Copy Boy by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I made it about fourth-fifths the way through this. In the end I was driven away from it for several reasons, not least of which was because the story seemed to drag, and it went frequently off at inexplicable tangents that always made me feel like I'd missed something, somewhere in the text.

It started out a bit confusing and a bit boring frankly, in a chapter that dragged on for twenty pages or so. To me it felt like that part ought to have been told in brief flashbacks or better, in brief flashes of memory of earlier events, triggered by things the main character sees and does in the present. I'd rather that than have had all these pages devoted to it. I'm not a fan of flashbacks at all, nor am I a fan of prologues, and this felt like a too-long prologue.

Despite this disappointment, I decided to press on because the premise of the story appealed to me, but though I stayed with it and it improved to begin with, it went downhill again, and then picked back up, and so on, so for much of the novel it felt like I was riding a reading roller-coaster in terms of how much the novel alternately engaged and bored me. I liked it best then the main character was interacting with "Sweetie" and "Rivka" the two girls Jane, aka Benny, lives with when she first arrives in San Francisco. This part of the story was far too quickly over with for me.

This frequent readjusting from one locale to another was part of the story, but it made it feel a bit disjointed, like it was more than one story about more than one person. Paradoxically, despite this, we got little sense that Jane had moved from the country to a big city. There was no real world-building to speak of, so the action could have taken place anywhere, and Jane adapted so readily to big city life and taking cabs, handling money, and drinking with the boys, and so on, that it felt completely unreal. Everything came far too easily for her.

Jane started out as a strong character, who was interesting and who was someone I wanted to root for, but at other times, and increasingly, she made stupid decisions for no good reason that I could see. She also had a lot of sheer luck in the investigation she was pursuing - far more than was reasonable, which stretched credibility too much for my taste. In the end she became an unpredictable loose cannon doing things which made no sense to me at all, and she quickly lost me as a fan. She came off as really flighty and I lost interest in reading any more about her.

For most of the story she's disguised as a young man and pursuing a career such a young man might pursue, and it seems like too quickly she forgets she's really a girl, so we get very little of her insights into how her life differs now compared with what it was before, and given her impoverished roots and the superficial change of gender on top of that, there were such huge differences between how she had grown up and how she was living now that it didn't make sense she would have so few observations to share about it. There was a major disjunction between the two lives she led, and her serious lack of any real reaction to it felt completely wrong.

Things in her life seemed to fall into place without any real effort on her part, and the story she pursues at the newspaper doesn't always make sense to the reader. At least it didn't to me. I mean, the overall story made sense, but the details of how she put it together seemed completely haphazard to me. It feels like successful leaps are being taken in her investigation without the author sharing much about how she makes those leaps. Either that or I wasn't following the story as well as I ought to have been for one reason or another.

Jane wasn't the only one whose life made little sense though. Both Sweetie and Rivka are two of the other characters who could have been really interesting, but their behavior didn't seem to follow any rational trajectory, and neither does Mac's. He's Jane's too-easy route into the newspaper business. Additionally we seem to have Robert Oppenheimer - the nuclear physicist - introduced into the story for no good reason! How or why that came to be I know not. In the end then, this story had too much and not enough and I could not enjoy it, so I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

The Campaign by Laurie Friedman

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
“never-a-hair-outof-place” is missing a hyphen.
"555 feet 51/8” five and one eighth looks like 51 eights!
“Mom spears a chunk of kung pao chicken” followed by, only one page later, “They’re both eating mu shu chicken with chopsticks”
My shu pork is Northern Chinese dish. Kung Pao chicken is a Sichuan dish from southern central China! Not really the same thing.

This book felt like it wasn't sure where to go and so took the safest, most predictable path from start to finish. It felt like a heavy-handed lesson on the Mount Rushmore presidents, but the face it offered was just as cold and stony as that edifice to presidents who were certainly not the best examples of humanity we could have chiseled into a rock face.

Amanda Adams (yes, that's her name) decides that she wants to run for class president, all without discussing it with her best friend who she expects to run as her VP; then she irrationally gets miffed when she discovers that her best friend is also running for the same office. Once again the book description was apparently written by someone who seems to have little clue what's going on in the book and is just trying to make it sound sensational, which it really isn't. We're told that "Politics is in her DNA" but she clearly does not have any such DNA, and she makes one gaff after another in a poorly-conceived campaign despite having grown up with a Congress person as a mom and a political strategist as a dad. Nor do we ever get any sense that Amanda has a real clue what she's doing. Quite the opposite.

All of this really undermines her credentials and make me wonder why she was running at all. She seemed to have no motivation or plan. The book might have been more engaging had Amanda been a rebel who was, for example, determinedly resisting her parents' efforts to push her into running for this office, but finds herself motivated to do it anyway because of some cause which stirs her. This book wasn't written for me, but it didn't seem like it would appeal very much even to its target audience as it stands. It was obvious from the start which running mate Amanda would end up with, but the real problem with it was that she'd had this idea of running for president for some time but had given zero thought to lining-up her running mate. And this is the girl who has politics in her DNA? Na-uh! Not even close.

We got an Amanda who ran into trouble getting the support of her soccer team because they all irrationally felt that she'd spend all her time campaigning and neglect soccer games and practice, but we're given no reason why they would think that of her. Didn't they know her better than that? It's no spoiler to reveal that her team loses an important game, because it's that kind of a color-by-numbers novel.

What's shameful is the approach to the game, treating it like it was a major 'take no prisoners and slaughter the enemy' battle in an ongoing war rather than with any kind of sportsmanship. I found these rallying cries offensive. Clearly they were taking their cue from the USWNT in the last soccer World Cup when, in their first game, they were lording it over a clearly inferior team instead of being professional about their scoring bonanza. Amanda is given the baseless perspective of a goalkeeper who thinks she and only she is entirely and solely responsible for keeping the ball out of the goal. I guess her team has no players on defense, with every other member of the team is playing on the forward line. It was entirely unrealistic and unbelievable.

Now you can argue that this girl is in seventh grade and may well think like she does because of that, but Amanda is supposed to be the hero of the story with politics in her DNA, and who takes life lessons from the Mount Rushmore community. The problem is that she never seems to learn anything from these mini-bios of the presidents that she bores the reader with, and the story becomes nothing more than jingoism, repeating the tedious and clichéd mythology without actually examining it at all.

Rather than break new ground and find presidents who led exemplary lives which would merit examination and emulation, the author took the road most trampled and trotted out Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. The book was just starting in on the womanizing John Kennedy when I quit.

Why take this trite and easy route? Why not dig a little and find presidents who were not land cheats, as Washington was; not slave abusers, as Jefferson was; not overseeing one of the biggest land-grabs from the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico as Lincoln did; not supporting waterboarding as Teddy Roosevelt did, or dishonorably discharging African American men of the 25th infantry Battalion (the Buffalo Soldiers) on unfounded charges as he did; and finally, not sanctioning the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War Two as Franklin Roosevelt did.

There have been 45 presidents in the US, and while the present one is a dangerous, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and scientifically ignorant clown, not all of them have been like that. Some - like Clinton and Kennedy - have been reprehensible womanizers, but others, like Obama, have been a beacon. Could the author not have found some like that? Apparently not.

I can't commend a book like this at all.

The Witches of Willow Cove by Josh Roberts

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book was a bit too much like the trope clones that came predictably rolling in post Harry Potter. Unless the author is really going to make an effort to bring something new to the table - something different, something original - then really, what's the point? I know this is aimed at middle grade (and read like it was) and I'm certainly not the intended audience, but to have witches waving sticks and chanting in Latin or worse, chanting in rhyming English, is so old and trite now that it's really not worth reading. Making your protagonist a female Harry Potter and doing the same thing with your villain isn't changing it up enough to get close to an original story.

The worst thing about this novel was the Salem angle. The Salem witch nonsense has been done to death and really, does it show any respect for the poor women who were murdered back then on the blatant religious lie that they were witches? No, it does not. It's shameful to keep dragging that out of the closet. For goodness sake let those poor women rest in peace. Even if the story had been brilliant, it would have tedious to read yet another witch story that tries to set its roots in Salem, but the story wasn't that interesting.

I didn't finish this, but the idea seemed to be that of a long-standing grudge, and so the question became: why was it so long-standing? Why didn't this evil witch carry out her revenge three or four hundred years ago? Why now? There seemed to be no answer to that, unless one popped-up in the very latter part of the story, and even if it did, what was the point of this revenge? It occurred to me that unless this person intended to reincarnate those victims from centuries ago in the bodies of her juvenile witch recruits, this revenge really offered her nothing, and even if she was planning on some reincarnation routine, the question of why now - at this time rather than a few hundred years ago still lacked a good answer.

So for these and other reasons, I quickly grew tired of a story that felt like one I'd read many times already, but under different covers and by different authors, so I did not finish it. I can't commend it based on what I read. There were too may tropes and too many clichés.

Feminist City by Leslie Kern

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Feminist City isn't an interesting sci-fi novel, but a non-fiction book about how cities are not designed with women in mind. I agree with that thesis as it happens, having read material on this subject before. This is why I requested this book. It never hurts to learn more, especially if you're interested in female issues and especially if you're a novelist who's always open to ideas for plots or at least ideas for how to make characters who are a different gender than your own seem more lifelike, realistic, motivated, and perhaps having issues to pursue!

This take on cities is a very personal view, and I have to say that the author went off on tangents that for me, didn't serve her main argument well. For example, at one point she devolved into discussing how movies don't tend to represent female relationships. I'm like what? The thing is that after rambling about this and even mentioning a couple of movies that do represent them, the author then got into a prolonged ramble about some TV shows I've never heard of that represent female relationships pretty well. I'm like: are you not undermining your own claim with this?

And what does it have to do with your thesis about cities not being female-friendly? I don't mind it when authors mention stuff tangential to their main thrust, but a digression like this seemed to be an extended reminiscence about her own favorite TV shows rather than anything that materially contributed to her argument. And lest it be forgotten, TV and movies are not reality, even when they're called 'reality shows'. In fact reality shows are the precise opposite of reality. They're as artificial as it gets.

The author lives in Canada so maybe these are Canadian TV shows or maybe they're just shows I never had an interest in. She seems to be forgetting that unless the movie topic is specifically about female friendships, the writer and director had no reason to go out of their way to tell a story about such things because the movie's story is about something else.

Despite her claim, there are in fact many movies that do have female friendship represented in them not as the main plot, but as an included element. Also there are many movies about female friendships. The author, despite writing a book herself, seems to be unaware that there's a whole genre of novels precisely about female friendships! I guess she doesn't read much fiction, but Netflix has a bunch of movies about female relationships and friendships, so I don't get this fruitless digression into fiction when she's supposed to be making a case for a real world issue.

Another thing that struck me as odd in a feminist book was her digression into the topic of the 'Flâneuse'. I'd never encountered this name before, but it's a French word that describes the kind of person who has sufficient idle time on their hands that they can perambulate the city, exploring it and people-watching. I've never been a fan of pretentious French words being introduced into the lingo, but this one is quiet ancient. The original term was Flâneur, and I while I understand that in the ancient past, a term specific to a woman was routinely coined, particularly in a language that absurdly insists that inanimate objects have gender, I don't get why this was perpetuated by a writer of a book like the one under review here. Nor do I see why a woman can't be a Flâneur and leave it at that.

To me it was disturbing to find a female author of a book, and especially a book decidedly aligning with feminism, seeking to employ a female version of the word. If we're about equality, shouldn't one word serve all genders? It's the same case in Hollywood: why actress and not actor for all? We don't call a female doctor a doctrix! We no longer use aviatrix! Why perpetuate the erroneous idea that a female needs to be singled out a special case? Now I'm digressing! I freely admit that this is a pet beef of mine, and fortunately the whole book was not like this.

For me the author was at her best when relating, anecdotal as they were, stories of contending with urban environments while also contending first with a pregnancy and then with a baby on board - that is, onboard a carrier or a stroller. This was in London where the deeply subterranean underground railway, aka 'The Tube' was effectively inaccessible to anyone with a perambulator and pretty much the same even with a stroller. The fact is that the London Underground is a resistance movement: it's antique for the most part, and resists change for a variety of reasons.

Women were largely unseen and herded, back when most of it was built, and while that's no excuse to persist with that idiocy today, it has to be said - given how old the system is - that perhaps it's harder than it might seem to upgrade it appropriately, which is why the inaccessibility problem persists. Not that I'm trying to justify it; it needs to be fixed, not just for moms, but for people who have disabilities. And fear of heights in some London stations (just kidding)! To me it seems that the real problem is that these things cost money, and the will to make those expenditures is lacking among authorities that are largely male, white, and not sporting any differently-abled status. Once that complexion is changed, the rest ought to follow. I hope.

One thing in this discussion of the London tube was when I read (of the author's experience while pregnant): "This was most obvious to me on the Tube, where I was rarely offered a seat during my rush hour commute." While I understand that pregnancy involves carrying around extra weight and fatigue along with a young life, at times the author seems like she's equating being pregnant with being an invalid! This seems as unkind as it is inaccurate. Not every woman feels disabled by her pregnancy. Some do, and clearly there's an issue here, but the wording might have been less ambiguous.

Clearly there ought to be an offer of a seat, leaving it up to the individual to accept or decline as she sees fit. But I didn't see how this was so much an issue with cities not being designed for women. I mean it's always possible to await the next train since they run so frequently during rush hour, and get in there ahead of the crowd to find a seat. To me this seemed much more of a societal issue, with people in general largely being selfish despite attempts by the news media to show how kind we are. If we were truly that kind, it would hardly be a news item now, would it?!

I went into this book thinking it would answer a question that's asked in the book description. I know authors typically don't write these descriptions any more than they design the covers, but it was a question I would have liked to have had answered. The question was "What would a metropolis for working women look like?" and the problem seemed to be that this book isn't an organized journey through the issues, laying out the problems and supplying answers, or at least offering suggestions toward answers. This book is more like a collection of essays and it's a bit repetitive and lacking in substance. It's more like an impressionist painting where I'd have preferred - on this occasion - a photograph, and for me it really didn't get where it ought to have been trying to go - where it suggested it would go.

The problems with cities were highlighted here and there such as for example, the aforesaid lack of elevators on London's underground system, and the sparsity in the design of public toilets (where these can be found and even if they are in good condition). Some of the issues were less about the design of cities and more about societal issues, such as the idea of "A place where women can walk without harassment." No design of any city is going to prevent this as long as men think women are property, possessions, playthings, or people who are to be treated like juveniles. Even the most perfectly designed city will be nightmarish if it's populated by a significant assortment of jerks and dicks.

One of the ongoing problems with cities and one which was not addressed here is that cities are not communities no matter how well they are designed. No matter how much, say, New Yorkers (or alternatively the media) like to pretend their city is a community, it's in actual fact a large, impersonal city and most people are out for themselves, attending to their own plans and business, and with little time to consider others. This is normal in cities.

That's not to say it's right or that it can't be better, but it is the status quo. Something that would improve the situation would be to design cities not as cities but as conglomerations of small communities, wherein the community is more like a village while still being part go the whole, but even Cuomo's fine words about looking toward an improved future, post-covid 19 (assuming there ever is a post-covid 19) are going to lead nowhere without serious infrastructure changes and attitude modifications. Some systems can be improved, but unless you knock down the whole city and redesign it from the ground up, it will never be ideal.

That doesn't mean there's no room for improvements or that we cannot make cities better even as they stand, but the problem is that there are many interests in the city, and cities have grown the way they have because of those interests, most of which are about making money, not about making sense. None of this was addressed in this book, which in the end was much more a collection of personal anecdotes and ideas about problems than it was about how to get there from here.

It was a bit rambling and a bit repetitive, and overall, I was disappointed in it. Thus I'm unable to commend this as a worthy read because it doesn't really deliver on what it promises. It takes one or two interesting steps in that direction, but it's a long journey and this doesn't cover anywhere near enough of the distance there to make for a satisfying read.

The Self-Love Revolution by Virgie Tovar

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Subtitled "Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color," I'm not sure this book was really radical except in the author's expression of the sentiments which have been expressed before, so this brings nothing new to the discussion other than the author's personal reminiscences. Virgie Tovar sounds like she might be a fun person to know and to hang with, but the book has the habit of coming off as strident and preachy at times. It was very outspoken and opinionated and while there's nothing wrong per se with that, and even though I sincerely support the book's larger aims, in the end I couldn't bring myself in good faith to commend this as a worthy read because it contains a little bit too much of anecdote as opposed to hard hitting facts, and I felt that this often undermined the author's arguments. It also has some misleading information.

The book assumes a specific audience, so it's like I wasn't invited to read it, and while I understand that it's important to target your readers, it felt weird to me to read: “I was a little older than you are—about twenty-five—when I did this.” No! She's nowhere near older than I am! That wasn't a big issue. It was amusing, though! The same kind of thing happened when I read: “‘No’ wasn’t a serious part of my vocabulary until I was, like, twentyone. It totally changed my life in the best way. I’m kind of jealous that you get to learn this before I did, but I’m glad I get to be the one who tells you about it.“ Nope! But fine for her intended audience even if it felt a bit exclusionary.

One of the real problems I had with this book was that it's all about being non-judgmental, and I support that aim fully, but even as it was saying this, the book itself sounded very judgmental at times. For example, in one part I read, “Some people talk about inheritances, like a piece of property or a really nice pair of earrings or your great grandmother’s silverware or your weird auntie’s salt and pepper shaker collection.“ Isn't describing your relative as ‘Weird auntie’ judgmental? I mean based on the fact that all we're presented with in evidence is her collection of salt and pepper shakers, that doesn't strike me as anywhere near sufficient to convict her! It felt like a case of "Pot, meet Kettle!"

On that same topic, I read, “I had a really big crush on my classmate (classmate's name redacted by me - Ian)...He only liked skinny girls and he was really mean to me.” The problem with this is that we have only the author’s story here! That's not to say the author is making this up, but there's another perspective that we never get to hear. Suppose she had this crush and was making herself obnoxious about it? I'm not saying this is true, but the way this anecdote is told, it leaves the person relating it open to the accusation that perhaps the recipient of this crush may have considered that for her, 'no' didn't mean 'no', and found that only rudeness could repel her unwanted attention.

Maybe that's the case, maybe it's exactly as the author reports; more likely, it's somewhere in between - six of one and half a dozen of the other, as they say. I don't know, and this is why this goes back to what I said about the evidence offered here being personal anecdote a lot of the time. Without a larger sample, it's really hard to exclude biased reporting and it makes it difficult for the author to defend herself against an accusation that she has a personal gripe - which still would be valid, but which would also serves to undermine her making a larger case.

As to misinformation? At one point the author writes: "I didn’t know about all the research that says that skipping meals is bad for people.” Yet nowhere is 'all the research' cited or referenced. Again, we have personal anecdote. I would have agreed with her if she'd said irregular habits (whether in regard to eating or to sleeping) are bad for you, but skipping over-indulgence is actually shown to be a good thing and is supported by research! The Harvard Health Blog is hardly a peer-reviewed science paper, but it discusses such papers and I'd take their word over anecdote. This article:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156
supports reading I've done elsewhere which argues convincingly that intermittent - i.e. regular short fasting - is actually good for your health as long as you eat healthy meals along with it and don't go overboard with the fasting part of it. The author of this book rejects any kind of fasting out of hand, saying at one point, “‘Fasting’ is not a good idea." But we all fast when we're asleep! That's why the first meal of the day is called break-fast! It doesn't hurt to have a period of time - other than when you're sleeping! - during which you avoid food, and eat regular meals the rest of the time. It's not hard to do and it pays dividends (now that's a personal anecdote!). I'm not a Muslim, but I tend to eat very minimally if at all during the day whether it's Ramadan or not, and to eat whatever I like in the evening - but let me qualify that by saying I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and little junk food. All I can say is that it works for me.

While I completely agree with the author that most diets - especially commercial ones and fad diets - are completely worthless - most people put the weight back on and many even gain more weight after than they had before - not all attempts to lose weight are failures. What's a guaranteed fail is dieting like the author says she did: ”When I was eighteen, I attempted a more drastic version of my sixth-grade summer diet. I decided I was going to try to eat nothing— maybe a spoonful of food a day.“ Now honestly, that’s not a diet, that’s just rank stupidity, but because you make a truly dumb decision when you're eighteen doesn't mean that all attempts to diet are stupid. It's just as judgmental to abuse people who wish to diet as it is to judge people who choose to love their body as it is.

Another example of a personal opinion injected into this work is “Food is good, not bad.“ Seriously? It honestly depends on the food. If you chose to eat nothing but cheesecake all day, every day, then yes that 'food' is bad. Choosing to eat healthily isn't ever bad, but the author assumes all food, all cravings, anything you want to put in your mouth is equal and that's dangerously misleading.

The author rightly decries the fashion circus and the cosmetic mega-business, but she conveniently ignores the agribusiness-industrial complex as you might call it, which is dedicated to selling us calories and doesn't give a damn if those calories come as sugary, fatty or salty foods, all of which are unhealthy if not controlled. In a study of almost 6,000 Coronavirus patients, ones with poor outcomes nearly always had underlying conditions, and 41% of those fatalities were at least in part because the patient was obese. Body positivity is the only smart way to go, but that doesn't mean becoming willfully blind to health considerations.

Yes, the author gets it right in that your body does need sugar. It does need carbs. It does need fat. The issue she conveniently ignores is that your body doesn't need the massive quantities of these things that we can readily get from junk food today. Here's where a good science education comes in handily, specifically the science of evolution. During most of humankind's history, it was hard for us to get these things (sugar, fat, salt) in our diet, so our bodies craved them because getting enough back then was the problem and a craving helped to satisfy that important biological need by driving us to seek out such important parts of a naturally restricted diet.

Here and now, in 2020, we do not have any problem at all getting all the sugar, fat, and salt we could ever dream of. That doesn't make it healthy to continue to crave it and eat it every chance we get. Quite the opposite. It's dangerous and unhealthy to suggest all food is equal and we ought to feel free to eat as much as we want, of whatever we want, whenever we want. It's downright irresponsible and this was the main reason why I started turning against this book even thought I would dearly have liked to support it.

The author claims that there have always been fat people, and she's right in a limited sense. What she conveniently ignores though, is that there has been a fat epidemic over the last half century or so. Obesity rates among US adults, for example, have pretty much tripled since the sixties:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228640/

This is something new and different. It's not business as usual as the author claims, but we're in danger of complacently letting it become so. What changed is still being argued over, but the easy access to cheap calories - and bad calories - i.e. those coming from junk food promoted by food manufacturers who spend millions lobbying Congress and the senate - is one leading candidate for bringing about this change.

The author claims that “We actually all know how to eat right.” but we manifestly do not. No one is born with the inbuilt instinct of how to eat right. That's something we learn - or do not - from our parents or guardians, our family, our peers, and from movies and TV, from advertising, and increasingly from social media these days where there are paid influencers for everything, and they don't always make it clear who is paying them to promote whatever it is they're pushing. Without having a solid foundation in healthy eating from the off, we're doomed to fail at whatever it is we think we're succeeding at or embracing.

At one point the author mentions “the white standard was the one I felt more pressure to meet” But nowhere is this explicitly defined. We can divine from reading elsewhere that it's intended to be a slim pretty female, but slim pretty females come in all races. They're not just white. This is a racist comment that seems to have roots in the author's own personal history. Again it's a personal anecdote, not the result of an impartial study.

She was on more solid ground when she was talking about how much of what people of color have traditionally been subjected to has been white: the movies, TV, and so on, but that depends on what you choose to watch - and it is a choice. A person who listens to a particular type of music - say country - might conclude there's a white standard whereas someone who watches rap is forced to conclude that there's a black standard. The same goes for watching many sports, such as football or basketball in particular. The encouraging thing is that there's a bigger diversity of media now than there's ever been so it's not quite as bad as it was, and we can personally choose what to accept from it and what to reject. Anyone who truly loves their body will realize this, and take all this promotion with a pinch of whatever.

That said, there is still a long way to go. An article on Huffpost:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.huffpost.com/entry/why-do-young-girls-hate-their-bodies_b_57f4cf08e4b0ab1116a54ca9/amp)
titled "Why Do Young Girls Hate Their Bodies?“ has (or had when I copied this URL) ads showing rail-thin women modeling clothes! That’s how hypocritical we are. A better and more positive article is this one:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/articles/2018-07-30/what-do-women-with-positive-body-images-have-that-others-dont

In terms of the general appearance of this book, the publisher once again seems to have allowed an author's book to be put directly into Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion mangle, and out came a noticeably garbled text. Fortunately it was legible for the most part if one ignores the random colorization of the text here and there, but there were issues with headers being interspersed with the text so that I read, for example, the following: “...but when she wasn’t in bed she’d be running around with uncorrected proof...” Now that's amusing, but the 'uncorrected proof' part is the page header which ought to have been removed well-before this book was ever allowed to become Kindling, which is what Amazon typically does to text.

In another section I read, “I never got more compliments from others than when I was Healthy and thin are not the same thing. starving myself.” I think 'Healthy and thin are not the same thing.' was intended as a heading, and Amazon managed to interleave it with the body of the text. That same heading was repeated right after this as well. Way to go, Amazon, you clowns! Not that Jeff Bezos, who has profited from COVID-19 to the tune of $24 billion so I read yesterday - while millions of Americans are now out of work - actually cares.

I personally have zero time for Amazon and I refuse to do business with them. I don't care that it likely costs me book sales. Someone has to take a stand and put quality over profit. Just remember that unless your text is pretty much plan vanilla, Amazon will dice and julienne it in very inventive ways, and especially if it contains images! Hopefully if this particular book is ever issued as an ebook, these problems will be fixed. This was an ARC after all.

So in conclusion, I support many of the sentiments expressed in this book. I dream of the day when perceptions, attitudes, and opinions change. I just don't feel this book will help as much as I wish it would. I felt the sentiments could have been expressed better and with a less blinkered perspective. We do need to be less judgmental and more supportive of people who are, in the author's word, 'fat', but we need to be wise in how we convey this information to people to help them wisely choose their course ahead, rather than brow-beatign them to accept 'my way' or offering them the highway as the only alternative. BTW, fatphobia isn't really a good word, although it's obviously gaining currency. The actual term is Cacomorphobia, even if it probably sounds worse! I wish the author all the best in her career but I can't support this expression of it for the reasons I've cited.

Don't Mess With This Witch by Liz Lorow

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
“...not a plant like a Fichus or Gardenia.” A fichu is a square of lace used to preserve modesty on low-cut gowns in the 18th and 19th century. I believe the author meant ficus.

“I had no control over a porcupine wandering into my neighborhood in rural England. They live there." No, they don’t! Britain has no porcupines! There are porcupines around the Mediterranean, but southern Europe is as far north as they get. Britain has hedgehogs which are unrelated to porcupines and much more cute. I had a couple as pets growing up there.

“...he flexed his bicep.” Doubtful! Biceps, yes, bicep? Not so much! I don't see how you can have a character who almost chides someone for not using 'whom' and then doesn't know that the bicep is only one part of the biceps which is the muscle that gets flexed! In another part of the novel I read, "Recommended? By whom?" Seriously, no one but the most pretentious people use that in speech, and you certainly don't hear it from a 16-year old in juvie.

“You’re itching is driving you crazy” - confusion of 'your' and 'you’re'.

Reading this book was like a roller-coaster in terms of my wanting to rate it a worthy read, and not. I kept changing my mind and I had multiple issues with it. In the end that;s what decided it. I read the thing the whole way through - except for the epilogue (I don't do epilogues or prologues) and I didn't hate it and in general the writing wasn't awful either, and I enjoyed some of the characters, but in the end, there were so many issues that I can't in good conscience rate it positively.

I like stories where a team gets together to achieve an end. I just published one myself, so I was a bit disappointed that what seemed to be a team forming here ended-up not becoming one. On the other hand I liked the main character - for the most part. She was smart and amusing and strong, which is a big plus for me, but countering that were the parts of the book where she was effectively infantilized by the trope YA guy named, of all things, Logan. I could have done without him. So that's the way this story hit me all along - one time I was up for it, the next I was having grave misgivings about it.

At one point Logan, the main character's love interest, says, “I was raised to respect and protect women." This turned me off the story because it became yet another YA story where the girl is the maiden in distress and the big tough guy is the white knight coming to save and protect her! Genevieve, the main character, needed no one's protection. I can see a guy saying that - guys do say those kinds of things, but the fact that there was no push-back from Genevieve was what was wrong. We need to get past this idea that women are universally weak and helpless and in every case, need a strong man to take care of them. It's that kind of thinking that leads to abuses: putting women on a pedestal on the one hand and slapping them with the other.

In another instance, I read, "Logan leapt to his feet and extended his hand to help me up." Again this suggests Genevieve is the weak one who needs the help. I know some people might view this as merely being gentlemanly, but unless you have a later scene where Genevieve extends a hand to help Logan up, this bias against women being capable of taking care of themselves is really an abuse. If Logan respects women, why does he constantly treat them like they're always in need of help? It felt sexist, especially in this case, given how powerful Genevieve truly is. In another instance, Logan said, "I don't want you going anywhere without me...Someone needs to be with you to protect you." Again with the infantilization. it was almost as nauseating as how many times characters rolled their eyes in this book or the incessant number of times Genevieve opened or closed her eyes. It was like she was doing that constantly!

Her power was also an issue in that she felt rather like a 'special snowflake' - like she never had to work for a thing; everything she tried to do was a great success, powers came to her just when she needed them, and she always had the right spell for the job despite her evidently substandard education on the topic. It was a bit too much. She never had to struggle for anything.

I liked the idea of witches in juvie. That's what drew me to the story in the first place. It was different, original, and interesting. The students were captive, but they were expected to follow an academic schedule - and they had a surprising amount of freedom, but their magical powers were somehow suppressed so they could not use them - and yes, these witches seemed more like magicians than witches. Not that the book description helped, since it wasn't at all honest in describing what happened: "Now the administration needs Genevieve’s help to find a student/inmate who escaped." No, they don't! They never asked her to do that. She did it all by herself!

That didn't detract from the story for me, but it does reinforce my own tack in avoiding Big Publishing™ because the people who write the back cover blurbs seem never to have actually read the story they're describing, and worse, the people who illustrate the front cover seem never to have read it either. I know those who do not self-publish have little say in their covers or book blurbs, which is why I pay zero attention to the front cover when deciding which books I want to read. They're highly misleading, and I laugh at authors who have dramatic cover reveals because they're so pathetic and juvenile. In this case, the cover showed a young woman with straight black hair, yet the antagonist in this novel has wavy brown hair. I honestly don't see how you can confuse the two. I guess it wasn't edgy enough for the cover photographer, huh? They'd rather misrepresent it.

But enough about the cover. I read a book for the content, not for the pretty picture on the front. One of the first issues I had with this, other than the silly trope of having spells cast in rhyme, was the fact that this juvenile witch detention center had an off-limits library! What? Why? Why would they put dangerous books in a detention center that could potentially enable these witches to escape? It made zero sense. A regular library? Yes! An off-limits one? No!

Though this wasn't a high-school, another issue (other than purloining 'muggles' from JK Rowling and changing one letter to make it somehow 'different') was the trope high-school bully, in the form of a teacher who routinely brutalized the children by subtly undermining their education, and using their failures to add months onto their sentences. I know there needs to be a villain in these stories, but this felt like lazy writing, with a teacher having that much power and evidently no review or oversight. It just felt like too much.

One of the issues I have with magical novels is that the authors tend not to think things through and truly envision what a world with magical powers would be like - even one where magic is kept hidden from the public). With few exceptions, they tend to have the world be exactly the way it is today, just with the addition of the magicians, or witches, or whatever, and it really doesn't work very well.

For example, in this story, there was a section where Genevieve says, “At least I didn’t live in Centralia, Pennsylvania. That town is deserted because of a coal fire that’s been burning underground since nineteen sixty-two." This is true. In fact recently, there was an article on CNN's website that talked about a stretch of abandoned highway there which has been literally covered in graffiti and has become a tourist attraction, but the authorities are covering it up because it's not safe for tourism.

So far so good, but this novel isn't our world: this is a world where there are witches with powerful magic, and yet none of the witches have been out there to try and stop the burning? If you're going to reference real-world events, then then it seems to me to necessitate a witch's perspective to go along with it. Why haven't the witches stopped the burning? Do they not care? Can they not do it? To suggest there are immensely powerful witches and yet this fire still burns, like the witches frankly don't give a damn, leaves a hole in the story for me. I think you really need to address why witches didn't make a difference. Or not mention the situation at all.

There was an instance where Genevieve is trying to hide behind a pole and I read, "I had to become invisible - something I’d never tried before, or skinnier - something every witch has tried with varying success.” This felt like body-shaming - that witches are universally overweight, or think they are. This felt like something that could have passed unmentioned, or if you have to mention it, then maybe say some witches have tried it. To call out every witch and suggest they're overweight or have a poor self-image felt like an awful thing for a female author to do to her fellow females.

So while this writer can write and tell a decent story in general terms, for me there were far too many loose ends and examples of thoughtless writing for me to rate this as a worthy read. I wish the author all the best in her career, because based on this one, I think she has some good stories to tell, but this particular one was too hobbled with issues to fly and sad as it makes me, I can't commend it as a worthy read.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I simply could not get into this novel at all. I loved the title and the idea, and even the cover photograph, which was exquisite, but the actual text seemed so rambling I honestly could not follow what was going on.

It began perfectly fine and I was really getting into it as these two women, approaching middle age, were evidently conducting some sort of casual lesbian relationship even as one of them seemed to be desperately searching for a man to latch onto. The other seemed quite happy with the status quo, but evidently her friend was uncomfortable with living out the rest of her life like that, or at least felt she ought to have more, and was trying to talk her lover into finding a man herself.

From there it seemed to quickly explode into a score of different directions with characters popping up out of nowhere and I lost track of who was who and what was what. The writing style seemed like some sort of free-association, stream-of-conscious affair which completely lost me. I would have been happy to have read a whole novel about those two women and no one else, but they became quickly buried under the other characters, in whom I had zero interest, so I gave up reading it. I can't commend this based on what I read of it, even though the beginning was remarkable and quite captivating.

Scullion by Jarad Greene

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I guess me and writers named Greene with first initial J, are not destined to get along. I quit reading this about four fifths the way through because it wasn't entertaining me at all. I kept hoping something would happen or that it would get better, but it never did, and I felt resentful of the time I'd spent reading it when I could have been doing something more fulfilling. When I picked the thing to review I'd thought the two characters on the cover were women who worked in the scullery of a castle, but only one of them is.

He gets kidnapped by trolls who mistake him for the other person on the cover who is actually a female warrior. Apparently trolls are really stupid mistaking an accidental headscarf for real purple hair, but the trolls are not consistent in their stupidity which made the device rather flimsy.

There were half-hearted attempts at humor. Despite this being set in medieval times, they have modern amenities and outlooks - but these fell flat on me. The story felt confused, with far too many characters coming in like Keystone Cops and filling up the panels without much of an introduction to set the stage. I lost track repeatedly as to what was supposed to be happening or why people were doing certain things (and not doing other things that seemed far more logical in the circumstances), and I decided this was not for me. I can't commend it at all.

Wave, Listen to Me! Vol 1 by Hiroaki Samura

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Me and this graphic novel ebook did not get along at all. There were several reasons for it. The first is the fiction that "This book belongs to:" with my name and email address, when the book never has or ever will belong to me! It's set up as one of those so-called 'social DRM PDF' books, but it's never actually a download, so if you close your browser before having read all of it, it's gone, and you have to go back to Net Galley to get it back again. It's not social at all. It's anti-social and falsely criminalizes reviewers who do not get paid for this, but do it out of the goodness of their hearts. I've never shared a review book, and have no intention of doing so, and personally I'm going to to quit requesting for review any book that employs this system in future.

Another issue is that the book is almost 200 pages long, but this format offers no way to navigate it quickly. If you want to get to page 196, you have to continually swipe the screen bottom to top since this vertically scrolls. It's a nightmare when writing a review and trying to find a specific page to verify something. It won't allow any fast scrolling, so if you stop swiping, the pages stop scrolling.

When you get there, you're greeted by this: "The success of this book depends on influencers like you..." Good luck with that after my experience! Once at the end, the fastest way to get back to the beginning is not to swipe again, but to close the entire thing and re-download it from Net Galley. The fact that it is faster that way is the very definition of insanity gone wild.

The next issue is that this is a manga, but it doesn't start from the back and read to the front as these typically do. It starts from the front, but then the pages are backwards, as compared with the western way of reading, so instead of starting at top left, you have to start at top right and read right to left. Not being an avid reader of manga this is a chore I have to keep reminding myself of, but it's manageable. What really irked me though was the rampant racism of the illustrations.

When Scarlett Johansson was picked for the role of Motoko Kusanagi in the live-action Ghost in the Shell there was an outrage because the character was perceived as Japanese. I agreed with that outrage. I was also outraged that because she gained notoriety for her role as Back Widow, she became the go-to girl for a host of other action movies, leaving other, capable actors of assorted ethnic backgrounds locked-out of those roles. On the one hand I can't blame an actor for wanting to ensure their financial security, but Johansson has a net worth of well over $150 million and she had a steady movie career long before Iron Man 2 came along, so I have to wonder about someone who repeatedly takes roles that other, less financially comfortable actors could admirably fill.

But I digress. The point is that here in this comic book we have every single Asian portrayed with western features. I have to ask: where is the outrage? I'm quite used to the huge-eyed and pointy-chinned representations of manga characters, but these were drawn realistically, and with some skill, yet not a single one of them was Asian despite all of them having Asian names and the entire comic book being set in Sapporo, which is the capital city of Hokkaido, an island which is part of the State of Japan. For me this is wrong. What are they afraid of - that readers might be turned off a book because it has fur'ners in it? That might apply some forty percent of the people in the USA who support a clearly racist, bigoted, and divisive president, but it doesn't apply to people like me who enjoy and welcome diversity in our reading.

The content page of this comic was rotated ninety degrees for reasons unknown. It was in landscape mode even though the entire comic other than that was in portrait format. So anyway, the comic is about a woman named Minare who is pissed-off with some guy, and vents about him to a stranger in a bar. Rather than give her a look and move carefully away from her, the stranger invites her to his radio station and records her venting on air, and she becomes a celebrity. This is a tired plot that has been done many times before and this version brought nothing new to the story. In fact, for me, it was confused, rambling, and incoherent, and I lost interest in it very quickly. I can't commend it based on the third or so of it that I could stand to read. Sadly, there far too many loudmouthed jerks who become celebrities in real life without having to read about them in fiction. I can not commend this as a worthy read.

Transmission by Morgan Rice

Rating: WARTY!

This was a middle-grade novel about a terminally ill thirteen-year-old who discovers he can receive messages from a dead alien culture. At first he thinks it's just hallucinations, but it becomes more and more persistent and finally he talks his mom into taking him to the SETI institute where it gets confirmed that he's really receiving genuine messages. The people who are studying the transmissions had been unable to understand them until this kid got involved and made sense of them simultaneously making sense of his visions.

It sounded like an interesting and definitely 'off the beaten track' premise, which is what attracted me, but the story was a little bit too juvenile and simplistic for my taste. I gave up on it about halfway through when the kid learned that the aliens had sent a sort of a time-capsule to Earth. The coordinates that the aliens gave were in Columbia, in South America, but the US people went there - with armed soldiers, yet - to pick the thing up apparently without saying a word to the Columbians, leading to a stand-off with the Columbian army.

This was exactly the sort of Trumpian bullshit that's lost the USA a lot of international friends - this sense of self-entitlement and USA über alles. I wasn't exactly brimming with enthusiasm over this story to begin with, but that was far too much to allow: sending troops uninvited was tantamount to a declaration of war and to present this in a children's novel as thought it was perfectly acceptable behavior, and then get aggressive when the locals showed-up and objected, was entirely wrong-headed and seriously poor writing.

This novel could have been written much more wisely than this, and for me it was the last straw. I can't commend this as a worthy read and I'm certainly not about to read a whole series like this. I should have stuck with my instinct which is to reject out of hand any novel that has 'saga' or 'chronicles' anywhere on the cover!

The Deep End by Julie Mulhern

Rating: WARTY!

This story was first person, a voice I typically detest, but even so I decided to give it a try. I ran into a major problem immediately and gave up on it at once, not wanting to tempt fate and read on in the faint hope it would improve. The story began with the main character strolling out to the backyard pool for a morning swim, and somehow she fails to notice a dead body in the water until she dives in and swims right into it? Was she blind? Did she keep her eyes closed until she dived into the water? It was, quite simply, bad writing and if I start out by reading that in the first few paragraphs I'm sure-as-hell not going to waste my time reading on under the delusion that it will get better. Certainly not in first person I'm not! I can't commend this one, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

Archangel by Sharon Shinn

Rating: WARTY!

After a hundred pages or so of this huge tome of a fine-print novel, I really didn't feel like I'd be very happy trying to read several hundred pages more if the first hundred are not doing much for me. The story had potential I think, but I feel it's been wasted and I'm not a fan of this meandering and waffling style of writing.

The premise is a world set in Biblical times, and in which angels interact with humans in ways the Bible never talked about. The position of 'Archangel' is due for a change of tenure, and Gabriel is up for it. For reasons which go unexplained, he's required to get him a human bride, but one designated by "the god."

Having failed to find his bride at the location he was told she would be, he begins a search for her, but can't find her anywhere. The village has been destroyed - and was razed several years ago, which begs the question as to why he was directed there when there was no 'there' there! That question, again, goes unanswered, at least in the portion I read.

It made zero sense because everyone in Gabriel's angelic circle is chiding him for not getting off the mark and finding his bride earlier, but if he'd done that when the village was still extant, then she would have been a child bride! Seriously? If he'd waited, as he did, until she was old enough to marry then her village was gone. What the heck? It made no sense at all. I don't think the author thought it through.

In another pov, we discover that she, Rachel, is a servant for a family which is organizing a wedding to which Gabriel has been invited. This is where he meets Rachel, purely by accident, but instead of following Gabriel's search and showing him meeting up with her, the author chose to skip to her life as a servant and ramble on about that, before bringing that to a jarring halt while we're forced to back-track to a documentation of Gabriel's fruitless search.

This held zero interest for me and as gar as I'm concerned, was a complete waste of trees. They'd already met at the end of the previous chapter! Why force a flashback on us? It contributed nothing to moving the story forward - quite the opposite in fact. It held it up and I react negatively to dumb writing choices like that. I'm not a fan of pointless flashbacks.

On top of this, what's wrong with this match up? A young woman to an antique angel? I mean let's face it Gabriel's been around since the dawn of time, so why would he have any interest at all in a juvenile human female? That said, Gabriel hardly has angelic thoughts. He doesn't come off as an angel at all, but as exactly how he's portrayed - a regular human male in his thirties or thereabouts. It was bullshit.

It's like that asinine 16-year-old Isabella falling in love with the hundred year old Edward. if she;d been legally an adult and he'd been half his age that would be one thing, but how is it remotely going to work given their massively different life experiences? I'm not one who denigrates May-December relationships; far from it, but in this case it was way extreme, and even more-so in the case of Gabriel and Rachel.

Why would someone of his antiquity and background have any interest at all in a woman who must have seemed like an infant to him? I'm not taking about physical appearance, but about mental compatibility. They would have had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common! Just yuk, and ugh, and blecch!

I never did get why it was so hard for him to find her if it's been divinely ordained that he and she are to wed and sing praises to a god at a ceremony. It made no sense to me, and I quickly decided I wasn't about to expend any more time reading another several hundred pages of this kind of writing. I ditched it and moved on to something better. Trust me, there's always something better! I see no point in wasting my valuable time on something that simply isn't doing it for me, and so, based on the portion of this that I did read, I cannot commend it as a worthy read, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

The Akhenaten Adventure by PB Kerr

Rating: WARTY!

This book, a part of the 'Children of the Lamp' series, did not agree with me, which perhaps is no surprise since it's not aimed at me! The thing is though that I've read many middle-grade novels and enjoyed a lot of them. This one, not so much. I finally got around to it after it had been sitting quietly on my print book shelves forever. Maybe that should have been a tip-off! But the story - some 350 pages long - took an almost forever to get moving, and it made little sense.

It tells you right up front - or rather right in back, in the book description - that the non-identical twins in the story, Phillipa and John (John Gaunt believe it or not - at least the author left of the O'), are djinni, aka genies. Why then drag the story pointlessly on for fully a third of its length before this is revealed to the twins? In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling had it revealed to him that he was a wizard before page 60, and that book was shorter than this one. So why the delay? I have no idea. It seemed ridiculous to me since it was already known what they were.

The problem, and this is only a theory, but the problem as I see it is that writers get lethargic when creating a series and drag everything out to fill lots of volumes so they can stick it to the reader for the cost of yet another novel in the series. It's not about entertaining the reader and giving value for money; it's about putting in the least effort for the maximum reward, and Big Publishing™ encourages this big time, of course.

Shame on such writers. Shame on such publishers. This is one of many reasons, and with few exceptions, that I detest series and why I self-publish. Writing is what's important to me - not milking money from people, especially in times like this with ten million people - and disproportionately minorities, teens, and women - out of work.

The kids meet their uncle Nimrod (yeah, really!) in a dream they have while having their wisdom teeth extracted, and they persuade their parents to let them fly to London to visit him. Why London? I don't know: a Harry Potter 'Brits are cool' diversion? It was pointless.

Why not have their Uncle living in Egypt, which is where they went next? Arab-phobia? It felt rather bigoted to me to have the story be about a race of people whose name is of Middle east origin, and then deny that derivation by starting it in the US and then moving it to London with the Middle East coming in third. But this is another problem with novels and too many movies. If it ain't USA, who cares? How small-minded. And how mercenary.

So the story was slow. Worse, it was not particularly interesting or original, or adventurous, and it didn't draw me in, make me like or even respect any of the characters, or make me want to read beyond about half way, which is more than I ought to have read, for sure. I can't commend this based on what I read of it.

The First Sister by Linden A Lewis

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the first in a trilogy ("The First Sister"). The thing is that there was nothing on Net Galley to indicate this was part of a trilogy. I would probably have not requested it had I known, because I've had little success with YA trilogies. But you work with what you have, so here goes! It was described as "Combining the social commentary of The Handmaid's Tale with the white-knuckled thrills of Red Rising." I did not like The Handmaid's Tale, and I'm not familiar with Red Rising at all, but the book description interested me, so I went ahead and selected it for review.

Unfortunately, and this is doubtlessly because it's a trilogy, the book took forever to get going and moved at a lethargic pace, while paradoxically doing next to nothing in terms of actually starting in on a story. Combine this with the multiple PoVs, all in first person - a voice I despise - and a tedious audio diary transcription from one of the characters who was unimaginatively named 'Hiro', and it seemed that the characters in this book were conspiring to irritate and bore me.

First person is so two persons ago, and very quickly I lost all interest in Hiro's non-story anyway. I began routinely skipping their sections. Even so, I made it only to 25% of the way through before I was forced to DNF this novel as a cause infâme, which is the opposite of a cause célèbre. Life is too short to spend it on stories that don't inspire, excite and engage. Your mileage may differ. I hope it does. It would be a sad world if we all liked the same things.

My first real problem was that I didn't buy into the scenario where there would be, in the future, a religious order of sacred prostitutes, nor was any help given to the reader as to how this had even come about. Instead we were simply presented with the fait accompli of a going concern. and expected to run with it. For me it was too thin, especially since the author was surprisingly coy about what exactly it was that these women did. Apparently there were three only on this entire troop ship, one of whom was reserved solely for the captain. The other two evidently had their work cut out for them, whatever it was.

The whole point of volume one of a series is that it's a prologue. I don't do prologues and I don't like volume 1's for that very reason, so it was ironic to me that this one told us so little about the world we're in. The comparison to Red Rising may or may not be apt. I can't speak to that, but personally I'd feel insulted were my work to be compared with someone else's like mine is a poor clone rather than something original, but as long as we're making comparisons, for me, a better one is to Star Trek, and it's a negative one, I'm sorry to say, because Star Trek has this same problem. In this story, just like in Star Trek, we have people doing everything, with not a robot in sight.

What happened to all the robots? We have them today in volume and they're getting better and better. So what went wrong? Was there a robot plague and they all died out such that there are none for the military and so human cannon fodder is required as usual? And on that score, why are there no sex dolls in the future such that women are required to serve as something for the men to masturbate in? But why would men prefer that if the women aren't very attractive? At one point in chapter 3, I read this: “She’s handsome for a woman." I'm sorry but WHAT?!

Again, we have sex dolls today and they're becoming more and more lifelike, but while they're a long way from being remotely human in any way, this story takes place well into the future. And still: no sex toys? It doesn't work without some sort of explanation as to why there are none and so there have to be actual humans in servitude to men - and on a ship captained by a woman?! Naturally there has to be human interest, but the trick of writing a good human interest story is to set it in a realistic future and still make it work. This future felt artificial and sterile. Humans are still doing all the fighting in person? There are no robots? No drones? No AIs? It didn't work for me.

Why would these women voluntarily have their vocal chords disabled or removed or whatever it was they had done with no explanation as to why, and give up their voice? Isn't a voice part of a good sex life? Obviously these women were not allowed to just say no, so their voice would have been useless for that, but why were they denied any expression of pleasure, whether real or just faking it? Women are fighting right now to have a voice, and yet in the future it's gone? Why? How did it happen? In the portion I read, that question got a Trumpian response: no intelligent answer, just redirection and deflection. Why would adherents of a female-oriented religion, with a goddess at its head, put themselves in physical service to men? We get no answers - not in the 25% I read. I needed more than this novel was apparently willing to provide, and that's one of the reasons why I began writing myself, so maybe it's not a bad thing!

As the book description tells us, "First Sister has no name and no voice." Even without a physical voice, she could still have set herself apart and showed some backbone, but she did not. Perhaps she grows a spine later, but will she also grow integrity? She's lacking that, too. She was so pathetic to me in that first quarter of this novel that I couldn't bear to read any more about her. I've read too many real-life stories about people in her position who have shown their mettle. I'm not interested in a fictional one who doesn't appear to have any, let alone know where to find some and I'm not about to read three novels where one would do in the faint hope she'll get some in the end.

When I open a new novel I'm always hoping to be shown something new; something different; something I've longed for without, perhaps, even realizing it. I've read many novels like that. Sadly though, I've read many more that were not like that at all: ones that took the road most traveled instead of least. It's nice to be surprised, but that didn't happen in this case. While I wish the author all the best in their future endeavors, I can't in good faith commend this particular one as a worthy read based on what I experienced from it.

A Trace of Copper by Anne Renwick

Rating: WARTY!

I like the idea of steampunk as a genre, but I seem to have had little success with that genre from what I've so far subjected myself to, and this audio book was no exception to that pattern. I could not get into it and DNF'd it before long. It did not help that this was the first in a series (An Elemental Web Tale), and I'm not much into series. The first volume is always a prologue and prologues and me definitely do not get along.

In this story, Doctor Piyali Mukherji, a recruit to an organization called "The Queen's Agents." I like a good Indian woman in a story and have enjoyed such stories in other genres. I'm in a sort of delayed process of gearing up to write one of my own, but in the case of this particular novel, I could not get up any head of steam, and I found myself caring less and less what she was up to, because it just seemed so rambling and uninviting. It went on and on and I couldn't focus on it at all. It was a bit weird frankly.

Her investigation was in Wales, which is also something I'm interested in normally. I love the Welsh accent and have visited wales myself more than once, but again, in this case, it failed to stir me. This 'reuniting' of Doctor Mukherji with an old flame, Evan Tredegar, and the kindling of past and alienated desires I could have done without. It's a tired trope and it offered nothing new.

The real question though is how was this steampunk? It was really an epidemiological study with nothing steampunk about it. It could have been any genre, so there was that strike against it, too. Maybe steampunk played a larger part in the story later, but I couldn't stand to read that far, having had my interest badly squandered by the uninspired writing.

So there's the real problem in a nut's hell: it (at least theoretically) has steampunk; it has a potentially strong Indian woman as a main character, and it was set in Wales, and yet this could not hold my interest! I can only conclude that the problem was not me, but poor writing which failed to engage me, and misrepresentation by the author and or the publisher as to what this book was really about, and what it had to offer the reader. I can't commend this based on what I read.

Finding Tranquility by Laura Heffernan

Rating: WARTY!

This was an ebook about this married guy, Brett, who is terrified of flying, yet he's supposed to fly to LA on 9/11 to interview for a job so he and his wife Jess can move there, so she in turn can attend med school. He panics and gives his boarding pass to another person who boards the plane which ends up flying into the World Trade Center.

Realizing he's now considered dead, he revaluates his whole life and suddenly realizes he can face the truth about himself which is that he was not happy in his life, in his marriage, or in his body. He feels like his wife can do better, so he 'stays dead' and travels to Canada. How that's accomplished is a bit too convenient in that he finds a passport stuck in a pocket in an old backpack he gets when he sells his clothes and suitcase to get some cash. It's a woman's passport and the owner conveniently looks rather like him and is the same age. It's far too convenient in fact, but he dresses as a woman - something he's always secretly felt he was inside, and she starts a new life as Christa.

Over the next eighteen years, Christa completes her sex-change and then by accident runs into Brett's wife, who despite the physical changes, realizes that this woman is her supposedly-dead husband. Yeah, it was highly improbable at best, how this was set up - the passport and the accidental encounter with the ex, but to begin with, it wasn't as bad as it sounds so I stayed with it.

The thing about this gender change story is that Jess was pregnant on 9/11, but neither of them knew it when Brett disappeared, so now Christa has a son who's almost eighteen. They finally all meet up for Canadian Thanksgiving and everything seems to be going well, but you know there's going to be a fly in the ointment.

Jess rather impulsively consults an attorney - a guy she'd briefly dated, after she fled back from the hotel in Canada to the US after meeting her ex. She was confused, and angry and fearful, and she confided in the attorney about what had happened and asked about the legal implications from her being the recipient of a $250,000 insurance policy payout, plus getting some money from the 9/11 fund - money which all together, put her through med school. This attorney seemed to be highly-biased against transgender people and the meeting did not go well.

I had a brief feeling that this lawyer was dishonestly going to try to spoil this blossoming relationship by outing the husband, but that's not what the blurb says - it talks of complications after the real Christa resurfaces, and that's what happens. The real Christa turns up and starts trying to blackmail the fake Christa, so Jess invites her spouse to move back to Boston with her and her son.

They all seem to be getting along, so they sneak Christa back into the US and then Christa gets into a fight with a guy at the last football game of the season for her son, and gets arrested for no apparent reason. She gets fingerprinted and they discover she's really Brett who supposedly died twenty years ago. People who live next door and across the street sell their houses when word gets out that a resurrected guy, now a woman is living there with his wife. This went beyond improbable, yet there it was, on top of too many other improbable events. A little bit of improbable is fine, but when the whole books seems to be depending on it, it's too much for me!

On top of that, their son Ethan gets into a fight with some of the guys on his basketball team - and this is after he's specifically told Christa when they first met that there are several people at his school who have two moms or two dads. It felt like this writer was just making-up stuff as she went along, trying to lard the story up with drama without considering what she'd already written.

I know that real-life transgender people have problems and can be subject to bullying, and threats, and have even been murdered, but this story felt a bit like it was cheapening those real tragedies by tossing far too much conflict into the story and losing sight of what ought to have been a love story. Instead of that it became a soap opera, and that doesn't appeal to me.

So! There were a lot of really improbable and highly convenient happenstances and coincidences in this story that could probably have been circumvented with a little imagination, and because that wasn't done, and yet more were accumulating the further I read, I quit this story about three-quarters in. It was just too much. A far simpler story would have been better, but his writer obviously didn't know when to stop gilding her lily. I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Love You Forever by Robert Munsch, Sheila McGraw

Rating: WARTY!

This was a bizarre pasteboard children's book about a creepy mother who treats her child like a baby even when he's a grown adult. It was entirely inappropriate and I can't believe it was ever published as a children's book. Shame on Firefly Books. This is more like a Stephen King horror story than a book about love.

it starts out perfectly fine with a new mother loving her child, but as the child grows older she becomes more like a stalker than a mom. She spies on her child, as a teen, sleeping in his room - opening the door without permission to watch him in bed. When he moves to his own house, she literally breaks in a cradles him, sitting on his bed? WTF? This book is a sickness in print. Stay way from it if you don't want to warp you child.

Glory Season by David Brin

Rating: WARTY!

This is a seven-hundred sixty-some page tome of a tombstone of a novel, and the reason for that is not that there's a huge story to tell, but that the author is so obsessed with world-building that he forgets to actually tell a story.

It's supposed to be about two sisters: clone-twins in a world where winter twins are nowhere near as appreciated as summer twins - why is never really explained. Rather than stay with their clan as summer clones do, they must leave to seek their fortune. It takes almost a hundred pages - a seventh of the story - before they actually leave the city! Most of those pages are taken up with world building - in a world they're due to leave, so why expend all that time on it?

If it had been done beautifully, that would be one thing. I'd still consider it a senseless waste of time, but it would have been readable. The problem is that it's not done beautifully. The author seems like he's obsessed with tossing in every flitting idea that crosses his transom and creating endless races of people, each of which is given a cursory mention and we move on. It was pointless because none of it stood out, and nothing was memorable or even interesting, nor did it contribute a single thing to the story unless endlessly-waffling confusion was actually the author's intent.

I quickly tired of this and gave up after a hundred pages or so. I have better things to do with my time than read another author's listing of all the alien species he thought up, but had never found a novel to fit them into so he decided to use this one as his waste disposal unit. This is the third Brin I've tried to read. The first, Kiln People, I read a long time ago and really enjoyed, but the last one, and now this I have not, so I guess I'm done with this author now. I can't commend this based on what I read of it.

The Dragon Choker by Stephanie Alexander

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
"...the more likely her husband would give up and returned to his own chamber." Returned need the -ed suffix removed.
"He must think thusly at times" - 'thusly' isn't really a word. The 'ly' needs to be omitted.
"...and since they both knew the way they let themselves in." - this needed a comma after 'way'.
"She lit on the muddy ground..." - unless she shone a flashlight on it or set fire to it, lit is the wrong word. It needed to be alit or alighted. Either is acceptable.

This is volume two of a series based on the Cinderella fairy-tale. There are several quite varying "Cinderella" stories though history, originating from as far and wide as Greece and China, but most people tend to think of Cinderella as the version written by Charles Perrault in 1697, titled Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre ("Cinderella or the little glass slipper"), which is where the Disney Fairytale Mining Corporation™ lifted the premise for the animated version it put out in 1950. That's the version that introduced the two evil stepsisters, the glass slipper, the pumpkin and all that, and upon which this novel is loosely-based.

I haven't read volume one of this series, and I'm far from convinced I'd like it if I did, so I wasn't about to try reading that before I started on this one. Since I'm not very much into series, whether I'd end up liking this one was the question. I started out quite happy that it wasn't written in first-person voice - which I despise, and which would have decidedly turned me off it, so I commend the author for that wise choice.

It was decently-written for the most part (subject to occasional grammatical and word-choice errors, some examples of which I'll list below. It did keep me engaged for a while, but as time passed I started losing faith in the author and consequently my interest in the story waned considerably. I also had problems with some of the plot choices and with the portrayal of Eleanor, which I think belied the book description - or more accurately the book description misrepresented the novel.

It was from that description though, that I had become intrigued by this story, being led to believe that the novel was something bit different from the usual premise. The not-so-happily-ever-after induced me to request it for review. The description began, "Eleanor Brice Desmarais, she of the cracked glass slipper and unladylike intellectual propensities" and that caught my attention. 'Desmarais' is French for 'of the swamp' so maybe there's some history related to that in volume one. Or maybe not! I can't speak to that. Character names are important to me so I tend to have them mean something which may not always be apparent to the reader, but maybe I read more into other authors' choices than I ought.

This promise of 'unladylike intellectual propensities' however, failed to materialize unless all that the person writing that description meant was that Eleanor had a sexual appetite. Oh how scandalous - a woman enjoys sex! Who knew?! Seriously? But if that's the case, then the writer of the description needs to get an education regarding the difference between intellectual and sexual.

The really sad thing about Eleanor though, and the tragic paradox of this story is that she's purported to be the people's princess, and yet she was risking bringing down shame on herself and the royal family by her uncontrolled behavior. This is hardly how a great princess behaves. She seems to have been modeled on Princess Diana, but unlike in that real life case, Eleanor starts her affair long before she's ever built-up any credibility by demonstrating a generosity of spirit, a warmth, and a caring attitude that the real life Diana did before she embarked on her affair. There's a huge difference between the two.

I think intellectual is sexy, but if it was merely used as a euphemism for sexual propensities, then it was a cheap shot. If it actually meant intellectual, then it missed the mark because Eleanor did not come across as any such thing. Quite the opposite. She spent all her time pining for Dorian, the best friend of her husband, Prince Gregory. At one point Eleanor mentions Dorian's "girth" and from that I could conclude only that her 'intellect' seemed decidedly low and her interest in him had nothing to do with love since they never seemed to have any conversation that didn't revolve around their physical trysting.

The story was boring because this was all she ever did. There was one brief interlude where she was visiting the poor and talking about opening school for girls, but that was a bump in an otherwise featureless romp, or unending talk of romping, or unending wishful thinking of romping, with Dorian. She didn't even spend any significant time with her child - not according to how this was written up to the point where I quit reading it, about a quarter the way through. Maybe things changed later, but I had zero faith, given what I'd read thus far, that it would improve. Eleanor was a one-trick pony (interpret 'trick' however you like), and she wasn't remotely interesting to read about.

I can understand that a woman who is unhappy in her marriage may seek solace elsewhere. I don't have a problem with that, and missing the first volume may well skew my perception, but did Eleanor even try to resolve things with Gregory or did she just leap right onto Dorian's girth? I know Gregory could be a bit of a jerk at times, but overall he did not seem to be a bad person, yet Eleanor was willing to spend all kinds of time on sexual technique with Dorian. Could she not spend any time at all working on her marriage with Gregory?

This perception diminished her in my eyes, and led me to the conviction that she's not much deserving of sympathy or support. Like I said, without having the first volume under my belt, maybe I'm misjudging her, but frankly she seems like a bit of a sleaze here. It's not a good look on her! If once in a while she'd expressed some regret or harked back to earlier times when she'd tried to work with her husband to make their marriage a good one and been rejected by him, that would have changed my perception of her, but in this story she's all Dorian all the time and it's tedious.

This book seriously failed to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test (after a fashion) because all Eleanor could think of was how to get with her lover. She had a one-track mind. Talking of Disney, it's like she had no life that wasn't animated by Dorian. After I'd read that book description, what I'd been hoping for was someone like the princess in my own novel, Femarine which really did have a different mindset from your usual princess story.

The very reason I wrote that was to offer readers some sort of an antidote to the disturbing plethora of stories about simpering, compliant princesses and their wilting addiction to princes charming, and it seemed I was not wrong because there is a readership for the road less taken. I just wish publishers and other authors would embrace that more, but it seems all they want to do it retread this old story, and even when a slightly different direction is taken - like this one attempted, the original prince is merely replaced by a new 'prince' and off we go, stuck on the same old rutted road - or rutting road in this case!

This is why I tend not to believe book descriptions much, because I've seen so many misleading ones, and it bothers me that they often seem to have been written by people who haven't read the novel, or in the case of YA stories, by people who seem to have completely missed the point of the #MeToo movement. But moving on: Eleanor is the Cinders of this story, having the slipper and the requisite two stepsisters, although as in the Drew Barrymore Ever After movie which I enjoyed, one of the sisters is friendly toward Eleanor. The other, Sylvia, is very much antagonistic and deceitful. Fortunately, she does not know that Eleanor has the hots for her husband's best friend Dorian, for that would be a disaster she'd dearly love to exploit.

I have to say a word about poor Sylvia. I was not a fan of hers, but she's after Prince Gregory. In her pursuit, she's doing nothing worse than Eleanor is doing, and arguably better since, unlike Eleanor, Sylvia isn't married! The problem is that she's portrayed as some sort of marriage wrecker or trouble-maker! When Dorian sees what she's up to he makes a mental note to tell Eleanor. The thing is that Gregory is known for quite literally whoring around, and Eleanor is already getting down to it with Dorian, so why slut-shame Sylvia? It was inappropriate at best, and it wasn't the only case where a woman is demeaned in this book.

On another occasion I read, "Pandra was twelve years his senior, but she was amazingly well preserved for all her years of use." What? That means she was only 38, not old by any means. Saying she was amazingly well preserved is ageism without a doubt. It's one thing to have a character say something like that about another person; it's an entirely different thing to have the author say it - and that comment wasn't in a character's speech - it was in the narrative! Now you can argue that it was intended as the thought of either Prince Gregory or Dorian, but that wasn't indicated as such, and if it was indeed Dorian's thinking, what does that say about his attitude toward women?

At a ball, Eleanor is recommending Dorian ask this one girl who'd shown an interest in him, to dance with him. This was not because she wanted Dorian to, but because it would be a diversion from their mutual horniness. After that I read, again not as speech, but as narration, "In truth, Patience had been an obvious dingbat." It's like if you're not part of the small specific set of people of whom Eleanor approves, then all you merit is insult. It really turned me off her. This was not the 'intellectual propensity' girl I'd been promised - someone deep and interesting, strong and motivated, fun to read about. She was just the opposite and I didn't like her.

And 'dingbat'? The term has been around for a century, but it's hardly terminology from the Cinderella era! I know you can't write a novel in ancient English - it would be tedious to read, if not impossible! - but you can write it with a bit of an atmosphere, ans a nod and a wink to the period in which it's supposedly set. This one was written with such a modern outlook that for me, it kept tripping up the narrative, making it seem like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be ancient or modern.

In this world, it is, of course, a capital offense for the princess bride to have an affair, even with the prince's best friend, so one has to wonder about Dorian's love for Eleanor when he willingly puts her life at risk by continuing to see her for sex. She's obviously so weak-willed that she can't help herself, but you'd think he'd be strong for her, if he cared. On the other hand, he's reported as someone who's been lucky to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases since he cannot for the life of him keep his junk in his pantaloons. He's had sex with so many women, he's lost count, so maybe his integrity is as poor as hers and his backbone just as flimsy. At any rate Eleanor has no reason to believe she's not just another conquest. Not from what I read anyway.

I began reading this with interest and quickly encountered an unintentionally amusing scene which brought the novel some credit by putting me in a good mood. That was sadly dissipated with disturbing velocity by further reading, and in truth it was another writing issue. An exasperated Eleanor is mucking-out the stable where her unicorn is housed. She's not doing this because she has to, but because she needs something to take her mind off her frustrations. While she's thus engaged, her husband and Dorian come down to take out the prince's horse, Vigor, for a ride.

In what I consider to be an amusingly unfortunate juxtaposition of ideas, I read, "Gregory kissed her again. This time she felt the flick of his tongue. He mounted and she held Vigor's bridle." Now, who or what exactly is he mounting - his horse or his bride? LOL! I assume it's his horse, but it just goes to show that one needs to be careful when writing narrative! There really needed to be something between "his tongue" and "He mounted" to distance the two actions. On a more adolescent note, it also struck me that the very title of this novel is rather unfortunate. To be clear: the Dragon Choker isn't a teenage boy's slang term for masturbation. It refers to a beautiful necklace that Prince Gregory buys for Eleanor and for which she shows little gratitude. Again, unlike the necklace, she came off in a bad light.

So, in short, I did not finish this novel. I gave up on it because the more I read the more I disliked Eleanor and the more I disliked the story. It felt like there were problems with the plot that could have been avoided with more sensitive writing, and with a better portrayal of Eleanor (and maybe a somewhat worse portrayal of Gregory). Eleanor comes across not only as having no character, she doesn't even have any depth - and certainly no intellect, let alone any sort of propensity at all to growing one. She wasn't interesting and I did not want to read any more about her. I wish the author all the best in her writing career, but I can't commend this one as a worthy read.