The Marquess of Gorsewall Manor by Adella J Harris

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a beautifully-written novel about two gay men, set in the Regency period, which despite its 300-some page length, was a delightful and fast read for me. It's not one of your smutty bare-chested muscle guy on the cover erotic story, which are so cliched and overdone that I canlt even get past the absurdist book blurb. Such novels are typically execrable, but this was thoughtful, well-paced, considereate, intelligent, and offered plenty to keep a reader occupied. There were some sex scenes, but not many, and those were tastefully done, and believe it or not, this was written in first person, a voice I usually detest, but it was well done. Once in a while an author can carry it off and I appreciated this author's light touch.

The story makes a reader feel they are back in the Regency without being too heavy-handed about it or imparting the feeling that the author is yelling, "Hey, look how much research I did!" It was easy to read and made a lot of sense in how it was put together, and in how the relationship developed realistically between the two main characters: naturally and thoughtfully.

Thomas Brook works in a lower-level legal job in London. He's gay, but discreet, and it's only through bad luck that he's arrested in a molly house and brought to trial on charges of indecency which back then would net you a time in the public pillory and a couple of years of hard labor. Why they considered locking up a gay guy with a whole bunch of other guys to be a real punishment is a question that's worth asking, but as it happened, Thomas didn't get that far. Due to laxity and confusin during the pillorying process, he manages to get away and immedately starts sneaking onto the back of stagecoaches heading north, paying for an occasional meal by offering discreet oral sex to certainly likely travelers or locals when he feels it's safe to do so.

Eventually though, his luck runs out and he's forced to take to his feet again, and ends up passed out on the moors. Not by coincidence, he's discovered before further harm can befall him, by Lord Elmsby, who also happens to be gay and dealing with issues of his own. Elmsby takes Thomas on as a cataloguer of his library until the latter gets back on his feet, and the two start to develop a mutual liking.

Elmsby's history includes a scandal several years before, when his fiancée disappeared without a trace, so he leads a solitary life now and Thomas is a welcome novelty - at least at first. But when a body surfaces on the moors, Thomas is left wondering what he's got himself into.

As I said, the story was engaging and entertaining, warm and enjoyable, although the murderer was quite obvious from quite early, and I'm usually bad about figuring out who the perp is in such stories. That didnlt spoilt he sotry for me though. It offered variety and entertainment, and was nicely-written with only a couple of minor spelling gaffs that I didn't bother over. I fully commend this as a worthy read.

Juliana by Vanda

Rating: WARTY!

This started out in first person which is irritating to me at best, but it started chapter one, set in 1941, and had a single paragraph talking about people waiting in line as fans of this actor, and the narrator says, "But wait; I'm getting ahead of myself. All that came much later." It switched to a new screen, started chapter one again and went into a flashback. I decided "No thanks!" right there and then, and I quit.

Something this badly written and with flashbacks and in first person is not for me. I can't commend it. I don't think this author understands the use of a charcter history. She seems to feel that she needs to include everything in the book instead of using it as background to round out the author's own understanding of the character. And the last thing I need is to start the first paragraph of a story I'm hoping to enjoy only to have it brought to a screeching halt while we travel even further back in time for a boring and tedious history lesson. No. Uh-uh. Not for me. I have better things to do with my time than to read a dithering story that has no sense of self, and no idea how to proceed.

Beowulf by Andrew BF Carnabuci

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a new translation of Beowulf - arguably the most translated Old English work out there. Dating - possibly - to around 1000AD, the time of Ethelred the Unreedy, and Cnut, this was ancient even in Shakespeare's time, and it tells a poetic (in what served for poetry at the time - not like modern stuff) tale of Beowulf (whose name gave the untitled work a title) and his three great battles against Grendel, Grendel's mom, and against the dragon.

It's really the story of a curse brought upon warriors for their philandering, because it turns out that Grendel is the child of King Hrothgar, and the dragon is the child of Beowulf himself, both of them the offpsring of their dalliance with Grendel's mom, whose real name is Lulabelle. Just kidding. She goes unnamed. In fact, as a female, she's lucky to get a mention since this is all about manly men, sterling feats, and lusty living.

You may be familiar with the story from that execrable 2007 CGI movie starring Angelina Jolie, Robin Wright-Penn, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, and a gratuitus John Malkovich, which while loosely following the story, was so wrong on so many levels. Grendel's mom wears high heels? Really? I know it's a macho tale of not backing down, but literally nobody blinks? Really?

The real story does often meander away from the main action into tales of Beowulf's achievements, but this is how it was back then, a sort of merrily plodding, repetitive, alliterative story-telling which got there eventually by hitting all the career high-spots of this legendary man's man and his cadre of steely warriors. It also uses the phrase, 'lord of the rings'! I guess that's where Tolkien got it from.

The only issue I had with this was that the embedded links from the text to the glossary/reference section were a bit flaky in that if they were close to the edge of the screen a reader risked swiping the screen to the next or the previous one when tapping on the link, rather than going to the actual reference. The reference section and bibliography is extensive though, running to 25 screens on my iPad.

Also, I read my books on a black screen with white text to save on battery power and the dark-blue reference numbers were hard to read against the black screen. This wouldn't have mattered except that the reference you jump to is part of a list of them; it's not to a single reference, so I couldn't tell for sure which particular reference in the list I had jumped to, and therefore couldn't be sure, when I tapped back, that I'd end up exactly where I left! That made for a fun read. The content list was likewise hard to read for the same reason - and it had, as usual, the listed items too close together to tap confidently to jump to a particular chapter. Double spacing between lines would have helped considerably.

That aside though, I liked this translation and I commend it for anyone interested in this ancient tale, for all are punishéd, and never was a story of more dolor than this of Grendel and his Modor....

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another diversion into the classics. I find the author's name amusing for some reason. In conjunction with reading this, I also watched the Disney movie John Carter which was loosely derived from the novel and was a huge loss for the studio, despite making some 300 million. That's bad business right there: your movie makes THREE HUNDRED MILLION and you still lose money on it? I am not a fan of Disney, but despite the movie being mildly entertaining and the novel being mildly readable, I have no intention of pursuing this series.

I don't know if George Lucas, in creating his Star Wars empire ever acknowledged how much he borrowed from Burroughs, but in my opinion he took a lot. Special snowflake super-powered savior guy and a princess to win? Telepathy? A desert planet? Sword fighting? Multiple alien species? Epic battles on land and in the air? Strange alien animals? Weird flying craft? It's all there. The leaders in the story are known as Jeds and Jeddaks. Is it a coincidence how close this is to Jedi?

I understand that this novel was written in a different era, and long before we knew a lot about Mars, but the story itself doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense even within its own fictional framework, and the hero of it, John Carter (it's convenient that his initials are JC, for a white savior, huh?!), really ought to have been named Mary Sue for all the luck he has going his way and the lack of effort he puts in to get the consistently sterling results he obrains. It's like everything he does, he becomes expert at, and everything that happens to him quickly facilitates his meeting whatever goal it was he had been hoping to reach.

As was the wont back then, this work was serialized in early 1912 before appearing as a 66,000 word novel. For this reason it has all of the prevailing white male privilege of that era, including all of the viewpoints that you'd expect. There is no enlightenment here, so you have to take it as you find it, or avoid it. Carter is a veteran of the US civil war (on the side of the South of course!) and shortly after that ended, he took to prospecting in the southwest USA. He gets to Mars accidentally through a portal hidden in a cave he happens upon. There is no explanation offered for the presence of this portal on Earth, much less its specific location.

Burroughs buys into the antique notion of Martian canals, born of a misunderstanding. Astronomer Schiaparelli described features (that were very likely optical artifacts) as 'channels' which in his native Italian was 'canali'. This was misunderstood as 'canals' - an artificial construction by intelligent beings on a planet that was drying-out, aimed at channeling water from the icy poles to support the rest of the planet. Burroughs uses this idea, just as did HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury. Burroughs also invents a huge river - no doubt based on the River Styx, along which people at the end of their lives were borne.

Mars is known to the natives as 'Barsoom', and it's been suggested that this is based on numbering the known heavenly bodies, starting with the sun and including the moons, 'bar' being the Martian word for eight. This makes no sense within the story, but I guess it could have been Burroughs 'rationale'. The five named planets are these: Rasoom (Mercury), Cosoom (Venus), Jasoom (Earth), Barsoom (Mars), and Sasoom (Jupiter), but since the word for 'one' in Barsoomian is 'ay' and not 'ra', this numbering theory would seem to be a non-starter!

People seem to praise Burroughs for such inventive world-building, but it really isn't. In fact, it's extremely derivative, and scientifically makes little to no sense. It's just a jumble of random ideas that apparently caught his imagination. Martians are green and with six arms? The equivalent of a dog has ten legs and is super-fast? There are wonderful flying machines in one part of the planet, and wagon trains in another? Mars is dry? None of this is really very imaginative. Some of it's plain dumb.

Anyway, Carter discovers, due to the weaker gravity on Mars, that he is very strong and can leap to great heights because his bones and muscles developed under Earth's gravity. The thing is that there are humans (or very like humans) on Mars - called red humans because of their tan - and any one of them ought to have been able to develop Carter's ability if they had only worked-out, yet in thousands of years, no one ever did? There's also a race of green Martians who are fifteen feet tall and have six limbs, but Carter can easily vanquish them because of his superior strength and agility. There are other races, but none that we meet in this volume.

Carter takes up with the green Martians who hatch from eggs after a five year 'gestation' period. He rapidly rises to a position of power despite being a curiosity, a non-native, and something of a prisoner. He learns their language quickly, but here's the weird thing: we're told that they say very few words aloud, and have only the simplest of spoken languages; they communicate a lot by telepathy, so he develops his telepathic skills just like that. Yet repeatedly throughout the story, these simple people, lacking a significant language, physically speak great volumes of complex words and sentences to him and there's never any more mention of communicating telepathically! So Burroughs is inconsistent at best.

The lack of air on Mars is overcome as the author reveals that there is (one!) atmospheric generation facility to keep the oxygen levels renewed, but this is part of the problem (especially at the end of the story), since the technology levels on Mars are wildly variable, particularly between the greens and the reds, although no reason is given for this.

Development of hand weapons seem to have halted at a late medieval level with simple guns and swords, yet the red society's power is derived from nuclear sources! The divide is, admittedly, largely between the greens and the reds, but the greens pilfer hugely from red airships that they shoot down with their long range rifles, so why their technology is so backward I have no idea.

The rifles are a problem. We're told that they can theoretically hit a target three hundred miles away, and reliably nail one that's two hundred miles away, but on Mars, the horizon is only two miles away, so how that weapon is supposed to work at a hundred times that distance, I have no idea! There's a vague allusion to wireless guidance technology, but this is completely out of line with the greens technology level, so none of this made any sense. His misuse of 'staunch' perhaps did back then: "I endeavored to staunch the flow of blood" This is really supposed to be 'stanch'.

The red humans have flying machines which employ an 'eighth ray' for propulsion, which is bullshit and nonsense, but hey, this is fiction! There are supposedly nine 'rays' and the eighth and ninth are talked about in this volume, but none of the others are discussed, so I have no idea what those are supposed to be.

The problem with this is that at one point, when JC is being suitably heroic once more and Mary-Sue-ing his way into yet another plum position, he encounters another human with a flying machine that has been downed due to a mechanical problem. Again this is highly convenient because we later learn that the stranded guy is a relative of a high-level official and thus provides yet another easy access point for Carter - which he promptly wastes.

We're informed that JC can't rescue this guy on his own flyer because they're fragile, but earlier we were told the eighth ray is so powerful that it accidentally launched an unsuspecting airship crew into orbit. How is this fragile? Did Burroughs mean that the ship's construction is fragile? There was no suggestion of that earlier, and these 'single occupant' airships are sixteen feet long so there seemed to be no reason why it could not have lifted two people if they sat on it carefully. I'm just saying!

Naturally, Carter meets a princess of the red humans and they almost immediately fall in love. They always use both names, so she's always Dejah Thoris and he's always John Carter, never John or Carter, and the both speak of themselves in third person at times. It's annoying. Everyone is quite warlike - whether that's because Mars is the god of war or the author just chose to make his story that way for dramatic purposes, I don't know, but despite this belligerence, no one invented a machine gun. Go figure! Even the red humans can't get along because there's a war between different factions of those, and the princess is supposed to marry her enemy against her will in order to secure peace, but you know that ain't happening.

So Carter gets into a position of palace guard at his enemy's stronghold, giving him freedom to roam the palace and search for the princess who is conveniently being held there. He is always - I mean always - hiding in the right place at the right time to discover key pieces of information. At one point he deserts his guard post to go look for the princess, and becomes hopelessly lost. He rests his back against a wall for a minute to catch his breath since he's apparently exhausted from roaming the hallways in search of her, and this wall just happens to be the one to the princess's quarters!

Instead of biding his time and making a plan, he bursts in there and slaughters the four guards who are berthed inside her room(!) She informs him that she has to go through with this wedding and that he cannot kill her intended because it is forbidden for her to marry the murderer of her intended. Dejah Thoris isn't actually a person, she's a tool, a lure, a trophy, a possession, a MacGuffin who is constantly in need of rescue, a bargaining chip. She's never an agent of her own, and is nothing if not a perennially half-naked eye-candy prize to be bartered and won.

Carter is equally lucky in fleeing the palace. Despite there being an uproar over the four guards he slaughtered, he manages to accidentally find his way to a truly convenient escape point from the palace. Unable to jump out of a high window in daylight (people apparently look up on Mars) he chooses to hide inside an elaborate lighting fixture, which happens to be hanging above the precise point where a group of people gather to explain everything that's going on.

Again with the luck: I read later of another of his adventures, "The building was an enormous one, rearing its lofty head fully a thousand feet into the air...The fact that Barsoomian architecture is extremely ornate made...a perfect ladder for me all the way to the eaves of the building" A thousand feet up! This is the guy who is so out of shape that he gets breathless searching the palace and yet he climbs a thousand feet with no trouble?

This kind of thing happens again and again, tediously so. For example, at one point, Carter is flying one of the little aircraft to Helium, a major Martian city which is a thousand miles away (I guess fuel running out is never a problem on Mars). Now this is the single most distinctive city on Mars, but he can't find it because his speedometer and compass are damaged, and he gets lost. Despite flying over several cities where he could have stopped and asked for directions, the idiot doesn't stop until he espies a massive battle going on between green Martians. Despite knowing how deadly a shot these people are, instead of avoiding the battle, he flies right over it like a moron, and gets shot down.

Why these fighting Martians even care about shooting him down when amidst a massive battle, is left unexplained, but he happens to land, in a field of ten thousands fighting Martians, precisely at the point where his friend is engaged in combat, and ends up saving his friend's life! This results in his becoming even more highly elevated in their society. Note that since Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, a compass would be useless there, but Burroughs could not have known that.

When Carter is trying to find an associate in the dark dungeons, I read, "Fortunately among the first I examined I found his jailer, and soon we had Kantos Kan with us in the throne room." Yep, he goes right to the jailer who has the very keys he needs to free the guy. He rallies a force of a hundred thousand green Martians who come with him to attack the enemy red Martian city and this takes no effort at all to talk them into joining his personal crusade. Despite needing three days to gather all the help he requires, he arrives at the enemy city right at the precise moment his precious princess is about to be wed, just in time to stop the proceedings!

There's an air battle which I imagine would have been rather thrilling to readers in 1912 when air travel was in its infancy, but the author utterly fails to think through the fight. He has the airships drawn up (like David Weber does in more modern sci-fi battles) as though the space in which they fight is two dimensional, so they're organized like ships of the line, static, and firing cannon at one another in broadsides! Eventually some ships' captains think it through and manage to rise above the others and drop bombs on them, but when it comes to taking on the million man enemy army, instead of flying over and dropping bombs on them, these idiots quit the ships and deposit their 100,000 men on the ground and fight it out with the million man enemy army - and they still win!

Carter is the most lucky klutz ever to blunder into a situation where he can't lose. So like I said, it's interesting enough to read purely from a historical perspective to see how people viewed both themselves and Mars (and non-whites and women) back in Burroughs's day. It's not something I was remotely interested in continuing on into other volumes. It is a free read - you can find it online, at places like Project Gutenberg, There might even be an audiobook version of it there - I dunno. For me though, like Carter's bride, it laid an egg.

Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu

Rating: WORTHY!

Finally, a classic that I enjoyed! Published only one year before the author died, the 1872 novella Carmilla is an engrossing tale of one woman's hold on others through her vampire charms. It's narrated in first person by a female protagonist named Laura (and one who I initially thought was a male narrator!). Normally I do not like first person voice, but in this story it's not obnoxious or overwhelmingly ridiculous.

The story is of the Countess Karnstein, who has lived for a century or more, moving from place to place and changing her name - but always the new name being an anagram. We meet her as Carmilla, but in earlier times she has gone by Mircalla and Millarca. Naturally until the story is quite advanced, the actors in this drama have no idea of Carmilla's age or her vampire traits.

Wikipedia declares this to be a lesbian vampire story, but there isn't any overt lesbianism in it and I think in declaring it as such, the author of that article (who I'd be willing to bet is a male!) misses the fact that in Victorian times women were often in close relationships with impassioned statements of love and feeling, but without necessarily any lesbian inclinations or behaviors. Perhaps that's what le Fanu intended, or perhaps it wasn't. For me, I don't care either way; I just don't think the case has necessarily been made.

In many ways this story was a template for Bram Stoker's much better known Dracula which came a quarter century later, but vampire tales and legend precede both of these books by a good many years. There is the female victim, Laura, and clueless male companions and friends, but again I take odds with Wikipedia's assertion that this is a female empowerment novel since it isn't Laura who saves herself in the end. In fact, she plays a rather passive role in this story. Predictably (in hindsight!), it is an older male expert who shows up later and finally dispatches the vampire in her coffin.

This story begins with the oddball overture of a carriage racing along and overturning right outside where Laura and her father live, and the plea of the female who is riding in it that Laura's father take charge of her youthful (so it's understood!) and out-of-sorts daughter, to enable the woman to continue with her urgent journey.

Those were much more trusting times, and the nobility were much more reliable, and trustworthy in general, so none of that is particularly strange for the era. What is strange is that this traveling party is neither explained, nor is it ever seen or heard from again. There's no explanation offered as to who the travelers are or why they're in such a confounded hurry, or even what their relationship is to Carmilla, if any. So they disappear and we're left with Carmilla and her blossoming relationship with Laura.

The two become, as they might have said back then, bosom companions, despite Carmilla's somewhat odd traits: her lethargy, her sleeping very late into the day, her pallour, and her off-kilter habits. They declare love for each other, but nowhere do they exhibit any overt behavior or any behavior beyond what might be expected of any pair of young Victorian ingénues who are very fond of one another and excited to have such a suitable companion.

After a time through, Laura starts succumbing to some sort of a wasting illness, accompanied by bizarre dreams, and stories are spreading of deaths in the nearby communities. Despite this, it isn't until General Spielsdorf comes into the story that Laura and her father learn that the supposedly extinct Karnstein family has an extant descendent: a countess who does not die, but relocates herself periodically under a new name and preys on vulnerable, young local women. After a search, Carmilla's tomb is located on the derelict Karnstein estate, and she is summarily dispatched, leaving Laura with bittersweet memories.

I throughly enjoyed the story, perhaps being primed to favor it through having seen the 1970 Hammer Film production of Carmilla which was titled The Vampire Lovers and which played very much into the lesbian aspect. It starred Ingrid Pitt, a vamp herself, as Carmilla, along with the startlingly fresh and youthful Madeline Smith as Laura, and the inevitable Peter Cushing as Spielsdorf. It was the first of a trilogy, but I can't recall if I ever saw any of the sequels. I enjoyed that movie however, and it does follow the story quite well, so anyone who isn't interested in reading an old novella might like to see the film instead. I commend the book though as a worthy read.

Silence for the Dead by Simone St James

Rating: WORTHY!

Read delightfully by Mary Jane Wells, this was a truly sweet story that broke several of my rules and still kept my interest.

Typically I do not like first person voice, but once in a while the author carries it. I've had two of these just recently - one an ebook, and this one - an audiobook. A second rule it broke was that I do not usually like slow-moving stories. This one was one such story but it kept my interest anyway, because the character was engaging and the reader's voice was quite captivating. The third rules was that this was an early twentieth century novel which I usually do not enjoy - WW1 and WW2 are not my thing. Again, this was set in 1919 in an asylum for 'shell-shock'; victims - people suffering from what we now recognize as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but still it told an interesting story that had not been done before - not in my experience anyway - and it made a good job of it.

Kitty Weekes arrives at Portis House - a very remote house that was once in private hands but which is now given over - at least the parts of it that are not derelict - to the care of soldiers from "The Great War" who are not themselves. She hears from a third party about how desperate they are for nurses at this place and she outright lies that she's a nurse who has worked at a hospital in London, Due to staff shortages and disorganization, her story isn't checked and she's hired. She's also relieved because this is her last hope. Kitty is running from something and she is happy to be somewhere - even a place as dismal and disturbing as this - where she feels she can safely disappear.

She had an interesting relationship with the other staff - a handful of nurses and orderlies, and an rather antagonist relationship with matron, who discerns very early that she's not a nurse, but is desperate for the help she can offer, so the two have this sort of love-hate relationship that's really quite charming to read about.

The patients are a variety: some are fairly benign, others quite disturbing even to experienced nurses, and they all seem to be tormented by bad dreams - even the same bad dream. But there seems to be something else loose in Portis House, in the odd noises, the strange, chill breezes, the voices, and the inexplicable sightings of unfamiliar people.

There's also the anonymous patient 16 which only certain staff are allowed to interact with. Naturally Kitty bluffs her way into the room and is startled to find out she knows this guy - not because he's a friend or relative, but because he's a well-known personality and this is why his presence there is being kept secret. Over time she bonds with him and they both start investigating the unnatural aspects of Portis house, leading to a showdown one dark and stormy night - literally - when the rain is exceptionally heavy, patients are falling to the flu, and the bridge from the Portis House island to the mainland is in danger of becoming impassable.

I loved this story and the characters and I commend it strongly.

Rock 'n' Roll Heretic: The Life and Times of Rory Tharpe by Sikivu Hutchinson

Rating: WARTY!

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

This author is a feminist writer who has several non-fiction books out there. I have not read any of those. This one appears to be her first foray into fiction, and I have to say right up front that I was not at all impressed by it. For me it was a mess. It was hard to follow, choppily-written, jumping back and forth in time with little warning, flooded with characters that were not well-defined and therefore largely interchangeable, it was tedious at times, and did nothing whatsoever to draw me in, to enable me to empathize with the main character, or to engage or entertain me. I DNF'd it at 25% (and some skimming of the other 75%) because I was bored to tears with it and thoroughly disappointed at such a wasted opportunity.

The story is supposedly an homage to Rosetta Tharpe, but it feels more like an insult. The real-life Tharpe was truly a revolutionary who rose to popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, was an innovative musician and a huge influence on Blues, and helped bring Gospel into the mainstream, but this book doesn't seem to have any focus at all, and is music-light. By that I mean that, while an ebook (as opposed to an audio-book, for example) doesn't exactly lend itself to musical interludes, you can talk about music with passion and give it some character and life. Music was supposed to be a character in this novel in a very real sense, judged from the book description, but it was a complete no-show in that first 25%.

There was a lot of talk around music, but no talk, experience, or any sort of feel at all for music. So the book that was supposed to be about a musician turned her into a rather stereotypical shell - an echo of a musician rather then a working musician who purportedly was talented. Yes, we're told she was on the down-slide, and was a much imitated musician, but we were given no sort of sense of why she was imitated or what she had been before she hit the slope - not in the portion I read anyway.

To me, the novel felt like a fraud, like this was a band trying to break into the big time rather than a respected musician who'd had a series of bad breaks. Worse than that, it was all over the place and it lost me repeatedly as I tried to follow it and engage with it. I have to say it was also racist in some ways, in a warped mirror sort of way, which is the same distorted reflection that lets black comedians, for example tell racist white jokes on stage, but condemns white comedians who do the same about people of color.

You can't have it both ways. If racism is bad - and it is - you can't allow it for people of one color while denying it for others. It needs to be anathema for all, and this book didn't seem to get that. On the one hand it rightly sought to condemn racism, but it did it in such a back-handed and hamfisted manner that it became more like a parody than a paradigm. It became an exemplar of the very thing it was supposed to be deriding. For these reasons, I can't commend it based on what I read of it.

The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen by Ada Bright, Cass Grafton

Rating: WARTY!

In another unoriginal, coat-tail riding episode, "Rose has dedicated her life to celebrating the legacy of her favorite author, Jane Austen. But when Rose’s mysterious new neighbor is revealed to be the time traveling novelist herself, the two women must work together to help Jane get back home… before it’s too late." Seriously? Barf.

Can we not let her rest in peace? Do we have to have yet another rip-off after all the endless derivations and rip-offs we've already had? And if we do have to have a rip-off, can it be something along a path not traveled - something that contributes rather than rips-off? I gues snot. But no for me.

The Hell of Osirak by Jaye Rothman

Rating: WARTY!

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

I made it only a quarter of the way through this because it felt weak on dialog and plot. It began with British MI6 (the Brit equivalent of the CIA) agent Nikki Sinclair traveling to South Africa to secure some microfilm regarding South Africa's supplying of yellowcake, which is uranium concentrate powder, to Israel to facilitate Israel's construction of nuclear weapons.

For reasons I could not fathom, instead of handing those over to the British emabssy in South Africa (from whence they could have been sent to Britain in a diplomatic bag), Nikki then takes an indirect flight out which ends up landing in Zaire! The plane is held for several days for some sort of inspection or repair, and Nikki is trapped there.

This seemed highly improbable to me. At best it was lousy planning on the part of MI6 and at worst serious incompetence! The thing is though that an old flame of Nikki's named Dvora, who works for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, is also on the flight, and she shows up in Nikki's room, univited, waiting for her to get out of the shower, which she does, and walks into her bedroom to find Dvora sitting on her bed. Nikki is of course wearing only a towel around her head and one around her waist.

Again this seemed so artifical that it made no sense, and it threw me out of suspension of disbelief. I can see a towel around the hair, but why around the waist? Why not around the chest? Why a towel at all since she believes she's alone in the room? It felt like the only reason she did this was to perk up the story, not because it's what real people do.

For me, this lack of realism was a problem that seemed to repeat itself, constantly reminding me this was just a story. Every other thing I read seemed like it was there because this was a fiction, not because we were supposed to immersed in real events. Suspension of disbelief wasn't an option after a while, because I could not lose myself in the story, for no other reason than how artifical it seemed.

On top of that the story itself wasn't really engaging. I couldn't bring myself to care about Nikki or Dvora, or their mission. I couldn't develop any interest in the time period the story was supposedly set, because there really was nothing to establish it in the early eighties. There was no mention of music or fashion, of vehicles, or news items. All we had was this yellowcake israel was buying.

I didn't feel any sort of tension or thrill from reading this and the premise felt weak. Why would the Israelis care about the safety of a British agent who they believed was about to expose some of their nuclear subterfuge? Why didn't Nikki (or someone) even once check the microfilm to make sure that what was on it was actually what the Brits had bargained for? Why wasn't the film handed-off once or twice to disguise who had it? The story felt so haphazard and at the same time too simplistic.

That said it wasn't until I read (as part of that bedroom scene):

Dvora shook her head. "Please, don't reject me." Her gaze pleaded. "I don't know if I could bear it."

that I gave up on this. It struck me as the last thing a Mossad agent would say to anyone, not even an old flame. It just felt too fake. Nikki is apparently still obsessed over a previous boss, and Dvora is still obsessed with Nikki. It felt too much like a soap opera and nowhere near enough like a spy thriller, and to me this wasn't the story I signed up for.

I think this author has a good story or two in her, but it wasn't this one. I like strong, motivated women who know their own mind, make things happen, and get things done, which it seemed to me is what trained agents should do; especially a Mossad agent. This felt too wishy-washy for my taste. I can't commend it based on the portion I read.

Sex Wars by Marge Piercy

Rating: WARTY!

I could not get into this novel at all. It bored me from the start. Usually I have no interest in historical novels that feature characters well-known to history, in this case: Susan Anthony, Anthony Comstock, Elizabeth Stanton, and Victoria Woodhull. The reason for that is that authors typically write really badly when dealing with real people from history: demeaning or belittling them, re-forming them in their own image, puffing them up ridiculously, or rendering them as caricatures; in general, not having any idea how to represent them realistically.

Unfortunately I overlooked my misgivings about that in this case, and sure enough, it wasn't long before I realized what a mistake that was. This story is of a woman named Freydeh Levin who is working to earn enough money to bring her family over to the USA. Somehow she didn't know her younger sister was in the city and when she tries to find her, she realizes she's actually missing. Freydeh starts looking for her, which takes her along a sad trail of cheap living, brothels, and prisons. That's hardly inspiring.

This could have been a really interesting story, but it dragged, and I never did like any of the characters. I tried several times to get going on it, but whenever I put it down, I felt no compulsion to pick it up again, so after it sat for a while and I realized I really had zero interest in pursuing it, I ditched it for something more interesting. Life is too short to waste on books that simply don't do it for you. I can't commend this one, based on what I read of it, which admittedly wasn't much.

Fires of Alexandria by Thomas K Carpenter

Rating: WARTY!

Taking place a century after fire burned down the library at Alexandria, this story revolves around two protagonists: a barbarian who somehow walks around Alexandria wearing furs without issuing a drop of sweat or having any inkling it's even remotely warm there. The other is a woman posing as a man and whose name Heron. Heavily in debt, Heron accepts money from the barbarian to resolve who set the fire and why.

Both the author and the barbarian he writes of seem completely ignorant that these questions have been answered already! That information has been known literally since the year zero! It was Julius Casaer who ordered the fire - not to burn 40,000 scrolls in the library, but to burn some ships that were docked in the nearby harbor. The fire got out of control. Mystery solved.

That wasn't why I quit reading this and DNF'd it. The reason was the poor writing and the interminable introduction to the story during which literally nothing happened save for the decriptive writing, which alienated me from both main charcaters. If I'd initially paid a bit more attention I would have noted that the book cover had the word 'saga' on it and I could have saved myself the trouble of even picking-up this one in the first place! My bad. I really need to learn my lesson here.

I can't commend this one at all based on what I read of it.

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Rating: WARTY!

First published in a single novel in 1848, I listened to this - yet another of my forlorn attempts at the classics - as an apparently abridged audiobook, although I have to say Chirp did not give any indication that it was so shortened. But it was just as well it was otherwise I would have DNF'd it anyway. Curiously this book seemed quite reminiscent of another so-called classic I listened to recently by the title of The Age of Innocence, although the gender roles are reversed in this, as compered with that one.

The story is of a social climbing young girl, recently graduated from an academy, who goes by the name of Rebecca. She's not a nice person. Why Amelia - a fellow graduate - is friends with her is a mystery. Rebecca aims to find a permanent place in a rich family and sets about it at once, finding work with Sir Pitt Crawley, who is quite wealthy.

Unfortunately, Rebecca can't keep it in her pants and rather than wait for Sir Pitt's wife to expire so she can have the master of the house all to herself, she secretly marries his son Rawdon. This proves to be a tragic mistake because Sir Pitt's wife dies prematurely, and Sir Pitt is then peeved that Rebecca isn't available to him. She's screwed in a second way because Sir Pitt's half-sister, who is also wealthy and who was favoring Rawdon for an inheritance, is put out sufficiently by this ill-favored marriage of his, that she disowns him.

As if that isn't bad enough, Rawdon comes home early one evening and discovers Rebecca in the company of the wealthy Marquis of Steyne, who apparently has been giving her money and jewels. What he got in return isn't specified, but after Rawdon assaults him, the latter finds himself sent to Coventry as they say in Britain, but in this case quite literally: he's unexpectedly appointed governor of Coventry Island - a hell hole of a place that no one wants to visit. Rebecca ends up wandering Europe in a downward spiral before she manages to finagle a decent living of sorts, but it's nothing like the one she'd dreamed of.

If I've made my review sound boring, it merely reflects the work that's reviewed, but at least be happy you were not the one who had to listen to it! I can't commend it.

The Body in the Thames by Susanna Gregory

Rating: WARTY!

Set in the 1664 London of King Charles the second, not long after the British interregnum which came after Charles first who was defeated by Oliver Cromwell's model army, lost his head and Cromwell took over as Britain's Lord Protector. It didn't last. This is the sixth tome in Gregory's Thomas Chaloner series, and I am, with very few exceptions, not a series fan. This is the first Chaloner and the first Gregory book I have read and I do not plan to be back for more having DNF'd this one about a third the way through. The reason? It was boring!

As is entirely predictable with series, nothing gets done. If it did, it would be a novel and not a series. Therefore everything takes forever and the thought of reading any more of Chaloner's bumbling treacle on a frozen mirror pace as he blindly saunters through a murder investigation, really turned my stomach. The book moves with interminably glacial progress, and Chaloner isn't doing anything except stumbling onto clues by pure accident. He's clueless and useless and spends more time whining about people's attitudes and suffering idle threats from fops than ever he does investigating. It's no wonder his boss is so down on him. I kept wanting to kick his ass to get him to move.

The plot, such as it is, is that there are negotiations going on to try and prevent war between the Nederlanders and the British. In the midst of this, a Dutchman is killed - poisoned and thrown into the Thames. It's Thomas's brother-in-law from his previous marriage, and he left a clue for Thomas embroidered into the top of his stockings. Of course, you can't have him say, "Mr X did it" or "My life is in danger because of item Y!" No - he just leaves three cryptic words in Dutch and Thomas is supposed to figure it all out, which he does a piss-poor job of.

Two of the words are New and Gate, and there was a Newgate prison (it was demolished in 1904 after seven hundred years of service!), but by the time I gave up on this, a third of the way in, he still hadn't got his lard ass to the prison to make enquiries. Yawn. I suspect that was a red heeren as ti happens, and new gate referred to something else, but Thomas is too stupid to ask even one Dutch person whether "nieuwe poort" has any special meaning and I reached a point where I could not care less what it meant. The book is tedious and I'm done with it and with its author.

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Rating: WARTY!

You know times have changed significantly when you read in an older novel (this was published in 1878), "...I don't care for gay weddings" and it has nothing whatsoever to do with same sex marriage. Unfortunately that was the only bright spot I could find in thirty pages of this. Despite it being Hardy's sixth and one of his most popular novels, it was such a tedious read for me that I gave it up at that point. There's no point in reading something that just doesn't do it for you when the next book you pick might enthrall you.

The native is apparently Clym Yeobright, who is coming back to Egdon Heath after time away in Paris. He can't marry the woman he wants, and so just takes up with someone else and unsurprisingly, the marriage doesn't work. Not really an exciting story. The only reason I started in on this was because the opening sentence of the novel was featured in a Monty Python sketch and it intrigued me. Well, color me intrigued no more, I cannot commend the plodding pace of this, based on the small portion I read, and I'm moving on to something which will, hopefully, grip me from the off.

Right Ho, Jeeves! By PG Wodehouse

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel, first published in 1934, is the second full-length book from Wodehouse about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. I'd been sort of idly interested in reading a Jeeves story for a while, but I never got around to it, so when this came up as a discounted audiobook on Chirp, I snatched it up. I didn't regret it. It was highly amusing to me and quite entertaining, although there were some bits where it dragged, and it's hardly politically correct, given its antiquity.

Note that there is one use of the 'n' word (although not in this historical context intended in an abusive way, merely descriptive, it's still, through our modern eyes, abusive enough) and there's the usual sexism for a book of this vintage.

On top of all of that one might justifiably take exception as well, to the idea of the idle rich having so much and so little of use to do with it, when so very many have so very little and are in urgent need of more. Those things aside, I enjoyed most of the book.

The story is of Bertram Wooster who, fresh back from Cannes, is looking for yet more idle pastimes to waste his life on. He discovers that his old school chum, Gussie Fink-Nottle, needs help. The book is replete with oddball names, my favorite being Pongo, which is not a dog but another of Bertie's male friends.

Anyway, Gussie is pining for a woman named Madeline Bassett. Bertie refers to her as 'the Bassett' and I must have missed something (I listen to this while driving, which always takes precedence in any conflict of attention, of course), because when he started talking about the Bassett, I was convinced for a while that it was a dog he was walking. It took me a little time to make the right connection which in itself was another source of amusement.

Bertie is rather peeved that Gussie is resorting to taking advice from Jeeves, and this is a theme that runs through this book - Bertie's jealousy of Jeeves's respected standing and his accomplishments in terms of winning people's favor for seeking advice. Naturally Bertie tries to take over all of these situations, convinced he'll do a much better job, and inevitably ends up screwing things up. Thus he takes on yet another love affair, that between another friend of his, Tuppie, and his betrothed, Angela, and messes that up as well.

Some of the most entertaining parts of the book are those which feature Bertie's interactions with his feisty Aunt Dahlia. I was laughing out loud at several of those. She is such a force of nature and is so disrespectful and dismissive of Bertie, and utterly intolerant of idiocy, a quality with which he seems over-abundantly endowed.

When his aunt tries to tap him for the prize-giving at the local grammar school where she lives, Bertie is aghast and ends up managing to offload the talk and prize delivery onto Gussie, who shows up drink and is quite amusing. The whole event is reminiscent of a similar occasion in David Nobbs's The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin wherein Reggie delivers an equally irreverent and drunk speech at an event before faking his own disappearance. I wonder if Nobbs might have cribbed his scene from Wodehouse's original example.

All ends well, of course, so overall I really enjoyed this book and in particular the spot-on reading of it by Jonathan Cecil. It's possible to get this book for free from Project Gutenberg since it's now out of copyright in the USA, but then I would have listened to it via my robot reader and amusing as that can be, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as entertaining as Cecil's version! I commend this as a worthy listen.

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.

La Dame aux Camélias aka Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils

Rating: WARTY!

Purportedly based on the real life of Alphonsine Rose Plessis, a French courtesan and popular mistress who died at the age of 23 from tuberculosis, and whose belongings were auctioned-off to pay her debts. Alexandre Dumas fils had an affair with her for about a year, and wrote this semi-fictional account it after her death. His novel became the basis of Verdi's La Traviata

That's how this story begins, with the unnamed narrator learning of such an auction, at which he buys a sort of diary. Madame Gautier (this is how the woman is referred to in the novel) never was Camille. She was Marguerite, and the title of the book in French was La Dame aux Camélias from which 'Camille' was derived, but this novel isn't really about "Camille" - it's about this guy Armand Duval's take on her. Duval is obviously Dumb-Ass himself, and that's how the story goes - or fails to. It's so meandering that it makes the Delta of Venus!) look like Love Canal.

I couldn't stand to real more than a few chapters. It was boring. I kept hoping it would get better, but it never does. It felt like a very selfish novel to me, and far from anything that could be seen as honoring a woman he supposedly had feelings for. I can't commend it base don what I read.

The Taker by Alma Katsu

Rating: WARTY!

This had sounded good from the description, but it sounded less good when I realized it was merely a prologue to a trilogy, and worse, it was written in mixed voice, with short, third-person interludes that segued into lengthy first-person flashbacks. This is not my kind of a novel. It's a tired, unimaginative, and clunky format. In short it's exactly what I'd expect from an author who boasts a BA in literature and writing, and an MA in Fiction, and especially from someone who apparently studied with novelist John Irving. I read about fifty pages of it, and it was so lethargic that I gave up on it out of tedium.

The story made no intelligent sense from what little bit I did read. I don't get how someone with supposed academic qualifications needs three novels to drag out a single-novel story. But I understand that kind of rip-off does pay well for both publishers and author, and let's face it: it's pretty much all she wrote.

This doctor, in a small New England town, goes to work on the night shift and is delivered a police detainee who is suspected in a murder - to which she confessed when found by a police officer. She wore a blood-soaked shirt, and was walking without a coat on a freezing night. The police brought her to the hospital for evaluation, and the doctor could find nothing wrong with her physically, but she started telling him a story of herself and her partner - a man she killed at his own request. They were she claimed, extraordinarily long-lived people. She kept urging the doctor to let her escape, but if she'd really wanted that, why not do it when she was free instead of wandering down a highway to be picked up by the police?!

Like I said, it made no sense, the first person voice was ridiculous - as it typically is. There's no way she had that kind of photo-perfect and audio-perfect recollection after all those years, so it lost all credibility for me. The idiot doctor was buying into everything she said without a shred of professional interest in her mental condition, or any sliver of disbelief, so he wasn't remotely believable as a medical practitioner. A case like this screamed for psychiatric evaluation, but nowhere was that discussed.

Even granted all that, her story needed to be nowhere near as detailed as it was. It felt like an amateur attempt at telling a story where no thought had been put into how it would all sound. The author seemed overly-enamored of the framing technique as befit her academic mind-washing: distressed beauty tells story to handsome rescuer, and they fall in love. Barf. No. Just no.

Frida in America by Celia Stahr

Rating: WORTHY!

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

For a biography with this title, this books spends a lot of time delving into Frida's childhood and teen years, as well as with a couple of trips she took back to Mexico while largely living in the USA, but the subtitle of this volume is "The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist." That time she spent and the experiences she had, whether in the US or in Mexico, or traveling between the two, contributed immensely to the intriguing artist she became.

The bio starts out brightly with Frida and her husband, artist Diego Rivera, traveling to and arriving in San Francisco, but that all comes to a jarring halt as we travel back in time for a history of her life up to this point - which occupies fully a quarter of the narrative - before we get back to her life in the US. For me that wasn't so bad because I find the subject of this biography endlessly fascinating, but others might find themselves irritated when the title so boldly promises a US story and they get sent to Mexico for an extended period! Maybe such readers should learn to be less provincial?!

What did impress me was how well researched this is. I've read a variety of books about Frida Kahlo, but never one that was so delving and so revealing of her inner workings as this one is. It was impressive and truly engrossing for me. Regardless of what it meant before, her art takes on a whole new meaning once you're initiated into the symbolism she employed so often in her work. The story picks up back in the US with Diego's commission, his workaholic approach to his painting as well as his endless philandering and his absurd misgivings over his (at least initially) erroneous belief that his wife was as bad as he was. Far too many men project like that, and poor Frida has to deal with all of this largely by herself.

The book has a wealth of detail about their life both in Mexico and in the US, the people they met, the relationships they formed and the impact they had, as well as the experiences that moved them in return. They were very influential on each other too, each taking cues from the other's work, and expanding or amplifying them in their own art. In a way, their art was a way of talking to each other about topics they perhaps felt uncomfortable discussing face to face.

Frida's initial love-affair with the US was an uneasy one at best, and it quickly turned to disappointment and antagonism the longer she remained there. She missed her family and her homeland greatly which didn't help her state of mind, and her husband was very neglectful of her, focusing on the murals he had arrived in the US to paint, and working insane hours, leaving Frida very much to her own devices. She cultivated her own friends and relationships and worked on her art, showing increasing sophistication and steady improvement over her time in the USA. This books explains all of that and excavates, sometimes a bit too deeply for me!) the meaning, symbolism, and origins of her imagery.

If I have a complaint about this book, it's the same one I would have (and have had!) about any such book where art is discussed in detail, and that is the complete lack of any examples of her art, or any photographs of her which were taken during her travels. Fortunately, with the name 'Frida Kahlo' being so very well-known these days, it's possible to find on the Internet a lot of the pictures discussed in this biography, but it's a nuisance to have to halt reading and go searching for them.

Many images, in particular the photographs that are mentioned, I could not find, which was very frustrating. I don't know if the author's intention is to include the images in a print version and they were simply omitted from the review ebook. I wouldn't blame her for that, because Amazon's crappy Kindle format is renowned for mangling anything that's not plain vanilla text, but if the pictures could have been included in a PDF version of the book made available for review, that would have been truly awesome! It made it rather tedious at times to read a long and detailed description of the art or a photograph without being able to readily view it, or in some cases without being able to see it at all.

That aside, I really enjoyed this book and commend it as a worthy read. But then I'm heavily biased when it comes to Frida Kahlo. She probably the first person I'd visit if I ever managed to get my hands on a time machine! I commend this book as a worthy read for fans of art or of Kahlo.

Strapless by Deborah Davis

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an intriguing biography of two people who intersected when one painted the portrait of the other, and the portrait was deemed scandalous. This result had very different effects on both participants.

The artist was John Singer Sargent. You may well ask why he wasn't named John Artist Sargent since he couldn't sing a note. I asked it, but the book never answered. That's books for you. Moody as hell.

The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Both were American ex-pats, she having moved to France with her mom after the Civil War, and he having moved there to study art. She married a banker and became a much talked-about celebrity despite being merely a socialite. He became well-regarded after having successful exhibits in the annual Paris art Salon.

The thing was that this was in an era where no one blinked at endless classical nudes, and portraits were common. The scandal came about because of one curious thing: Sargent painted Gautreau with one thin strap of her gown partway down her arm. Yes, that was it. And this was in France! And she never really recovered from it. Sargent felt so bad about it that he hid the portrait away for thirty years letting hardly anyone see it. Now it hangs in the Met in New York where anyone can see it. Six years after the original, someone painted an homage to it, and no one blinked an eye. This is why I don't have a lot of regard for art critics! LOL!

The book was well-written and went into a lot of detail about various people's lives and the relationships between the two main characters and other well-known people of the era. It may be too much detail for some, not enough for others, but for me it was fine. I confess I did skim a bit here and there where it was of little interest to me, but I read avidly for most of it. I would have liked to have read more about Singer's art: his techniques and so on, but the author seemed interested only in the size of his canvas! Someone should tell her it's not the size that matters, but what you do with it! That aside, though, I did enjoy it and commend it as a worthy read.