostova takes a whole chapter to write about a drive from A to B, which has nothing whatsoever to do with moving the action forward, In fact it did quite the opposite. It would be like that movie, Dunkirk about the dramatic evacuation of British troops from French beaches at the onset of World War Two, showing five minutes of action on the beach, five minutes of disembarking the boat at Dover in England, and then two hours in between spent in existential angst during the twenty-mile boat ride, or admiring the beautiful ocean, the action of the waves, the blowing wind, the burning of the surf, the engine noise, the diesel fumes, and declaiming upon ocean wildlife.

Or maybe in that famous car chase in the movie Bullitt, instead of simply showing the car chase as they did, the story focused on backstory and admiring window boxes of flowers as he drove, and stopping to gas-up and get a car wash, and slowing to let the chicken cross the road and so on. I am not kidding about the chicken, it quite literally happened in this story. It ruffled my feathers and I decided that was more than enough for me.

In short I cannot recommend this drivel, and I am now completely done considering this author worth wasting any more time on.

Puerto Rico Strong by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

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

This comic collection of shorts was put together quickly with the intention of raising money to aid victims of Hurricane Maria, which hit In late September 2017, and from which Puerto Rico is still recovering, hampered by failure to get the same rapid response that Texas got after Hurricane Harvey hit just a month before.

Texas is back on its feet. No one talks about the hurricane any more. But where is Puerto Rico? Still mired. Why? Puerto Ricans are American citizens, but Puerto Rico is poor and has no voting rights. The response to their plight has been nothing short of shameful, and my feeling is that this comic doesn't help because it's just as much of a mess as Puerto Rico is right now. In this case it's not due to a hurricane, shameful mismanagement, a clueless president, and a poor response from the US government; it's due to poor editing and an indifferent selection of stories which could have been better presented.

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth territory of the United States of America, and to describe it as the poor cousin is about as on-target as you can get. Unemployment is double what it is in the rest of the US, which is why people leave Puerto Rico to move to the mainland, and this out-flux of population reduces the tax base and contributed somewhat to throwing the island further into debt. Poverty there is rife and the USA has treated this territory, gained after the American Spanish war of 1898, shabbily to say the least.

The problems are not all because of Maria though. Puerto Rico was poor and in debt to the tune of seventy billion dollars before Maria hit because its own government has mismanaged everything, but it's not all on that government. Puerto Rico is also strapped by an act of Congress that will not let foreign ships deliver goods directly to Puerto Rico. This is the act that the president had to waive for a period after Maria came roaring through, in order to maximize the aid that could be brought in. That waiver was short though, and arguably ineffective.

Why this insanity hasn't been overturned is as much a mystery as it is a tragedy, but since Puerto Rico has no say in its own destiny, due to being very effectively a vassal "state" of the US, things aren't likely to improve until Congress and the Senate both are cleansed of special interests and those members owned by big business, the oil companies, the NRA and so on, are tossed out on their bribed ears and Puerto Rico is either admitted to statehood or granted independence and full self-determination whichever its population wants.

It has a population higher than thirty of the fifty US states, and that's with the majority of Puerto Ricans now living outside of Puerto Rico. If they all lived on the island, and it was a state, it would be the thirteenth most populous state while having by far the lowest median household income. But you won't read that in this comic.

Puerto Rico is so badly-off that it has also been getting about two billion dollars yearly through the Nutrition Assistance Program since the early nineteen-eighties. Complaints are that this assistance has been flat, but Puerto Rico's population has shrunk a lot, too, so maybe it's not so flat? But you won't read anything about that here either.

You'll also learn very little of the history of Puerto Rico from this graphic novel. Yes, there is a lot of history shown, but it's a very biased and repetitive history showing stories of the Taíno people and little else. The contributors ought to have collaborated more so that instead of a dozen stories of the Taíno, we got one or two of those and more stories of other aspects of Puerto Rico's history which, as the name suggests, is very rich, unlike the financial circumstances of the people who live there, especially post-hurricane when more than fifty percent of Puerto Ricans were left in Poverty. But you won't read of that in this comic book either. Again, a better spread of information, and a move diverse subject matter would have made for a better comic.

The problem with the stories of Puerto Rico's history is that they all tell the same stories mostly of older history and nothing recently. There are too many stories of of the Taino for example, and of Puerto Ricans serving in the US military from World War One onwards, and these stories leave little room for anything else to be told. I believe one story even suggested that Puerto Rico was granted the status it has so that the US could draft troops during World War One, but that seems unlikely given the facts and how Puerto Rico was viewed back then by the US government (as primitive, backward and substandard).

What's missing is recent history. What's too often missing is the rich culture. What's missing is geography and wildlife. One glaring example of omission is the onslaught of the Zika virus which ran from 2015 well into 2017, causing 8,000 cases per month for a while. It was declared over (in that cases had dropped to very low levels) only three months before Maria hit. Maria probably killed off the last of it by destroying the mosquitoes which carried it, but they'll be back. There's not one mention of the Zika virus epidemic. Has the Puerto Rican diaspora forgotten about that already? Or where they never aware of it?

The Taíno were the original inhabitants of the island which have largely been wiped-out, or subsumed over the last five hundred years through inter-marriage with the Spanish invaders and the African slaves. They spoke an Arawakan language. Smallpox killed ninety percent of these people, but you won't read that in this graphic novel, although there is a brief mention, if I recall, of the depredations of 'imported' diseases. In 2010, less than one tenth of one percent of the island's population self-identified as native American although you won't read that in this graphic novel. All you;ll read about is how many have "Taíno blood." The representation of the Taíno in these stories makes it look like everyone in Puerto Rico is Taíno, but that's very misleading.

There are 41 stories here in 190 pages (excluding additional material), which means that they are all short, some of them very much so, and once again I have to take the editors to task because sometimes it's really hard to tell where one story ends and the next starts. Some of the stories were really good, but most of them were average to very poor, and this assessment includes both writing and artwork, so the consistency is really patchy. Note that the contents page has the page numbering wrong (nor is it clickable/tappable to jump to a given story or to return to the contents page), and one story "From Within" is not evident in the actual content without a search. Here's a brief mention of each:

• Hereby Ronnie Garcia told a story bemoaning Puerto Rico's fate, but telling us little else. While it was well-drawn, the text was almost illegible in parts, so the story was significantly diminished and it was not that impressive to begin with.
• Madre de Dios by Daniel Irrizarri Oquendo is a single image and a poem incorrectly telling us that juracán was the Taíno god of chaos. In truth, it was the goddess, Guabancex (aka Gua Ban Ceh) who was of chaos - or more specifically of earthquakes, storms, and volcanoes. Juracán was merely the name of the winds she spawned from time to time.
• Helping Hands written by Alan Medina, art by Ariela Kristantina. It was only the change in artwork which announced this since the title was nowhere in evidence on the first page of the story. It shows up on page three which is the last page of the story. The artwork had a scrappy look to it, and I rather liked it, but I had no good idea what this story was about.
• Pasitos Grandes written by Tristan J Tarwater, art by Cynthia Santos. Pasitos means little steps, so this title is a contradiction in terms: Big Little Steps. It's set in 2062 and looks back over Puerto Rican history, but it says barely a word about Hurricane Maria. the artwork is abysmal.
• Areytos written by Vita Ayala, art by Jamie Jones. Areyto or areíto refers to a religious song/dance which the Taínos enter-Taín-ed themselves with. This story has interesting, moody art and tells of the resistance, led by Agüeybaná Segundo, aka El Bravo to Spanish depredations in the early sixteenth century.
• Gods of Borikén by Sabrina Cintron. Borikén is another name for Puerto Rico. This is just a very average one page image.
• Stories from my Father written by Adam Lance Garcia, art by Heidi Black. This tells of a young girl visiting Puerto Rico. It's nicely drawn and colored, but it really doesn't say anything. It's trying to say that people who have ancestry in a certain location ought to try to reconnect to that location, but there is absolutely no good rationale as to why anyone should do this, and there's certainly no point in trying to make people feel guilty if they don't! Way to domineer!
  If they want to, then fine, but it's every individual's choice and there's no obligation whatsoever on anyone to connect with or even acknowledge your roots. To portray a young girl as somehow lacking something because she can't connect with Puerto Rico is an abuse as far as I'm concerned and the author should be ashamed. For goodness sakes, we all come from Africa originally, so there is as much of a 'call' to reconnect there as there is anywhere else, so why not tell that story? This one made no sense whatsoever!
• Resiliance (sic) by Lamplight written by Aldo Alvarez, art by Sofia Davila. The word is actually Resilience, editors! The Spanish word for it is resistencia, so this is simply a case of misspelling. It appears to be only a two page non-story consisting of a title page and a pointless drawing of two people's heads as light bulbs. I assume it has to do with the sluggish return of electricity to the island, but who knows?
• From Within by Nicole Goux. This was in the contents, but I could not find it in the actual stories unless it is the untitled and unattributed pastel-shaded story that actually precedes Resilience by Lamplight. It was not of interest to me.
• A Broken PROMESA by Rosa Colón. PROMESA is the acronym for the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. This story, more text than art, is one of the few which actually makes a coherent, worthwhile, informative, and educational contribution, but it's not a story, merely a five-page précis of the comedy of errors in governing Puerto Rico. It's one of the few which blames the island for at least a part of the post-Maria woes. I liked this one very much.
• Thanks for Nothing by Tom Beland. Simplistically drawn and sarcastic, this is an entertaining view of the mismanagement of aid post-Maria.
• La Casita of American Heroes written by Anthony Otero, art by Charles Ugas. This is another story which has no title at the beginning. The thing that looks like a title is 'Fajardo', which is actually the name of a small town in eastern Puerto Rico, but it's not the title of the story! We don't see that until nine pages later, on the last page of the story. Is this a manga that I should read it backwards?! This story has very average art work and starts out well enough, but then it dives headlong into another tale of how many Puerto Ricans fought in how many US wars. It tells us not a single thing about the ravages of Maria. You now, the wars are history, I've never understood the morbid American obsession with them. The problems with Maria are now! Can we deal with those, please?
• Yúcahu and the Creation of the First Man by Little Corvus. Yúcahu (known by several similar names) is the of fertility in Taíno mythology. This is simply a one-page illustration that shows two near-naked guys together in a pond. Fine if that's how two guys want to spend their time! I have no problem with that per se, but neither of them look Puerto Rican or Taíno, so what, exactly, does this have to do with anything?
• A Taíno's Tale written by Shariff Musalam, art by Alejandro Rosado. This is another poorly illustrated history. Didn't like it.
• Of Myth and Monsters written by Marco Lopez and Derek Ruiz, art by Jamie Jones. This was a mildly amusing and amusingly illustrated story about the Chupa Cabra which is typically taken to mean 'goat eater', but which actually means 'sucks goat' which could have led to an interesting and amusingly perverse story, but this wasn't it; however, it was better than too many of the other stories here.
• El Vampiro de Moca by Leonardo Gonzalez is a really scrappy one page image which ought to have been left out of this collection.
• Family Ends with Me written by Lilliam Rivera, art by Allison Strejlau is a tale of how women were sterilized but it places the story in 1969 long after these sterilizations ended - unless the author knows something I don't. When I say ended, I mean in Puerto Rico - they were still going on for Latina wimen in the sixties and seventies in California, believe it or not. American Nazism has never died out.
• La Operación by Ally Schwed is also the name of a documentary film by Ana María García on the same topic. While sterilization had been instituted many times in Puerto Rico, the only one that really succeeded in its evil aim was begun on May 13, 1937 and ran unhindered until the law was overturned as late as June 8, 1960! This story has the sterilizations going on into the 1970s, but I cannot find independent documentation of that. However, it doesn't matter when they ended, because they should never have begun and the people who did this should be in jail.
  No matter how long it actually lasted, in the end about a third of women of childbearing age had been sterilized in Puerto Rico. How is the US government any better than the Nazis in this regard? Seriously? This was an important story, but I would have liked it better had it delivered more information in a less sensational manner. The story implies that no one was informed about the permanence of tubal ligation, which cannot be guaranteed to be successfully reversed by any means.
  There was a study in the mid-sixties which indicated that only a third of the subjects/victims did not know it was permanent, which is a nauseating number admittedly, but I don't know if that means that the other two-thirds learned of this beforehand (or figured it out for themselves) or if some or all of them did not know this until later. I don't believe Puerto Rican women are completely stupid or gullible. They can be misled as anyone can, but do we know if any elected to have this operation as a deliberate and deliberative choice to take charge of their own family size - or were they all duped as this story implies?
  I find that latter option rather insulting to Puerto Rican women and their intelligence. Is it possible that some women, even if it was a small percentage, knew what this was all about from the off and chose it as a means of birth control? I believe it is, but there seems to be no readily available information one way or the other about this, which is concerning, but not as concerning as this whole affair is, let's face it.
• The Puerto Rican Birth Control Trials by Ally Schwed. This is a sort of sequel to this author's previous story, and this one is about the testing of the birth control pill on Puerto Rican women - a pill which contained significantly more medication than is considered appropriate now. Women got sick, a handful died.
  The artwork is equally as simplistic as it was in the previous story (and has the same color scheme), but that's acceptable to me because this story is an important one and needs to be widely known. It's yet one more inexcusable abuse.
• Breaking Bread written by Tara Martinez, art by Rod Espinoza. This was a breath of fresh air. It was a beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated story and my favorite of the whole collection. It tells a simple but important story of keeping hold of the little things and the simple pleasures in life no matter what. All of us need that.
• The Dragon of Bayamón written by Jeff Goez and Fabian Nicieza, art by Adriana Melo. Bayamón is a city just south of Puerto Rico's capital of San Juan and this tells of a young kid visiting this area where he's never been before and knows nothing about. He fears his father of whom he has little and not good recollection, but his mother sent him to Puerto Rico, so he has to put up with it. It's a little predictable in that you know from the start that he's going to start feeling at home there, so there were no surprises, but the story was decent and the artwork pleasant.
• On Traditions & Being Homesick by Jesenia Santana wasn't of interest to me at all, but the art was not bad. And she has a very cool name! And it was short!
• Con Amor LES by Kat Fajardo was an uninteresting one page postcard of an illustration. Com Amor means with Love, but I have no idea what LES stands for.
• Cocinar written by Vito Delsante, art by Yehudi Mercado was yet another one which had no title at the beginning (it was at the end again). It looked like Kat Fajardo's one page illustration was the opening page for this story! Bad editing. The story is about a cook (which is what the title means) who is starting a new job and pleasing the restaurant's owner by turning out a family treat which she happened to like, but I have to ask if she wants Puerto Rican cooking so badly, then why not go back and live in Puerto Rico? I don't have any time for whining and nostalgia. Deal with where you are, or go back home!
• Family written by Grant Alter, art by Manuel Preitano. Having one family title after another (especially one that's also about food, at least in part) I think is another example of bad editing. Maybe if certain editors had quit trading Voltron GIFs and spent more time focused on their job, this would have been better put together? That's not this author's fault though. The problem here is that this story really doesn't tell us anything except to help with hurricane relief any way we can. One page would have sufficed for that, although it's actually self-evident.
• Dreamer by Kristin Van Dam was an untitled, unattributed, unsigned single page. The art was not bad, but I don't see what it had to do with anything else where. It's a pity the editors didn't wake up and credit her for this contribution though, but these guys are the worst editors I've ever encountered. Always sign your work, Kristin!
• Taíno Online by Joamette Gil. Yet another story on Taíno ancestry. Yawn. Joamette is a cool name though.
• Knowledge of Self by Javier Cruz Winnik. Yet another story on Taíno ancestry, but better illustrated than the last one. Yawn.
• Blame it on 'Rico by Alberto Serrano. This was an amusing story about a Puerto Rican muralist who is constantly questioned about his ancestry. I can relate. I liked this one.
• Macondo, Puerto Rico written by Javier Morillo, art by Dan Méndez Moore. Another Puerto Rican history telling the same story over again, but with indifferent art and way too much text. Yawn.
• Faceless by Matt Belisle was a misleading one page illustration that preceded yet another story which had no titles at the beginning, Really getting annoyed by this crap by this point. What's the Spanish for 'the editing sucks'? Chupa Editando?
• I Dream of Home written by Greg Anderson-Elysee, art by Dennis Calero. This was a weird story which I did not get, but the art was excellent.
• Hope written by Neil Schwarz, art by Ramón Sierra. This is a story about a guy who takes his kid to Puerto Rico. Nothing special. Predictable. Art not bad.
• Puerto Rico Strong by Alejandra Quintas is a simple on page illustration of some exploitatively scantily-clad Puerto Rican woman holding the Puerto Rican flag (which was actually banned at one point a half century or so ago, believe it or not). Not impressed.
• Reality Check written by Tony Bedard, art by John R Holmes. This was a nicely drawn ironic look at Puerto Rican history and it made a pleasant change from what had gone before. I liked this one.
• Heroes of Our Own by Marco Lopez and Derek Ruiz, art by Brett Booth. Yet again a single page illustration indifferently drawn right before yet another story where the title page was the last page. Really pissed off wit the editors by this point. Ready to tell them where they can shove Voltron. Why did a single page need two writers? Was there something missing from my copy? Who knows.
• The Last Pirate in the Caribbean written by Mina Elwell, art by TE Lawrence. The title page was the last page. I got nothing from this story. The artwork so bland as to be almost impressionistic in style.
• Todavia Tengo Puerto Rico en Mi Corazon written by Eugene Selassie, art by Orlando Baez. The title means "I still have Puerto Rico in my hear, and this was a clumsily illustrated futuristic story of robots, which I skimmed because it held no interest for me. It's yet another of those where you want to say, if you love it so much, quit whining about it and go home!
• The Heart of Puerto Rico written by Alexis Sergio, art by Jules Rivera was a nicely illustrated and welcome story. It was teasing and playful, and it was about a young queer couple who had a sense of adventure and a love of Puerto Rico such that they actually lived there! I liked it.
• Ojala by Mike Hawthorne was the only one page illustration I actually liked. Beautifully done. Ojalá, pronounced 'Ohall-a' (slight emphasis on the last letter) means 'hopefully'. It was perfect and should have been the first illustration in the collection, Another bad editing choice.
• What Remains in the Dark by Amparo Ortiz, art by Eliana Falcón-Dvorsky was about Julia Constanza Burgos García, better known as Julia de Burgos. She was a nationalist, a teacher, a civil rights activist, a poet, and an advocate of Puerto Rican independence. She died a tragic death in that she collapsed and died in a place in New York City where no one knew her, and her body went unidentified and unclaimed, so was buried in a 'potter's field' until some people heroically tracked her down and had her remains repatriated. This was a story worth telling, and a very different approach from the others.
  It made me wonder why there were not more stories about such Puerto Ricans and somewhat fewer about soldiers? There are renowned Puerto Ricans from all walks of life. Don't go by the 'famous Puerto Rican' lists on the web. Yes, these people have Puerto Rican ancestry, but very few of them were actually born in Puerto Rico, so I certainly would not classify them as "Puerto Rican" without qualifying it. That's cheating!

You know, comic book writers and illustrators can work anywhere! Not that there's an abundance of electricity in Puerto Rico right now, but there is sunshine and solar panels are relatively cheap these days, This is golden opportunity for Puerto Rico to shine - literally. Why was there no story about that? About rebuilding? About hope? The stories seemed to be all downers about nostalgia and loss. I refuse to believe that the Puerto Ricans - at least those who actually live there - are like that. Why were there no stories about Puerto Rican diaspora returning to help their island by living there and bringing their relatively rich US income with them? Now that would have been something different, something worth writing about, something worth reading.

I was very disappointed and disillusioned by this graphic collection. I admire and respect the desire to put something out there to aid the hurricane victims, but I can't help but feel in this case that contributing the price of the comic (and then some if you can afford it) directly to a hurricane victim charity will do more good than buying this comic. There is nothing in the comic that I saw, which indicates how much of the sale price goes directly to the needs of Puerto Ricans, which seemed very strange to me. If you love comics, then by all means buy this one as opposed to some other, but I cannot recommend it based on my reading of it.

Sashenka by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Rating: WARTY!

Sashenka was another audiobook experiment I tried that failed. I don't normally go for the longer books because my time is valuable and it's a bigger investment of it to put it into a longer book and have that fail. If it works out, it's great, but given that I take more risks with audiobooks, they tend to fail more than other media, so I tend not to go for the longer ones. This one sounded like it might be good if it worked out, but it didn't.

If it had bee about half the length it was, I might have been willing to invest more time in it, but it was endlessly rambling, jumping back and forth, and worse, the author seemed like he was obsessed with showing off his knowledge of the classics instead of telling a succinct and engaging story. He spewed out title after title, some of which I'd even heard of, but it served the story not at all. Writers who do this are among the most pretentious, substituting books for smarts, and book names for knowledge and sophistication.

Despite this focus on showing how intellectual the main character is, the ham-fisted book blurb describes her - sixteen-year-old Sashenka Zeitlin - as "Beautiful and headstrong" like her best trait is her beauty. I detest writers who reduced women to skin-depth, like a woman has nothing else to offer and their character is quite useless except for her 'beauty'. What does it matter where she is on the dangerously sliding scale of beauty to ugliness if she's an interesting character? Is she so boring that the author has to make her beautiful in order for her to have anything at all to offer the reader? Because that doesn't work for me.

It's not just the book blurb writer. The author himself is equally culpable, sexualizing his character very early on in the story when he informs us that she has the "fullest breasts in her class." How is this remotely relevant to anything? If the story were about sex, then I can see how it would be something of import, but it isn't. It's supposed to be about this woman and her life in Tsarist and then revolutionary Russia. Her breasts are really nothing to do with her story unless she goes to work for the communists seducing political enemies, in which case I could see some relevance. if the tit doesn't fit, you mustn't acquit, and I find this author guilty.

I thought it might start to get interesting when Sashenka is thrown into prison as a political offender because of her association with her uncle, but no! The novel is set in 1916, right before the Russian revolution, and I thought this might make it quite gripping, but the author seems to have sterilized it so effectively that the rich soil of a potentially entertaining novel is reduced to unproductive sand.

The only interesting thing to me was the repeated mention of gendarmes, which I had never heard of in connection with Russia, but these were the political police. It would have made more sense to call them jandarmov, which is how the Russians pronounced it.

The author may be able to write knowledgeable non-ficiton about this era, but he has no clue how to write a gripping novel, a compelling main character, or realistic female characters.

Gamora: Memento Mori by Nicole Perlman, Marco Checchetto, Andres Mossa

Rating: WARTY!

I wanted to like this - I really did, but from the unnecessarily sexualized full first page image of Gamora, my stomach started turning. One reason I picked this up was because it was written by a woman (Nicole Perlman who co-wrote the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie); the problem was that it was drawn by a guy (Marco Checchetto). Maybe it if had been the other way around, it would not have been so bad? Once that first image was done though, the depictions did seem to improve, but the story never really did.

Gamora is given a 'gift' by her adoptive father: the knowledge of where the people are who wiped out her own people. After she slaughters all of the royal lineage, she seems to think the job is done but she's not fulfilled. Why killing the royals would destroy their society is a complete mystery which is never gone into in the writing which is sadly very sketchy. Would they not simply appoint a new lineage or open elections? It's not like if the British royal family were all wiped-out Britain would simply fall apart and come to an end! Ad how does she know she's got them all? They all look exactly alike - how do you tell royalty from commoner?

As it happens, she didn't get them all. Gamora discovers that this highly patriarchal society has a princess - the last of these supposedly crucial people of the royal bloodline, and so after torturing one of the lizard people, she embarks on her own crusade to kill this last royal. It's all downhill from there. The story made zero sense. If these people - the green lizards, literally do smother all female children at birth as we're told, then how do they ever procreate? It made absolutely no sense whatsoever! With whom did the king mate to produce this princess? Apparently the author doesn't care because she never mentions it.

I loved Guardians of the Galaxy, but now I find myself wondering what parts of it, exactly, did this author write because it was far more entertaining, thoughtful, and provocative than this graphic novel ever was. The story could have been a truly engaging one, but it got lost somewhere along the way and never improved. I cannot recommend it.

Wonder Woman Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first book in a series of four novels (not graphic!) based on DC icons. I don't know all of them, but I believe two of the others are Catwoman: Soulstealer by Sarah J. Maas (author of the execrable Throne of Glass which I panned) and Batman: Nightwalker by Marie Lu (author of the execrable Legend which I panned!). The rule here seems to be that if you write a really bad YA romance trilogy, then you can get a contract from DC comics! This is why I favor Marvel!

Leigh Bardugo is of course the author of the execrable Shadow and Bones which I also panned, so why am I reading (read: listening to) this? I admit I thought twice about picking up this volume precisely because of the author, but I was curious to see how she would handle something which wasn't her own creation. She mishandled it badly, making Wonder Woman look like some clueless, air-headed teenager. Wonder Woman Warbringer? Crappy title as well! Not that the 'warbringer' referred to WW.

At this point I am convinced that Bardugo simply cannot create intelligent female characters, but I started out by being honestly curious as to what she would do with such a being (and especially so, now Wonder Woman's profile has been raised so high by the excellent Patty Jenkins movie). This novel came out in 2017 - the same year as the Wonder Woman movie, and what a contrast here is between the two! Bardugo has another disaster on her hands.

This one started out seeming like it was just another origin story, and it completely contradicted the one told in the movie, which as far as I'm concerned is canon at this point - especially since the comic books are always retelling their stories. Seriously? If there's one thing we really do not need more of, it's super hero origin stories!

I don't know how the author came into this: did they hire her and tell her to write this particular story or did they hire her and ask her to write a story about Wonder Woman, leaving the actual choice up to her? Or did she send them a story outline that she wanted to do and they agreed? I don't have those answers, so all I can do is base this review on what I read - or in this case listen to, since this was an audiobook.

Audiobooks are very experimental for me. I listen to them while driving, so my attention is most often on the road, not the book, but I can still follow what's going on. Since I'm a captive audience several times a week, I get through quite a few of these and I also take more risks with what I select to listen to, and therefore run the risk of more failures in finding things which please me, but I also find many gems this way.

The novel was read by Mozhan Marnò who didn't do too bad of a job except that her pronunciation wandered at times. She pronounced Themyscira for example, as thought it were "Them is scarier" which, given Amazons, perhaps isn't too far adrift, but all it did was make me laugh every time she said it. Themyscira (Greek Θεμίσκυρα) was a real place and it's pronounced with a soft 'th' sound as in 'thought' not in 'this'. It should sound a bit like Theh-mees-keer-a, with equal stress on all syllables but maybe a touch more on the 'mees' part - as far as I know. This begs the question as to why they got a woman of Iranian descent to read this rather than one of Greek descent?

This book began with Diana, aka Wonder Woman to be, taking part in a foot race. Normally the princess doesn't do this, but in this case she wants to assert her growing womanhood and take what she believes to be her rightful place as an Amazon woman rather than a cosseted royal. unfortunately, a sinking schooner on the coastline distracts her, and she ends up diving in, pulling out a woman, and saving her life.

This is where the first confusion rose because one of her friends on Themyscira is an Irish woman, yet when she pulls this (almost-) drowning victim from the sea, she talks of her as human. Was the Irish Amazon not human? If she was Amazon and not human, then how is she Irish? This made no sense to me at all. I thought all Amazons were human, except Diana, who was fashioned from clay.

The problems with the writing began here because Diana is in fear now of being punished because of her transgression in saving this woman's life and bringing her onto the island, yet Bardugo forgets that Diana is a princess of royal blood. She has this fellow Amazon bullying her with absolute no blow-back, and she has Diana living in fear of failure and of being punished!

Diana did not read as royal at all, not remotely, let alone heroic! She was just another Bardugo schoolgirl character. This was when I realized that it was Bardugo, not Diana who was out of her depth here. She simply cannot write an engaging story, period, not even when it's handed to her on a plate like this.

The story did not improve, it got worse. Diana had a critical deadline to meet regarding this woman she had rescued, and yet she spent so much time lollygagging on the way until it became a last minute thing. In short, Bardugo made Diana look like a moron, not heroic at all, and I can't forgive her for that. She made Diana into a man with tits instead of telling the story of an amazingly powerful, yet restrained woman. There was no gentility or even femininity here. It was all brawn and power, not compassion and smarts, and the villain was telegraphed right from the start of the story such that even I could recognize them. I'm done with reading anything else by this authors, and I cannot recommend this story.

Eternity by Matt Kindt, Trevor Hairsine, Ryan Winn, David Baron

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was available on net Galley as a 'read now' and sometimes such books can be gems; other times they can be awful; upon another occasion, they can be simply just not appealing. This was in the latter category, I'm sorry to report. mat Kindt's writing was nothing out of the ordinary - not bad, but not really anything new or special. The drawings (ink by Ryan Winn, pencil by Trevor Hairsine) were okay, but nothing thrilling. Colors by David Baron were brilliantly hued, but still failed to impress somehow.

This new world felt drab despite the bright colors. It felt confusing, and uninteresting, and full of vague new-ageisms instead of anything solid or gripping. The story is of a black couple whose child is taken into this parallel dimension (or whatever it was) to replace an 'observer' who was killed. The only observation worth making here is that he evidently didn't see it coming!

The way the child was drawn made him look far older than the way he was depicted through his behavior. I don't know if any of these artists have young children of their own, but they should probably study a few crawling kids before they draw any more of them.

This death of the observer creates a panic for reasons which are entirely unclear. The rest of the story is of a battle between human cavemen who wish everyone to have self-determination, and the parallel world people who apparently don't. The bottom line is that none of us truly has free will (changes have occurred in our brains long before our conscious mind becomes aware of us making a decision), so if the people in this story had been less new age mysticism, and more science-based empiricism, they would have realized their conflict was pointless! I couldn't get anything out of what proved to be a very forgettable graphic novel, and I cannot recommend it.

On a technical note, my iPad, using Bluefire Reader, had issues with disappearing speech on pages 8, 60, and 77 (as measured by the Bluefire Reader page count - the graphic novel has no page numbering. When I loaded this into Adobe Digital editions, however, the text was there =- there were no blank speech balloons, so be aware of this issue.

Little Pierrot Amongst the Stars by Alberto Varanda

Rating: WARTY!

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

I reviewed Little Pierrot Get the Moon favorably back in August of 2017, but I cannot say the same for this volume. It's in the same format, comprised of sepia-toned sketches that are, in this case very disjointed, more-so than in the first volume. Many of them made no sense to me. Some of them seemed like a response to something which had gone before, but which wasn't included in the book! Nearly all of them were not interesting or amusing. The artwork was of the same high standard, but overall, this seemed like a completely different book compared with the first one I reviewed. Of course, it is a different book, but it's so different that it seemed totally unrelated to the first book.

I wish the author all the best, but I cannot recommend this volume.

Gonzo Girl by Cheryl Della Pietra

Rating: WARTY!

I literally could not get beyond the first couple of chapters of this. It entirely rubbed me the wrong way from the start and the prospect of reading the rest of it after that just turned me off. As if the writing wasn't bad enough, the story is told in first person. Apparently it draws heavily on her experience with Hunter Thompson, and I have no respect for him either. If that is the case, then one has to wonder why she wrote this fictional account rather than a real one.

The story is of this fresh college grad Alley Russo (yes, spelled like blind alley!), a girl who wants a chance to work as an assistant to a purportedly renowned writer who is really an arrogant and a self-absorbed dick. This guy was so hard-edged that he was unbelievable as a character - hard-living, hard smoking, hard-drinking, hard to take seriously in fact. He began by humiliating this girl, who has so little self respect that she takes everything that's dished to her.

I picked this up because I thought it would be about the writing, but it really isn't at all; it's about this weak sop of a girl subjugating herself to an immoral slave-driver with the ridiculous name of Walker Reade, and foolishly thinking this is going to help her writing career. The sad fact is that she's willing to do literally anything to further her writing aspirations - except actually sit down and write! I have no respect whatsoever for her and none for this novel.

I was especially turned off it when I read a Kirkus quote. The quote merely said, "Fascinating" which could have meant anything! The Kirkus review could have said "It's fascinating how stupid this story is", but my guess is that it didn't. The problem is that Kirkus never has a bad word to say about a novel so their reviews are completely meaningless. Anyone who quotes them in support of a book is a moron, period.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is a product of its time and in some ways shouldn't be judged based on modern standards, but this review is not about how children in 1900 will perceive the 'modern fairytale', but how children and parents in the 21st century will, and I have to say up front that the book is long, tedious in parts and worst of all, decidedly gory. It's also - unsurprisingly - clueless when held up against our modern sensibilities. I did not like it and I cannot recommend it.

This is a print book that I got on close-out at a book store. It's a classic, heavy, solid tome, with glossy pages and illustrations, so it's a nicely put-together book overall, but the illustrations are bizarre; they make all the characters look like zombies on drugs! Austin-based artist Michael Sieben illustrated this book, but I have to say how disappointed I was with the colored drawings. They were ugly and unappealing. There were also pages where a quote from the text was strewn across the double-page, writ-large like it had been hand-printed in block caps. Who did these and what the point was I have no idea, but they contributed nothing positive to the overall appearance of this edition.

Prior to this reading, the only knowledge I had of this story was from the movie, which in its own time really wasn't a huge success (it took a decade to break even!) and which had multiple problems in filming and abundant continuity issues in the finished product. The movie only really took off once it began to be shown on TV, and while the two (book and movie) are the same in broad general terms, some of the details are quite different in the book as compared with the 1939 movie. I read somewhere that there are some forty differences which I guess isn't so surprising given Hollywood.

What jumped out at me is that there is no interaction between Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West in the early part of the book. That was all added to the movie to create dramatic tension. Nor did Dorothy meet Glinda until the end of the novel. She met merely the Good Witch of the North at the beginning (Glinda was actually the good witch of the south), who gave her a mark on her forehead by means of a kiss, that protected her rather like the Mark of Cain!

In fact, the movie makes no sense in having Glinda appear and outright lie to Dorothy that she has to see the Wizard in order to get home! You may recall that Glinda tells her later that she's always had the power by clicking her heels Nazi style. Why would a good witch lie to keep her from going home? The book doesn't have this problem.

There's very little interaction with the munchkins either (and no singing!). Dorothy is off along the yellow brick road pretty briskly. One thing I did note is that during their journey, the scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Woodman really step-up, thereby disproving their supposed brainless, cowardly, and heartless traits by the things they do to help get their party to Emerald City.

A better writer than Lyman Frank Baum would have gathered these threads together at the end of the story and had the wizard point this out instead of having him hand out worthless baubles. The wizard claims to be a good man (and a bad wizard) but he's actually a deceitful con-artist who does nothing for his adopted people and gets away with it.

I was really surprised by how gory the book is. I know this was penned in an era of wild and crazy fairytales and he was writing a modern version of those (so he claimed), but I think it's far too much for young kids even in this era of overly violent video games, TV, and movies. Sensibilities were different over a hundred years ago in a time when fairy stories were having witches eat children, but Baum did not need to go that route, but he made the deliberate choice to do so

The Tin Woodman, for example is described as being that way because he was once a flesh and blood person, but the evil witch, by means of enchanting his axe, cut off in turn, his arms, his legs, his head, and finally cleaved his body in twain. Each time he lost a body part, the local tinsmith replaced the missing part, but not his heart. I can see why they wouldn't want to go into any detail about all that in the movie!

In turn, the Tin Woodman shows no qualms about cutting off the head of a wildcat chasing mice (thereby proving he does have a heart). He defends Dorothy from the wicked witch in defeating forty wolves by means of simply cutting off their heads one by one. Dorothy, waking up to a pile of headless wolves, shows no reaction whatsoever. No wonder wolves are scarce in California! Yes! Unsurprisingly, Oz is southern California. Dorothy crossed a desert from Kansas to get there - where else would it be?!

That sam,e night, the scarecrow defends her from evil crows also dispatched by the witch only to be dispatched themselves by means of his wrenching their necks one by one. The cowardly lion proves he isn't cowardly by scaring off the witch's henchmen. The scarecrow proves he isn't brainless by devising several means to help them on their journey. Contrarily, his movie-self proves he is brainless by screwing up his lines and getting the Pythagorean theorem wrong!

One amusing thing to me was that tin doesn't rust like iron does. It oxidizes of course, as most metals do, but it's quite resistant to this, so the tin man, were he were truly made from tin, likely wouldn't rust and seize-up as he's depicted as doing in the story. This isn't really important in the grand scheme of the story though, which moves along at a brisk pace when it isn't sitting in the doldrums inexplicably. It drags on at the end though when it ought to wind up smartly.

The real problem is that it's not very inventive, nor is it very interesting, except for me in noting the differences between it and the movie version! The writing is a bit leaden in tone, and too grown up. It's very politically incorrect being a product of the nineteenth century, so parents might want to consider whether they want their kids reading something so violent, so unappreciative of nature, and with little to redeem it.

Dorothy is hardly the modern girl. She's like a character from your typical modern YA story: helpless, weepy, and needy, and really never takes charge. She's very selfish and ungrateful, and hardly a strong female character, nor is she a resourceful one. She defeats both evil witches, yes, but not through smarts and bravery (or even by good looks!), but by pure accident in each case. In the first instance, her house falls on the witch and kills her, and in the second, she simply throws a convenient bucket of water at the witch and melts her!

Why a witch susceptible to water damage would keep buckets of water lying around her establishment is an unresolved mystery, Clearly Baum didn't think his wiring through at all, but that's a common problem with writers. Hopefully it's all clear now why I cannot recommend this. There were too many issues with it, and there are far better stories about intelligent and self-possesed young women to be had. I'd recommend looking for those in place of this one. The Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen have told a few.

Tomb of the Golden Bird by Elizabeth Peters

Rating: WARTY!

Set at the time when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, this novel is number 18 in the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters aka Barbara Mertz, PhD in Egyptology, but not in writing exciting adventures or thrilling prose. I wasn't aware of this being another in a series I'd already dismissed, since I'd effectively wiped my memory of the previous read!

One of the biggest problems with it was yet another author's inability to grasp that first person voice is worst person voice and should not be used in any novel unless there was a damned good reason for it. Her mistake was revealed here repeatedly by her habit of switching from first person to third person by quoting from some document which was evidently one of the family's other member's record of events. It didn't work and was truly annoying. When will these idiot writers learn to ditch first person altogether unless they can actually justify it and make it work?

This one I stayed with longer than the previous one and found some parts of it interesting and amusing, but ultimately the plot turned out to be as dry as Egyptian sand, and the story went on and on way too long, destroying the warmer feelings I'd harbored for it earlier, and since I found this ultimately to be a tedious read (read; listen!), I shall not be pursuing any more novels by Elizabeth Peters aka Barbara Michaels!

I thought the story might have something to do with the truly amazing discovery of "king Tut's" tomb, but it really didn't. It was to do with some plot to overthrow a government and there were so many red herrings that it stunk of mummified fish, os the thing I was most interested in was merely set decoration. There really was nothing much about the tomb discovery. The rest of the novel was the retarded family rambling on and on about various matters which in part in the beginning was amusing but which became ever more boring the longer the novel went on.

One of the few things which actually made this listenable for me was the reading of Barbara Rosenblatt, who did an amazing job of voice characterization, and of the reading in general. I can see why she's won so many awards for it. Se had equal facility for both male and female voices and did a fine job overall. Sadly, the novel wasn't up to her high standards, and I cannot recommend it!

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler

Rating: WARTY!

I watched a couple of Chelsea Handler's TV shows and while they were mildly entertaining, they were not enough to make me want to keep on watching. I picked up this book out of curiosity since it was on close-out, but when I read it, I was far less impressed with this than with the TV show. I now have absolutely zero interest in this woman!

The biographical stories were boring and juvenile and presented like she was the only one that anything remotely like this had ever happened to. I had no interest in what she wrote and took quickly to skimming and finding less and less to engage me the further I went into it. In short order, I gave up on it entirely.

Does anyone really want to read about her OCD with masturbation at the age of eight? Do we really find it funny that someone pulled a prank on her that she'd killed a dog? I have zero interest in any of this juvenile stupid behavior and I cannot recommend this, not remotely, not even if you're actually a dog-handler from Chelsea in London.

Vlad the Impaler by Sid Jacobson, Ernie Colón

Rating: WARTY!

This graphic novel purports to tell the history of Vlad Dracula, Vlad III, Vlad Țepeș, or Vlad the Impaler, however you want to think of him. Rather than tell an accurate story, the graphic novel delights instead in purveying endless images of graphic violence, bloodletting, and Vlad as a rapist impaling young women - as often unwilling as willing - with his penis.

There is no doubt he was a violent man, but these were very violent times, so the issue is not whether he was violent, but whether he was more violent than those who surrounded him, and I think this is an open question. Was he a rapist? There's no evidence of it to my knowledge, so again, neither better nor worse than his peers.

Impalement, for example, was not his invention! It was common in the Ottoman Empire (right into the 20th century). Vlad was in league with the Ottomans for much of his life and learned all he knew about warfare from them. He knew no other life. This doesn't excuse him, but it does explain him and demonstrate that he was simply continuing well-established, if horrific, traditions rather than creating his own.

While the broad strokes of this story are accurate, the details are pure fiction, and embellished fiction at that. This book contributes nothing either in interesting story-telling or in great imagery. It's really just pornography, and not even in a sexual sense. I cannot recommend it. As an alternative to this I would recommend And I Darken by Kiersten White which tells a story about Vlad's sister Lada and his brother Radu, which isn't a graphic novel, but which is equally fictional, and which does offer a much more interesting story. I reviewed that one favorably in October 2017.

Sunstone Vol 4 by Stjepan Šejić

Rating: WARTY!

I really have very little to say about this! I got both volumes 3 & 4 from the library at the same time, thinking they might be interesting but after I read volume 3 I was so disappointed that I had no real interest in reading this one. In the end, I skimmed the whole thing stopping here and there to read a section, and it was just as uninteresting as the earlier volume.

The art was great as before, although as before the female characters were all the same character with different hair and clothes! There was at least one character of color I noticed, so that was a minor improvement, but the 'story' was simply the same thing over again - shallow, one-note, and uninteresting with the author relying entirely on the sexual and the kinky to focus the reader's interest, and it failed in my case.

I'm not the kind of person who finds a negligée on a store mannequin remotely interesting. Put it on a woman in whom I have no vested interest, and I might find it mildly distracting, but put it on a woman I already find fascinating and who might merely be a choice voice in an audiobook, and it's a different story. The same thing applies here. I need a story. I need to be interested in the women. Putting leather on them doesn't make me interested. Shallowness turns me off. This novel was far too larded with both, and all this author could offer was a gossamer fabric with no body of work underneath it. It's nowhere near enough!

As I mentioned in my review of volume three, this was such a disappointment because I had loved Šejić's work in a volume of Death Vigil and a volume of Rat Queens both of which I reviewed favorably here. I cannot offer the same for this.

Sunstone Vol 3 by Stjepan Šejić

Rating: WARTY!

I picked this up on spec from the local library because it looked interesting and the artwork was awesome, but on closer inspection - and reading - it turned out to be much ado about doting, and BDSM came to mean Boring Detail, Sapping Mindfulness. I wasn't impressed at all. This was a disappointment because I loved Šejić's work on a volume of Death Vigil and a volume of Rat Queens both of which I reviewed favorably here.

I have not read either of the first two of this five volume set, so I can't speak to how those were or what kind of lead-in they were to these two volumes. I can say that this story was not interesting. I think the author is far more in love with the idea of portraying women in kinky clothing than ever he was in telling a story of two lesbian women who happened to share an interest in Bondage, Discipline, Domination, Submission (or sado-masochism if it's okay with you, Mistress Acronym).

The artwork was gorgeous and several leagues ahead of the all-too-common comic book flat color, flat image style. It was nuanced and shaded and had a lot of character, but ironically, having used that word, the big problem was that every single female character looked exactly the same! They were all thin lipped, long nosed, and lithe, willowy and skinny. In contrast the guys depicted in the story (although few and far between), had at least some characteristics to differentiate them, although all of them seemed to sport facial hair. This did make a refreshing change from most other comic books where precious few guys have facial hair, but it was taking the pendulum too far in the opposite direction! Worse, there were absolutely no people of color present whatsoever.

The biggest problem with this volume though, was the complete lack of a story. There's a thing known as the Bechdel-Wallace-Woolf test wherein a story, film, or show is said to fail unless it features at least a couple of women (preferably named characters) who talk to each other about something other than guys. I think there should be a similar test about stories where characters seem to have a problem talking to each other about anything that's not the core topic - in this case BDSM. It should include a component about the level of obsession with the core topic, too.

The two main women in this story were almost tunnel-vision, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else - on the topic in question. In short, they were simply not realistic to say nothing of a total failure in the rounded and interesting people department. Though an outside life was hinted at (one was supposed to be a writer, the other a lawyer, yet none of this was actually depicted), they actually had no life at all outside of their sexual interludes! Worse, they failed to treat even those interactions like they were actually a real part of their lives. Instead, they were disproportionately excited, surprised, drooling and wanting, to a level that was simply idiotic. It made it all fake and far more like cheap pornography than erotica.

In the end this story was not at all about how they were falling in love and building a relationship, but about how much the author-artist loved to draw shallow characters in leather and latex. The problem was that this was all the story was about. This was so clearly a guy's take on this topic that it failed to entertain or engross me at all. I don't mind reading about people's quirks and kinks, whether or a sexual or of any other nature, but when that's all the writer has to offer and there's really no actual story in sight, it's tiresome. I cannot recommend this one at all.

Atom Land by Jon Butterworth

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is Jon Butterworth's second book on physics. I have not read his other book. The author is a Professor of Physics at University College London and also works at CERN on the ATLAS particle detector experiment. This was one of two large hadron collider experiments which were instrumental in discovering the long-sought-after Higgs Boson.

I have to say up-front that I was very disappointed in this book. For me, it confused things far more than it clarified them, which is unfortunate. I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, and I have only a lay-person's understanding of the topics covered here, but I have read extensively on these subjects, so I know my way around them in general terms. I was hoping for more clarity or new learning here, and I felt I got neither. The author used the metaphor of exploring oceans and islands to pursue the investigation of forms of energy and sub-atomic particles, but it didn't work and it felt much more like a shallow tourist trip where it's all about superficiality and gewgaws, rather than an actual exploratory voyage during which we really learn something about the venue we're visiting.

But before I really get started on content, I find myself once more having to say something about formatting. This book is laid out as a typical academic-style text, with very wide margins, lots of white space, and lots of extra pages up front that strictly aren't necessary. The publisher determines how a book should look, and supplicants to the publishing world are required to conform whether the antiquated rules make sense in a modern world or not.

For me, the bottom line is that we cannot afford to sacrifice so many trees in a world where climate change is running rampant and may be irreversible. We need trees alive, not crushed and sparsely printed on. Naturally in an ebook, this is irrelevant except in that bulkier books eat up more energy in transmission over the Internet, but for a large print run, this slaughter of forests has to stop, or at least be contained. Wasting so much paper is unacceptable.

This book had an extensive contents which served no purpose at all because it contained no links to the actual chapters nor did the chapters contain a reverse link to get back to the contents. Neither was there an index in the back. I assume there was no index because ebooks are searchable and therefore an index and a contents are really irrelevant. Who reads a contents page? Maybe some do, but I never do. I don't read prologues, forewords, introductions, or prefaces, either. If you want people to know what's in the book, make the back cover blurb serve a real purpose and put a brief contents list on that cover!

The real problem here though was the margins which ate up (by my estimation) at least a quarter of each page in white space. The chapter title pages wasted more, and each book section wasted yet more by having its own title page. I'm sure authors and publishers think this makes a book look pretty but you know what? Trees are far prettier than any book I've ever seen or heard of. The book could probably have been two hundred pages instead of three hundred, had more judicious margins and a slightly wiser use of overall space been employed. I can't sanction that kind of wastefulness in formatting.

Another issue was that while the publisher very wisely did not publish this using Amazon's crappy Kindle format, which mangles anything but the plainest of text, the book was published in a format which lent itself poorly to being read on a smart phone, because every page insists upon presenting itself as a complete page. Like an atom, it's not easily broken down into smaller component parts and the entire page is too small, especially with those margins, to be read comfortably on a phone screen. It's really designed for a tablet computer which is far less easy to tote around than is my phone.

On the phone, the reader is constantly having to stretch the page to fill the screen. Shrinking those large margins made it intelligible, but that also rendered it 'unswipeable': you can't swipe to the next page, so you have to reduce the page back to original size - sometimes requiring two shrinking efforts to achieve this properly - swipe it, enlarge it, read it, shrink it, rinse and repeat. It makes for an irritating reading experience at best.

The real problem or joy of any book though is the content (as opposed to contents!). Does it do the job? For me this did not because there were so many confusing metaphors here that it really muddied the water rather than clarified it. It was like comparing the pristine Inverness river of the thirteen century with the disgustingly polluted Thames of the Victorian era.

As I mentioned, the metaphor of sea-travel and island visits is employed here, and the book even includes maps of them of these locations, but this struck me as completely fatuous and an entirely wrong-headed approach. Illustrations of some of the concepts he was discussing would definitely have clarified things, but none of those are to be found anywhere. Instead, we have fake maps of fictional seas and islands that really have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject under discussion. To me this was ill-advised.

It didn't help that the author continually jumped around like he was in Brownian motion between one topic an another. First we sail to this island, then we sail back to where we started, then we take a train journey, then we re-board the ship and sail to another island, oh look at that island over there, but here we are at this island instead. It made for a nonsensical text in which the reader struggled to follow the topic instead of being helped along by a favorable breeze as it were.

I can't test the whole document since I don't have the text, but out of curiosity I typed in this one tiny section which struck me as being obtuse:

The sprays, or jets, of hadrons will be collimated roughly in the direction of the initial quark and antiquark. The energies and directions of the initial quark and antiquark can be calculated in QCD, and the calculation agrees well with measurements of the jets.

This scored marginally over a forty four in Flesch reading ease, where a score for comfortable reading would be sixty or seventy. Low scores are bad! The Flesch-Kincaid grade level was 12.5 which indicates a person who has started college (beyond twelfth grade in the US means graduated high-school - or post-GCE-A-level student in Britain). Although this was hardly a random sample, I believe it's representative since it isn't atypical of how this book is written, so be warned that the reading level isn't exactly aimed at the general populace! I think this is a flaw perhaps induced by having only scientist colleagues read the text? I don't know.

By the time this book reached chapter 19, roughly halfway through, and very accurately titled 'The Weak Force', and went rambling on about W and Z particles, once again without really explaining anything, but instead comparing the whole thing to an airline, I had pretty much lost all interest in this book. This chapter seemed to be one of the most confusing and therefore the weakest in the chapter list so it was aptly named, but maybe this was simply because I was so tired of these meaningless meandering and overblown metaphors that I really had no heart left in it at all, and I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere.

Even when we got down to the actual topic under discussion, the text really didn't do very much to educate or illuminate. As I mentioned, it was like a tourist version where we see the sights, but learn little to nothing of local color and history. We got a scientist's name tossed in here and there, but nothing in depth about the subject before we were whisked-off to the next. Every topic got the same short shrift no matter how easy or hard a topic it might have been to explain.

For example at one point (page 127 of the book, page 145 of the screen page count, which is an indicator of how many fluff pages there were at the start of this book), there was a brief discussion of the elements and how well-bound (or otherwise) they are, with iron standing out as tightly-wrapped no-nonsense kind of a fellow, but nowhere in this section was there any sort of discussion as to exactly why iron, of all the elements, is like this! There were hints all around it but nothing as solid as iron itself is.

Why is iron such a problem in star formation and development such that when a star starts making iron in its belly, it's doomed? Iron is like the legendary black spot in pirate lore, predicting your demise if you get it, but we learn nothing of exactly why this is so. We're told only that this is why iron is so common. I had expected, in a book like this, that there would be something to learn here, but it seems that either there isn't or the author thinks it not worth sharing, and we were never party to which of those options it was. To me this was a starting point: begin with trusty old iron, talk about the elements, and use those discussions of elements and their properties to launch the other topics covered here.

Another such issue was when the text started in on the color of quarks. Color when used in this sense has nothing whatsoever to do with what you see on the TV or movie screen, or in images on your camera. It's an idiosyncrasy of science which Richard Feynman detested. Red, green and blue are used to describe various quarks, but their opposites are not cyan, magenta and yellow! Instead, they're woodenly named: anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue! There was an opportunity for humor there which was missed a in a community which seems fine with quarks named strange and charm! In physics, the color of a sub-atomic particle has to do with the charge of the particle, not with color, but beyond that I have no idea what it really means and this book utterly fails to explain it, or even broach it. This to me was emblematic of the overall skimpy approach employed here. I'm surprised the ship didn't run aground in such shallow seas.

The fact that topics got short shrift - or more à propos, set adrift, as opposed to being anchored solidly in something people have an instinctive grasp of, really sums up the problem: I expected a lot more from this than I got, and it was a truly disappointing experience. I wish the author all the best in his career, both academic and literary, but I cannot recommend this book.

The Crystal Key by Robert William Gronewold

Rating: WARTY!

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

This book was overall decently well-written from a technical perspective and it started out quite engaging, but as I read on, I found it more and more slipping into the worn-out mold of young adult fiction: the perky best friend who is either gay or a female. In this case it was a female named Margo who was obsessed, of course, with fashion. There was the trope of the girl (in this case the oddly-named Felicity Bough) finding her new and great magical power and then being thrown into the threat or clutches of evil. There was the tiresome love-triangle with the reliable trustworthy boy-next-door versus the so-gritty-he's-really-animated-sandpaper bad boy who rescues her. That's what actually turned me off the story. Not so much the ultra-predictable bad boy as the fact that this girl who was initially shown to be so strong, was rescued and thereby was rendered into nothing more than a simpering acolyte of the thoroughly nauseating bad boy.

Evidently like other reviewers, I initially thought this was a graphic novel. It is not. It's a ~400 page tome of pure text, which is way too long. The story revolves around a world which is evidently ours but projected into a future where evil has become so pervasive that even the sun has gone out. What keeps the planet alive are these inexplicable well-springs of light which fountain-up from various places on the planet, But, just like in The Never-Ending Story movie, the dark is encroaching upon the planet piece-by-piece and no one seems to be interested in doing anything about it.

This world is predictably exactly like the USA, except for the magic and the asinine transportation, which seems (for no reason I was given in the fifty percent of this novel that I read) to be based on animals. Cars are tigers and stallions, buses are bears, cargo transportation is elephants, and so on. I was rather surprised not to see the cat bus from the anime Totoro. These are not real animals, but machines named after them and which apparently have some animal traits, but the description was so vague as to leave these things a mystery. They do evidently have wheels, so I didn't get the animal reference at all. None of this made any sense to me; it wasn't entertaining or amusing. Quite the opposite: it increasingly became an irritant in short order.

Someone at Chapterhouse Publishing needed to read this because there were multiple problems with the text. In general it was not awful by any means, and spelling and grammar were fine as a general rule, but there were some bizarre oddities which ought to have been caught by an editor if not by the author himself. For example, on page 48 I read "...then is shot down and dived...." I assume the author meant, 'then it shot down'. A little later I encountered, "...verdant shade of green" on page 73. Verdant actually means green, so this is a tautology. On page 117, I read "...plain stone brick wall...." It's either brick or it's stone; the two are not the same. This is maybe a case where the author started out using one and changed to the other, but forgot to delete the one they were trading out for the other. We've all done that!

On page 128 there was a mistake of using clamored instead of clambered as in "...clamored over the old blocks....' Clamor is to make a noise, whereas clamber is to climb over. I suppose one could say that clambering over the rocks was causing a clamor, but it really doesn't make a lot of sense to do that. On the next page I read, "...who knew what something bigger could do." which ended in a period instead of a question mark. I encountered a common error on page 134, where I read "She tread quietly...." The past tense of tread is 'trod', not tread, and certainly not 'treaded' which I've actually read in more than one novel.

On page 153, I read, "...two large trees that created the top of the hill" I don't get what that's supposed to mean. The trees don't create the top of the hill; they might sit atop it or surmount it. They might even furnish it, but they don't create it. In a part of the novel where Felicity is sitting in a machine I read "...two throttles sat upright ready for steering." Nope! Throttles control speed. They don't control steering, unless the direction is also controlled by the thrust, but since this was a land vehicle, not a water or space vessel, that seemed unlikely, especially since Felicity didn't know how to drive it. Finally on page 156, I read, "I'm hungry too," this speech was followed by the word 'returned' I think it was intended to be 'he returned', as in he spoke back to her. I'm guessing by how often I was discovering these that they didn't end on that page, but that's what I found in as far as I wanted to read in this novel.

In terms of overall formatting, I once again find myself having to beg authors and publishers to have some consideration for trees. This book had very wide margins on all four edges, constituting, by my rough estimate, some twenty-five percent of the page. If the book is issued only in electronic format, this isn't such an issue (although longer novels eat up more energy to transmit over the Internet), but for a book that might go to a long print run, serious consideration needs to be given to how many trees you're going to slaughter in this era of runaway climate change. No one wants to read a novel where the text is jammed together over the entire page, but if the margins had been even slightly less generous, the book would have been shorter and eaten up less paper.

Chapter one didn't actually begin until page fifteen and it ended on page 400. Some of those fifteen pages could have been also dispensed with, instead of rigidly and blindly conforming to antiquated publishing rules created when no one gave a damn about trees and climate change. I found it ironic that the encroaching evil upon which this author discourses is actually upon us (albeit in a different form from the one he writes of), and yet publishers and authors perpetuate their blithe (or blithering) blindness to it.

If these story had been shorter, less 'maiden in distress', and the bad boy third leg of the tired love triangle been dispensed with, this would have been a lot better. In faith, methinks it too low for a high praise, too long for a short praise and too little inventive for an imaginative praise. Only this commendation I can afford it: that were it other than it is, it is unhandsome; and being no other but as it is, I cannot recommend it.

Promethea by Alan Moore, JH Williams

Rating: WARTY!

This is a graphic novel I picked up from the library because it looked interesting. It's the fifth and final issue in the Apocalyptic series (this compendium collects individual issues 26 - 32), which I knew up front, so I have only myself to blame for this mistake! I have not read any of the other four and I'm actually pleased I missed them because this novel sucked majorly.

The story is about some powerful goddess coming back angrily and determined to destroy Earth, although she does a really poor job of it because she actually improves things, This part was interesting because she changed the flat, solid color 2D images into something a lot more realistic: 3D-looking subtly-shaded views of scenery and people, Some images were simply photographs which had been 'cartoonised'. None of that could make a really confused, boring, and meaningless story come to life though.

As one reviewer amusing put it, it looks like Moore finished up the last section on acid, but to me it seemed more like the artist was the one doing the drugs. The artwork was a mess of pastel psychedelia, and the text was in white and some other colors and impossible to read against the heliotrope background. I honestly didn't even try. I'd been ready to give up on this many pages before this last section, and it was the perfect excuse to simply drop it. Not literally, since it was a library book, but I truly did wish I could have dropped it right into the recycling. Cardboard coffee cup holders would have been a better use of these poor trees than this was. What a bloated, self-indulgent, self-absorbed exercise in masturbation it truly was! Don't miss it! Avoid it like the plague.