The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein

Rating: WARTY!

Here's another non-fiction I didn't like. Again I came to this through a TV documentary and it really highlighted the problems with documentaries versus the problems with books. TV documentaries are way too much fluff. They show the same images over and over and over, and ask hoards of questions, but give very few in-depth or satisfying answers. Often they outright lie, as I discovered when watching the documentary Pump about the inexcusable stranglehold oil has on society in the USA.

The problem with this audiobook is that it had way too much detail, going onto things in far more depth than I was interested in listening to! By the time the guy rather breathlessly finished his details, I had forgotten what the heck he'd been talking about earlier! This went on for page after page (or in this case disk after disk, and there were a lot of disks). In the end I simply gave up on it. Yes, a lot of people have got rich off arms sales, including US corporations and politicians. Yes it's obnoxious, but after listening to this I was almost ready to say, "Good for them!" I didn't, but I can't recommend this.

If you're interested in excruciating detail, much of which is out of date, and you can get the ebook or print book and read it quietly, focusing on it 100%, it might be the book for you, but it's not something you want to try to get anything out of when driving in traffic because it requires too much attention to detail!

Sudden Justice by Chris Woods

Rating: WORTHY!

From a Heath Robinson start with next-to-nothing, the US now has the capability in drones, logistics, and support, to run over sixty simultaneous observation operations with the ability to deliver a deadly payload if required. The old MQ-1 Predator drone could carry two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or equivalent, whereas the MQ-9 Reaper which replaced it can carry fifteen times more ordnance. We're told these things can observe quietly, gather intel, track people and vehicles, and destroy them if it's deemed necessary, with "surgical precision." The problem, as investigators have discovered, is that no one in their right mind would ever want that kind of surgeon performing an operation this ham-fisted on their body.

This detailed - but not overly detailed - account quickly and efficiently gets to the heart of the issues: where the drones came from, how they were brought into use, how badly-organized the effort was to begin with, and how clinically efficient it is now, yet despite these improvements, the money thrown at it, and the massive support organization, this missteps, and the collateral damage caused by this system is scary - and may be doing more harm to efforts to combat terrorism than it is ever doing good.

The problem with the system is a human one, as always! The issues range from getting good intel from sources other than the drones in order to set the drones on the right track in the first place, to correctly identifying targets and tracking them. The drones fly at 18,000 feet (6K meters), and from that height, even with good video, you can't tell if a person is carrying a weapon. You even be sure who that person is. And without expert support and the patience of a saint, you can't be sure if the gathering you're about to blast with a HARM missile is a meeting of terrorists, or some kids sitting around playing and chatting. The reaper can also carry Sidewinder or AMRAAM air-to-air missiles.

Another issue is the pilots/observers. The USAF has been of late training more pilots for these vehicles than for any other system, and these people evidently work twelve-hour shifts. That's twelve hours (with breaks of course) spent in a darkened room, staring at a rather grainy monitor on which very little is happening for very much of the time. Who came up with a dumb-ass scheme like that is a mystery, but it has government and military stenciled all over it. The result is that pilots are falling asleep and are diverted from the monitors by other interests such as reading a book, chatting with others in the room, and playing computer games! The regular games won't work on this system, but games built using the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or clones of it will work quite handily! This is how a virus - fortunately benign it seems - came to be found in some of these systems.

This book gives the goods on all of this and a lot more. I recommend it if you're interested in finding out what these drones are up to and what their shortcomings are.

The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti

Rating: WARTY!

Unfortunately this is what you get when a reporter writes a book and doesn't realize he's writing a book and not a newspaper column. He's so focused on making the subject seem real that he goes way overboard. Did I really want to know that Mr A smokes Benson & Hedges? Seriously, no!

It's true, as the blurb says, that "America has pursued its enemies with killer drones and special operations troops; trained privateers for assassination missions and used them to set up clandestine spying networks; and relied on mercurial dictators, untrustworthy foreign intelligence services, and proxy armies." How a writer can make that boring is a mystery to me, but this one did.

This book, which I came to via a TV documentary I watched recently, had some really interesting bits, but most of it is now out of date and the bulk of it is boring. Overall it was a tedious listen. I found myself skipping tracks more and more, and then I skipped the entire rest of the book. I can't recommend it.

Year of the Monsoon by Caren J Werlinger

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"She looked at Leisa with a hunger that make Leisa’s insides tingle." - wrong verb tense.

When I began reading this one, I was truly favorably disposed towards it, but the author very successfully managed to turn me off pretty quickly. I made it to about forty percent and had to give up for a variety of reasons. The first of these was that this was yet another LGBTQIA novel which was claustrophobic in its obsessive lock-down. It felt like it was a queers only zone, with no heteros allowed! That's not strictly true, but it certainly felt like it was the spirit of the thing. I find this reprehensible in and era when hetero stories, both in print and on the screen are opening their arms (for better or for worse at times, I admit) to the queer community, it seems like a huge backward, bigoted and negative step to me to depict this as totally closed-off from hetero community. It's also totally unrealistic, since neither of those groups operates in a vacuum.

That wasn't even the biggest problem. For me the most obnoxious one of all was that the author was obsessed with larding her story with a massive volume of mini-flashbacks woven invisibly into the fabric of the novel. I detest flashbacks at the best of times and rarely find them readable, much less enjoyable. The fact that these were hidden in the text made it often impossible to know I was reading a flashback. The same symbol which was used to indicate a change of scene on the book was the one used to indicate a flashback, so you were in it and trying to figure out whether this was just a change of scene or a flashback and of course, missing the story because of this. It felt ham-fisted to me, and I can't help but believe that a more skilled author would have done a better job.

The story itself was where the other major problem lay. The big theme here was adoption, and rather than focus on one aspect of the theme, the author slammed in three adoption stories intertwined, which was frankly, a huge mess and which dissipated the impact of any one of the stories from the sheer volume. It detracted from the power of the tale, weakening it to the point where it was no longer interesting. It was also a bunch of trope: the adopted girl just has to know her birth mother! At first I thought the author was going to be smart enough to avoid this pitfall and make this more original by not having this character chasing after her bio-mom, but that soon changed and so did my commitment to pursuing the story for this and other reasons.

Talking of realism, my last problem with this is that we're presented with two women, only one of whom is really interesting, but who clearly love each other, yet who seem unable to talk about anything with each other! We're really offered no valid reason why they can't talk or why they're apparently drifting apart. One has a secret which the other discovers through the rather amateur and disturbing ploy of stalking her partner, and which put me off her as a character.

At one point I read, "She had been a beautiful woman." I don't get why female authors do this to their female characters. Yes, if this had been a novel about some female movie star or some fashion model, perhaps one who felt her looks were diminishing with age and consequently her 'career' - shallow as it was - was slipping away, then her looks might have played a part in the story, and a line like that might have had a place, but in this case none of this applied, so why does the ugly idea that once she had been beautiful have to do with anything? Would the attendant sentiment have been completely inapplicable if she had been "ordinary" or "plain" or "ugly"? The shallow mentality involved in writing like this is quite frankly disgusting: that a women's worth is skin-deep only? Screw you. I'm tired of reading crap like that and in particular, women who write like that ought to be especially ashamed of their writing.

I was already off the other one, so my passion for following this relationship was gone at that point. It seemed like whenever one of them was about to launch into a topic with the other, a death popped up in the family and then there was, unbelievably, simply no time at all to broach the topic which had been right on their lips just a moment before. This felt so amateur it was pathetic, but worse, it told me that these women were morons. So grandmother died. It's horrible, but did one of them have to get on a plane within a half hour and set off alone so that the important topic in a troubled relationship couldn't be dealt with? NO! Their behavior made no sense, and it robbed the story of both immediacy or authenticity for me.

Overall the story was less of a coherent narrative than it was a series of vignettes densely punctuated by a staccato blitz of flashbacks which contributed little in the grand scheme of things. The bottom line is 'THE END' - no, I'm just kidding. The bottom line is that it didn't work and was annoying. As I said, I simply gave up on it around forty percent, but this story had given up on entertaining the reader long before that. I can't recommend it.

Welcome to Shirley by Kelly McMasters

Rating: WARTY!

It's been a while since I've reviewed a non-fiction, so I am due for a few. This is the first of those and it's a negative, I'm sorry to have to report. I came to this book via interviews conducted in a documentary I watched about nuclear pollution. The author was one of those interviewed and it mentioned that she'd authored this book about the nuclear waste leakage from Brookhaven National Laboratory which was apparently causing an unduly-high number of cancers in the town of Shirley.

The incompetence and irresponsibility has cost roughly a half billion dollars to clean up, to say nothing of health concerns. There's no way in hell, given the track record it has demonstrated, that this country is fit to be running nuclear power plants, labs, and and other such facilities with this level of abuse of public health and public trust. The world has a half million tons of toxic nuclear waste and nowhere to put it safely. This needs to stop right now, period. Nuclear power plants need to be permanently decommissioned. It's that simple.

I thought that this would make an interesting read, but it didn't. The entire first half of the book had nothing whatsoever to do with any nuclear waste issues. It was a memoir of the author's childhood and youth, none of which was interesting to me. It wasn't even very factual according to one reviewer who actually lives (or lived) in the town. I became so bored reading it, and seeing it fail - on page after page - to actually get to the topic I thought the book was going to be about, that I simply gave up on it. I cannot recommend this.

Timescape by Gregory Benford

Rating: WARTY!

I'm a sucker for a good time-travel story, Unfortunately, this wasn't! It sucked big time. It was tediously slow-moving and could have been about half the length it was if all the fluff had been vacuumed out of the corners. Seriously, do I really want to know that someone is taller than someone else but the other person is only five feet six anyway? No, not unless it's important to the story or an important part of a character's make-up!

Do I really need another story which rambles on about someone's obsession with coffee? No! Do I really need to read a whole chapter about some ruffian harassing an old woman because he has nothing and she's reasonably well-to-do? No! Not when you already told me the situation was dire. Please, dispense with this and get on with the sci-fi story I wanted to listen to in the first place!

Yes, this was another experimental audiobook, and the experiment failed, as many of these do. The readers voices, Simon Prebble and Pete Bradbury were not great, but not dire. The story was the problem, and it felt like listening to Professor Benford giving an insufferably rambling lecture on astrophysics at the University of California. Yuk! I feel bad for his students - assuming he still has any!

I didn't finish this because I don't waste time on stories which don't grip me. Life is far too short and books are way too many! That doesn't mean I don't owe an explanation as to why I didn't finish it, and the reason was as indicated. The story was ponderously slow. It took many chapters before anything happened. The novel needed to start at the point where contact was first made - hazy as it was - between 1998 and 1962. I didn't need a multi-chapter prologue which was tiresome at best. I cannot recommend this one.

PePr Inc by Ann Christy

Rating: WARTY!

This was nothing more than a thirty page teaser for a series which I have not read and have no intention of doing so after reading this. The story is not a stand-alone because there is far too much in it that is tied to other stories in this series, and which made no sense without knowing those other stories, so it was largely unintelligible to me, and what was understandable was not at all entertaining.

Evidently this is a world wherein robotic companions have been designed for humans, and humans are not allowed to have intimate relationships with other humans, but must have one with a robot? Robots of course cannot reproduce, so the children have to be born by usual means, but then only one of the parents gets to raise the child? It's ridiculous. How would a system like that ever develop?

The story devolved into rambling on about how the robots were slowly growing more independent and pursuing their own lives, and contemplating maybe taking over or maybe living alongside humans, but as a separate society. None of this made any sense whatsoever. I can't recommend this based on this teaser. If the author is trying to win more readers with this kind of thing, which isn't a bad idea, I suggest she make the lure more appealing and a lot more intelligible. The author is an ex Navy officer. It seems to me a woman from the Navy ought to have far more interesting and more realistic stories to tell than this one.

A Killer Closet by Paula Paul

Rating: WARTY!

This novel promised sufficient differences from the usual female-centric murder mystery (no cupcakes or coffee-bars here) that it sounded very appealing, but in the end it proved itself to be so lacking in credibility and so full of trope that it turned me off. The best part about it turned out to be that one, it was not first person voice, for which I heartily thank the author, and two, it was very short - only one-hundred fifty pages or so, again for which I offer thanks, otherwise I might have had to DNF this one.

The main character, Irene Seligman is essentially blackmailed to leave her comfortable and rewarding life in New York City to move back to home town Santa Fe, New Mexico, because her mother is a cruel parasite. Despite her job being that of an assistant district attorney, she abandons that "prestigious job" completely for no reason that we're given, and opens a very upscale designer clothing consignment store. This abrupt and dramatic switch in career choice made absolutely no sense to me because it had no roots or background, but I was even willing to let that slide in the hope of a good story. Unfortunately I didn't end-up with the bargain some of the shoppers in the store got!

The morning she opens her brand new store, Irene discovers a dead body in one of the closets. I was willing to run with that, but by the time I reached the end of the novel, I had seen no reason offered as to why this body had been left in her store. The store was locked and someone had to pick the lock or use a duplicate key to get in there and dump the body. It made no sense and didn't fit with what I later learned of the perps. Maybe I missed the explanation, but I didn't miss that despite the victim having evidently been killed elsewhere and dumped here the scene was described in a way that suggested the murder was done right there. How that worked is an unexplained mystery, and there were too many of these in this novel.

This novel is one more example of how the cover artist never reads the novel he or she is illustrating for, and ends up drawing a cover which bears no relationship whatsoever to the events. The cover shows a woman in a purple skirt with what look like Christian Louboutin's on her feet and wearing something white around her torso. She's lying in a relaxed fetal position on her left side. Here's the description of the corpse from the very first page of the novel:

The dead woman sat with her legs straight out, her upper body leaning against the wall. She was dressed in blue silk Prada pants. She wore a brown silk jacket, also Prada.

In other words she looked nothing like the cover. This is why I ignore covers when picking a novel to read. They're meaningless and irrelevant. They have no respect for the author, because the author routinely has little or nothing to do with the cover unless they self publish.

The problems didn't stop there. Here is the description of the woman's appearance: "The woman herself had been an attractive blonde." I'm sorry, but what does the fact that she's attractive have to do with anything? Would the murder have been less of a tragedy if she'd been an ugly brunette? I seriously don't think so! So why describe her as attractive?

If it had been written in first person, this might have made some sense because some people do think like that - that a murder is more tragic if the victim is pretty, but this was not first person. The other side of this coin is Irene's later observation of her aging mother. "Seeing her now in the bright light without her makeup, Irene thought she looked every day of the seventy years she’d lived." So we have an announcement here that without make-up, women are ugly, especially when they're older women, who quite obviously from this should never put their face out in public without a pretty mask of make-up to hide it behind. How cruel can you get?

But Irene's behavior never did make sense. She used to be an assistant DA, yet everything she does here gets in the way of the police investigation. She repeatedly ignores, for example, direct orders for the police and thereby risks contaminating crime scenes. Her behavior is inexcusable, and not something a DA would do. There are ways to force her, by good plotting, to do these things if they're necessary to the story, but none of that was in evidence here. Consequently, Irene simply looked like a stupid, interfering busy-body who was betraying her entire career training, and doing it for no reason whatsoever.

Perhaps it's needless to say after that, I did not like Irene at all, and I loathed her mother who was one of the most clueless, vapid, and vacuous characters ever to disgrace the pages of a novel. In fact I don't think there was a single character I did like in this novel. All the women are presented as gossiping busy-bodies. All the men are macho or boyish in one way or another. There's nothing in between. None of the characters was interesting. It was pretty obvious from early-on who the villain was and who the good guy in disguise was.

Irene's painfully obvious love interest was right out of the young adult trope stockpile: "He was tall, and he had blue eyes set in a square-jawed, high-cheekboned face and a boyish shock of blond hair that fell across his forehead." Barf. He's randomly referred to as "J.P." or "P.J." like the author couldn't decide which she preferred. That needs to be corrected before this goes to final print. I know that advance review copies are disclaimed as an "uncorrected proof" but that, in this day and age, is no excuse at all. We do not live in an age where people write novels out by hand or laboriously type them on a typewriter, and then the type has to be set in leads in a literal galley tray and painstakingly corrected. We have search & replace. We have spell-checkers. We have grammar checkers (although I don't recommend Microsoft's, which sucks). This doesn't catch all errors by any means and I sympathize with authors having to read and re-read their work, believe you me, but we ought not to be seeing mixed-up initials.

There's a lawyer who is nothing but an obnoxious stalker yet Irene seems to have no problem with him despite his pushy nature and the fact that he inexplicably knows everything about her despite having literally just met her. He flatly refuses to accept that "No!" means "Hell, no!" yet she doesn't find this remotely suspicious! She puts it down to living in a small town, yet Santa Fe, with a population close to seventy thousand is not a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business. This guy is a creep and still Irene allows him to drive her home. She's an idiot.

At one point, there's a golden opportunity to discover the identity of one of the villains because she actually came into Irene's store, make a purchase, and pays with a credit card, yet never does Irene have the smarts when she later learns this woman is bad news, to go back and look at the receipt and report her identity to the police. She must have been an utterly lousy assistant DA.

Irene makes no sense, especially as someone with DA affiliations. She is very reticent about giving information to the cops despite him asking questions about the corpse discovered in her closet. She repeatedly reminds herself not to tall him too much, and there's no reason whatsoever for her attitude. Yet later, again for no reason, she spills her guts to someone else with a load of unbidden and extraneous information: "She didn’t tell me anything about a struggle. She just called and told me she’d found a building and used the money I wired her to pay the first month’s lease. She said she got a good deal on a building that had been vacant for several months." Again it made no sense.

At one point, against expressed police orders, Irene decides she must visit a location out of town (instead of simply telling the police about it), but instead of going right then, when her store has been forcibly closed because of the dead body and police investigation, she puts off the trip until another day when she has to leave the store full of valuable merchandise in the care of a brand new hire whom she doesn't know, and who is supposed to be part-time. She doesn't even tell him she will be gone. He has no keys to the store and isn't told she will be away, yet he manages to open the store with no problem! Maybe he's the one leaving the dead bodies?! LOL! Seriously, this made no sense, and this novel was full of this kind of out of left field inexplicable behavior.

In the end, not remotely liking the main character and finding the story repeatedly making no sense, I cannot in good faith recommend this one.

Kris Longknife Defender by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WARTY!

This is the last volume of the Kris Longknife series I ever intend to read. It's been a long run and I enjoyed some of the earlier volumes, but as the series dragged on, the stories became more and more formulaic and less and less interesting, more trudging and more boring. I don't know who his editor is, but Mike Sbepherd is still using the wrong words here and there (like amend when he needed append, for example).

This one, volume eleven, was better than the previous volume, but nonetheless tedious. Nothing happened for most of it. The big battle took place in the last twenty pages of a 370 page book, and was by rote and uninventive, so in the end this volume was just like the last one: a prologue for the next one where, I presume (although there are never any guarantees in this series) there will be a final showdown with the belligerent alien race the humans have encountered, and on their home turf. That makes two successive prologues. I am not a fan of prologues and I skip them as a matter of habit. I'm glad I'm now done with these.

For the first time in this series that I really found myself skipping and skimming, especially during the pathetic and amateur "romance" scenes between the now-married "Jack" and Kris, who despite being this Mary Sue commander who never loses, still needs "Jack"'s protective arms around her to feel safe.

Most of this tedious book was about logistics, with the occasional light fight with roaming belligerent alien ships to leaven it not much. There was their rescue mission to locate the other ship which had escaped the previous battle, and the search and rescue was performed like an afterthought despite all the pompous posturing about "leaving no one behind". Seriously? One of the things which turns me off this series is the jingoism and bullshit infallible military pomp.

The worst part about this book though, was that the humans had no problem whatsoever raping and pillaging the alien planet for resources. Yes, they were short of food, and they needed materials for the fight (this is the first book in the series in a while - perhaps since the first one - where the title actually described the overall story!), but this doesn't excuse the takeover of the benign alien planet with little regard for the locals. It made Kris & crew look far more similar to the belligerent aliens than to decent human beings. And they're still stripping gas giants for "reaction mass" to power their ships. Apparently they have learned nothing from disasters on Earth from poor management of resources, from reliance on unsustainable resources, and from pollution and contingent climate change!

I didn't get the issue with the food. The author is evidently telling us that in several hundred years of expansion into space, the only technological advances humans have made are all tied to militarism, and none to human comfort. Space-farers in the future will still have to haul food supplies with them evidently, since they have no means whatsoever of manufacturing food on-board their spacecraft. They still have to wholesale slaughter living things on random planets they pass to get 'fresh meat'. Shepherd seems not to grasp that a planet's ecology is tightly interwoven. Things do not evolve randomly, but in step with the environment and with other living things. The chances of humans being able to actually digest things which have grown on alien planets is highly questionable at best due to a crucially differing biology and genetic roots.

One thing the author did mention here, if only in passing was the pointlessness of considering trade to be an option over interstellar distances. I've raised this issue in several reviews of space-opera style stories, and finally the author agrees with me, but it's passed over too quickly evidently for him to realize that everything he's written previously about trade between planets is negated by the few words he typed out here. I rest my case.

I can't recommend this, and I can't recommend the series overall unless you want to turn off your brain and just have some dumb-ass and very light reading. That might work, but even then you have to face the formulaic nature of the stories which are, until the last few volumes, simply the same story told over again with slightly varied situations and actors. Even for the last few volumes, they were largely the same when you get right down to it. It's tedious to keep reading of the same situations, and hearing the same conversations, the same pat assessments, the same stock phrases all of which appear to be tied to American ancient history (as it would be in these novels), and seeing the same characters in different guises, and hearing the "homespun wisdom" of the old timers spouted endlessly over again.

The one character conspicuous by her absence over the last few volumes was Vicki Peterwald, because she was being spun off into her own series. This doesn't account for the fact that she was bonding with Kris after being mortal enemies, yet now seems to have reversed her course, so I am curious about that, and I have one volume of her series which I shall also review, but I have to confess right here that I'm not holding out much hope for it. We'll see!

The Midwife by Jennifer Worth

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second of two memoirs I'm reviewing this month. The other was Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash. I have to say I'm not a fan of this kind of book but as it happens. I enjoyed both of these. This one I got into through the TV series which was made from it (and named Call the Midwife). I really enjoyed the series, which is set in Britain in the late fifties and early sixties, and I wanted to read the book (the first of three) because of the TV show, but I have to confess I was very skeptical since book and screen rarely mesh well.

In this case it was not a bad experience, so despite it being a memoir, and despite it being a book from which the show was derived (and which I saw first), I enjoyed the book as much as the show. Do please note though that, as is the wont of TV and movie, things have been modified, re-ordered, compressed and combined so while in general, the two follow each other quite well, there are some notable differences here and there (mostly there), some of which were a bit jarring. Obviously the book is canon in this case, so I accepted the book version without question or issue.

Having said that, one problem I have with this kind of book is the ostensibly crystal clear recollections of the author. These are events which happened some forty years prior to the book being published! I can barely remember anything from even five years ago except in very general terms, especially when it comes down to supplying the kind of detail I was reading here. I could fill-in details from various memories, but that's not the same as reporting what actually happened or faithfully recording the surroundings in which events took place, and it's sure as hello not recalling actual conversations.

I know in this case that the author made notes in a professional capacity about her visits to her 'patients', but those would not have carried detailed descriptions of people (outside of medical requirements), and their homes and possessions, and certainly not verbatim recollections of conversations, so I have to wonder how much of this is accurate and how much is fantasy. Maybe she kept a diary, but she makes no mention of making diary entries in the narrative. It doesn't take from the power of the story, because I'm sure the essence of it is quite true, and she did make many visits to some of these homes and grew to know the environment very well, but I keep wondering about the details, especially given how faulty people's memories generally are. That doesn't stop it from being captivating and from being an entertaining account of what things were like back then in her world, so I won't harp, carp or warp on that. Ha! English! Why is that last one an 'or' sound and the others not?

The TV show begins with Jennifer first arriving at the medical convent, whereas the book retains this until chapter two, throwing us right into her work in the first chapter. The order of events isn't just changed in this one place though. Events are quite mangled in some accounts in the TV show as compared with the book. For example in the show, Jennifer is depicted letting her childhood friend Jimmy crash at the convent in the boiler room for one night, whereas in the book, this happens when she was a nurse prior to joining the medical convent, and it wasn't just Jimmy, it was he and several friends who had failed to pay their rent.

They were housed in a drying room in the attic of the nurses accommodations for several months, and had to climb an exterior ladder late at night to get in, and leave very early in the morning to avoid running into nurses or worse, the strict and severe sisters who were in charge of the nurses. Some of this is augmented by later events though. In the show, the story appears to be the kind-hearted and loving Jimmy being callously turned away by Jennifer because she was in love with a married man and could not get over him, whereas in the book, Jimmy appears to be much more of an irresponsible young man without whom she's better off. The married man, conversely is made to appear much more irresponsible and more of a user than the book, in which he figures very little, depicts him to be.

One event in the TV show related to eclampsia, is a combination of two separate events in the book, one of which is recounted as a recollection rather than a current event. Billy, the odd-job guy a the convent is largely confined to one chapter in the book, but is spread throughout various episodes in the show. The story of the Spanish woman, Conchita, is compressed and rather more dramatized in the show. The chapter on her in the book is different and charming, although she still had twenty four pregnancies by the age of forty-two, which is shocking to us, but from the account, was very much everyday life to her. She must have been a startlingly strong woman. Finally, in the book, Jennifer's growing religious leaning is made more clear than it is in the TV show.

I have to say that the stories slid a bit in quality towards the end - they seemed much more hum-drum, almost as though they were being summarized and tossed in for a page count that being truly warm and/or memorable events, but perhaps I was also becoming more inured at that point, so the last few chapters weren't as captivating for me, but overall, I really liked this book and I recommend it as a worthy read.

The Devil Went Down to Austin by Rick Riordan

Rating: WARTY!

Though it was read quite competently by Tom Stechschulte, and though it started out reasonably well after a slightly rocky first couple of chapters, this audiobook soon devolved into endless family politics with very little of interest to me happening, so I started skipping and skimming, and then quickly gave it up as a bad job. Life is too short to waste on stories which don't grip you. I skipped to the end before I dropped it off back at the library and discovered, not to my surprise at all, that the main suspect turned out to be not the real bad guy, and one of the guys I'd encountered briefly earlier, who I'd tagged as a possible main villain was actually the villain, so no real surprises at all.

This is apparently number four in the "Tres Navarre" series, that name (the first part of which is pronounced 'Trace') being the name of the main character. If I'd known that before I picked it up, I'd not have picked it up. As it was, it looked like it might be interesting, and it was a story set in central Texas, but it really could have been set anywhere and remained the same story (with local details changed of course), which meant it wasn't really about Texas. It was a stand-alone - that is to say, as far as I could see I didn't feel I'd missed anything by 'starting' this series at number four. On the other hand, I didn't really feel I'd missed anything when I DNF'd it, either!

I liked the idea of the PI coming to Austin to teach literature for the summer (although he actually does no teaching!), and that this brother is a software engineer who is in trouble with his new anti-virus app, but neither of these things really played a large part in the story except as a rather flimsy background.

Most of it (at least the parts that I listened to) was boring. There was far too much extraneous detail, and far too much tedious twisted family history which some readers might like but which turns me off a story. For me it made a stodgy dough of a recipe which the occasional nice turn of phrase did nothing at all to leaven in the long-run. Based on what I did listen to, and the uninventive ending, I can't recommend this one. Maybe Rick Riordan should stick to his Percy Jackson series?

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

Rating: WARTY!

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

Not to be confused with Richard Williams's The Animator's Survival Kit which is on a related topic, this is another first person PoV story. Why so many authors are so addicted to this voice, I do not know. I detest it, but it's hard to avoid as a reader unless you can get a look at the story first, which is difficult to do with ARCs. If I do know it's going to be 1PoV, I reject the story even if it sounds interesting because I am so tired of this voice. I didn't have that opportunity with this particular novel, but as it happens, this was not awful, so I could at least start to read it without a feeling of nausea. I think novels in 1PoV need to carry a warning on the cover. My one and only such novel, just published, carries such a sticker on the print version like a cigarette pack! Fair's fair!

This is also another novel where the blurb writer isn't the author's best friend. God bless Big Publishing™. You can't blame the author for the blurb unless they self-publish of course, and ironically in this case I can't really blame the blurb writer either. The blurb is predictably misleading, but it misled me into thinking this would be about artists and animators, and it really isn't. Take that away and put the two main characters into any other medium: office co-workers, police partners, stagecoach driver and shotgun, fashion models, and you can tell pretty much the same story without having to change a whole heck of a lot.

This was a big disappointment for me. I kept wondering why I'd been lured in with the talk of art and animation if it wasn't really going to be a big part of the story. Yes, it entered the story and yes, it exposed the main characters' pale underbelly to public view in many ways, but the parts of this novel which were actually focused on that subject became increasingly scarce as the story progressed, and with that came the waning of my interest in it. In the end, I reached the fifty percent point, and it felt like it had taken me forever to reach it. I decided I could not support a story which had felt more and more like bait and switch-off, and where the art and animation had become pretty much tangential to a story which really was only about sad-sack childhoods and family melodrama, and which wasn't at all interesting to me because it had nothing new or original to say on the subject.

I think the blurb was rather exaggerated too, when it suggested they became instant best friends. They quickly became friends, but it was really their college experience and the succeeding decade of working together which made them best friends. The problem is that we got none of that at all, which is a shame because for me that would have been far more interesting than what we did get.

This was another thing I resented. I had to ask why this portion was there, brief as it was. Why not simply start it that decade later and merely reference how they first met? It would have made the reading experience less sluggish and avoided the breath-taking and abrupt cut-over, and made for a much less jolting reading experience. It was like a prologue, and I don't do prologues. The truth is that I wanted to learn more about that experience: of these two 'charity case' girls in a snooty college. That, for me, is where this story lived and where it ought to have been allowed to breathe, and I felt robbed! I felt that we lost so much when we time-traveled ten years into the future. In part, this is what I mean about being denied the art and animation part of this story, which for me was badly under-served.

In that regard, the author does know her stuff. Not that I'm an expert, but she seems like she knows what she's talking about when she does reference their work, but this only made me miss it more. I'd hoped for a lot more focus on what they did, and how they worked together, yet we got only off-hand, throw-away references to that. The bulk of the story is effectively divorced from their art, even though it is linked.

Most of the story is about difficult and underprivileged childhoods, and it seemed like it took forever to tell even that. It just went on and on and on, with these women magically coming up with cash (when they were all-but claiming bankruptcy) to crisscross the country in search of answers. I felt like getting in their faces and explaining to them that most of us have childhood issues. We don't wallow in them or act out about them, or let them dominate our lives. We don't let them control or propel us, and we certainly don't helplessly allow them to push us into our friends' faces demanding explanations or exposés from them about painful childhood experiences!

That sounds cruel to write it so baldly, and if the story had moved a bit faster and focused somewhat more on their work, I would have felt more charitable, but I kept looking at the percentage meter at the bottom of the screen and it crawled as weakly as one of the characters might have at one point after a hospitalization. I kept thinking, "I can't believe how slowly this is moving!" It felt like I would never get to the halfway point and when it did, I didn't have the interest or the stamina to plow through any more stock dysfunctional family references and get-togethers or to read any more about how addicted these two characters were to smoking (pot or tobacco) or drinking. It was juvenile and boring, and for me it was the story itself which ironically became more damaged than the characters were!

The blurb tells us that "...they draw upon their own pasts to make intimate animated movies, a process that has left their personal lives-including their friendship-in tatters." This isn't actually true. It's not the first animated movie they make - one which draws on main character Mel's life - which screws with their friendship! It's Mel's inexcusable and appalling behavior caused by her disregard for the feelings of others and her lack of an internal censor augmented by her dangerous drug and alcohol abuse.

I was starting to really dislike the story and Mel herself, whom I had liked best of the two of them to that point. When she appears to turn herself around, it's not the renaissance I'd hoped for, but merely the overture to a predictable story-line which has been done over and over. It was at this point too, where I thought it might be starting to get good again, that things began to descend into the obligatory "hellish childhood issues" trope that I was so hoping would be danced over rather than slogged through.

The story is told by the improbably-named Sharon Kisses, a poor Southern Gal who gets a scholarship to a snooty art college up in New York state. She meets a girl named Mel Vaught, who has a somewhat similar background, and the two hit it off. With regard to their backgrounds, one odd thing which made me pause at the start of this novel was how a girl like Sharon would even know how much a "Coach" purse would cost. She didn't come across as a woman who particularly cared about or lusted after fashion-wear and accessories, much less could afford or had hung out with people who could afford such things, yet she remarked, "I watched a girl at a party barf into a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse." That struck a false note with me and is one of the problems with 1Pov.

If you're telling this in third person, you can readily say something like that without it being attached to a character, but when this girl is narrating it, it's she and not an omniscient author, who has to own the things she's saying. This just didn't feel right. If it had been worded along the lines of "I watched a girl at a party barf into what I was told was a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse," I think this would have made the assertion a lot less jarringly out of place, and would have fit the character much better for my money (all five hundred dollars of it!), but it's a minor writing issue and not a deal-breaker for me. On the other hand, I related to Mel. I think this is yet another case of me tending to find the 'side-kick' more interesting than the main character, or maybe it's because I knew someone who went by the name of Mel and who this character reminds me of in some ways. I could see where she was coming from to begin with, and she made sense.

It's when we meet Sharon's family that the complete lack of authenticity in Sharon's first-person voice becomes glaringly apparent. Her voice - neither her internal one nor her external one - is anything whatsoever like anyone else in her family! Frankly it would have been even more tedious to read if it had, so I can see why the author did it, but the fact that she sounded like she very much belonged in the snooty college and not even remotely related to her roots rang totally false. Nowhere in the narrative (not in the part I read, anyway) is this dissimilarity even so much as remarked upon, not even by Mel, which was a big fail for me.

Technically-speaking, this author can write, and I wish her all the best with her future endeavors, but I can't honestly and in good faith recommend a story which felt so false and had nothing new to offer, and which rather duplicitously lurked behind a veneer of art which ran no deeper than a coat of paint.

Kris Longknife: Daring by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WORTHY!

My plan to review all eleven of the Kris Longknife series I have - ten of which I read some time ago, continues. This was volume nine and finally we get an entry in the series which truly has a different plot from the previous eight cookie-cutter versions. After a couple of real duds, the author gets back on track and they go after these aliens which the Itechee have encountered to their sorrow. Nothing is known about them, but the expedition discovers they're humanoid, uncommunicative, and ruthless.

So, after dilly-dallying around for the first half of the novel, Kris & crew find themselves not "halfway around the Galaxy" (as the book itself and far too many reviewers assert), but a small fraction of the way around the rim. Given that the galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across, it's 314,000 or so light years around, making Kris & crew's paltry trip of ~2,500 light years less than ten percent of the circumference assuming they actually have been arcing around the rim and not zig-zagging back and forth in the same region.

I was glad that in this volume we get back to the topic raised two or three volumes earlier, wherein the Itechee, an alien race with whom humanity went to war eighty years previously, came to humanity to ask for help in resolving a problem of disappearing Itechee space craft. This move was highly improbable given the comnplete lack of contact between the two species for the intervening near-century, but so are all the stories in this series! Here, the Itechee representatives rejoin Kris & crew and they all set off jumping through one wormhole after another in pursuit of these predictably humanoid aliens. When they encounter evidence of their presence, it's in the form of a thoroughly devastated planet.

In a plot straight out of the original Independence Day movie, a people who seem intent upon destroying every sign of civilization in their immediate vicinity in space turn out to be their quarry. This one planet Kris & crew encounter has been razed to the height of complete destruction. It looks like the major political centers were nuked, other major cities destroyed by impact from meteors, individuals on the ground massacred, and the planet strip-mined for resources.

The poor innocent victims were insectoid, which makes little sense except in that sci-fi writers can't seem to come up with original ideas for aliens without rooting them on one of the major classes of animal life on earth and of these, typically vertebrate ones, such as mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, or fish, or at a real stretch, insects. The TV show, (Star Trek) Enterprise outdid itself in this regard by having a season arc tied to the Xindi, a civilization consisting of all of these classes!

Of course the retort to that is that it's hard to write a story of alien interaction if we don't anthropomorphize the aliens, so you pays your money and you takes your choice I guess, but there is a large number of classes of life on Earth, many of which are quite literally alien to us, so I'd urge writers to dig a little deeper next time. The problem with Shepherd's aliens is that they're amazingly like insects on Earth, but he claims that some of the sea-going versions they observe have "calcified skeletons" which makes zero sense, since insects have chitin (a derivative of glucose) exoskeletons, not calcium endoskeletons.

Worse than this, he writes that the people on land - the insect people - have been killed by Sarin gas. On Earth, Sarin acts on acetylcholine in the nervous system and even though it breaks down rapidly, it doesn't break down rapidly enough for you to survive even a tiny dose, especially if the dose enters your skin. Vertebrates did not evolve in quite the same way as invertebrates, so the effect of modern versions of these chemicals is debatable, even though the original form of it (Tabun, or GA) was actually developed to control insects.

The problem with Shepherd's depiction of it, though, is that Sarin is a chiral molecule - that is, it has handedness, like humans might be left-handed or right handed, so unless it can fit like a key into the molecular lock in these alien species, it's simply not going to work. Sci-fi author Larry Niven understands this and exploits it in his novel Destiny's Road (from what I understand - I've not yet read that novel), where the planet humans wish to exploit has proteins of the wrong chirality for human digestive systems to make use of.

The chirality of molecules is actually a fascinating facet of chemical science. Note that I am not a chemist and know only what little I've read on this topic, but one interesting example is that right-handed or D-glucose is a sugar than can be processed in the human body, whereas L-glucose cannot. These two "mirror' versions apparently taste the same, and at one time it was thought that L-glucose would make a great sugar substitute. Even diabetics could use it, but it doesn't occur naturally, and it proved far too expensive to manufacture. Another popular example is limonene. D-limonene has a citrus smell, but L-limonene smells like turpentine even though the two molecules are exactly the same other than their chirality! You definitely don't want the manufacturer of your favorite brand of orange yogurt to mix up those two!

But I digress. The story didn't really pick up until about halfway through and then it took a while to really get going to the point where Kris & crew actually encounter the aliens, launch a surprise attach using questionable neutron bombs, and then high-tail it while the aliens chase them and beat up on them. Of course her escape is no more in question than is the destruction of her fleet, so there's no tension. That return journey is rather drawn-out and then inexplicably, they try to arrest Kris on her return to Wardhaven space, which is insane. How they even knew what had happened at that point is a mystery, but I was skimming and skipping boring bits here and there, so maybe I missed it.

The neutron star bombs are questionable not because they were used to literally destroy half the aliens' massive ship and kill what we're told is billions of these savage ruthless aliens, but questionable as to whether such a bomb (each contained a small piece of a neutron star) is even feasible, and even if it is, why is it any more powerful than a nuclear bomb? It made little sense.

Overall though, despite the usual ridiculous and utterly tedious behavior of Kris's crew which was, I'm glad to report minimized here, and despite the utterly irresponsible act of transporting Abby's teen niece into battle - again - this was a definite improvement on the two previous volumes. I am done with this series though, once I've finished the next two because it's so predictable and so lacking in inspiration and inventiveness. This one though, was okay - a worthy read.

Not Quite So Stories by David S Atkinson

Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
"Broderick always did that was well." Maybe "as well?" (p4)

I'm not quite sure why this author named his set of twenty-three short stories the way he did. They have no kind of relationship to the Rudyard Kipling stories which I reviewed favorably back in December 2014, but they were different and unusual, and made no attempt at being 'literary' (trust me, that's a compliment from someone like me who gets hives when in proximity to 'literary' stories!).

I'm not a fan of collections of short stories even though I have written one myself, and the author of these seems very fond of simply ending the stories without offering any sort of a dénouement. I'm definitely in favor of less is best, but some of these seemed abrupt even by my standards! However, overall, I recommend this one as a worthy read. I'm not about to review each and every one individually, but the list below consists of all of them with a one line smart-ass comment from me.

G- Men
In which the government manages to find a way to spoil the enjoyment even of skydiving. You know what officialdom is like and it’s not like fun.

Cents Of Wonder Rhymes With Orange
In which orange is the new track-star. It either has a mind of its own - or somebody juiced it up.

Domestic Ties
If they're going to dragoon private buildings into helping out the overcrowded penal system, wouldn’t bars be better than homes, Sherlock?

Home Improvement
In which a man's home leaves him in the lurch and goes off looking for a new partner. If I had a haus for the number of times I've seen this happen, well, I'd be home & drei.

A Brief Account Of The Great Toilet Paper War Of 2012
In which the domestic bliss of ablutions is obliterated in and all-out escalating war over toilet paper and toilet seats.

The Bricklayer’s Ambiguous Morality
In which Larry is a brick, Derek is dead on his feet, and no one understands the gravity of the situation.

Changes For The Château
The Castle of Hope doesn't really offer quite the economy you might have expected on the room. Unless you're American....

Form Over Substance ≈ Eggs Over Easy
When a clown won’t leave you a loan?

Last Known Sighting Of The HMS Thousand Thread Count Sheets
Lamar is rather disturbed to discover that his beautiful hardwood floor isn't all it’s washed up to be.

Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!
This is what happens when somebody monkeys with a car engine.

The Elusive Qualities Of Advanced Office Equipment
Rocking bureaucracy.

Happy Trails
Six-pack leads to six-shooter?

The Boys Of Volunteer Fire Two-Twenty-Two-Point-Five (And A Half)
This was the first really dumb story, and it annoyed rather than entertained me.

The Des Moines Kabuki Dinner Theatre
Jamón para arriba a la Castellan

Turndown Service
Grave expectations.

Dreams Of Dead Grandpa
I wonder if this title ought to have been assigned to the previous story? At any rate, I only skimmed this one because it was boring.

The Onion She Carried
Some people's lives aren’t as concentric as an onion - they have only one layer and it has only one side.

Context Driven
I think this would have been more driven had it been a time travel story!

60% Rayon And 40% Evil
Bear-Faced Liar?

An Endless Series Of Meaningless Miracles
The reach of a preacher.

The Unknowable Agenda Of Ursines
And maybe this should have been the title of a previous story, too, or would that be gambling too much?

The Headshaking Disappointment Of The Misguidedly Well- Intentioned
How to get a drug user drug out of an elevator?

Up, Up, And No Way
Overflown with weirdness.

Marie by H Rider Haggard

Rating: WARTY!

As I've mentioned before in reviews of audiobooks, they're throwaway for me. I'm a captive audience commuting, so I turn to more experimental fiction under those circumstances, which means audiobooks are more likely than others to be found wanting. Plus I get them for free from the library (they're far too expensive to buy because the publishers insist upon hiring actors to read them which means a hefty fee which too-often isn't worth it since the actors do such a lousy job. They need to get ordinary people - people with good reading voices to do the reading. They'd save a fortune, get better narration, and be able to sell the novels more cheaply, thereby attracting more buyers! Idiots.

This one is about Allan, H Rider Haggard's Quatermain man, despite the fact that it's purportedly about his girlfriend. Many people believe the H in Rider Haggard's name stood for heroine, but it really didn't. It's Henry, which as everyone knows, is really shorthand for heroine, thus this novel is about Quatermain's Lady-in-Watusi, Marie Marais, who was named after a siren used on police vehicles in French Iguana.

By modem standards, the story is tediously slow. At one point Marie and some other dude have a plan to spirit Q out of captivity, and hide him in a mealie bin. Whereas a lesser-spotted Wood-writer might have dealt with the basic plan in a few sentences, and then turned the actual rescue in a several page adventure, H Rider Haggard it out over page after page after page before the actual rescue even began and dealt with the rescue in a few sentences. He expended those earlier pages discussing every factoid facet of this plan and that's where I gave up. I'd been skimming prior to that, and this was the final store that broke the chameleon's back.

No more looking Haggard for me!

667 Ways to F*ck Up My Life by Lucy Woodhull

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Note also that this novel shouldn't be confused with EM Moon's 667. This one trolls a similar ocean in many ways, which seems peculiarly fitting for an author named Woodhull!

When I sat down and began writing this review, I was thinking it would be positive, because I'd enjoyed a lot of the novel, but I had also seen a lot of issues with it and what really changed my perspective was when I began to consider everything in total, and especially the ending. When it came down to it, I honestly could not, in good conscience recommend it, not when I've rated other novels unworthy for less. I may well be in the minority in this view, but all that matters is that I can honestly live with the views I express here.

The title was the first problem, because despite what it claims, the novel fails to actually itemize 667 ways in which main character Dagmar screwed-up her life. More on this anon. As for the wording of the title, I couldn't help but wonder why we put that asterisk in there in place of the vowel. As soon as someone sees "f*ck" they know it means "fuck" and it's that word, not 'f*ck' that pops up in their brain whether they're prone to expressing themselves in that way or not, so you still generated a four-letter word in their mind!

Maybe we like to make people swear even if they find it offensive, but it's not the word which really does the trick, is it? It's we who've secretly agreed to brand a perfectly good and venerable English word 'offensive'. Some of us agree that if we use it, we intend to sound offensive, and others agree that if they hear it, they'll be offended. It's a foolish game we play. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from a rational PoV, but since when is language rational, especially in an election year? The truth is that it's all about shock value!

In deference to those who are sensitive though, I shall refer to this in the same way that one of the characters does: as "screw-up". I think it would have been more amusing had each letter been substituted, such as "$*@&-up" but that's just me. Be warned, though, that this is very much a highly questionable behavior and bad language novel, so if my previous use offended your sense and sensibility (for which I apologize), it might take a lot of persuasion to get you to read the actual book. As for me, I don't care about bad language in books in principle since it’s the way people talk and/or think in real life, so it’s not inappropriate per se.

As for the plot, it holds no mystery at all, so there can be no spoilers in this review. This story has been drive too many times to not need new tires and brakes before it's read-worthy: the decent, innocent, straight-shooting (or some such combination) girl gets fired by her caricature of a misogynist boss, and dumped by her jerk of a boyfriend on the same day.

How a woman with her potential ever got played into that position in this day and age remains largely unexplored (and I was glad of it!), but, but evidently smarts and self-respect got no casting-call. Anyway, she decides to change her life and predictably and magically, this leads to a better life and to the man of her dreams (Yash); however, she's been lying about things (in this case, her job and her name inter alia) when she first meets the guy, and finds herself inexplicably unable to avoid her lingering lies when the relationship deepens and then inevitably fails. Predictably, they then get together "romantically" and all's swell by the end bell.

To me, this play-acting wasn't Dag's major screw-up. The screw-up was that she failed to come clean with him as soon as she realized these feelings and this relationship were the one genuine thing amidst all the lies; worse than this, the author fails to justify her behavior. The major problem with this story then, is that Dag had absolutely no reason whatsoever to continue the lie, and this is where the novel began to fail for me because it became clear that the author wasn't letting the story happen naturally. She was like a show jumper who had a fine and spirited horse, but she wouldn't give it its head and trust it to jump, so fences were coming down all over the course!

Like a piano player who's been drilled too rigidly and never allowed to breathe the music or have any fun with it, she played the notes almost exactly as they'd been played by countless other artists before her, and never dared to set the melody free or improvise. That's why it felt so disappointing and unnatural to me. We got the predictable break-up and the equally predictable reunion for no other reason than a rigid adherence to a clichéd paradigm for this genre of novel.

That's when I lost the very faith in the author that she'd patiently built earlier. She made me hope for something out of the ordinary, and then deliberately stomped on that hope and killed it. Even as I feared this would most assuredly happen, I also entertained the fantasy that that maybe it wouldn't so at least in that regard, I went through the same thing that Dag did in her break-up. I doubt this is what the author had intended!

One of the things I had to try to overlook was that the title is rather fraudulent, as I mentioned earlier. There is no tally of 667 screw-ups here. This enumerated epistle which is added-to periodically throughout the novel (and which in some instances appears in place of the novel), is much more like a reminder list, or a list of observations or one of regrets, or of cute/inane comments/non-comments (items 541 through 547 I'm looking at you!) than ever it is an exclusive itemization of ways to screw-up.

For example #331 says, "My life had a forty-two percent rotten rating at rottentomatoes.com" which is actually getting on for fifty percent better than the Suicide Squad movie had, but it isn’t a screw-up in itself! It was funny, I admit. Some of them were, and I don’t doubt that such a huge list of ways to screw-up is do-able, but would it be entertaining? Hence the wimp-out list, which sometimes succeeded admirably. Other times it was simply intrusive, annoying, and trite.

There were many instances where several successive line items said pretty much the same thing if in slightly different ways, or which amplified an original thought:

320. Maybe I could write a literary erotic novel
321. The hero threw the hussy onto the couch and grrfflsh ajdjdhdhha unnffffff-ed her

and this:

323. It was the hormones released from such good kissing
324. Such sexy, nasty, sweet kissing
325. The kind of kissing that kills everyone in a Shakespearean tragedy

These are no more screw-ups than they are unique entries in the list, and the hormones motif was overdone, especially when it appeared in the form of "it's hormones, nothing more." If a male character said the same thing of a woman he wouldn't be allowed to get away with it unless the idea is to portray him as a complete dick, so how is it any better if Dag says it? That felt gratuitously insulting to me, and out of place in the novel that this aimed to be.

Items 367 to 384 (excluding item 383) consist solely of the sentence "I was in love". Item 418 was "Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!" - hardly a screw-up unless it took place at a funeral or when being threatened by a gang member, and neither applied in this case. "474. He didn't even owe me bird shit" would have been funnier if it had read, "Unless it was bird shit". So yes, this title is dishonest, but it does have the benefit of standing out. This is an important consideration, since "One Way to F*ck Up" would never be as appealing a title despite being more accurate! But enough said on this score.

I have to confess I was concerned about Dag's drinking problem. At one point, she actually recognizes that she has a drinking problem, which is admirable, but she resolves only to give up daytime drinking and then promptly breaks that vow. She made no vows whatsoever related giving-up becoming the falling-down, vomiting, passed-out drunk (fortunately in that order), of which she was guilty. This is exactly why her drinking is a problem bordering on, if not embracing alcoholism since it's made repeatedly clear that it's alcohol, not friends, not exercise, not books (there goes literary!), not music, not crafts, not movies, not even food, but alcohol, which is her life-jacket when ineffectually opposing a sea of troubles. She actually abuses her best friend Mel, who sounded far more interesting to me than Dag became, although I was disappointed that Mel had nothing to say about Dag's drinking.

The story definitely took a serious downturn when she started stalking her ex and obsessing over him even more than she had before. That's when it was no longer romantic or a comedy for me. Had the genders been reversed and a guy was doing this, he would have been called on it by the readers if not by another character, so how is it any better that a woman is doing this to a man? It's not. It's neither entertaining nor is it funny.

Yes, Yash is being a bit of a jerk, so maybe this co-dependent couple really did deserve each other in the end, but at least he has cause for his behavior. She has no excuse whatsoever and worse, she doesn't even get that he needs to be left alone so she's compounding her main course of liar thermidor by adding a side dish of ass stalks. It made me really dislike her and negated any good feelings I'd entertained towards her from earlier.

But enough about meme; let’s talk about eupathy. The milieu of the story was a comfortably predictable one. It seems like whenever an author or screen-writer is aiming for a 'literary' story, they have their main character, who is typically a female, somehow involved with books. In this case, Dag is employed as an editor at a publishing company, but she doesn’t work on novels. No fear! She works in non-fiction - and there are no environmental dilemmas for Dag; it’s all about print, as though involvement with ebooks is slumming it.

More than this, the guy she falls for is a writer, and she predictably turns her web log into charmingly printable woodcuts. None of this is spoilers. All of it is inevitable from the premises. So well-traveled is the route that it's a rout, and more of a sow's ear than ever it was a silk road. The problem appears to be that if such stories were not so predictable, they likely wouldn’t garner for themselves such a predictable readership. Too few authors have the courage to take the road less traveled, even in an era when they do not have to beg Big Publishing™ to lend them that sow's ear.

This novel was too much an attempt at an edgy version of a Meg Ryan movie or more accurately, it felt like a remake of the Kate Hudson/Matthew McConaughey movie How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. I know I've read other novels which have run in a similar rut, but none of those were impressive enough for me to recall a title off-hand.

Some of it rang rather hollow or odd, such as where I read, "sew destruction upon Taylor." I honestly couldn't figure out if that was simply a case of bad spelling (that no spellchecker would catch!), or if it was actually intended as a pun - you know, sew...Taylor, but since I hadn't really seen any devotion to puns in this story, I think maybe "sow" was intended? And we're back to the pig's ear pun! Just kidding! But don't you love the English language?

Dag's approach to agents and publishing houses to sell her blog made little sense (especially when it was loudly telegraphed beforehand who would get the nod), and it made less sense given what a huge following her blog had garnered. She didn't need any help at that point, and why would she even consider it given that her plan supposedly was to screw-up? It felt like both a sell-out and a continuation of the endless Mary-Sue moments she was improbably accruing without any effort whatsoever.

The fact that this option isn’t even discussed made me realize that it must have been voted down by this 'literary' paradigm into which the author had locked herself like the clichéd emotional bride in the toilet at the wedding. Traditional publishing dominates, and the small prints dons the crown! E-books don't get a look-in! At this point the novel had become a fairy-tale lacking only Prince Chakra, and we knew for a fact that he wasn't far behind, so there was no suspense here at all.

But the bottom line for me is whether the novel is worth reading or not. It's one way or the other. I can’t tell you that two-fifths of a novel is worth reading and the other three not. It’s either worth my time or it isn’t and in the end, this one wasn't. So while I did find parts to be an entertaining read, overall it was disappointingly unoriginal. I think changing the paradigm would have made for a much better read.

A problem with stories like this is when to end them. It's always better to end sooner, even if it's too soon, than to let write be dumb. That's a territory this one danced with perilously, in tandem with me dancing with changing my mind. My mind is a lousy dance partner though: it keeps stepping on my prose. I think the story should have ended, given that it must head in this tired direction, right at the point where he texted her, and that should have been the first contact of any kind he made.

End it right there and you're doing better than you are with an ending which keeps on going right on into an epilogue. I don't read prologues or epilogues, so I never did learn what the last couple of itemized non-screw-ups were and it doesn't bother me at all. I wish the author all the best with her career, and I believe she definitely has a voice, I can't recommend this expression of it.

Oh Joy Sex Toy Vol 3 by Erika Moen, Matthew Nolan

Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
p60 "aught" means nothing! The word required is "ought" as in 'feel compelled to'!

Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan seem like a fun couple who have made an industry out of graphic - and I mean graphic! - adventures with sex toys. This is an adult publication, be warned, with no holds barred - or anything else for that matter. It's also a whopping three hundred pages, so there's a heck of a lot here.

The discussions are frank, open, amusing, and detailed, and they cover topics which are important and far too often badly served in a fundamentalist and conservative nation like the USA: sexual health (both disease-wise and exercise-wise), sex education (inlcuding book reviews), and physical/mechanical sex aids. I've never been a fan of toys myself, but this is evidently a fifteen billion dollar industry, so clearly many people are, and it was climbing out of the closet and into the mainstream, so get used to it!

I don't know anything about Matthew Nolan,but I'm vaguely familiar (in an innocent way) with Erika Moen's work. She's an artist who's been involved in comic books and other art endeavors. She's also a member of Periscope studios which has had a hand in some Wonder Woman comics, so it's good to know that super hero is in highly capable hands if that team is anything like Erika, who reminds me of one or other of the two goal keepers in my Seasoning novel. It's good to know that goal mouth is in capable hands, too!

On a point of order, I have to disagree with her assertion on page 53 that the particular item under review will open up her "world of wanking opportunities". I contend that female cannot truly 'wank' unless she is unusually well-endowed clitorally-speaking. It's just not physically possible although I don't doubt it's fun to try! Masturbate yes! Wank? Not really! LOL! However in the interests of the Equal Right-On! Amendment, women are most welcome to go for it!

I have to say that a lot of what's in here (I'm talking about sex advice and discussion of sexual disease and medical conditions, not the product reviews) is common sense and common knowledge - at least it ought to be common knowledge, but that's just the problem. Because sex has been treated as such a tabu subject, nowhere near enough people are educated on these topics. This is why knowledgeable and responsible publications like this are so important.

This kind of graphic novel isn't for me, and some parts of it felt incredibly naive and gullible (notably the two sections on porn films, where in the one they believed it wasn't staged, and in the other they seemed to be polishing the whole porn industry with a huge shine based on one particular filming session they'd witnessed).

This is aimed at sex positivity, and I can understand that, so I didn't expect anything truly negative from it, but it seems to me they're under-serving their readers if they don't look at the downside of things as well as the upside. They do review a book which touches on some of those stories but it's aimed not at how the porn business works, but at how some performers coped with balancing their professional life with their private life.

The last third of it is guest comic strips, and they cover a variety of topics all related to sex. I didn't find these as amusing as the first two hundred pages, except for Donut's Cream For You which I thought was hilarious. My biggest concern over these though, was that they were heavily biased towards trim Caucasian couples and where women were involved they seemed to be almost exclusively slim and comic-book curvy. While that's common in comic books (and on TV and in the movies and in literature), it's not right, and in a graphic novel like this, which is all about inclusivity, they seemed inappropriate in a way which had nothing to do with their subject matter!

I haven't read the previous two volumes in this series, so perhaps they have a slightly different take on things, but the feeling I have is that they would be very much like this one in tone and approach. That said, I don't doubt that these volumes will be useful and helpful to many people so I have no problem recommending this one. We don't need less of this, we need more! But we also need balance, so keep that in mind, and enjoy!

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

Rating: WARTY!

This was an awful novel, badly written and in the audiobook format, badly read. I've been forced to conclude that not only is Isaac Asimov irrelevant, he is antique and I need read nothing further by him. His prose is pedantic and far too absorbed with irrelevant details, and his characters were anachronistic even for Asimov's own time. I don't believe any ever exclaimed "Jehoshaphat" not even when Asimov was alive. It's tedious.

On that score, it seems like everyone but the robots in his world are named after Biblical characters (the leading non-robotic character is Elijah, and his son is Benjamin, for goodness sakes! Why this novel written by an atheist, and set in the future is so obsessed with an antique work of poor history and copious fiction would make for a more interesting book. Supposedly set a thousand years from now, the novel evinces nothing significantly different from Asimov's own time despite the passage of a millennium. People still smoke pipes for goodness sakes! There is nothing inventive here, and the robot is more tedious and brain-dead than Commander Data in the Star Trek Universe. I expected better. Now I know better.

Who Killed Kurt Cobain?: The Story of Boddah by Nicolas Otéro

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy of a graphic novel for which I thank the publisher.

While I was glad to have the chance to read this, I have to confess up front that I was disappointed. The title makes no sense. We know who killed Cobain. The artwork for the most part was uninspired and even perfunctory, and the story felt too fanciful. Kurt Cobain had an imaginary childhood friend named Boddah, and he wrote a note to this character before he shot himself, leaving the note behind, along with his wife and young daughter.

I'm not someone who thinks that actors and musicians somehow get in touch with the mystical through drug use. I think they're simply juvenile, spoiled, and selfish morons who are often delusional. You can argue that as adults they're in charge of what happens to their bodies, but I don't think you can divorce the adult from the child, not when the child has experiences like Cobain did. He needed a better intervention than the one he got, for sure.

I don't think that Cobain was particularly brilliant or insightful or that his music was revolutionary or particularly special. It was just part of a genre, but in his case, it was magnified and amplified by his life, yet we see none of that here. He may as well not even have been a musician at all for as little reference as we got to his music in this story. I do see how people clambered aboard his bandwagon, because we see this routinely amongst humans. We're very much sheep who are drawn to cults and gangs, and clubs and societies, and to mindlessly jumping aboard bandwagons. Everyone wants to feel special which is paradoxically why we see this herding instinct so routinely.

While I wouldn't go as far as the blurb and claim Cobain is "modern rock's greatest icon" (Google puts him halfway down the first page of images!), it's not at issue that Cobain was talented and had something to say; the only curious thing I find was that evidently he didn't feel this way about himself. That would have been worth exploring, because there's no mystery about his suicide. It was entirely predictable and could have been prevented, but it was inevitable given his circumstances. Preventing it would have required a lot more care, love and real attention than was available to him. Given how hell-bent he was on self-destruction, it may be that no amount could have saved him, but we'll never know.

What I don't understand is the lemming-like rush to label these people heroes and spirit guides to the unknown. They're not. They're sick, troubled children who need help. In his case, heroic would have entailed his giving up drugs, getting treatment for his depression, and taking care of his daughter. The route he took was not heroic; it was cowardly, leaving the child to the single parenting of a woman who has evidenced pretty much as many issues as Cobain did. In many ways she become the hero, sadly fallible as that hero was, yet she gets nowhere near the attention Cobain did. Heroic would have been making a super-human effort to give his daughter a role model of how to cope and make a life, so that she doesn't go down the same drain he did. In that, he failed.

But this is a review of the graphic novel, not the life it depicts, and for me, that also failed. Yes, it told his story from a certain perspective, but it was scrappy and full of gratuitous flourishes. In my opinion, it focused foolishly on the destruction, not on the creation, on a person's weaknesses, not on his strengths - his music. The blurb claims the story is told from the perspective of the imaginary friend, made real here, but that's not the impression I got. Some of the drawings were great, but for the most part, they were so sloppy and indistinct that sometimes it was hard to tell if it was the imaginary friend or Cobain talking, and perhaps that was intentional, because in the end, there was no friend. There was only Cobain alone.

I can't recommend this because I don't see what this gave us that we didn't have before, other than an excessive amount of gratuitous nudity and gore, and none of that is revelatory these days, I'm sorry to observe.

The Woman In the Mirror by Cathryn Grant

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy from Net Galley, for which I thank the publisher.

I'm not sure I agree with the blurb's premise that "Everyone knows someone who deserves to die." I personally don't, although I would argue that there are asses which need kicking from time to time! I won't hold it against the author, because unless they self-publish, authors have little to do with the blurb or the cover. That's why on my blog I talk very little about covers, and I don't even show them any more in the reviews. It's the plot and the story-telling that's the only important part of a book. Covers are window-dressing at best, and honestly irrelevant unless you're not really a serious reader.

While vigilante "justice" is clearly wrong-headed in reality, it does make for some interesting stories, which is why the last sentence of the blurb intrigued me: "Alexandra Mallory isn't like other women - she gets rid of people who make the world a dangerous place." I was far less curious to know exactly how she dealt with her dangerous people than in how she determined who they were and which ones deserved dispatching. The problem I had was that this novel seemed far more interested in diverting into endless, tedious flashbacks and info-dumping histories than ever it was in propelling the story forward. It lost my interest short-order, and I gave up on this without finishing it, so keep that in mind with regard to this review.

That wasn't the only problem. I shall lightly step-over the fact that this title (girl/woman in mirror) is way over-used, and move on to the voice I most detest in story-telling: first person. Countless authors seem obsessively-compulsively addicted to it even when it harms their story. One of the many major problems with 1PoV is that it severely limits the ability to tell a good story, and this author admits this after the very first chapter by abruptly vaulting from first to third, which would be impressive were this a baseball game; not so much in literature, though. The story bounces back and forth between perspectives, but the second chapter is from the guy's perspective, and for some reason the author deems him unworthy of 1PoV! He merits only third place. Why, I don't know, but it seemed genderist at best. I mention that particular aspect because the guy has a decidedly warped perspective on the worth and valuation of women, and telling it in third person made it even worse than if it had been delivered in first.

His first take on Alexandra, the protagonist, is all about her "beauty" and physical qualities. Clearly if you've just encountered someone, the only knowledge you have of them is how they appear, but Jared's super power is quite evidently sex-ray vision: he can see only skin deep and immediately objectifies Alex without a second thought. I find it obnoxious that so many authors, especially female ones, are so addicted to this approach to describing their female characters. I mean, you can say a guy found a woman attractive without belaboring physical attributes to excess, and risking making other women feel like crap if they don't measure-up, just as you can describe a male character without making guys feel inadequate. Frankly, I wanted to ditch this novel right there, and never pick it up again, it was so shallow, but this was at about 2% in, and I felt compelled, against my better judgment, to press on at least a little further. It wasn't a charmed plan, as I discovered when it became bogged-down in flashbacks.

Alex is thrown together with professional liar Noreen, and "studly" Jared (see? That's how it's done! LOL!), all three living under one roof when Noreen sublets her rather precarious cliff-top house to them. It seemed pretty obvious where this was going, and it was all downhill from the top of the cliff. This was the beginning of yet another series, and I am rarely a fan of series. They tend to be repetitive, lazy, derivative, and unimaginative. I can't get on board with this one, which was far too wordy for my taste when the words conveyed so little and did nothing to move the story along. I wish the author all the best with her series, but I cannot recommend this based on what I read of it, which was more than I honestly wanted to.