Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane

Rating: WARTY!

I've been a big fan of Duane's ever since I read So You Want to be a Wizard? many years ago. This book I am sorry to report is not up to the same standard. The subject matter of this kind of a novel is really a bit of a tired topic at this point: social networks gone bad, MMORPGs, and that sort of thing, and you really need to bring something strong and new to it to get a good story, and while this one isn't lousy, it really isn't a great entertainment either. i read this some time ago and I cannot for the life of me recall what the content was in any detail, which speaks volumes about how little of an impressionism this made on me when I read it.

The author seems so enamored of the idea of MMPORGs that she spends far too much time delving into the game and its technology than in actually telling a truly interesting and engrossing story. it seems to me she should have let this stew for a while before writing it. The impression I had was that she'd just learned about these games, maybe played one or two and become entranced by them, and immediately decided to write a novel about one. She went into endless detail about the game, and all this served to do was to make her 'real life' characters seems flat, one dimension, and uninteresting. It was boring. I can't commend it at all.

Unison Spark by Andy Marino

Rating: WARTY!

This is the debut novel of the author and it was a fail for me for an assortment of reasons. I made it about halfway through and resented wasting even that much time. I had to keep forcing myself back into it - it wasn't like I couldn't wait to read the next bit, and the book felt like it was going nowhere slow. I couldn't get to a point where I liked either of the two main characters, couldn't see where it was going, couldn't get into the story. It was like work and I can't believe I stayed with it as long as I did.

The basic plot is that two characters - a boy and a girl - of course, live in this dystopian society - of course - composed of haves and have-nots with no gray area in between - of course. The boy is of one group, the girl of another - of course. It was so tedious and unimaginative. All they have in common is that they dream the same dreams and are clearly genetically or otherwise modified (brings a whole new meaning to binary relationship doesn't it?!), but the story took so long to even reach that point that I couldn't stand to read any more and ditched it, irritated that I'd foolishly wasted the time I'd already spent on it. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Our Lizzie by Anna Jacobs

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this in short order after I read how yet another female writer refers to her female characters. "...Lizzie was a child still, but when she grew up - ah, then he'd be waiting for her...He'd enjoy taming her, wooing her first and then mastering her, as all women loved to be mastered. Marrying her, perhaps." That was page six of this novel and it was where I and it parted. I don't care if this is supposed to be the male character's thoughts. That picture just turned my stomach and I had no desire to read any further.

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I did skim through the book a little and at one point I read the unintentional humor in "I'm a rotten sewer" - where what the girl meant to convey was that she was poor at sewing. Later a character who wants to be her lover is named Peter. he;s described int eh book description as her new love - like the old one was actually a "love" as opposed to an abuser. It confirmed that I'd made the right decision to quit reading this when I did.

I can't commend this precisely because of that.

Legion by William Peter Blatty

Rating: WARTY!

This was Blatty's attempt to get back some of his former glory after The Exorcist supernova had faded. I thought that original offering was a great novel and I really enjoyed it, but this one, which I read some time ago yet did not realize until today that I hadn't reviewed it, was a poor, poor sequel.

Often when a writer has a huge hit it's hard for them to get anywhere near that point again. We've seen it with runaway best-seller writers like JK Rowling after the Harry Potter marathon, and Suzanne Collins after The Hunger Games and its sequels. Inevitably they're drawn back to retread old tires because efforts to go in other directions are met with indifference. Typically retracing steps is a mistake and it fails.

The plot for this is very confused, resurrecting people who clearly died in the original novel and turning the demon into a limp and unoriginal serial killer, jumping from living body to body to leave trademark serial killer crimes scenes but with different fingerprints. The book was clearly very badly-written, very confused, and not worth the reading. A better take on this idea is the Denzel Washington movie Fallen which did not perform well at the box office but which I think far outstrips both this novel and the movie that was made from it. I can't commend this particular novel as a worthy read.

Just a Stage by Corey Majeau

Rating: WARTY!

This book was entirely inappropriate for young children - or anyone. it had an attitude that the environment is there for the pillaging and wasn't even remotely ashamed of it or apologetic about it.

The story in short is that there's no place like home. A house on stilts is the main character, living on a rock in Newfoundland. The house is described as a fisherman (note the gender-bias), but it's one which fishes indiscriminately, apparently having no use for the fish, but just pulling as many out of the water as possible. Never mind the fact that fisheries are collapsing worldwide because of over-fishing. Just pull them thar fish out as fast as you can.

As if this isn't bad enough, the house gets bored and, leaving its trash on the island, it moves to the pristine Canadian forest which is described not for its beauty but in terms of its natural resources to be exploited: trees, a stream, and plenty of animals. The house immediately starts clear-cutting the forest.

Next it moves to a desert, but presumably there's nothing to exploit there, no even oil, so it leaves. The next location is displeasing because, and without a hint of irony, the house finds it 'dirty'. Eventually, it harnesses a whale (no kidding) to swim back to its original location riding on its back, where it settles on the back of a poor turtle and starts fishing again. WTF? I'm sorry but this book is probably the worst children's book i ever read. It's completely anti-environmental and it sucks. Trump, in active process of rolling back no fewer than 100 environmental regulations, will probably buy this by the truckload for his grandchildren. Me? I actively dis-commend this toxic trash.

Her Perfect Life by Rebecca Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

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

I made it about a third of the way through this book before I gave up on it. The story is about a wealthy author who apparently commits suicide on a beach right as her latest novel is hitting the public eye. It's also about her sister who lives a rather more impoverished life, apparently receiving no assistance from her rich sister, and who gets an unexpected call from her distraught brother-in-law. I immediately suspected that guy rather than suicide, but since I didn't finish this novel, I have no idea if I'm right.

Eileen flies to her sister's home, and that's where I gave up on it. The story did nothing to move me at all. In fact it felt like a depressing and dreary read, but two things really turned me off it. The first was the screeching halt to which the story was brought to by flashbacks. I cannot stand flashbacks. I can't think of a better way to annoy your reader than interrupt what had begun as an interesting story to explore tedious family history. When I read a story I want to get on with the story. I do not want to be constantly and irritatingly interrupted by the author forcing me to go back in time, giving me whiplash by suddenly - in Chapter three, for example, forcing me back two years ago. Tell the story now for goodness sake!

Neither did it help by the tennis-play chapters - now we're with Eileen, Now we're with Simon. No, it's back to Eileen. Wait a sec! Now Simon has it. Slap! Look left. Slap! Look right! Sorry, but no. No. NO! I was initially attracted and intrigued by the idea of Eileen reading Clare's latest novel and finding clues in the writing as to what happened, but he author seemed defiantly intent upon putting me off that story altogether by screwing around instead of getting on with it. The more I read, the less I felt that the payoff would be worth the work of reading this, and work it was.

One of the most obnoxious parts of the book was that I once again had to read a female author describing a woman and putting beauty first in the list, like no woman has any higher calling or more important trait than being beautiful. I have seen this time and time again in reading books by female authors and I find it sickening that they cannot value their fellow women - not even fictional ones - for anything apart from beauty first.

I read, at only 6% in, "Clare Collins was beautiful...." Yes, it went on to describe other qualities, but beauty was always foremost. 28% in: "...beautiful, talented, and simply awe-inspiring sister...." Yep. Beauty first. Again. How beastly. 37% in "...her beautiful face...." 40% in: "...her beautiful surface...." 41% in: "Clare was beautiful...." Oh wait! at 51% in we get a change! Clare is "...vivacious and..." on no! "Vivacious and beautiful...." There it goes again. 61%: "...beautiful and talented...." It was tediously repetitive.

This is tiresome, obnoxious, and awful writing. People who write about women like this are a part of the problem and I cannot commend a book that persistently devalues women to a skin depth and little more. The book description has it that this is "a page-turning debut" but for me it was a stomach-turning one, and a cover-closing one so I could move on to the next read on my list which hopefully will feature characters who are not valued only for skin which is 'bright and clear' which is what the name Clare means. I can't commend this based on the layout of the book, the demeaning of a female character, and the content of the third of it that I managed to stomach.

Utopia by Thomas More

Rating: WARTY!

Originally published (in Latin in 1516!) as A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic's best state and of the new island Utopia this book proved to be as boring as the title. It began well enough, but though it's fiction, it is by no means a story as we would imagine one in modern times. It's much more like a lecture that will put you to sleep, so don't listen, as I did, while driving! Although I survived it, the lethargic and droning delivery could prove fatal in some circumstances!

I made it about 60% of the way through, and I was planning on finishing out the week with it, but after listening to it while driving home on the Thursday I grew so deadened by it that I couldn't stand to listen to it on the Friday, so I ditched it for something else. The reader, James Adams has a voice that doesn't help. My Latin is barely existent, and although this is fortunately in modern English, it's possible to imagine that More himself is reading it. It started out well enough, but over time, it became repetitive, plodding, and tedious to listen to.

Utopia is supposedly an island, although it actually was a peninsular though which a canal was cut to separate it from the mainland. The problem is that there's nothing Utopian about it. Life is highly regimented and there is slavery and a death penalty, so how this remotely resembles any idea of a utopia we may hold today was a mystery to me.

The "islanders" have rejected money as any sort of local currency, although they do use it in foreign trade if necessary (trade, after all, literally meant a trade - one item of goods offered for a different item in return), but the society itself is pretty much a communist one along the lines of everything being held in common, with each giving according to ability and receiving according to need, although there is more to it than that in this case. The thing is that while all this may have been original five hundred years ago and may even have impressed some people, clearly it impressed precious few since it never took hold. Today, it's nothing more than quaintly antique, and it offers nothing special, or new or interesting.

In some parts it was unintentionally amusing, being rather reminiscent of the board game The Settlers of Catan where sheep and bricks are traded, and little else. I've never played that game but I am familiar with it, and it was amusing how limited this 'vision' was - about as limited in scope as the game. Though I can't commend this at all as a worthy read, my recent migration through reading/listening to antique works continues to at least to one more volume - but by a different author. I'll post that review anon.

Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Rating: WARTY!

This was written in the eighteenth century and published in 1798 the year after the author died. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest feminists in the UK, and was the mother of Mary Shelly. In a way this is a sort of fictional sequel to an earlier book, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published six years earlier.

While writing that earlier treatise very quickly, it seems Wollstonecraft struggled with the fictional form, and had not finished it when she died from septicemia after giving birth to Mary in late 1797. Her husband, the philosopher William Godwin cobbled together what she had written and added a commentary here and there explaining that parts were missing and some parts were confused in that Wollstonecraft had perhaps wanted to tell it one way at the beginning, but changed her mind later and told it a different way, but never had the opportunity to go back and correct the earlier part.

The story tells of Maria, and begins an asylum for the insane, where Maria's husband, George Venables has had her placed so he can avail himself of her money. He also took away her child and the child died in his 'care'. The story begins with Maria managing to contact a fellow inmate, Henry Darnford, via an intermediary named Jemima, a helper at the asylum. The two begin by exchanging messages, and then Maria gets access to the man's books and eventually, the man bribes the guards to allow him to meet Maria face to face. This part is fine, but after a short while, the story devolved into a diatribe about the way society demeans and devalues women, and I'm sorry to report that it starts falling apart then.

For me it felt far too preachy - even while it is accurate. It just rambles though, and provides precious little in the way of engagement for the reader. The main character is shown to be weak and easily dominated even as the author tells us she is strong, and in the end, she clings to a man. For me this was the wrong way to write this book, and I felt it cheapened Maria's story and devalued it, which is precisely what society did back then to women - and still does today in far too many ways. This is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read despite my admiration of, and support for, the author.

Death in a Hansom Cab by Kerry Segrave

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
Having missed being at the track on the Monday and Tuesday, he last sighting was on the Sunday when he was spotted in a restaurant with Randolph" - His last sighting? The last sighting?
"While her performances in Floradora do no seem to have garnered any critical reviews" - do not
"Them he grew neglectful, despite her protests" - then he grew
"continued her statement by stated she first met" by stating / by relating?
"and no bullet hold in the coat pocket" hole? This is a quote, so it may be original, but there was no attempt by the author to clarify.
"left lung and lodged in the fourth vertebrae." - vertebrae is a plural. The word should have been vertebra.
"this account at least correctly the false reports" - corrected?
"Soon Mrs. Young head abut the affair." - heard about?
"Young "wrecker" his home" - wrecked?
"and give it out that she was one of the members of the Floradora chorus but had tired on the stage." - gave it, tired of?
"Patterson knew abut the Europe trip and possible separation" - about
"reported that Nan had no eaten" - not eaten
"Throughout the period of Nan's incarceration it was regularly noted, from time to time" - regularly or from time to time? It can't be both!
"and I am amazed that the man should pursue such a coarse." - course - again this is quoted speech with no confirmation of original
"before thee Smiths finally resurfaced" - the Smiths.
"Smith had said to her; "You will have to do it," ad she answered; "I won't." - and she answered
"where the water from a simple faucet dripped into a wooden paid." - pail?
"Another long article abut Patterson appeared" - again with about
"Over four month in Washington Patterson was said" - four months
"Nan responded to rumors that he husband Leon was going to divorce here by saying such speculation was untrue." - one sentence, two errors, both of which should read 'her'
"That a report surfaced from Cincinnati that Nan had been named as corespondent" - then a report, and correspondent is misspelled.

The impression I got from this author is that she has access to a bunch of newspaper archives from a period of time from around 1850 to around 1950 and she scours them for book ideas. She's written about drive-in theaters, vending machines, shoplifting, police women, and many other topics. It felt like at some point she came across this death in perusing the papers, and decided to write about it. The problem with this particular book was that there were so many errors (I list a score of them above) and so much repetition in it that despite my initial interest in the curious story and my bias in favor of reading it, it quickly became rather tedious to read at times.

Some of this repetition was due to poor editing. For example, I read:

"Whenever Miss Patterson disapproves of a talesman who is satisfactory to both counsel [each side], her lawyers promptly reject the man."
side], her lawyers promptly reject the man."
year-old retired merchant.

Clearly this is poor editing, and the book would have been immeasurably better if it had a spell-checker and a grammar check run on it. Most of the errors I report above would have bene caught by such a precaution. It's really a lot to ask a reviewer to approve a book when it's in such a sloppy condition.

Another instance is where I read,

third point was that on the afternoon of June 3 Young took a pistol away point was that on the afternoon of June 3 Young took a pistol away caliber revolver; fifth point

There is duplicated text here, and the fourth point is missing completely!

Some of the text was just plan rambling:

Nan Patterson was called to the bar for once again, to be tried for murder in the first degree, for the third time.

It's tautologous to use 'once again' and 'for the third time' - only one of these is needed. Later I read:

Forty-two of the 60 peremptory challenges allowed to both sides were used (30 allowed each side) with the defense using 24 of its peremptory challenges while the prosecution used 18 of its challenges.

This is just repetitively rambling, as is this:

Another over-the-top exaggeration about Nan and her reaction in court supposed came on April 24 when the defendant was supposedly overcome

The basic story is that in early June 1904, a man by the name of Frank Thomas "Caesar" Young was riding in a hansom cab with his lover, an actor by the name of Anne Elizabeth "Nan" Patterson. Young was married and supposedly on his way to board the Germanic, a White Star Lines cruise ship heading for Europe. Germanic was a precursor of the Titanic which would be built starting just five years later.

The ship was supposed to depart at 9:30 am, so the author says, but another account I read indicated 9 pm. The author never addresses any question of whether it was a morning departure or an evening departure and goes with the morning. I take her word for it since it seems that such ships would tend to leave in the morning or mid-afternoon, not at night.

One thing that is certain is that Young was not with his wife on the dock. Instead, at 7:30, he called Nan who was staying with her sister and her brother-in-law at a hotel. He picked her up in the cab at Columbus Circle around 8:00. The plan, she understood, was to travel together to within a block or two of the ship, and then drop her off. Young's wife knew of the affair, and since she controlled the purse strings, she was ordering Young away from Patterson. How that thing with the purse strings happened goes unexplained, since Young was the one with the fortune, but his wife was insisting on this trip to try and break up her husband from his mistress.

The cab traveled alarmingly slowly apparently, because according to this narrative, Young insisted they stop on two different occasions to get a drink at a bar, and on a third occasion to buy a straw boater! This conflicts with an earlier account in the book, in which the author tells us the cabbie claims nothing untoward happened on the journey until the shooting. It's quite a ride from the Paul Hotel where she was staying, down to the pier from which the ship would depart. How he hoped to board in time is a mystery, but the author never addresses this. Perhaps he had no intention of boarding.

The incident occurred around nine, at a time when you would think the ship would have pulled up the boarding gangways and be making ready to depart, but there's no word about what Mrs Young was doing at this time. The author, in her focus on Patterson seems completely uncaring about what was happening with Mrs Young. The cabbie heard a muffled shot, and it was discovered that Young was dead, shot in a way that made it look like suicide was not an easy explanation, although suicide is how the case was treated initially, and which partially explains why forensic evidence was so poorly attended to.

Later, Patterson was arrested, and despite three trials over the next eleven months, the prosecution was unable to get a conviction, and Patterson was let go, but not acquitted. She was not tried again, and ended up remarrying the man she had left for Young, although that guy apparently took ill and died, and Patterson seemed to show no interest in his welfare. The author glosses over this in her laser focus on this supposedly wronged woman, who later married again, and then fell into obscurity and likely died a pauper's death.

The author is right in that Patterson was hounded and smeared by the newspapers none of which thought an actor could possibly be a person of decent or moral character. The author makes a big deal throughout the story of calling out various assertions about Patterson as lies, but without offering corroboration as to how these lies were exposed. For example, I would read, "or so the account would have its readers believe. It was a lie." There is no evidence or argument offered to explain why it was a lie; we're simply expected to take the author's word for it.

This sort of bland assumption appears often. For example, at one point, I read this:

"Certainly no account ever appeared anywhere else about a constantly raucous and unruly crowd of spectators. Thus the above story was another fabrication and perhaps was published only to display the not so subtle misogyny of the newspaper."

There really is no ground whatsoever for making such an assumption! First of all, the author herself does report other instances where the crowd was unruly, but she makes no real distinction between reports of unruliness inside, versus outside the courtroom, thereby confusing things.

One glaring example of biased reporting is the disappearance of Patterson's sister and her husband for several months. The author makes much of how the police on the one had are supposedly tailing them, but on the other do not seem to be able to arrest them, but she makes no inquiry whatsoever into why the sister of a woman accused of murder would disappear, together with her husband right when Patterson is going to trial - nor why they are gone for so long.

To me, this is highly suspicious because it relates to the question of a man and a woman purchasing a revolver in New York City which was likely the one discharged in the cab. The author simply assumes, with little evidence, that it was Young's gun. She never once asks why, when Patterson is in dire trouble, her sister, with whom she'd been living, was nowhere to be found. Not only is that suspicious in and of itself, it's also suspicious as to why the author fails to ask hard and obvious questions about this bizarre behavior on their part.

It's this bias and the lack of any sort of gray-shading that spoils the value of the reporting here. The repetitions and the score or more of grammatical and spelling errors further detract from the story, taking attention from the woman who the author would like to gently place at the center of this story and focusing it instead on the problems with the book. In view of all of this, I cannot in good faith commend this as a worthy read.

Without Hesitation by Talia Jager

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"Empress' face" - this needed an apostrophe S - 'Empress's face' since it's a possessive and empress is not a plural.
"but there were still quite a bit I didn't recognize" This needed to read either 'were still quite a few', or 'was still quite a bit'! It can't be both!

I liked this book to begin with, because it's not a bad story at all, and in some small ways it reminded me of my own Femarine. Set a millennium into the future, when Earth has been rendered uninhabitable (that part is getting here already), this sci-fi adventure tells the story of two women who encounter each other as antagonists out in the reaches of space where human colonies have been taking over habitable planets wherever they are found. Faster-than-light travel (although in reality precluded by the laws of physics!) is the means by which these far-flung societies maintain contact.

Everleigh is the captain of a mercenary outfit which has been tasked with capturing the Empress Akacia, who rules over one of the colonized planets. I'm not at all sure how she got to be an empress. She's not royalty. She rules over a relatively small and homogenous colony on one planet. It's hardly an empire! But there's no information on how this works exactly. Was she appointed? Was she elected? We don't know. It seemed a bit much to me, but I was willing to let that go for the sake of a good story.

After a failed kidnap attempt, Everleigh and Akacia were thrown together by accident, and I have to say I was surprised that Akacia trusted her so readily, but then there is that attraction between them. At times that was a bit much, like when the Empress describes her kidnapper (during the kidnap attempt!) like this: "She was beautiful" The kidnapper is likewise enthralled: "The Empress had a weapon I had never encountered before. She was beautiful." That also was a bit much. His is where the story really began to go downhill for me.

The book description assures us that "Labels and stereotypes are a thing of the past and gender and sexual identity are as fluid as love", but here we have two female characters in a book written by a female author reducing two women to the shallowness of skin depth. It was worse during a scene where one of them was injured and I read: "Did she have a head wound? Was she hurt? And how did she manage to make that look sexy? Oh, God. There I went again with the whole sexy thing." I said to myself, "Seriously?" when I read that! No labels, huh?! This really felt inappropriate to me.

I don't like that kind of writing because it isn't realistic. Maybe when she recalled the incident later she might have added that thought about how sexy she looked, but at the time, when someone is injured, you really don't think like that - not if it's someone you honestly care about. You think about what bad things could happen and what you can do to prevent those things. So to me it was not authentic. Any one or two small items, I would be willing to let go, but this book kept adding to the tally of things I wasn't willing to let go in the end.

What kept me reading for a while, was the story in general and the hope that it would flourish, but it kept failing me. In many ways it was very unsophisticated, even simplistic, like it was written for a younger audience. Part of its initial charm was the plan text, that told the story without trying to fly to any great literary heights, but after a while it seemed too simplistic. Normally I rail against first person voice, and twin first person is twice as irritating. I didn't like that approach, and it only got worse, particularly when the empress falls into the hands of those who would abduct her and she's tortured. This is written in first person voice and it seemed so completely unrealistic that I gave up on the story right there. No one realistically writes about their own torture in such a way. It felt fake and shallow, and constitutes only one of a score of reasons why first person should be avoided like the plague unless it's deemed truly and absolutely necessary to telling a story. The best plan is to not use it.

I'm not a fan of flashbacks either, which bring any story to a shuddering halt and typically make me lose interest. I read the story to find out what's happening now and every time the author defeats that desire by rambling on about some past that's typically irrelevant or contributes little, it just pisses me off, so this was another strike against it. In this case, the Empress starts her story three years earlier, when she was sixteen, but she's older when the main action takes place. I honestly could not see the point of doing that. Any such reminiscences could have been slipped lightly into the text as it flowed, without halting it.

While on the topic of the Empress's age, I have to wonder how she gauges it! We're told early in the story that her planet "had almost no axial tilt, giving it a mild, almost boring climate." No axial tilt means no real seasons. The winter/summer roundabout on Earth is caused because the globe is tipped on its axis by 23.5 degrees, making the northern hemisphere garner less sunlight for half the year, and more sunlight the other half, exactly alternating what the southern hemisphere gets. This is what delivers both hemispheres a winter and a summer every six months.

A planet with no axial tilt would be very much the same climate year round, so there would be no noticeable winter - or other seasons - at all. It would be a little bit like living on the equator for everyone, with the temperature varying only by latitude, not by season). Why then does the Empress open with this clause: "Three years ago, when I had passed my sixteenth winter..."? On a planet where winter isn't a thing, wouldn't there would really be another way of measuring age? Certainly a non-existent winter couldn't be used as any sort of measure of a year's passage! The author evidently didn't think the consequences of her (lack of) axial tilt through very much! Little things like that can matter in story-telling. For me this wasn't in itself a story-killer, but added to all the other issues it became one more thing that turned me off the story.

The same thing applies to the use of 'earthyears' as a measure of time. I don't see how that would work a thousand years from now when Earth is a distant memory for everyone. Who would care about Earth years, really? This tells me the author really didn't think this through properly. Some to the text was a bit weird to read too, such as, "From her long neck to her supple breasts" I'm by no means convinced that supple applies to a woman's breast! How exactly is a breast supple?! 'Supple' is an adjective meaning that something can bend and flex. It would seem right for an arm or a leg, or even a back, but a breast has no real muscle or bone in it. I wonder of the author maybe was looking for something like 'ample'? or maybe soft, or fulsome? I dunno. Supple just wasn't right.

I read a description of Akacia given by Everleigh, which read, "She smelled like honey and...milk" That seemed a bit off to me. Like Akacia was a baby! Another instance was when I read, "I seized her lips and deepened the kiss. When Akacia pulled away the tiniest of moans escaped my mouth. A smile played on her lips that I swear tasted like honey." I'm not sure how you would seize someone's lips when kissing! Carpe labia! But the idea of a smile tasting like honey is just off.

Like I said, I made it to the torture scene and that was just too much. I could make no more excuses to continue reading this and ditched it. I need something better than this - more depth, more realism, even if it's fiction. I can't commend this as a worthy read.

I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane

Rating: WARTY!

I believe I saw the Armand Assante movie based on this novel, and evidently I found it unmemorable. I started reading the novel and it was so bad that I could not get into it at all. I know it's a novel of its time (1947), but seriously? Frank Morrison Spillane was working in a department store and he got his start in writing through concocting super hero stories for the comic book industry right before Pearl Harbor. Maybe it was his military experiences that hard-boiled him, but Mike Hammer's debut was penned in just 19 days when Spillane was looking to make some money to buy a nice house.

I think that two-week gestation shows in the writing, but it's the Trumpian treatment of women which bothers me. "She had million-dollar legs, that girl, and she didn't mind showing them off...[she] wore tight-fitting dresses that made me think of the curves in the Pennsylvania Highway..." Hammer leaves his girlfriend at a party, going off into the woods outside to have sex and then returns. Spillane's books are racist, homophobic and misogynistic. I can't commend this one and I'm definitely done with this author.

The Girl Who Fell Below Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M Valente

Rating: WARTY!

This sequel really wasn't needed, but you know there's pressure from Big Publishing™ to milk a successful title for all it's perceived worth. This is why ten years after The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins is coming back to milk it some more with a story that's pretty much the same thing over again. Doubtlessly it will be made into a movie. That's not my world at all. I only started in on this one because I already had it in my possession. If I hadn't already bought it when I bought the first one, impressed by that one's title, I would never have read this.

This story was even less engaging than the first, which is entirely unsurprising. It felt like a series of sketches rather than a story - a litany of set pieces which really had no real connection with one another. The basic plot is that September misses fairyland, and jumps at a chance to return, but she finds it a different place to the one she left: her own shadow is now queen of the underworld. She goes by the name of Halloween (now there's an original) and is stealing everyone's shadow.

Why this is even a problem, I have no idea, but of course just like in Peter Pan (yawn), shadows have personalities here. Why September's own shadow is evil, again I have no idea. It makes no sense. Maybe it's explained in the story, maybe not, but I'd be willing to bet that any explanation offered is as limp as a shadow. Fortunately she hasn't yet stolen the shadow of the dragon which September befriended in the first story, so at least she has a friend.

That reminds me of a funny picture taken by comedian Rick Gervais of his wife and tweeted to his followers, and that one image had more soul than this story. I can't commend this any more than I could the first one, and I am done with this author.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente

Rating: WARTY!

I am not a fan of series, but I loved the title of this middle-grade book, so hoping against hope, I bought both it and the sequel since they were on sale at a bookstore. I gave both of the titles a shot, but neither impressed me.

I think I made it about a third of the way through this one, but the story was so rambling and dissipated that it felt like it wasn't so much a story as it was a boring sort of a diary. Apparently the author crowdsourced funding to work on this. I should be so lucky! Then she put it online for free and it was discovered by a publisher, so a success story in that regard, but the story itself left a lot to be desired for me.

Taking a leaf out of wizard of Oz, the author starts her story out on the plains, in Nebraska, though, rather than Kansas, and has her young girl whisked away by a powerful wind, to a fairy-tale land. The child is a 12-year-old named September, who is apparently the only one who can fix a problem. Why this is, I don't recall, assuming it was ever revealed. She needs to recover a talisman, and of course she does and all is put to rights - until of course things necessarily break down in order for a sequel to be written.

The story didn't entertain me despite my gamely plowing into it quite a ways - about a third or so, as I recall. Despite the author's attempts to add whimsy and novelty, it was still your typical story, requiring a cis girl to meet a boy (named Saturday - seriously?) and solve the problem. I couldn't get into it and I cannot commend it based on what I read of it.

Geist by Philippa Ballantine

Rating: WARTY!

I could not get into this. I made it through three chapters and it was unfurling so painfully slowly that I looked at it and the thought of suffering three hundred pages of this was too much. The author seems to be channeling Stephen King, but the fact is that if the only way you have to make your characters pop is to detail their life history even unto the third and fourth generation, then I'm sorry but you're doing it pedantically wrong.

The book description tells us that "The undead are here and only the Deacons stand in their way," but it really doesn't tell us a damned thing about who or what deacons are, how they get to be in such a position, and what they actually do. Everything is so unnecessarily mysterious and after three chapters of that, I was tired of not knowing anything./p>

These deacons are supposed to be "guardians against ghost possession," but the author never showed us what a deacon would do with one of these ghosts, or undead or whatever-the-hell-they-are. Instead we're introduced to the anomaly of a host of them without ever being shown what the norm is, so it really means nothing because we have nothing with which to compare it! This is the first book in a series, naturally, and that's the first problem because it means the author thinks she has four books at least to tell this story.

She really doesn't. If she fails to tell an engaging story in volume one, no one in their right mind is going to want to read further. So it sure doesn't mean that she can coast through the first volume without doing any work. I can't commend this based on what I suffered through.

The Time of Green Magic by Hilary McKay

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is a middle-grade novel set in Britain. I'm normally a bit biased toward such novels, and this one started out for me in great style, with Abi from one family, and Louis and Max from another being brought together into one big family when Abi's father Theo marries the boys' mother Polly. They move into a larger house, which has a lot of character and Abi finds that her immersion in novels becomes a little too literal. She'd be reading Kon-Tiki and the book would end up wet, with the water tasting of salt. She'd be reading about an Arctic adventure and almost get frostbite.

That would have been adventure enough, but there was also other stuff going on that seemed unconnected with Abi's experiences - like the large cat that young Louis encounters, or the paranoia that Max experiences, alongside his interest in this French art student who occasionally babysits. On top of that, Polly's work calls her away from home for a couple of weeks (I'm not sure why the author wanted her out of the way), and Theo it seems is hardly home, so the kids are left to their own devices a lot. At once there seemed to be both too much going on and not enough.

The story was going in so many different directions that things were becoming confused, and also being skipped: like how these kids were getting along given that one of them was entirely unrelated to the other two, and how little information is imparted about the books they're reading. The kids seemed to have no inner life, and the novel reached a stagnation point about halfway in. I began quickly to lose interest in it. It did not improve and I gave up on it at seventy percent out of sheer boredom.

Again, it wasn't written for me, and middle-graders might get more out of it than did I, but I've read and enjoyed many middle-grade level books and found them highly entertaining. This one wasn't in that category, and while I wish the author all the best in her career, I can't commend this particular novel as a worthy read.

The Secret Explorers and the Lost Whales by SJ King

Rating: WARTY!

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

The secret explorers are a group of young children who investigate the natural world and help right wrongs. It's a series, so not all the kids go on every mission. They each have specialties and are selected because of what they can bring to making the mission a success. In this one, my first encounter with this series, Connor and Roshni are the underwater crew investigating why a pod of humpbacks seem to have lost their way. In process of pursuing the investigation, they encounter problems and issues that need to be worked through, and learn things about ocean life.

I was disappointed in this book for two reasons. While I appreciate its aim of trying to engage young people in developing an awareness of the natural world and the human-caused problems it faces, the natural world really needs to be left alone. The problem isn't the natural world, it's decades of human callous indifference to it that has caused the problems, and this is where efforts need to be applied. A Band-Aid and an aspirin isn't going to work where major heart surgery is urgently required. And you know, there's not a lot of point in saving one pod of whales if the Japanese or American Indians are going to hunt and kill them anyway.

The other problem I had with this ebook is that it simply did not work. I'm talking technically here. The book hung up on me around fifty percent in and crashed the entire app. I tried it in two different apps: Bluefire Reader, and Adobe Digital Editions. Both of these normally work perfectly, but this book failed at the same point in both apps, which tells me it's the publication, not the app. Just now, before I finalized this review, I tried it once more on both of those apps and the book wouldn't even open in ADR. It hung up the app. In BFR, it opened, but immediately hung the app.<.p>

I don't know if it's the intention to put this out as an ebook, or if that's simply how review copies were distributed (for my sins, I'm not the sort of reviewer who gets the hardback copy!), but given the poor quality of the e-copy, which prevented me reading half of it, and my misgivings about the priorities being set in this story, I can't commend it as a worthy read. Your mileage may differ.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith

Rating: WARTY!

Several years ago I tried reading The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by this author and did not get along with it. I guess I picked up this book at the same time form the same close-out shelf! It's been sitting gathering dust and I finally decided to give it a try-out, without holding out too much hope. This book is part of a long series, so I guess it has a readership, but after sampling about a tenth of it, I can safely say that readership does not include me. I'm done with this series and this author.

This book had precisely three same problems the other one did in that it rambled incessantly, it insisted on using the full name of every character every single time they were mentioned, which was tedious, and the story simply didn't pull me in at all, so I gave up. The thin plot revolves around Mma Ramotswe worrying over her fiancé, Mr. JLB Matekoni not having set the date for their marriage yet, along with Mma Makutsi, Ramotswe's assistant, wanting a husband, on top of which, a rival detective agency has opened doors for business. It's not enough. I can't commend this based on the admittedly limited sampling of it I could stand to suffer.

The Truth-Teller's Tale by Sharon Shinn

Rating: WARTY!

You know there was nothing outright bad about this novel, but there was nothing great about it either, and in the end, that was the problem. It was bland to the point of pointlessness. I read it very nearly all the way through - all except for the last few pages and by then I had begun to seriously resent the time I'd wasted on this when I could have been reading something more memorable and engaging. As it was, it was not even really a story; it was just a meandering ramble that really had nowhere to go, but downhill.

The problem was that it so quickly became perfectly obvious exactly what was going to happen, who the mysterious visitors were, and where everyone would end up. If you're going to tell such an obvious story, then you at least need to spice it up a bit with some misdirection and red herrings. The author never did. I don't know if she was foolish enough to believe that no-one could see the glaringly obvious truth (in a novel where 'truth teller' is part of the title!), or if she understood that and simply didn't care, but the fact that it was so painfully obvious to the reader, and yet not a single one of the three main female characters even had a clue, tells me that this author evidently delights in writing about truly stupid female characters. Why female authors do this to their characters I do not know, but it happens a lot and it always pisses me off.

The story is set in a sort of medieval world where there are three kinds of gifted people, all of whom seem to be female for some reason. One of these kinds is the wish-granter. She has the power (so-called) to grant any wish, but since we later learn that she has no power to choose which wishes are granted and which are not, it rather neuters her power, and renders it completely random.

The other two kinds of people are represented by the mirror twins who are the main characters. That is, they are identical if one is seen directly, and the other seen in a mirror reflection. The have the palindromic names of Adele and Eleda - something that was again obvious from the start, and while the reader has the advantage of seeing the names in print which makes it a bit easier than if we'd simply heard them, it's not impossible to figure it out. Yet no one ever does! Maybe it's just that the whole city is stupid?

One of the twins is compelled always to tell the truth. She has the power to discern truth about a person and typically cannot prevent herself from speaking it. The other has the seemingly pointless power of never revealing a secret. It's quite literally impossible for her to tell a secret that's been shared with her Again, that power seems a bit dumb, but because she is so similar to her sister, there is the quirk that sometimes someone who thinks they're sharing a secret that will never be passed on, makes a mistake and speaks it to the truth-teller. This plays such a small part in the story that it seems pointless, but it does again illustrate how dumb these people are.

That was the whole problem with this: the pointlessness of it. There really wasn't a story here to tell. There was never any adventure, never anything at risk, never any great revelation, never anything unpredictable, never any thrill or danger, and never any real romance or heartbreak for that matter. It was bland to the point of being tasteless and I cannot commend it as a worthy read. It's the middle book in a trilogy. I hadn't read the first, and it's not necessary; they're stand-alones it would seem, but I'm done. I have no desire to read any more of this trilogy or or any other Sharon Shinn novel. This is the second work of hers that I've been disappointed with and the thought of reading anything else by her now just leaves me cold.

One Foot in the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Rating: WARTY!

According to wikipedia, One Foot in the Grave is volume two of the 'Night Huntress' series, being preceded by Halfway to the Grave by six months, but according to the listing in the novel itself, the first volume is OFitG, with HttG following. I'm confused. Actually, I'm more confused by the titles: what, pray tell, is the practical difference between having one foot in the grave and being half-way to the grave? Isn't that the same thing with different wording?! This is a big problem with a novel series - how the heck do the newbies know where to start unless there's a volume number on the cover? Yeah - dig inside, I guess, but what a nuisance. Oh well, best foot forward - to the grave....

I started this novel out fresh from the excellent Dead Until Dark which means that Jeaniene Frost isn’t getting perhaps as fair a deal as she ought in the comparison, but what really hit me strongly in the first hundred pages was how 'young-adult' this novel seemed even though it isn’t a YA title. That's not to say that YA titles are bad per se, but picture the worst YA instadore you ever read, and that's what I'm getting at.

The main character is Catherine Crawfield, who goes by Cristine Russell and is known as the Red Reaper by her vampire enemies because she has red hair. She has dyed it for anonymity in this volume, but I don’t see the point of that given that vampires have heightened senses and can tell who she is regardless of her hair color! That's not the problem though. The problem is how sickeningly on pretty darned near every page, we’re treated to Cristine's desperate pining for her ex-vampire love, "Bones", who I shall refer to as Boner from this point on because this isn't about love, it's about sex, period. I can understand that she was hot for him, but she left him, not the other way around, and although she did it unwillingly, it has been well over four long years. This is a woman who is in serious need of urgent medical therapy.

That aside, the story hasn't been too bad (and it's hard to put aside when the stench of it is rammed under your nose on every other page). Cristine works for an offshoot of the Homeland Security Agency which is tasked with keeping the vampire population under control, so yeah, it’s the vampire hunter trope. Except she's described as a 'huntress'. I'm not quite sure how to rate the potential genderism in employing the feminine form there. This is a writing problem. Do we say both genders are equal and therefore use only the one term, so as not to 'discriminate' against women by using a specific feminine term for them, or do we go the other way and argue that employing what has been hitherto the masculine form is actually a form of insult to the woman so depicted?

I've tended towards the former option: employing the masculine term universally, but this is really something each writer has to decide. Look at it this way: what if we employed exclusively the feminine form, even to describe the male? So for example, if this novel had been about Cristopher Russell (instead of Cristine) we would call him a vampire huntress. How many people would find that strange, and doesn’t it say something awful about our society that such would be the case? It’s worth a thought or few.

At the start of this volume, Cristine is tasked with bringing down an ancient and powerful vampire. Cristine FYI, is literally half-vampire/half-human in that her mother was impregnated by a freshly-turned vampire who evidently had viable sperm flopping around in his resurrected testicles. This gives her enhanced powers which is how she came to be hired by the HSA. How that works is something quite literally never discussed in vampire stories: have you noticed? They supposedly have no heartbeat, so by what means does the nutrition from the blood they drink get to their cells to keep the vampires looking so young?! Osmosis?! In Cristine's case, how did that sperm become genetically changed in order that it could both still match up to the mother's genetic complement, and confer upon Cristine the vampire traits she garnered? This suggests that vampirism is genetic: that the dying body undergoes a genetic change before resurrecting as a vamp. But no one ever talks about it!

Frost employs some standard vamp tropes, such as older vampires are more powerful, and silver kills them, whilst dispensing with others: her vampires aren't allergic to crosses, churches, or daylight, and the silver knife not only has to penetrate their heart, but it has to be twisted to actually kill them! Thus although Cristine stabs this vampire in the heart, she's in deep conversation with him (another trope: smart-mouth your foe as you beat the crap out of each other - thoroughly unrealistic but sometimes entertaining) and from her conversation, she learns something which causes her to spare his life and let him go free, just as a favor to her ex-lover. Will this come back to, er, bite her? Of course, she then has to stab herself to make it look like he escaped, but it’s fine since she heals very quickly.

Cristine's best friend Denise, who knows all about her, is getting married, and Boner shows up as one of the groom's retinue. Cristine is a complete Mary Sue here. At that point it was patently obvious to we readers that Boner was going to show up, yet Cristine is completely clueless, and then she turns to Jell-O® in church when she sees him. It’s truly pathetic and frankly made me nauseous. This kind of writing stinks, but as I said, other than this tripe, the story isn't too bad at all, so I had planned on trying to stay with it. That plan failed!

I was very roughly halfway through this and as I said, finding parts which were interesting, but it was so hard not to drop this in the recycle bin because the "romance" was so awful, so tedious, and so uninteresting I honestly didn’t know how much more of this I could stomach, especially since I finally had some more library books, every one of which was calling to me far more strongly than Frost's 'amateur masturbation for teens' tome was. Parts of her effort did continue to be really interesting; that wasn't the problem. The problem was Cristine's dishrag-to-a-bull act which had continued to travel beyond merely sickening and into heaving stomach convulsions and projectile vomiting.

The hilarious irony is that Cristine was so angered at being such a limp dick in Bones's company in church that she hared off to the next gig her team was supposed to undertake (so to speak!) alone! Yeah, she's that kind of moron. There was a nest of vampires hanging out at a dance bar, so rather than go there immediately to deal with it, the team evidently had decided to let the vampires kill a few more innocents before they took them down; they planned to raid the place the next night, but Cristine decided to do the job herself like the dimwit loose cannon that she is.

She killed a bunch of vamps, and Boner (the walking hard-on to Cristine's slavishly gushing pussy) showed up and killed one more, but there were still three to go, so naturally, Boner takes Cristine dancing while they wait for those vamps to show because, god forbid they should actually go outside and wait for them! The other vamps turned up (their vamp instincts evidently having failed to warn them) and these three were also rapidly dispatched. Boner then raped Cristine; not sexually, but vampirically. Cristine had no problem with this - she limply let him have his way as he sucked heavily on her blood, preparing herself to die. I told you she needed therapy.

This so-called hero of the novel is nothing but a toy for a guy who has no reason whatsoever to be attracted to her other than that she evidently is a moist location in which to keep his dick when he doesn't need it free for urinating. Cristine hasn’t even an ounce of self-respect or feminine strength to her name. She's no hero. She's no one to look up to. She has no spine. Why is this essentially always the case in vampire stories? Why is it all-too-often the case with female so-called heroes in novels in general? Are we not to even expect a feminine main character in a vamp story who isn’t an invertebrate when she finds herself within smelling range of some hot vamp's blood-engorged brain-dick? Can nobody come up with a better way to tell this kind of story than this god-awful whiny, clingy, needy, co-dependent drivel? And what does it say about the women who enjoy this garbage?

The problem today was that I was stuck at work and this was the only lunchtime reading I had, so I gave it another half-hour, and it continued in the same - er, vein! Or maybe vain? If I could just excise the mindless teen-romance trash, I could enjoy the novel because I'm interested in the overall plot and where this will go, but I'm not coping well with Jeaniene Frost's depraved wallowing over what is, let’s face it, an abused woman. The problem is that the plot is increasingly taking a very distant back seat to the endless nymphodore (that's the same as instadore, but where the relationship is exclusively sexual) "romance" which doesn't even feign a weak pretension towards actually being romantic!

A quick word about the English language: it's not still four hundred years ago! No one calls women 'poppet' or 'kitten'. It seems that Frost has seen one-too-many Pirates of the Caribbean movies. And I don't care if she tries to argue that the vampires are old and still using the lingo they heard in their formative years, because then she's arguing that they cannot or do not change no matter what era they're from, and her own writing gives the lie to any such claim: clearly they do change. So please, "pop it" in the trash unless you intend upon including a barf bag with each novel you sell.

As if the rape wasn't bad enough, Cristine was kidnapped by Boner and woke up lying in bed with him. As a result of this, she decided to get back together with him! Is this what we want to set out as an example for young women* that if your lover persists in stalking you and in doing things you didn’t invite and have no control over, then the best solution to this dilemma isn't to kick the son of a bitch in his balls and report him to the authorities, but to get back with him and let him have what he wanted all along? Let's face it, this relationship has nothing whatsoever to do with companionship or with being with the right life-partner. It has entirely, solely, and exclusively to do with sex. There is no love or romance here.

* yeah, she's a teenager: though she's twenty seven, Cristine apparently has the body of a nineteen year old! Again, there's no explanation for how that works. If she ages so slowly that her life expectancy might be double or more what your common-or-garden human gets, how did she mature so rapidly that she looks even nineteen now? Shouldn't she look like she's three or something? Of course, then the thing with Boner would be entirely inappropriate. Not that it's any more appropriate to have a hundred year old vampire dating a nineteen year old woman....

Moving right along now.... Despite my desire to find out what happens in the rest (i.e. the non-brain-dead portion) of the story, I'm going to ditch this one and move on to something more intelligent, or at least more entertaining and far less tedious. Perhaps I will hold onto the novel, and maybe try and get back into it at some other time. Maybe if I skip the gooey parts completely and just read the other bits, I can still read it to the end and enjoy it insofar as that goes. Unfortunately, in order to do that, I'd still have to dig through the goo to find the good! For now, this is warty!

The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age by Conrad Wolfram

Rating: WARTY!

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

At one point in this book, the author writes, "When I started this journey, I thought there would be a huge amount of straight hostility. So far, I've found confusion predominates instead." Having read a substantial portion of it before giving up on it, I can only agree.

The book is written by the younger brother of the creator of the Mathematica software, and given that this very software is mentioned more than thirty times throughout the text, I had to wonder if this really is nothing more than an extended sales pitch for said software. The truth is that I honestly cannot say because despite the book being billed as "a groundbreaking book that exposes why math education is in crisis worldwide and how the only fix is a fundamentally new mainstream subject" I could not for the life of me, despite several searches throughout the book, discover what it is that the author proposes to replace traditional math teaching with.

That said, I must confess that I gave up on it about 25% of the way in. The book really dragged. Instead of launching into the new ideas from the outset, the author requires that we spend fully a quarter of the book listening to him waffling on about the problem without really telling us anything. I agree with him that the math we teach these days has little to do with most people's real-world experience of or need for it. The simple solution to that is to teach less of it and more of what people do need!

The language of this book is a bit high level, too. I wasn't sure who the author's intended audience was supposed to be, but given the college-level language he uses, it's definitely not the stereotypical 'man (or woman) in the street'. I didn't have too much trouble understanding most of it, but the writing was very dense, and quite academic in tone. I listened to it (read by my iPhone's Voice Over software) on the commute to and from work each day, and on the morning I decided to give up on it, and the reason I quit was because I realized that I had not understood a single word he'd written in some twenty-five minutes of driving.

This was not because I was too focused on traffic. The streets are largely devoid of traffic when I drive in to work, and I typically have no problem driving safely and hearing what my book or novel of choice is all about as I drive. That morning was a huge fail in this regard, and it's solely because of the high-falutin' language he used.

I read scores of books of all types, and have college-level education, and while it was not wholly impenetrable, this book was far too dense for my taste. He could have eased this quite readily by employing more everyday language, but his attitude seemed to be "why use 'used' when you can write 'utilized'"?! I can't take anyone seriously who regularly writes 'utilized'. For a book that claims to be clearing the cobwebs out of mathematics, perhaps his first step should have been to clear the cobwebs out of his writing, and write at a level that's easy for your average reader to grasp? Just a thought!

Just so you know it's not only me, I pasted the first 600 or so words from the first chapter into an online readability app, and these were the results:

• Flesch Reading Ease score: 39.1 (difficult to read)
• Gunning Fog: 17.2: (difficult to read)
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 14.1 (College)
• The Coleman-Liau Index: 13 (College)
• The SMOG Index: 12.4: (Twelfth Grade)
• Automated Readability Index: 15.6 (College graduate)
• Linsear Write Formula : 17.3 (College Graduate and above)

So: not aimed at Jo Average! But it wasn't just the level of the language, it was the jargon employed. The word, 'computational' for example appears over 400 times. Here are a few examples, and no, I did not bookmark these at the time (driving!) I just went to random places in the book, and swiped a page or two in one direction or another, and sure enough there was a phrase right there. It's not hard to find them:

"Nor do they provide an appropriate structure for so doing, though in some cases they're complementary outcomes lists and can usefully coexist with outcomes for core computation."

"...that's nullifying the point of having a machine do it instead..."

"...indeed, that the rationale is not orchestrated for practical application distinguishes the discipline..."

"One of the drivers for this is the aforementioned problem of traditional outcomes listings being per maths tool, where our outcomes map instead reflects a distillation of substructure..."

"...not pre-abstracted calculation problem segments..."

"...with respect to a a (sic) core computational curriculum change..."

If only some of this had been rendered into more everyday language it would have improved readability immensely. But this was not the worst problem for me.

The real problem I had was that I really wanted to know what his alternative was, and beyond a vague idea that it seems to involve using computer software, I could glean no idea from the opening portion of the book, and nothing from skimming through and doing some reading in later sections to see if it's explained anywhere at all. I confess it's entirely possible, not having read the whole thing, that I could well have missed it, but I could not for the life of me find anywhere where the author says, 'this is what I propose' or words to that effect and lays out a summary of the new plan. The fact that this book has no contents page did not help in my forlorn quest to get to the 'core computation' (to use a phrase of the author's) and find out what he would like to see as the future of math education. To me that was a serious failing.

Given how tedious it was to read this, and how the author himself seemed curiously loathe to share his plan with the reader, I can't in good faith commend this as a worthy read. The problem seemed to be that he was preaching to the choir for the first quarter of the book. If the language had been simplified a bit, and he'd ditched that first 25% and launched right into it, assuming his readers were interested not in the sorry history of math education, but in discovering what his new proposal was, he would have made a better impression on me. But if his only plan is to sell the Mathematica software to every student at eighty bucks a year, then this seems a little self-serving to me. Maybe he had some other plan; I can't say because I couldn't find out what his plan was!