The Adventurers and the Cursed Castle by Jemma Hatt

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook that has 'series' written all over it, although there's nothing on the cover to indicate that. It's aimed at a young middle grade readership, and while I didn't think it was particularly good, it wasn't awful either, so I'm rating it a worthy read because it's not bad for the audience it's aimed at. I just think it could have been better, but the readers who go for this sort of thing are probably not as discerning or critical (or whatever!) as I am.

The story was read pretty decently by Ciaran Saward, and involved a couple of cousins, Lara and Rufus, going to stay with their great uncle at his 'castle' which is a crumbling old mansion on the coast in Cornwall, an English county that's right at the tip of south-western Great Britain. Naturally there's a 'pirate treasure' angle to it, involving an antique relative of the family, but it's not really pirate treasure, it's more like artifacts from ancient Egypt which were purloined or otherwise appropriated and were, for reasons which go unexplored, hidden away in secret location. None of this made any sense to me, much the less the byzantine cryptic clues which the kids, of course, solved.

On the down side, I felt a great educational opportunity was missed here because we learn little to nothing of Cornwall, or of the era in in which the adventurer who originally hid the treasure lived, or of Egyptian antiquities. Naturally no kid wants to read a novel that sounds like a boring and lecturing textbook, but there are plenty of ways for a skilled writer to incorporate some educational content, especially in a treasure hunt where some knowledge of history and customs can readily be made a part of the hunt, and I was sorry those opportunities were missed.

The story is a bit like a Dan Brown for middle-graders, and my problem with that is that I've never bought into this kind of 'cryptic clue hunt' because they're so far-fetched, and it makes even less sense that a small group of kids would be the subject of one incredible adventure after another, as a series of these would demand. Of course, young readers don't care about that! But cryptic clues are silly and cheapen a novel for me, and the improbability of the whole thing is like those cozy mysteries that take place in a little hamlet where the murder rate would make even a seasoned Chicago cop tremble!

No one who is dying of stab wounds is going to work out cryptic clues for Dan Brown's protagonist to solve. He's going to at best write a short note asking the protagonist to contact his granddaughter! That was truly laughable. That same sort of short-sightedness inhabits this story in that the elaborate hiding of the treasure and then the distribution of multiple cascading cryptic clues makes zero sense. Who are the clues aimed at? Why did the guy who initially had the treasure not sell it and enjoy the proceeds for himself, otherwise why did he even steal it in the first place? Did he really believe his clues would be readily soluble two hundred years hence - or even ten years hence? That takes a lot of faith!

That said, it's a reasonably fun adventure for the target audience. The younger boy, Rufus, was just annoying to me, and the girl seemed a bit lacking in oomph. The older boy Tom was also quite flat, but the story itself was innocent enough and fun enough that young middle graders will likely lap it up, so this is why I commend it as a worthy read. It's not for me though, so this series, if there is one, ends with this volume for my purposes.

Charlie Thorne and the Lost City by Stuart Gibbs

Rating: WARTY!

Not being a big fan of series, I don't normally ever get to volume two even if I started volume one. In this case, I skipped the first in the series because I was unaware of it until I saw this one and was attracted by the fact that it involved Charles Darwin. You don't usually see his name in this kind of a story. It would have been nice to have seen a little bit of education slipped in here and there regarding his scientific Theory of Evolution, which is the bedrock of modern biology, but there really was none of that, and worse, there was some seriously misleading science. So while I initially began reading this favorably, I can't commend it after finishing it and realizing there were far too many problems with it to overlook them.

I wasn't expecting much from this middle grade novel, but it proved to be an engaging read to begin with, if annoying at times. The story is very much of the Dan Brown category: someone who is speedily following a series of clues to solve a mystery, while being chased by evil-doers. I don't use that comparison as a compliment since I'm not a Dan Brown fan, but it will give you a broad idea of what's going on here.

After her adventures in Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation, Charlie has evidently been hiding out in the Galápagos islands seeking anonymity. She's surfing and otherwise generally doing nothing save read a book here and there. She has money, presumably somehow obtained during the first novel, so working isn't a necessity, and it's just as well since she's only twelve - but apparently looks older. That was the first slippery slope proposition in my view, since it's often used as a lousy non-excuse when a guy is charged with statutory rape ("Well she looked eighteen"), so while I let that slide for the sake of reading on, it's nevertheless a problem for me.

The main problem with Charlie though, is that she was much more of a Mary Sue than a Charlie. She never got into any real difficulties, and effortlessly effected escapes worthy of an animated series. On top of that, she was constantly reminding us, that is, when the author wasn't, that she was a genius - probably the smartest person on Earth. That was irritating as hell. For example at one point I read,

"Of course I’m right," Charlie told him. "I’m me."

Seriously? Even if it were true about her being so smart, it's a stupid mistake for an author to keep slapping his readers in the face with it, but the fact is that it's not true.

The confusion is a common one. The author conflates knowing a lot of trivia with being smart. The two aren't equivalent and the sad thing is that though we're reminded of how smart she supposedly is with metronomic tedium, the truth is that Charlie's actions prove her to be other than a genius. She wouldn't do dumb things that make little sense if she were indeed as smart as she's so often claimed to be.

Maybe she's hiding her light under a bushel, you think? Bushel is an archaic term for a bowl, hence its more modern use as a measure as opposed to the use back there as a shade. But knowing that trivial item doesn't make me super-smart. The thing is that we really don't get a lot of Charlie as an actual person. She's more like a place-holder for a real character, or more like an android (or given her gender, I guess a 'gynoid'!). We never see her around kids her own age in this story, so she's constantly dealing with adults who never seem to like her at best and at worst, want to kill or to capture her, so maybe this influences how she presents. Or maybe they just knew her better than we readers ever will?!

The thing is that if Charlie truly wanted to stay off the radar as we're told she did, she would have kept a much lower profile than she had been doing where she was hiding. Instead of being a star of the surfing circuit, she might have found a quiet cove to read or to snorkel? And making her brilliance known by volunteering at the tortoise rehab centers was a poor choice. This is what I mean about her not being as smart as she claims, because she ought to have known better, and she doesn't. Better yet, why not move her idle carcass to a large city where it would be a lot easier to hide? And where she could actually do some good helping other people instead of indulging her every whim? She doesn't seem like a nice or a thoughtful person to me.

But her dwelling on that island and volunteering is how she comes to the attention of Esmerelda, who seeks her out for help deciphering a code that was, we're told, etched onto the shell of a tortoise by Darwin himself, the better part of two centuries prior to Charlie finding out about it. In an era where we've discovered a certain ex-president's name scratched onto the back of a manatee, this sounds a bit inappropriate to say the least, but I'll let that slide. Tortoises in the Galápagos islands are very long-lived unless the animal has been hunted for meat or died from some other cause and rotted away prematurely. So Darwin etching the underside of the tortoise is problematic with a message for the ages. It seems like he would have been smarter than that.

Darwin was studying change both in the planet's crust, and in the lives of plants and animals and it seems very doubtful to me that knowing how impermanent things are, and how living things can also change so readily, he would have recorded the various clues he left in a form where such inevitable changes could easily erase or destroy them, and in only that one way given that he lived a long life after his voyage and had ample opportunities to record it elsewhere or share it with people he trusted. For the undiscerning middle-grader, these things might seem convincing, but if subject to any thought at all, they're so far-fetched.

That same rule applies across multiple clues, others of which I'm not about to reveal in any great detail here, but I have to say that in one case, a stone used to build something tends to be a rectangular block, and if something were etched on it and later that same stone was carved into a different shape to be used for another purpose, any original etching would be long gone! And if you're trying to hide a clue in a natural setting by using fire to mask it, you'd think a genius would make it look like a natural forest fire rather than a deliberate attempt burn off a clue! This is what I meant about Charlie's actions not really mirroring her billing as a genius.

There were some writing issues which I shall mention because there were so many of them. One or two here and there are not an issue, but so many do tend to distract from enjoyment of the story. At one point, for example, I read how a stick of dynamite behaved when kicked off a boat: "It sailed off the boat and exploded a second later, close enough to knock her and Dante off their feet. A piece of red-hot shrapnel nicked her arm, while others whistled past her head." Shrapnel is named after a British army general and initially referred to what in modern times might be a pipe bomb or something similar. Dynamite itself contains no shrapnel - typically metal fragments, or ball bearings or something like that. The way dynamite would hurt would be from a compression wave, especially if experienced underwater, and would result in a concussion and ear-bleeding, so this rang hollow, but again, maybe middle graders won't think twice about it.

After a certain person (name redacted) had literally tried to kill Charlie, and she makes this observation about that person's mood: "XXXXXXX sounded as though they really wanted to kill her." That's a bit much given that the person really was trying to kill her! At another point I read, "...it would swallow up any evidence of the cities within decades, if not sooner." Well, the 'within decades' covers 'if not sooner' so it seemed a bit superfluous. At another point in the story Charlie and another person were searching for some food in the jungle, and I read this: "They had tracked down a moriche palm full of aguaje fruit within only a few minutes-and then spent another two hours trying to retrace their steps." This suggests again that Charlie isn't so smart. Had she not thought of calling out to the person they'd left back at the boat, in order to follow their voice back? If they were only a couple of minutes' walk away they could surely have heard each other. It felt like it betrayed the girl's smarts.

At one point I read, “The most famous spot was Yellowstone National Park, which was located in the largest volcano caldera on earth,” which simply isn't true. The largest (as of this writing!) is the Apolaki Caldera in the Philippine Sea. If you're talking 'on dry land' and 'square area', then Yellowstone caldera gets it, but it's actually four overlapping calderas, and the park isn't in the caldera, it's the other way around. By the same token, the Amazon basin isn't quite the same size as the entire United States, but once you start seeing errors of fact, it's hard to stop! I don't agree with those people who claim it's just as easy to get it right as get it wrong. It's much easer to get it wrong, but I think we owe children a better education than this, so when they call out a 'fact' from your novel in an argument or worse, in school, they get it right, not wrong, and they trust you as a writer.

One of the annoying and anti-scientific facets of this novel, and which does Darwin a grave disservice is talk of 'proof' of evolution and of 'missing links'. First of all, science doesn't talk about proof, it talks about the preponderance of evidence and that's a bit stodgy for young children, but not asking too much for them to understand if a bit of foundation had been sown through the writing. But to talk of a definitive 'missing link' in hominid evolution is pure bullshit.

Human evolution is complex and it's replete with links, so there's nothing critical that's still missing. In Darwin's time there was, but he barely mentioned humans (in terms of evolution) in "On the Origin..." brushing it safely under the carpet with a "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." It wasn't until over a decade later in The Descent of Man that Darwin tied humans into the mix. If he'd found anything concrete he would have mentioned it there, and he would not have spent the time he did studying an orangutan named Jenny at the London zoo. The fact that he had the chance to mention this fictional 'discovery' without giving anything concrete away about it in 'Descent' yet did not undermines this whole story's premise. The fact is that finding a fossil, or for example, something like chimpanzees in South America wouldn't 'prove' anything. And there is no way he could find any such thing there because it South America never has had apes and no evidence of there ever being any such thing has turned up there.

One last problem was this animal that Charlie befriended. It had earlier been terrified of this helicopter, yet later it's depicted sleeping soundly onboard while the chopper is flying, and while you can argue it was sedated, when it awoke it showed no sign of fear or panic whatsoever. It wasn't realistic. Again most kids who read this might not think about these things, but that doesn't mean an author ought not to be aware of them and get them right - or re-write! We all screw up; there's no escaping it, but a little more attention can reduce these incidents to a negligible level.

The only other issues I ran into were the usual Kindle formatting ones. I detest Kindle because it slices, dices, and juliennes everything that's not plain vanilla and pure text, so I wasn't surprised to see a numbered list appear like this:

There were three reasons that might be true:
1) Darwin had traveled faster than she had calculated, so they had not reached the right spot yet.
2) She had misinterpreted what Darwin meant. 3) The river no longer turned to blood.

Note the third item is on the same line as the second instead of on a line of its own. This is one of many reasons why I will do not business with Amazon. But that's just me, and it doesn't reflect on the content of the novel itself - just on the editing and checking. Clearly this is another novel written as a print novel with little to no thought given to the ebook version.

Another such issue was where the page headers got tied right into the text because of the incompetence of the Kindle process, predictably turning everything into kindling, so I read:

“...archaeolog CHARLIE THORNE AND THE LOST CITY • 263 ical sites”

That happened in more than one place.

But I'm judging on content, not on kindling, and by that measure alone I can't commend this as a worthy read. The main character was at times obnoxious and her situation was just too Mary Sue and simultaneously too improbable. As a Saturday morning TV cartoon, this might have sufficed, but as a middle-grade novel it needed more. I can't see any promise in a series that pretends on the surface to honor great scientists, but in practice does them such a disservice by making up improbable stuff and treating real science so cavalierly.

Night Night Norman by Marie Dimitrova, Romi Caron

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a hard-bound, large-format print book, with thirty pages of full-color, full-page illustrations by accomplished artist Romi Caron, and which is written amusingly by author Marie Dimitrova. The story is of Norman, a large chesnut horse who is cared for by Ellie. She lavishes attention and food on him in the evening and then disappears for the night.

Norman decides that he has to know where she goes, but he doesn't whinny about it. instead, one evening, he sneaks out and follows her - she looking adorable in her dungarees and galoshes, he sneaking around trying to discover where she went. And of course, havoc ensues. Apparently not having much horse sense, Norman gets into places where he shouldn't be - and can barely fit. Is he a whickered person? No, but he is a bit naughty, and he messes with stuff he doesn't really understand. With no one around telling him to "Hoof it," he leaves a mess - and no, not that kind of a mess. Let's just hazard a guess that Norman's middle name is probably 'Disorder'! Once he's back in his stall, he's a bit more stable and reins in his impulses, but is he about to cease these nighttime 'for hays'? In a word: neigh!

Obviously this book isn't written for a guy like me, but I was happy to get saddled with it because it was good for a few horse laughs, and the artwork is beautiful. I happily commend it as a worthy read for children - because of course, it takes the right tack....

Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the final volume of this five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep on step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

It's taken Kylara three volumes to finally get her defense force up to a decent size where she can take on the pirates. Her first port of call is a shipyard where vessels are being built that the pirates intend to pirate and bring into their own fleet, Kylara meets them head on and denies them the success they expected, but loses her own spacecraft in the process. This defeat though enables her to sneak around while she'd believed dead and in the end, as you know would happen, defeat the pirates.

There were parts of this series that I didn't particularly enjoy: for example, Kylara's love interest did not inspire me at all. There were also some lengthy and tedious boring bits, but overall I consider this series to be a worthy read, and I commend it as such.

Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume four of a five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep on step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

Kylara Vatta started out as military, fell into disgrace, went limping back to her family's interstellar commerce, was successful, but was gradually forced back into military mode by piracy. This volume was a bit of a pause and a breath before the finale, since not a whole heck of a lot new happens. The villains who have taken down the purported galaxy-wide communications system have acted with speed and decision, and seem to be winning the battle. Everyone else has been wrong-footed and there seems to be little orchestrated effort to take on the pirates or to fix the damage they've done. This is the gap that Kylara is aiming to fill.

This to me is the biggest weakness with these space operas. You can't write about space in the same way you can, for example write about piracy on the high seas, yet far too many blinkered and short-sighted sci-fi writers (David Weber I'm looking at you) think you can translate 2-D Earth issues and events into outer space with very little thought or change. They simply do not get the massive size of space, and the fact that it's 3D. It results in stories which sound stupid and fake.

I for one have never been convinced that there would be a huge traffic in interstellar commerce and nothing I've read in a host of sci-fi stories has convinced me otherwise - not yet. They simply don't get the massive costs involved in interstellar travel even if warp vessels were invented, nor do they seem to appreciate the vast distances involved and the pointlessness of buying items from one planet that could far more easily and cheaply be manufactured on the planet where they're needed.

Yes, maybe a planet has something special that is found nowhere else, but would people truly want to pay the billions involved in having someone go there and bring that particular thing home? Often the thing is some sort of mineral or alloy, but the same elements found on Earth or in asteroids around the solar system exist throughout the universe. There's nothing out there that can't be found or manufactured here. There are no magical undiscovered elements, and any alloys or minerals can be recreated far more cheaply on Earth than the cost of flying interstellar distances to retrieved them. In short, it makes no sense.

That said, Moon tells a decent story and if you're willing to overlook some of the more incredible parts of the novel, an entertaining tale is to be had here.

Engaging The Enemy by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume three of a five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep on step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

Despite the title, this particular volume has Kylara running more than engaging. She is intent upon taking on the pirates who were partly responsible for her family's woes thus far, but she makes little progress and worse, has a falling out with a cousin who's annoyed that Kylara seems more focused on fighting pirates than ever she is on conducting business, which is an odd change for Kylara, since she was hitherto all about profit and trade; however, they come to an agreement where Stella is to run the business while Kylara is to focus on protecting trade routes. It turns out that Kylara (unsurprising trope!) isn't who she thought she was.

Engaging the enemy is a bit of a misleading title because while she does engage in some mild ways, she really doesn't in the way you might think - as in having a space battle - not until the end, and even then she ends up fleeing and licking wounds. That said, the story was still exciting and engaging, so I enjoyed it and wanted to continue reading the series.

Marque And Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

Also known as Moving Target in some markets, this is volume two of a five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep one step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.

In this volume, Kylara has delivered a shipment to a planet and is waiting on a return cargo when she almost becomes the victim of assassins who bomb her spacecraft. She soon learns that she's not the only target: Vatta ships and berths have been attacked elsewhere resulting in many deaths in her family. As Kylara arms herself and her ship she learns of a cranial implant she needs to get which will give her the control codes for, and complete access to, the family business.

She's forced into forming interesting and unlikely alliances and hiring a paramilitary outfit for security as she tracks down the person responsible for the attacks, who turns out to be someone very close to home. Again, another fun and engaging adventure which I commend, although I confess I didn't much like Kylara's love interest who was brought back for an encore appearance in this volume and who is the trope bad boy from a wealthy or important family. Yawn.

Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WORTHY!

Here's another series, this one a part of a five-book set known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal (aka Moving Target), Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, the lone girl in a large family of sons, who is trying to make her way in the world.

She has chosen to join the military rather than go into her family's business. The problem is that she runs into a situation where she's betrayed by a fellow cadet, and it results in her being expelled from the military academy and heading home with her tail between her legs. In that regard (female soldier screwed over by male colleague) it's very much along the lines of David Weber's main character in On Basilisk Station which also kicks off a series, although this is much more of a rebel sort of a story than a ramrod up the ass senseless military procedural like Weber's books are.

Despite this setback, Kylara finds herself with a chance to start back on the road to redemption, as she gets the opportunity to captain a Vatta vessel. It isn't much, but it's better than nothing and she can maybe build on this over time. Her lowly assignment is to pilot an aging ship to the knackers yard, and her father is taking no chances since he crews the vessel with old hands as much to keep a weather eye on his daughter as to make sure nothing goes wrong.

The thing about Kylara is that she may be a girl and she may be lowest on the totem pole at that, but she's a Vatta, and when the lure of 'Trade and Profit' pops up, she sees an opportunity to pick up a shipping contract that's let lapse by another company. She undertakes to meet the challenge, seeing the chance of making some money along the way to dropping off this clunker of a ship at the breakers - unless of course, she can upgrade the ship and maybe make it her own into the bargain. She soon discovers that it's not all plain sailing and Kylara's military instincts and training come into full prominence as a simple delivery of agricultural equipment turns into a chore of becoming a prison ship, and enduring a sort of a mutiny among the prisoners.

I enjoyed this book. Despite it being a part of a series, it held my interest and made me want to read on. It was different, off-beat, entertaining, and featured a strong and smart female character. I commend this and the series.

The Adventures of Rockford T Honeypot by Josh Gottsegen

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This middle grade chapter book was a little long and involved for my taste, with two voices and two tenses, so it's not your common or garden simple story, but for the avid young reader, it should provide a wealth of adventurous pursuit and engrossing reading.

Rockford T Honeypot is your usual reserved and retiring chipmunk, albeit with a healthy respect for germs and hygiene, but circumstances are about to throw him into an unwilling and unwitting adventure that will change him all-around and make a ground squirrel out of him! Until he ruins the family business and is abandoned by his strict father and ne'er-do-well brothers, the only adventure he has is reading of his favorite fictional hero. Little does he know he's about to personify that spirit he so admires and make a story all of his own.

Framed by an older Rockford looking back on his life, and told over the course of many chapters, with occasional interruptions, Rockford learns to fly (sort of), learns to fight, learns to be fearless, and to face problems head on. He learns to spot business opportunities and to supply a need when he sees one, as well as mastering exercising his brain in solving problems. He travels and has adventures, makes friends and meets the girl of his dreams. And he creates the perfect roasted hazelnut recipe.

The adventure has thrills and chills, danger and amusement, and tells a whopping great story about the little guy winning through. I commend it as a worthy read.

Fly Girls by Keith O'Brien

Rating: WORTHY!

Fly Girls details the lives of a handful of early female pilots back when air travel was new, largely experimental, and very dangerous. The story of these people proved to be highly engaging. My only disappointment was the lack of images - it would have been nice had there been a pic of each of the pilots covered in the narrative, but of course that's the price we pay for listening to an audio book! I don't know if the ebook or print book has such images, but pictures can be readily found online of both the pilots and the airplanes.

The book is subtitled "How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History," but it never really made it clear who these five were. That picture only emerged slowly over the course of the book. The blurb, which usually the author has nothing to do with, identifies them as Louise Thaden, Ruth Nichols, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Elder, and Florence Klingensmith.

It was paradoxically Earhart, not a great flyer, who got the lion's share of the story and Klingensmith who got so little. The blurb was highly inappropriate, too evidently written by a guy and breathlessly describing Thaden as a studious pilot, mother, and wife, although why 'mother and wife' were in there is a mystery. Have you ever read of a male pilot being described as a 'father and husband"? I haven't. In the same blurb, Ruth Elder is described as "gorgeous." Why? She looked like most other women of the 1920s did! But the question is, was Chuck Yeager or some other male pilot ever described as gorgeous? I don't think so. This is a serious and ongoing problem with Big Publishing™.

Other than that, the only real complaint I'd have was this one section which rambled on endlessly about this guy Cliff Henderson, who was instrumental in setting-up air racing back then when it was a new and exciting thing. Why the author chose to go off at a major tangent with him in particular, I do not know. Many men were mentioned, of course, including some air pioneers with renowned names like Beech, Curtiss, and Fairchild, with a few details given in each case, which is entirely understandable, yet none got the treatment Henderson did. I guess it's hard for some authors to leave all that research unused, but it was annoying and it felt inappropriate and rather insulting to the five women and the other female pilots about whom this book was purportedly written.

Other than that, the writing was good and engaging, although perhaps fanciful here and there, the author claiming to know what these pilots were doing, and thinking and saying when clearly that could not have been the case. In some cases there were diaries and newspaper reports and so on, and books (Amelia Earhart wrote one) which supplied authentic and interesting information, and O'Brien did his research, but I've never been a fan of fictionalized accounts creeping into an otherwise non-fiction book.

One of the most interesting sections (aside from Earhart's cross-Atlantic trip) was the 1929 Women's Air Derby. This was of course re-named the "Powder-Puff Derby" when that jackass, so-called comedian Will Rogers disparaged it as such, and the newsmen got hold of the story. The race was from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland over several days. Despite disparagement from men, out of 20 pilots who began it., only six failed to finish, which is pretty impressive in an era of relatively untrustworthy airplanes and multiple technical issues.

One competitor died when her plane lost an argument with gravity. She apparently had engine trouble and was trying to set down on a flat area close by a river, but ended up crashing. She'd evidently tried to use her parachute, but deployed it so late that it didn't even have time to open before she quite literally hit the ground. Her name was Marvel Crosson.

Amelia Earhart was in that race, but came third. She would have been fourth had Marvel not crashed. The men who organized it put all kinds of obstacles in the way, such as telling the women the airplane had to have horsepower 'appropriate for a woman'. One of the contestants, Opal Kunz, owned and flew a 300-horsepower plane that was disqualified as too fast for a woman to fly, so she was forced to find a weaker one! There were incidents suggestive that maybe some of the women's planes were sabotaged - like when one woman discovered gasoline had been put into her oil tank in place of oil, and so on.

One of the biggest critics was a man named Haliburton - yes that one - who founded the company that Dick Cheney had ties to, and that has a string of issues tied to its name including some during the mid-east conflicts. Haliburton was convinced women didn't ought to be flying at all - that they ought to be home having babies - and probably barefoot and in the kitchen! He likely would have died of apoplexy had he lived until 1993 when Jeannie Leavitt became the first female fighter pilot. She was the one who trained Brie Larsen, the actor, so she could pretend to be a fighter pilot in the Captain Marvel movie. Shades of Marvel Crosson!

This book was sad at the end. Of the five girls the story covers primarily, Amelia Earhart disappeared without a trace, as most people know, but the other four, despite typically accomplishing more than Earhart did, are far less well remembered and most are equally sad.

It's not a spoiler to relate the historical record: Florence Klingensmith died young, in a crash. She demands a movie be made about her life, feisty daredevil that she was. Ruth Nichols almost died in a crash and spent the last few years of her life depressed and in pain from assorted injuries until she committed suicide. Ruth Elder also attempted suicide, but was discovered in time, and she went on to live up to her name, dying at the age of 75. Louise Thaden seemed to be the only one who escaped those problems, perhaps because she had a happy marriage and children, and she died last of all in 1979. As I said, it's a real shame that Earhart is better remembered than any of the others; all of them deserve to be remembered.

Despite its sadness, and despite how angering it is that these women were constantly kept down and demeaned for their gender, I commend this book as a worthy read. It demands to be read. People need to know how far we've come and then maybe they'll better understand how far we still need to go.

The Storybook of Legends by Shannon Hale

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
On one page I read, "She treaded water" - the past tense of 'to tread' is 'trod' (and also 'trodden'). It's not 'treaded' - not unless she put a tire tread on the water, which I guess is entirely possible if you can do magic....
Later I read, "But it's not like I can just look up in a phone book..." In context, this should have read, 'look her up in a phone book', or depending on what precisely the author meant, 'look in a phone book'. Either way something was wrong here!
Past tenses seemed to be a problem for Shannon Hale because later I also read, "Apple reached out and pet the dragon's tail...." This should have read 'petted'. While language is dynamic and changes over time, perhaps now faster than ever in history, some authors don't seem to get that there's actually a difference between reported speech and narration. Reported speech can be completely informal. Narration and description need to give at least a nod to grammar and correct tense!

Quite frankly, this book was an embarrassment to me and has been kept hidden away on my shelf like some sort of family black sheep. Finally I decided to take it out and read it and damn the torpedoes, and it has turned out to be highly entertaining, inventive, amusing, and fully-engaging. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Note that it's the Storybook of Legends, not leg ends, which would be quite effete....

I should not have been surprised, I guess, because I've had a positive history with its author Shannon Hale. This is, I think, the fourth or fifth thing of hers I've read and liked, but strictly speaking, it's not wholly original with her. The story has its roots in Mattel's monster dolls line. From that they created a fairy-tale doll line, and from that came a web series, a movie, and these books. Shannon Hale was, I guess, commissioned to write this one, and she did an amazing job with it. This was definitely my kind of novel even though it's not my kind of age range!

I can't promise to follow the whole series (I'm not a series sort of a guy), and especially since other volumes are written by other authors, but it was a highly enjoyable read, surprisingly. I came to admire the author both for her inventiveness and her winning sense of humor.

It's a sort of middle-grade fairy-tale fantasy in a series, no less! The series is called 'Ever After High', and it's about these children of famous fairy-tale characters returning to school after the holidays. Raven Queen is the daughter of the Evil Queen from "Snow White". Apple White is the daughter of Snow White. Cedar Wood is the daughter of Pinocchio, and Madeleine Hatter is the daughter of the Mad Hatter. Cerise Hood is the troubled daughter of red Riding Hood.

I think Maddie is my favorite character because she is so unapologetically nuts, and at several points actually has exchanges with the narrator of the novel, which I loved. Raven runs a close second as my favorite, and is an outstandingly intelligent and strong young woman. She's balking at being an evil queen like her mother was. She's supposed to feed the poisoned apple to Apple, but she doesn't want to be evil, and this makes people nervous because they think if she doesn't fulfill her role, then others' stories might fail and the whole of fairyland might collapse, so the plot is engaging, too.

The book ain't cheap! It was priced at fifteen dollars, but I recall picking it up at bargain discount at Costco several years ago. It intrigued me, but it seemed so juvenile that I hid it away until now. It's a hardcover which was printed in all these pastel shades, with the edges of the paper colored, and the pages having a colored border. After several years of looking at it and turning away, I decided to take the plunge and it proved so entertaining that I wished I had not let it sit for so long! It was a breath of fresh air and I enjoyed it for its irreverence and endless diversion - never boring, always...entrancing! I commend it fully.

Let's Fly a Plane by Chris Ferrie

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Friends, red kangaroos, children, lend me your engineers! Having just seen Fantasy Island at the movie theater, (the plane the plane - yes they did use that phrase and the movie was great!), how could I not want to review this book with such a bold and maybe even a teensy bit reckless title?

This was a short and fun little book about a kangaroo who wants to fly, but who can't seem to get off the ground. She seeks out author Chris Ferrie who has a doctorate in applied mathematics and who is a senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney. Dr Chris explains the four forces involved in flight (drag, gravity, lift - or was it Uber? - no it was lift!, and thrust), and does so in simple terms. The lift component to flight is the one that's most often misunderstood, even in textbooks, but the explanations here are kept simple and straight-forward.

Red Kangaroo still can't manage to propel herself into the air, but she gets to fly in an airplane! This was a colorful and easy book, useful for introducing young children to a complicated idea without straining young minds. Hopefully a few who read this will become engineers and make some wonderful things because their interest in science was piqued by books like this one, I commend it as a worthy read.

Bonyo Bonyo by Vanita Oelschlager, Kristin Blackwood, Mike Blanc

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This begins a stretch of some seventeen children's non-fiction books I shall be reviewing! Deep breath and off we go!

I've had a lot of success with Oelschlager's books, and this was no exception: it was a lot of fun, as well as informative, and interesting book, beautifully illustrated by Blackwood and Blanc. It's a mini-biography of a young boy who was living in Kenya in Eastern Africa, a country lying just below what's known as the horn of Africa. The boy's name is Bonyo Bonyo, and he loved to go to school That's not a given in Africa. Even if you can find a school, you may have to pay to go there.

These school fees may be cheap compared with what a paid education in the US costs, but people are impoverished there, and even what we consider to be a trivial amount in the US can be an insurmountable obstacle in the so-called third world. This is why we can do a lot by contributing even a little to charities which help with people in such situations. Bonyo had a hard time, and had to travel a long way to get his education, but he was determined.

He did so well in school that he got a chance to go to a college in the USA. All he needed was the airfare! Yikes. That was hard to come by, but through work and donations from friends and well-wishers, he eventually achieved his dream and became a doctor, and now he runs a clinic on his home town and also a practice in the USA. Spoiled as we are for good food, clean water, and a free education in the west, it's easy to forget that others are not so fortunate. It's sad that our millionaire president is too selfish and simple to grasp this. This book is an important reminder to those of us who are open to an education.

The book mentions a college in Texas, not a college in Ohio. While I can find no confirmation of the Texas college attendance, I did find an article online that lists the college he attended in Ohio as an osteopathic college. Such is not exactly a complete medical education. Osteopathy can provide some knowledge of human physiology, but it has only a limited application: to bone and muscle health. It's really not a lot of use for the great diversity inherent in practicing general medicine. In a way, it's a bit like chiropractic (and I could tell you a sorry tale about that!), but at least it wasn't homeopathy! However, that's not so important in a children's story because the take-home message here is one of enduring and triumphing, of courage and persistence, which Bonyo exhibited in spectacular fashion. On that basis I commend this as a worthy read.

Princeless Raven the Pirate Princess by Jeremy Whitley, Rose Higgins, Ted Brandt

Rating: WORTHY!

Normally I would steer clear of a book, even a graphic novel, with a title like this, but I had come to this via its predecessor, the Princeless graphic stories about a feisty young princess whose self-appointed mission is to rescue all of her sisters who are distributed in various towers throughout the kingdom, the aim of which is to inspire princes to come and rescue them so the king can get them married off. I've given up on this entire series now not so much because it was so bad, although the stories were becoming rather monotonous, but because it was impossible to figure out in which order they should be read.

Take this one for example: it's listed as 'Book 2 Free Women', but it's not the second in the pirate Princess series. It's the first. I don't think it's even the second in the Princeless series, although at this point I'm not sure. For me this was the biggest problem with this - that the arrangement of these volumes is a total disorderly mess. I can't find a definitive listing, although I admit I did not search exhaustively because I was so tired of looking by then and my local library did not help because there was no consistent naming strategy for the volumes! Thanks librarians!

Anyway this volume, wherever it comes, deals with Raven and her crew of women setting sail to go after Raven's evil brothers. I read this a while back and only just realized I never reviewed it, so while I did want to say I found it a worthy read, it only just fell into that category, and my review will be a bit vague since I recall only the gist of it. Higgins and Brandt did the heavy lifting with the art which was pretty decent, while Whitley did a bit with the writing.

Raven has to deal with all manner of villains on this island they arrive at, and that's pretty much it! I do recall it was entertaining, but I started running into the law of diminishing returns, which is inevitable in any series, and which is why I tend not to read very many of them. It's rare for one to truly engage me because there's typically too much sameness, too much repetitiveness, and very little innovation once a writer has locked their self into a series. This is why I'll never write one! While this was okay, I read this and a companion volume, but didn't feel any urge to continue reading because it wasn't that great!

My Kindergarten in 100 Words by Sophie Beer

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Yes, there are indeed 100 words, spread over ten pages with fine illustrations to identify what each word is. This was an ARC and the first few images were in color, the rest black and white line drawings, so I don't know if the finished product (I'm not the kidn of reviewer who ever gets the finished product!) will be like this or completely in color. Nevertheless the drawings alone are nice and will draw the eye of kids who look at this, and each is labeled.

I ought to note that while Sophie Beer is the illustrator, I am not sure who the author is. Maybe it's all Sophie Beer's work or maybe the author is anonymous. There's no copyright page and I'm not a beer drinker myself (joke!) so it's not clear who exactly wrote this.

Anyway, the book takes us through the day, from getting out of bed, through morning ablutions and enjoying breakfast, to walking to the nursery, the day at the nursery and five pages of things you might see there, to being picked up for the trip back home. The book is short, simple, and sweet, and I can see this being a really useful tool for preparing a child to go to nursery for that first time, and even getting them excited about it and looking forward to their first day. I commend this as a worthy read.

Jackie Chan Adventures by Duane Capizzi, David Slack, Tomás Montalvo-Lagos

Rating: WARTY!

This was a small format graphic novel featuring two stories, "The Mask of El Toro Fuerte" by Capizzi, and "Enter...The Viper" by Slack. The artist in both cases was Tomás Montalvo-Lagos. The artwork wasn't bad, but the stories were really not particularly inventive or interesting, and worse, featured clichéd villains and uninteresting story lines. Why they're Jackie Chan adventures I have no idea because there's no kung-fu involved at all, not even vicariously. They were more like Indiana Jones adventures, but I guess Harrison Ford wasn't interested - either that or they couldn't afford to pay for the use of his name?

I dunno. The adventures were not the great. The first was about a magical lucha libre mask which gave extra strength to the wearer, and the other about some female thief which seems to have borrowed from a Doctor Who episode if I recall, but I really am trying not to! Admittedly these were written for a much younger audience than me, but even so they were pretty limp and despite being a fan of Jackie Chan, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

My Brigadista Year by Katherine Paterson

Rating: WORTHY!

Read charmingly and beautifully by Frankie Corzo, this was a very short audiobook (written by the author of Bridge to Terabithia) that I picked up on a whim at the local library. It turned out to be an inspired whim because I really enjoyed it. It tells an interesting story based on actual Cuban history.

Evidently at Ernesto Guevara's suggestion, Fidel Castro launched the Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización en Cuba, known as a year of education, which occupied almost the entire length of 1961. Literacy brigades (the Brigadistas of the title) were trained and then sent out into the countryside to build schools, train new teachers, and teach the illiterate to read and write. The campaign taught almost three-quarters of a million farmers and their families, and succeeded in raising the national literacy rate from around seventy percent to almost one hundred. There's a short documentary titled Maestra about the campaign, but I have not yet seen that.

This novel tells a fictional story of one such teacher named Lora, a girl in her mid-teens, who lived on a small farm while teaching the family and nearby families the alphabet and reading and writing skills. It was at no small risk to her life, since there was an orchestrated campaign against the literacy project because it was viewed as a political effort to indoctrinate those people, and there were attacks on the Brigadistas, including murders.

The story is told very actively, always moving forward, with little time for reflection, but which is nonetheless included in appropriately brief and organic moments. There is tragedy and joy and humor and moving times, and there were times I laughed out loud at the Brigadista's observations particularly towards the end about her friend's poetry (how many times can you write in the same poem that your heart was broken into a million tiny pieces?!). I commend this novel as a worthy, educational, and fun read.

The Magic Misfits by Neil Patrick Harris

Rating: WARTY!

Neil Patrick Harris is an actor known for Doogie Howser, MD and How I Met Your Mother neither of which show I ever watched. He's also supposedly a magician, but I've never seen him perform. Maybe that latter interest is what made him write this novel aimed at middle-graders, but for me it wasn't very good. Read by the author, it was full of clichéd stereotypes and average writing as well as nonsensical events - that is, they made no sense even within the context of the novel.

The basic plot is about the adventures of a group of misfit kids who have various talents - like one girl is an escape artist and lock picker, and the main kid is a magician. So while I must give kudos to having a handicapped kid as a main character and having prominent, self-motivated female characters (I particularly liked Ridley), the story never rose above its poor to average roots. The villains, for example, including the main kid's uncle (I forget the names of these characters, but make no apology for that - they were very forgettable) were made villainous not through any real villainy, but by having 'greasy hair' or bad breath, or by being overweight. No. I'm sorry, but no.

The story was unrealistic in that there were opportunities for the kids to get the police involved, yet they never did. Obviously in a story like this you want the kids to resolve things without calling in the adult cavalry to the rescue, but if you're going to do that, you need to do the work to make it happen. You can't just lazily have it happen contrary to all logic and sense. For example, the main scheme in this story was this one guy's attempt to steal this huge diamond which for inexplicable reasons was going to be exhibited at this villain's funfair. There he would replace it with a well-crafted fake and Robert's your aunt's husband.

These kids had two golden opportunities to derail this scheme and they ignored both of them. The first came when they broke into the villain's hotel room and discovered the fake diamond. If they had stolen that, right then and there, his scheme would have been thwarted, but they don't even consider it. This tells me they're profoundly stupid.

The guy's bathtub was full of stolen property - wallets and jewelry, etc. They could have called the police on him there, got him arrested, and thereby saved the diamond, but they failed to do so. This tells me they're profoundly stupid. Later, at the show where the switch is to take place, they were all in attendance and could have called out that the guy had surreptitiously switched the diamond since, as budding magicians, they knew exactly how he'd done it. There were police right there, but never once did they utter a word. This tells me they're profoundly stupid.

The main character is an orphan who runs away from his evil uncle, and he knows hardship and hunger, yet later in the story, these misfits douse the main villain in breakfasts - lots of eggs, syrup and pancakes, I don't know where they got this from, (I guess I tuned-out on that part), but the fact that not one of these kids thought of what a waste this was when there were hungry kids who could have eaten it, turned me off the whole story. If they'd used food that was spoiled and tossed out by some restaurant, that would have fixed this issue, but the author was too thoughtless or careless to make that happen, evidently thinking solely of slapstick instead of how real kids in this situation would have thought or felt.

In short it was really poor, amateur writing, and because of this, I can't commend this one. It's also, I have to say, really annoying that celebrities get a free pass with Big Publishing™ for no other reason than that they're celebrities, even though as writers, they suck. Meanwhile there are perfectly good, well-written, original, inventive, novels from unknowns which are routinely rejected by these same publishers. Clearly they aren't interested in good books, only in fast bucks. That's why I will have no truck with Big Publishing™.

Hocus & Pocus by Manuro Gorobei

Rating: WARTY!

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

The subtitle: "The Legend of Grimm's Woods The Comic Book You Can Play" is misleading. Yes, if it's a print copy, then I'm pretty sure you could, and maybe it's entertaining for young kids. Unfortunately, I'm the sort of reviewer who only gets the ebook version to look at, which is fine by me, because I love trees, but you can't do with the ebook what you can presumably do quite readily with the print version, and no one has bothered to create the same effect in the ebook - which is eminently possible these days, so it felt a bit like switch and bait.

It's the old style book where you read a section, make your choice, and based on that choice, you're directed to page this or page that to pursue your course of action. The only twist here seems to be that you have a choice of choices in that if you're playing as Hocus, you choose one option, or as Pocus, you choose the other. In addition to this, the book requires players to use sheets to track and calculate progress and success. These are useless in the ebook, so you technically cannot play the game properly, and since there are only five sheets, you're going to be doing a lot of Xeroxing if you want to play more than five times.

The adventure was a bit uninspiring for me and the colors were a bit too neon for my taste, but again I'm not the intended audience. I went back and forth on this trying to decide how to rate it and in the end, the truth is that all I can do is rate the version I was sent, and I cannot commend buying the ebook version because it's a fail when it comes to trying to do what the book says you can do.

In this case it was not a matter of turning to a page, which would have been relatively easy, but to finding a comic panel - which was a nightmare in an ebook, when a simple link to tap on could have solved that problem. How hard would it have been to have had a small image of Hocus and one of Pocus, so you could tap the relevant image to go to the panel you wanted? Not putting in links is not only lazy, it's downright abusive and so I cannot commend such a book. It would be at best a disappointment for children and at worst, an irritation. It's not a good idea to irritate children! Even in the print version, I can't imagine younger children being able to play the game and I can't imagine older children being very interested in it.

City of Saints &Thieves by Natalie C Anderson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was another audiobook experiment and it's the one I wait for while wading through all the others! The story was really good, very engrossing, and it kept moving. I felt there were bits here and there that dragged, but for the most part it was exceptional. More importantly, it's based on real truths about what happens to people, especially to young woman, in this volatile part of the world.

Pascale Armand's reading of it was flawless and remarkable. It was so good and it definitely contributed to my attachment to and appreciation of the novel.

The story is of young Tina, who runs with the Goondas, a street gang in Sangui, Kenya. Having fled with her mother from the Congo, Tina is an orphan; her mother was shot while working at the home of the wealthy Greyhill family, and Tina just knows Mr Greyhill did it. She's planning on revenge, breaking into his home and exposing him for all the dirt she's convinced he has on him - that is until she's captured in flagrante delicto by Greyhill's young son, and held prisoner. But why doesn't the just turn her in?

Being pressured on one side by her gang leader to come up with the goods - the secrets to where Greyhill's wealth is hoarded - and by her captor on the other, who is equally convinced his father is innocent, these two young people forge an uneasy alliance and develop a plan to determine the truth no matter what it is, but that involves traveling on a banana lorry right back into the Congo where it all began.

I loved this story, and I recommend it highly.