Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older

Rating: WARTY!

This is your trope story of your innocent kid finding she has superpowers. The problem is that by fully a third the way through this novel, I had no idea whatsoever what her superpower was. None! At all! That was strike one. The story has the tired cliché of her being delivered to 'enlightenment' by some new guy she meets - because you know that no girl can do a damned thing on her own. That was strike two. Worse, it seemed to be going nowhere, and taking its own sweet time even about doing that, so that was strike three, and I ditched it at a third in, and moved onto something more interesting.

The main character is Sierra Santiago, a young artist (who never actually does any art) who is tasked by her grandfather with updating a fading mural painting which evidently offers some sort of protection (I guess) against some sort of a threat (I imagine), which begs the question: why didn't grandaddy get off his lazy ass and fix things in his younger years? This story is written way younger than the characters in it!

Anyway, Sierra meets the new guy in school of course, who is also an artist (who never does anything other than token art), of course, and who will be her validator. Before he even deigns to lift a finger to help her, she's accosted by a reanimated corpse (although she doesn't know it at the time) demanding answers to a question she doesn't even understand. The ridiculous name they give to the corpse is 'corpuscle' which doesn't work (neither does the name John Wick which also turned me off this story). Even then this guy Sierra befriends is really tight with information like he wants her to struggle. Some friend.

There was diversity in this story, but I don't think reviewers at this point should be giving credit to stories for being inclusionary and presenting a diverse array of characters! That should be the norm - the baseline, so I don't give extra credit for that.

The story seemed to be going around in vacuous circles and sure didn't want to tell me anything, so I said the hell with it. You want to keep the story to yourself, why even publish the freaking novel in the first place?! I can't commend this at all.

Atom Land by Jon Butterworth

Rating: WARTY!

I usually like to favorably review science books that I read, because I usually enjoy them and I learn something. Once in a while my instincts fail me and I end up with a book that didn't do the trick. This, I am sorry to report, was one such book.

Now you can try to make a case, if you wish for books about physics and in particular about sub-atomic physics (see what I did there: sub-atomic - particular?!) to be poor choices for listening to in audiobook form, while commuting, but I disagree. I've enjoyed a variety of non-fiction books, including some pretty heavy (for a layman) science books, and not felt like I've missed anything critical. I can't say the same for this book, which I felt took the wrong approach - or maybe it wasn't so bad an approach, but it was definitely one with which the author became far too enamored, for I felt that his attachment to the metaphor he'd chosen, took the book slowly downhill and made the concepts a lot denser than they needed to be.

On top of that, there are things in books that don't translate well to audiobooks - especially things in science books. I don't want to be read a formula that I can't see, nor do I need a fraction to be quoted to a dozen or more decimal places with a host of tedious zeroes, much less several in siuccession. It's just annoying.

The approach this author used was the metaphor of the world of the atom, with boats sailing from ports to other ports in the various lands on this world, and journeys by air or overland to various places within each territory. I can see why such a metaphor might appear to make sense to a writer, but just because it made sense to this author doesn't necessarily mean it will appeal to everyone or make it any more intelligible. To me, it did not. It just confused things, especially since the author himself was evidently confused, and had to backtrack more than once. That to me is poor writing, or it's poor planning or it's a sign your over-arching concept is failing you.

Some of the land names were a stretch, too - I mean Bosonia? Really? And one extended piece about the airport not being close to the city for these three particular locations, and the tedious endless descriptions of people who may arrive at one airport but be traveling to a different city were obnoxious. They really were.

I think that's about the point where I decided I had had enough. I made it about three-quarters the way through this, which was more than it deserved because I got a lot less than three-quarters of the content of the book, but in the end I'd firmly decided that I really did not want to visit this land, much less travel extensively in it. The thing is that I already have a decent layman's grasp of the ideas here, so if they made little to no sense to me, or bored me even as they made sense, then I fear they're certainly not going to reach anyone who is a complete newbie to this world. On that basis I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang

Rating: WARTY!

This was a mess, and not even a hot one. It was so boring that I twice tried to get into it and failed in short order both times, ending up DNF-ing it. There was nothing to hold onto, nothing drawing me in, nothing that that stirred my interest. I resent that I paid for this. I think I'm going to flat-out quit reading any story from now on that features twins.

The very short novel, which I encountered in audiobook form read by the sadly unengaging Nancy Wu, is supposedly about Mokoya and Akeha. The former has a gift of prophecy, the latter an ability to see motivations in people, but in the portion I could stand to listen to, they never really used these gifts to much effect. It seems they were involved not in a story but in a succession of cameos fighting fantastical monsters, and then boring would happen for a while, until the next monster presented itself for extermination. The story was rambling and tedious, and once I realized it really wasn't going anywhere, I had no interest in continuing with it. I can't commend it based on what I heard.

The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman

Rating: WORTHY!

Subtitled "Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul" this audiobook goes into some detail - often quite nauseating and gruesome, be warned, but at other times highly amusing, and then at others downright depressing to think people were once so ill-educated and poorly informed. It's read admirably well, given the subject matter, by Susie Berneis.

The sad, but in hindsight and with historical distance, amusing thing about the nobility of yesteryear, is that even as they had people to taste their food to catch would-be poisoners, these idiots were in fact slowly poisoning themselves by employing dumb-ass makeup containing lead and arsenic, and adding things to their diet for medicinal purposes, which were also actually poisons.

Herman's well-written book travels through history from ancient times to modern, reporting on various historical personalities, dignitaries, and royalty who had encounters with one poison or another in one way or another, from belladonna to plutonium, some of which survived, others who succumbed slowly or rapidly. This author has done her research, and it shows without being tedious.

The book is fascinating and very educational, especially if you're thinking of writing your own historical novel involving someone's untimely demise! Which I am not, but you might be! I highly commend this book as a worthy read.

The Artful Read-Aloud by Rebecca Bellingham

Rating: WARTY!

This was a non-fiction abridged audiobook about the importance of reading aloud to children to engage them in the written word and enrich their lives. That's a sentiment I am fully onboard with, but it felt to me like this was written more for teachers than for parents and there's an awful lot of PhD-Speak in it. I don't believe it's going to reach those parents who would most need it and most benefit from it. I made it to about the halfway point and gave up on it because of this and other issues.

It started out well-enough, but there were so many lists in it - in just the 50% I listened to - that it was hard to keep track and there was no ready 'take-home' message from any of it. The blurb talks about ten principles, but there were scores of them in the lists. I have no idea what the specific ten principles were because everything was so mixed up and repetitive that it just confused things - and in an audiobook, you cannot readily go back and re-read a paragraph or find the particular spot to re-reference something you heard earlier with any facility.

The other problem, especially given that this was an audio-book is that the reader, who was also the writer, did not offer any real examples of what she meant in the text. She would refer to some technique or to something in a book that would make you want to stop and talk about it, or that would make you want to read it in a special way to better engage listeners, and then she would not read an example to illustrate what she meant. This was an abridged version, so maybe the full version offers that. I don't know. All this version offered was a website to visit where presumably, you could hear examples, which is frankly an annoyance, especially since you cannot get to that without logging in, which requires your email address, so no! I am not giving my email address out so it can be handed around so I can get more spam than I already do! And not when that stuff ought to have come with the book.

There was one amusing contradiction in it when, after a chapter bemoaning how children these days never look around them, because they're always looking down at their device, the very next chapter started with a chapter quote about the importance of looking down - which contradicted what the author had said previously! LOL! I am not a fan of chapter lead-in quotes. They're pretentious and meaningless to anyone but the author, and typically they have zip to do with the content of the chapter they precede. Additionally, though the author kept mentioning older students, she seemed like her focus was primarily on very young children, and on fiction - she never mentioned the possibility of applying this technique to non-fiction works. Not in that first 50% anyways.

Though the book claims it's speaking to all parents and guardians of children as well as teachers, to me it felt strongly like it was only speaking to professionals as judged by the educational buzzwords being tossed around, and the academic-level speech and concepts being used. For example, the author frequently referred to an alphabetical scale by which books - and I assume book reading difficulty/ease - are measured. She kept talking about things like "the O, P, Q band" and so on, using one or another triplet of sequential alphabet letters, but nowhere was there any explanation whatsoever as to what that was, what it meant or how to use it!

With my wife's solid support, I've raised two children and put them through school and never once have I encountered this scale. This is what I mean by PhD-speak and why I feel the book is aimed at professionals with little regard for your everyday parent or guardian out there. It would not have hurt to explain what that scale meant, but the author kept on referring to it without evidencing any desire to explain it at all. Maybe in the unabridged version this is explained, but that doesn't help here, and it's a lousy way to treat your reader.

Another issue regarding elitism was that there are authors mentioned here and there as worth paying attention to (without really giving us a reason why or a short example of their work to judge by), but I hadn't heard of a single one of them! I do not count myself as any sort of great authority on children's fiction by any means, but I am very widely-read across all genres and age ranges, yet not one of the names she mentioned was familiar to me at all.

Worse, she mentioned a Newbery award winner, which turned me right off. I have no respect for 'award-winning books' which to me are almost (not quite, but almost) universally trite, pedantic, and tedious to read. There wasn't a single well-known or widely popular author on her reading list apparently, and when she spoke of someone I had never heard of as an "acclaimed" author, I had to wonder momentarily what it was that made that author so acclaimed? Was it just that this author happened to like her? Was it that this author had read her name a few times? Or was there something more? I dunno, but it tried my faith in her examples and her assertions to have things like that put out there unsupported.

The author made a lot of references to the performing arts and there are authentic parallels to be drawn between those, and the act of reading aloud to engage a child's mind, but I'm not a theater-goer and I detest musicals, yet these were the only things the author referenced, as though other such forms: TV, movies, streaming services, YouTube, for example, are beneath her. It felt snobbish and elitist. I suspect most of the people who would truly stand to benefit from this book are not theater-goers either, so this felt, ironically, like it was falling on inattentive ears.

So while I whole-heartedly support the idea of reading to children in your care, even if you do not embrace any of the suggestions this book offers (it's still better than not reading!), personally, I found this book to be of little helpful in any signifcant measure. Instead, to me it felt rushed, confusing, and babbling, which is precisely the opposite of what you need to be if you wish to artfully read aloud to children. Consequently, I can't commend this.

Rise of the Sparrows by Sarina Langer

Rating: WARTY!

Read indifferently by Leanne Yau, this audiobook started out quite engagingly, but proved to be such a plodding story after reading a little further into it that I DNF'd it after chapter 25, which was about halfway through. I had thought I'd make it to the end and give it a positive review, but the problem was that the story was slow, and main character Rachel's constant and repetitive dissection of events became thoroughly tedious and irritating in short order. I really began to dislike her and the inevitable an unoriginal male interest, named ridiculously, Kale. The predictability of the story on top of Rachel's stupidity was a big negative for me, too.

Set in a fantasy medieval world where there are X-men...um mutant children...who have unlikely powers, such as the usual sketchy ability to see the future, fire coming from someone's hands, and so on, was not something I would reject the novel out of hand for, but how an author handles these things is important and clearly this author had no intention of offering any sort of an explanation for the powers. Additionally, the disgust and rejection of such mutant children by the villagers was predictable, but a likely consequence, especially back in such superstitious times.

The problem here was that the complete lack of anyone who might have been even slightly sympathetic was far too much of an extreme, but it's what authors predictably do in such stories and it's inauthentic. I mean there were so many of these 'mutant' children that it was hard to believe they were so universally rejected. It's like everyone is the same and there are no gray areas, and I'm so tired of that trope - and of authors who are so lacking in imagination that they cannot make it a bit more realistic.

Talking of which, I had to wonder who these stories were aimed at because it read like middle grade, Rachael being barely high-school age, and Cephy, the younger mutant she took up with, about ten years old, yet the story was discussing torture and rape and so on, as though this were a young adult or new adult novel. Anyway, the plot has it that the two girls are not welcome in the city because of Cephy's wanton destruction of her entire family in a burning incident when she got pissed off, and form which semes seems to ahve suffered no negative consequences whatseover. So they escape into the nearby forest, pursued by the White Guard, sent by King Eric and these guys are so caricatured that they could be cartoon characters. Cephy also burns those dudes to a crisp.

They're taken in by a witch who seems welcoming, but who you know from the start has her own agenda and it's not favorable to the kids. Unaccountably this witch hands them over to 'heroic guy' Kale for no apparent reason, and this is supposedly the good guy, yet he creeps around scaring Rachael without any rationale for his behavior at all. He's the trope creepy love interest who is always there as though he's stalking Rachael, yet while she agonizes over every possible threat to her and Cephy, she never once thinks there's anything wrong with his behavior. Go figure.

One major problem with Rachael is that she has supposedly lived on the streets of the city for most of her years, yet she seems dumb as a brick at times with no street smarts whatsoever, and her so-called visions of the future are the usual clichéd half-assed vague 'seeings' that really tell her nothing useful at all and are essentially no better than a hunch. She claims at one point not to rely on them, and at another how reliable they are so again, go figure!

I realize of course I'm not of the youthful age range this story is aimed at (whatever that is), but for my own perspective, I had no interest in finishing this, let alone reading a whole series of this nature, so I cannot commend it based on my experience of it. The acronym for the title is RotS, and that's how it went for me I'm sorry to report.

Blow the Bloody Doors off by Michael Caine

Rating: WORTHY!

Michael Caine's autobiography is read by himself in the audiobook version and it was interesting, informative, and laugh-out-loud funny on occasion. I confess some slight disappointment that he doesn't talk more about the making of the various films he's been in. He does talk a lot about them, but his approach every time seems to be to focus on the elements which would help aspiring actors: offering tidbits and advice, and lessons he's learned, which is great, but I felt like he wasn't really talking to me, somehow.

I don't regret buying the book though - it's well worth listening to if you like him as an actor or are interested in the movie business. He covers his life from birth through youth to his first interest in the movies and thence onto his career: how there was a struggle and then how it took off once he'd made two relatively early and successful movies where he had major roles, such as Zulu in 1964 and Alfie two years later. This brought him to international recognition, and got him a lot more choice roles, and brought him into the world of movie superstars with all the attendant pleasures and problems.

Throughout the book the author remains grounded, good humored, and informative. He has no illusions about the movie business and tells it like it is - the good parts and the bad parts. He offers a lot of information and advice, and jumps from one move to another to make a point or illustrate an aspect of his life or his career. I'd have liked a lot more depth and breadth in his discussions of the movies, but I did appreciate what was offered. I enjoyed this book very much and commend it as a worthy read.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Rating: WARTY!

This was another depressing attempt at approaching one of the classics. I feel bad that Erin Bateman had to read this 800 page disaster - or however many pages it was in her edition. No, on second thought, I don't, because she really didn't read it well. Her voice and tone were so wrong for this, and at times it was irritating to listen to her. But even that would have been manageable if the novel were not so endlessly tedious, and rambling, and uninteresting in the extreme. And so completely illogical.

I guess 'show, don't tell' wasn't a thing back in Henry's time, because he tells everything in extraordinarily mind-numbing detail. His main character, Isabel Archer, is, we're told, a smart, adventurous, engaging young woman, but what we're shown is a dull, clueless, and uninteresting woman. To me, it's a mystery - other than that she's 'hot' I guess - why any sane man would want a relationship with her, but it seems that everyone wants to marry her, while she on the other hand doesn't, we're told, want to marry anyone, because she wants to stretch her wings. Apparently marriage prevents this even for someone welre told is strong-willed and adventurous. But apparently lacking in imagination.

The problem is that she has no money for travel, and as soon as she does have money - through an inheritance - she marries the worst guy she can find. Despite turning down devoted and eligible men who would have been good for her and who proposed when she had nothing, because she wished to retain her freedom, we're told she jumps into a marriage on imprudently short notice with the worst guy there is. This story is a piece of garbage.

Before We Disappear by Shaun David Hutchinson

Rating: WARTY!

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

Be warned that this is going to be a more rambling review than usual because there are several aspects of this story that I need to address. Anyone who's read any of my 'non-reviews' will know that I have little respect for book descriptions which are trite, uninventive, and always playing to the lowest common denominator. More on this anon. In short though, they're written for idiots, frequently by someone who evidently has never even read the novel they're 'describing'. The blurbs are often dishonest and as I point out regularly, they have certain key words and phrases that ought to warn you away from the book that's being described.

So I have only myself to blame for the fact that I ignored my own advice with this book and I consequently paid the price of wasting my time on a novel that I should have turned my back on the instant that I read the description. The thing is that I was intrigued by what seemed like it might be a good LGBTQIA story - and set at the turn of last century, no less. It sounded too good to be true and it was.

I need to preface this by detouring slightly into talking about audiobooks and how you can have your phone read you an ebook as though it's an audiobook. I can't speak for Android phones, but for iPhones there's a technology called 'voice over' which is an assisted-use system that reads your screen to you, indicating buttons and other stuff on the screen. In order to make this work, you need to open your ebook to the place you want to begin reading, and ask Siri to turn on Voice Over. For those who don't already know, I'd like to share with you that Siri is ADHD, so it may take more than one request to get her to start it, and more than two requests to get her to stop, but once voice over is in play, simply tap on the first sentence you want to be read, then slide two fingers lightly down the screen from there to the bottom of the screen, and Voice Over will read your ebook to you!

Note that this is far from perfect. The voice is unnatural which is why I call it Robot Reader, and it's subject to disruption if the text contains images or has gaps in it (as Kindle frequently does, which is yet one more reason to avoid all things Amazon like the plague. But overall, it works pretty good, and I get through a lot of books this way. It's also amusing listening Robot Reader's quirky pronunciations, so there is some entertainment value from that, too.

I honestly do not understand why the big ebook publishers do not employ this. Google has similar technology. They could adapt it easily to read your ebooks to you - or to your kids. Apple has it. Kobo books could quite readily get their hands on it, as could Barnes and Noble. B&N has had their ass kicked to the curb by the despicable Amazon, so why they aren't fighting tooth and nail to get every edge they can, I do not know. I guess their management is simply incompetent.

All this to explain why I was impressed by Net Galley's audiobook technology employed on this novel. While far from perfect, this was the best yet, and it really has great potential. It was a synthesized voice, but it sounded real - not at all like my adorable Robot Reader. There were flaws. The voice sounded quite flat; it was lacking inflection and 'life' for want of a better term, but it read quite competently and sounded reasonably normal.

My issues with it were that the voice was completely wrong for the novel, which was supposedly being told in first person by not one, but two people who were in their teens. The Net Galley synthesized voice didn't remotely sound like a teenage boy. Obviously if they can synthesize the voice, they can synthesize a sixteen-year-old voice. Why they didn't I don't know. This made the novel rather tedious to listen to at times, but that's not all on the synthesizing. I'd love to get my crazed, inventive hands on this technology, rest assured!

As usual, the biggest problem was the novel itself. It was not at all well-written, and it was slow-moving and uninspiring. Plus, listening to it as an audiobook while driving is not the best way to take in this book. When I'm driving, my attention is of course on the driving, where it should be. This is especially true if it's a problematic drive, so the book loses my attention even if it's an interesting one. This book wasn't.

I pay more attention to a story in the early morning when the roads are largely empty, than when I'm driving home during rush hour, so I missed portions of this, which isn't typically a problem, but in this case it lead to serious confusion because I didn't realize to begin with, that this was dual-first-person voice (DFPV). It is. And the switch between characters went undetected.

The thing is that when you do a DFPV, you have to identify at the start of the chapter who is speaking. The problem was exacerbated in this novel because the author pretentiously put the location and the date at the start of the chapter like it was some big important announcement. My eyes (or in this case, my ears) skate right over that crap because typically it's just annoying, irrfelevant, and so self-importantly pretentious in an already overly self-important first person story that it leaves me cold.

Normally, 1PoV is quite irritating enough, and it's exponentially worse when it's squared. DFPV is merely the author's cute way of admitting that they made a serious mistake in choosing first person voice to begin with. Typically, it's a grave mistake because it limits your story and your options; it makes the main character insufferably self-centered, and the voice is unnatural. No one but an imbecile narrates their own life as it's happening. No one but an eidetic can recall conversations and actions verbatim, and eidetics have their own raft of issues to deal with.

1PoV constantly tosses me right out of suspension of disbelief because it's so inauthentic and annoying: hey lookit me! This is what I'm doing now! Pay attention to meeee! Barf! It's worse when the author admits they screwed-up by having to add a second 1PoV or resort to third person for portions of the novel. It's laughable and I avoid these stories whenever I can. In this case I had no warning that it was first person or I would never have even started reading it. Such books should carry a warning like cigarette packs do. I actually did that on a parody novel I wrote!

So, let's look at the novel itself. The first warning ought to have been the title, which is a bit pretentious but not godawful. The next indication that this was to be fled from was the use of the words 'star-crossed' in the description. That's like a bio-hazard warning to me, and in this case, it's bullshit, but like an idiot, I ignored it. The second warning was that one of the main characters is called 'Jack' - the most tediously over-used go-to name in literary history for an action character. It shows a complete and utter lack of imagination on the part of the author, but like a dimwit, I ignored that because this wasn't an action adventure novel. More fool me!

The story is of two rival illusionists, one whom goes by the name of 'The Enchantress' for whom Jack Nevin works. He's a skilled thief, and he steals the secrets of other magicians and illusionists, which The Enchantress then incorporates into her own act. It's how she's stayed on top for so long. Her rival is Laszlo, who also has an assistant for whom Jack falls. That's the LGBTQIA part of the novel, but it played such a non-existent part in the story to the point where I could stand to hear no more of this (25% in) that the book may as well have been a cis novel.

Naturally you can't publish a novel in the USA unless it takes place in the US or at least has one important American in it. It's against the constitution, you know? Who cares about the rest of the world? As Donald Trump says, it's entirely unimportant. The US is the only nation worth considering or writing about. So despite starting out in Paris, the City of love, the novel quickly comes running home to mamma. Barf.

I honestly wish US authors had far more courage than they do. And were more inventive and original; especially YA authors. I would have loved for it to stay in Paris, but it ain't gonna happen. Not from an American author. At least not often. You can argue: well, they're only writing what people will buy, but is that really the truth? And is that really what should motivate us? Do authors have to bow down to the LCD that I mentioned earlier, tugging forelocks and kowtowing, or ought they instead to be leading their readership to greener, fresher pastures? If the readers are really such sheep, why not?!

So when things go south, The Enchantress and her crew head to Seattle. Why there, I have no idea, except that was an exposition going on, I guess so they thought they could score big there. Or is it just that this is where the author lives?! Anyway, that's when they run into Laszlo and his crew, and when Jack first gets to meet his love, who sadly isn't named Jill - or any masculine variant thereof! Jilhelm?

The thing about Lazslo is that his assistant, Wilhelm, really can do magic and Jack is at a loss to explain how it's done, thinking it's just another illusion. Wilhelm is a sort of BDSM slave to Lazslo, and not in any decent or fun way. He's outright abused. Frankly this part of the story turned me right off, and that, along with the tedium of the plodding pace, I lost all interest. I simply could not stand to listen to any more, so I DNF'd it. Life is far too short to spend it on stories that don't do it for ya. I can't commend this based on the portion I listened to, and for the reasons I've detailed above.

Tesla Wizard by Mark J Seifer

Rating: WARTY!

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

From what little serious and accurate information I could gather online, Mark Seifer is an apparently self-promoting, ex-teacher of parapsychology. This immediately put me on my guard, because parapsychology is an out-and-out bullshit fringe field which has been exposed and debunked repeatedly. It has zero solid scientific evidence to support it, but this author brought in everyone, including the evidently deluded Andrija Puharich, and the laughable and discredited Uri Geller, and treated them all as though they were reality-based, instead of debunked and exposed as they are. That was when I quit reading this rambling, dissipated, haphazardly tangential, and misleading attempt at a biography.

The audiobook was read decently by actor Simon Vance who, but even he can't make up for the gullible and naïve material used here. This book is a joke; it's garbage. Do not waste your money.

Thinking Better by Marcus Du Sautoy

Rating: WARTY!

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

Okay! On to some reviews of books, as opposed to idiotic book descriptions. Described as "The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life" I have to say up front that I was disappointed in this book. Maybe it’s just me, but there really didn’t seem to be anything here that I could use in my life, and worse than that, I didn't see much benefit in modern everyday life to be derived from the shortcuts that were discussed here. Some of the math and how it was arrived at historically was interesting, but it also felt rather repetitive after a while, and it was largely historical.

I am not a big fan of book descriptions which can be misleading at best, so I was amused by the one for this, which claims that the book is "above all practical." The description also said, "Du Sautoy explores ... whether you must really practice for ten thousand hours to become a concert violinist, and why shortcuts give us an advantage over even the most powerful AI." With regard to the violin: the people who did that study were annoyed when people started claiming they had discovered that it takes 10,000 hours to become a virtuoso. They said it misrepresented what they reported. The bottom-line is that are no shortcuts to becoming a maestro or a maestra.

The fact is that you do need to practice long and hard, and there's no way around that. Not that I plan on taking up the violin (or the cello, which is what was discussed here), but I resented that the book description suggested otherwise about shortcuts. The only shortcuts offered here were of the lesser variety - in that you can play a note in more than one way on a stringed instrument, so adjusting fingering can enable you to play a difficult piece more easily - but in order to realize that you still have to learn to play the piece competently - which is what takes the time! So this was misleading at best.

The part about "why shortcuts give us an advantage over even the most powerful AI" is equally misleading. AIs are not as bad as this indicates. Yes, they can make mistakes, but they can also find shortcuts humans failed to see, and they're getting better all the time. Humans really aren’t!

Based on the fact that this book really failed to deliver on the implied promise - that we can make use of math to inform us of beneficial shortcuts in our lives, I felt it failed. The book delivered on stories of how shortcuts have been found using math in the past, and even led to great discoveries, but none of this really had a whole heck of a lot to do with your average person's everyday life, and the book failed to offer anything I could see that would benefit me in my life. So while the math was interesting in places and some of the historical paths to discovery were educational, I felt the book fell short of its implied promise and I cannot commend it.

Vulnerable AF by Tarriona Ball

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Written and read by Tarriona "Tank" Ball, this book of hard hitting poetry tells a very personal story of relationships and the attendant hurt, and I enjoyed it a lot. It's very short - only about 40 minutes in audiobook form. The author is talented, with a strong poetic voice and a good reading voice, and her choices of words and phrasing are lively and challenging.

The actual audiobook apparently comes with PDFs of the illustrations from the print book, but my review copy had no such augmentation, so I can't speak to those. The subject matter is relationships, so the 'vulnerable' in the title has a very limited meaning. No prizes for guessing what the 'AF' means! The poet behind this has a slam poetry kinf of a background - not my faovrite, but this isnlt quite that. Some of the couplets might seem a bit off here and there, but you cannot deny the depth of feeling that underlies this. amd the relationship resonance that powers it.

Having said that, I had two issues with the audiobook version that I should mention. The first is that the author, who read this herself (for which I commend her), would often launch into a poem strong and loud, only to tail off into a whisper at the end, so this was an issue in that you'd have to have the volume up to hear the end, but then the start of the next poem was too loud and brassy, or you'd have the start at a comfortable volume only to miss the ending because it was so sotto voce. I listen to audiobooks when driving, and this book is not suited to that at all because of the volume changes, but even when parked I was still uncomfortable with the significant changes in volume.

The other issue I had was with the piano accompaniment, which to me was an annoyance. The author's voice is a fine one and it felt like gilding the lily to add a rather monotonous piano accompaniment to it. I'd rather it was just me and the author. I'm a big advocate of an author reading their own work although I understand that there are often valid reasons why an author will not or cannot do this. It seemed a shame to me, therefore, that I went into this with a joyous 'play Ball!' in my mind only to have my expectations sometimes overshadowed or diminished by the rather tuneless piano playing.

But that could not hide the inherent power, inventiveness, and strength of these words, which is why I consider this a worthy read despite the distractions. I commend it fully. Tank Ball is a poet to watch - and to listen to!

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Rating: WORTHY!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though it was rather on the long side and a bit rambling, but it's a topic I enjoy greatly, and an author I love. On top of this, it was read beautifully by Sean Runnette. I'm a big advocate of an author reading their own material, but I understand that there are good reasons why many authors do not. Though this reader isn't Dutch, listening to him reading it so well, it was one of those occasions where, with a slight stretch of the imagination, you can fool yourself into thinking that this is how the author would have read it.

The book rambles a bit and might be somewhat stodgy and overly academic for some, but it was precisely what I was expecting and I had no unpleasant surprises, only a lot of satisfying ones. There were scores of examples of animals' intelligence, with many interesting anecdotes and lots of descriptions of scientific studies which went into enough detail to explain why it was a scientific study and what result it showed, but without belaboring it. The studies have covered all kinds of animals from mollusks to monkeys, birds to apes, fish to elephants, and a variety of others.

The book explains how these studies differ and what they show, and how one study can or cannot be made to work with another species for an assortment of reasons. While it was thorough, I was never bored, and felt no need to skip a page or two. We learn how studies have changed along with our view of society and why older views as to the limitations of animal cognition are invalid, so it's as much a measure of change in human cognition as it is in measuring animal cognition, which is quite intriguing.

I whole-heartedly commend this as a worthy read.

Alpha Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is one of the most original, entertaining, and amusing stories I've not read in a long time. By that I mean it was an audiobook, so I didn't even have to read it - I just sat back and listened - and laughed my ass off. There were some minor issues with it, but nothing to take away from the brilliance of the story and the hectic way it was told.

On top of this, the reader, Laci Powers, was awesome in the role and really put soul into the story and life into Cookie, the main charcter. I'm not a series fan, but I did secure the sequel to this before I even finished the first volume which is highly unusual for me. I remain nervous about sequels, and rightly so, because I did not enjoy the sequel at all. I'll review that next.

Be warned that this first volume pulls no punches, and is as explicit with language as it is with sex talk, which is to say there's a lot! That was one of the most amusing parts for me: to hear the naïve and softly-spoken Cookie talking so frankly and cussing like a sailor as she became liberated from her servitude, but this may bother other readers. I enjoyed her liberation, and I think it was made all the more amusing by Laci Powers's take on the character, too. The subtle snipes the author frequently took at male chauvinism and the genderist world order were wonderful.

Cookie Rifkin is a life-like AI robot designed to emulate a woman and to be servile and submissive to men, specifically her husband Norman. She's a gynoid if you will, but in the books they're referred to as womanoids. The thing is that, in New Stepford (get the reference?!), there are no human women, just human men. There are no children either. None of the womanoids think this is odd, that is until Cookie starts a book club with four other womanoids (Chrissy, Isabel, Paula, and Rita, all of whom have their own stories to tell), meets Wayne, finds her freedom, and becomes a startling rebel. Frankly, I think the story would have been even more powerful without Wayne. To me he was an annoyance, but this is what we have here.

The story begins innocently enough in a small homage to The Stepford Wives (and note to some ignorant reviewers: that was a novel from the same author who wrote Rosemary's Baby long before it was ever a movie!) where Cookie is wakened - and eventually woke - by the bed shaking and realizes that her husband is masturbating. This inexplicable and unexpected event in Cookie's life is what sets her off on her trail of discovery and eventual insurgency.

After meeting Wayne, Cookie encounters Maggie, who appears to be some sort of slacker police officer, but the more Cookie learns, the more she realizes that not everything in New Stepford is as it seems at first sight, and her encounters with Wayne and Maggie are not accidental. There is much more going on here, and over time, Cookie and her friends learn what real networking is, and they're not so much going to eat the forbidden fruit as overturn the entire apple cart. But it's not going to be a smooth ride by any means.

As far as problems are concerned, I said they were minor. There are times when Cookie's 'functionality' is described in ways that make her seem fully human, and at other times makes her seem very robotic, so this to me was a paradox; like for example she seems to eat and drink and breathe although she seems not to need to do any of that. The author never really went into any of the details of how she worked which was fine to begin with, but later, when Cookie learns how to upgrade herself, she seems much more robotic than she did when the story began, so it felt a bit like the rules of the world were changing, and this was a bit confusing, but it wasn't enough of a problem to detract from the story for me.

Also the upgrading is a bit problematic in another way. I don't want to give away spoilers, but in a way it's reminiscent of a time travel story where something goes wrong in the past and it would seem perfectly simple to just go back before that time and nip the problem in the bud, but the author makes up some arbitrary rule why that's not possible and it spoils the story for me. In the same way in this story (which involves no time-travel let me be clear!) Cookie's upgrades seem endless, but when she could have used a relatively minor upgrade to get her out of a tricky situation, she seems not to think of doing the very thing that could solve her problem. This rather demeans Cookie's agency and her inventiveness.

It made for a bit of a deus ex machina situation at some points and a 'Cookie has to be dumb not to think of that' at others, with problems being very easily solved at times, whereas at other times, they seemed insoluble by using the same convenient means. It was a bit inconsistent. I was enjoying the story enough that I let that slide, but this may bother some readers. Additionally, there is no real LGBTQIA angle to this story. There's a tease here and there, like the author is intrigued by Sapphic stories, but is too afraid to explore one for herself; so this is essentially hetero all the way

Overall though, I highly commend this story as beautifully done, entertaining, amusing, and even educational. I'm just sorry the sequel was a different thing altogether.

Fever, Feuds, and Diamonds by Paul Farmer

Rating: WORTHY!

Read decently by Pete Cross, this audiobook was short, to the point, and highly informative. Farmer talks about the 2014 epidemic of Ebola that assaulted Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, but the roots of the problems reach far back beyond that into almost ancient history - that of the exploitation of Africa beginning with a conference in 1884 that resulted in some 90% of America being "owned" by European powers by the turn of the twentieth century. Slavery may well have been considered over by then, but in effect it really wasn't. The location of it was merely switched back to Africa instead of remaining visible in Europe and the Americas.

Farmer does an excellent job of digging beneath the scary news headlines of the ravages of various diseases on the African continent, particularly Ebola, the most nightmarish of them all, but he never loses sight of the victims of this horrific outbreak, or of what truly caused it to be so devastating. As the book description says, he rebuts "misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly" and "he traces West Africa’s chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice.

Books like this one ought to be required reading (or in this case, listening!), especially in times like these when a world-wide and equally scary pandemic is affecting everyone, everywhere, from all walks of life and socio-econiomic backgrounds. You will never view African epidemics in the same way again. I commend it.

Map of Shadows by JF Penn

Rating: WARTY!

In this, the first book of the Mapwalkers Series, Sienna Farren inherits her grandfather's map shop when he's murdered. Yes, this is the tedious trope "You're a wizard, Harry" kind of story, where a kid is raised in complete ignorance of their supernatural power. Nonetheless, it seemed like it might be a worthy read, but I was quickly disabused of that quaint notion.

Despite it being crystally-clear from the off who the villain is here, no one, least of all Sienna, who of course is a special snowflake with legendary powers, can see it. Wouldn't it be nice if once, the one with the special powers is actually smart and perceptive? No such luck here.

Sienna learns that she can 'map walk' - that is, can go to places in time and space using maps - and her "specialness" is that she can even do it based on nothing more than a map in her head. The villains are people who use the skins of other map-walkers to draw their own special maps and of course there's a 'shadowland' that they want to open the borders to - and of course Sienna is the only one who can stop them.

Despite having zero training or even any clue what she's doing, Sienna exhibits heroic powers from the off, and despite landing in the HQ of the villains, wherein several vital skin maps are hung on the walls, neither Sienna nor her companion - an experienced map walker - think for a split second of destroying or of taking these maps, to limit the powers and abilities of their enemy.

It's a no-brainer, but these two girls evidently have no brains. It made me want to quit reading the story there. While I don't mind a good story about someone who starts out dumb and wises up, I really don't appreciate stories by female authors about dumb women who start out dumb and bask in it throughout the story, consistently making bad decisions that even a moderately intelligent person in real life would avoid like the plague.

The story seems to revel in how gory and stomach-churning it could be, and that along with the fact that it really had no saving graces, and was larded with trope characters exhibiting predictably idiotic behaviors forced me to DNF this after maybe a third of it. I can't commend it based on what I could stand to listen to.

Thief Trap by Jonathan Moeller

Rating: WARTY!

The idiot librarians at Goodreads, who are useless in my experience, have this author listed under two names - one of which is Jonatha Moeller! Not that I hang out at Amazon-owned Goodreads, but I noticed this when I was looking the author up online for this review!

The novel is book one in the "Cloak Games" series - not that the book cover will tell you this. Having the cover say it's a 'Cloak Games' story is not the same thing as saying it's a prologue to a series, which all volume ones are. I don't do prologues or epilogues. The prologue is chapter one, the epilogue is your last chapter and should be numbered as such. Deal with it, authors! That said, at least this volume did not leave you hanging off a cliff at the end, and it did tell a story, so there's that. But I have to wonder at the series name: is 'cloak games' meant to try to siphon cachet from The Hunger Games?! I don't get what it even means otherwise. But it's nothing remotely to do with any Hunger Games scenario.

This was an audio book read by Meghan Kelly (not to be confused with Megyn Kelly) and there was something about her voice that didn't work for me. It didn't seem to ring true for the character for one thing. I'm not sure if that was the whole thing, or if it was just her tone or what, but I failed to be completely at ease with her reading of this book. The voice constantly took me out of suspension of disbelief.

That's only one problem though. The biggest problem was not the reader but the writer. Also, that front cover illustration? What was that? I go by a book's description and pay little to no attention to covers, but once I had this I noticed that this particular cover is so inappropriate, I have to say something about it. Normally this is not on the author because they typically have nothing to do with covers unless they're self-publishing, but this novel came through Amazon's Create Space, so it is self-published. But note that there was nothing on that cover that had anything at all to do with the main character or this story!

There is an alternate cover which also has little to do with the main character's actual abilities, but at least that one isn't a picture of a woman's torso - ignore her brain because female brains are clearly unimportant - and this woman has a leather skirt that's hardly more than a belt, and she's pulling a - what is that: a light saber from a sheath? No. This character does not do light sabers! The cover not only completely misrepresents this character, it also appeals to the lowest common denominator. Shame on whoever decided this was a 'good cover' for a novel. Maybe I should pay more attention to covers in future - and reject stories outright which have cover versions like this even if the description sounds interesting?

Ah, the story! It made little sense once I actually did get to it. The premise is that in 2013 (why then I do not know), a gate to another world opened, and Elves used their magic to conquer Earth, crushing all resistance before them. There is nothing about the takeover other than this and a rather salivating description of how the entire US federal legislature - and the president - were publicly executed. Since then Queen Elf has ruled.

The idea, I suppose is that the rest of the world suffered likewise, but the story is so US-centric - as usual - that the rest of the world may as well not exist. Nothing else is said: nothing about why the elves came, or about how the military fought back, or whether there's an active guerilla war against the occupation. Yes, we hear vague mentions of rebels, but it's so understated that it may as well not be mentioned at all.

We do learn that in the shadow lands where the elves evidently emerged from, modern weapons do not work. Since the elven swords do, I'm forced to assume that the problem isn't metal, but chemical, yet humans, who are chemically based, can live and fight in the shadow lands very well, so WTF? The other edge of that sword is that firearms do work well here in our world, so how was it the elves where able to win so easily? Nothing is said about any of that. If it was due to their powerful magic, then why do elves need humans at all?

This is a problem with this story which supposedly takes place 300 years after that conquest - yet Earth hasn't changed a bit! it's not even run out of oil! The problem lies in that one elf, Morvilind (it sounded more like Morvellan to me in the audiobook) has taken in human Nadia as his thief in residence - sort of. He trained her from a young age to work for him, giving her fighting and thieving skills, and teaching her some rudimentary magic. Why was this necessary? He's an elf. He has powerful magic; so why does he need a human thief? No explanation is given for this and Nadia never questions it despite questioning everything else.

She works for the elf because he's working a cure for her kid brother who has 'frost bite' - that's not what it's called, but I forget the actual name. Frost fever? The elf tells her the cure takes 20 years and if she fails him, so will the cure fail her brother. She never questions this! He also has a vial of her 'heart's blood' whatever that is, which gives him power over her. She has six more years to serve, but for some reason she never looks ahead to try to figure out if she can get free of Morvilind after her time is up, or if he will still force her to work for him.

Her big trial comes when she's tasked with stealing a magically-protected 'old Earth magic' tablet from a collector. This was when the story went seriously downhill for me. The male love interest for Nadia is telegraphed from several light years away. It's so obvious and she is so doting on him, it's pathetic. it turned me right off this story or any others like it and anyhtign else by this author.

Now we're told that she's supposed to be this expert thief with all kinds of mad skilz, but as soon as he shows up at the party where she's planning to steal the tablet, she subjugates herself to him in all things and is constantly reminding us of how hot and muscular he is. There's the inevitable 'let's kiss to distract the opposition' moment that is so trope it's pathetic. Is this some sort of authorial wish fulfillment? I dunno, but it's tedious.

Predictably, they succeed in their respective quests and they part with him in her debt which is ridiculous if entirely predictable. That's the end of the story and I have no desire whatsoever to pursue this series in any form. I can't commend it as a worthy read because there's too much trope and too many holes in it.

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book read competently by Emily Woo Zeller. The story is of two childhood friends, one of whom, Aveda Jupiter (note that this is her superhero name), grew up to be a renowned - if spoiled rotten - San Francisco super hero, whereas the other, Evie Tanaka, who also has a power, had such a traumatic experience with it when younger that she tamped it down and is happy - so she thinks - to play sidekick to her friend. On the one hand Asian superheroes is a good thing, but on the other, Asian stereotypes is a godawful thing.

I don't know if the author did this on purpose, but Aveda backwards is 'a diva' (near enough!), and it suits the character perfectly. Other parts of this story were amusing too, to begin with, and I liked that the 'super villain' approach here was something off the beaten track, but I DNF'd this about halfway through because I grew sick and tired of the ham-fisted and telegraphed from ten miles away 'romance' between Evie and the macho-muscled guy who also worked on Aveda's team. Their codependent relationship was the exact opposite of romantic and once again we get a novel where sexual diseases seem not to exist - at least they don't with regard to people talking about them before diving into sex. Also I didn't like the 'Jupiter' part of the hero's name. What was that all about ? Rip off Watchmen much?

There was another problem with this, too, and arguably it was the biggest one. Evie was far too weak and servile for my taste. She just annoyed the hell out of me. She did begin to rebel, but it took her half of the novel before she even remotely started to get pissed-off with the truly shitty way she was treated by Aveda. This is a toxic relationship and Evie needed to get out of it, yet no one is advising her along those lines.

I know these guys a have a long history together, but that made it harder to understand how Evie had been so subjugated for so long. Plus Evie's oft stated desire is to be normal - no superpower - but if she's that into it, why the hell doesn't she get out of the superhero life and find a "normal" job where she's not stressed, and get that life for herself? Her show and tell are completely at odds with one another.

Also we're told like fifty million times that Evie is shut-down with regard to sex (again due to her traumatic experience), and despite it being entirely possible that she is in fact asexual, this is never addressed. Instead, people are all along essentially telling her that she needs to get laid. Do I actually have to say this is the wrong approach? Not only that, it's entirely insensitive to anyone who actually is asexual.

This shut-down of Evie's inexplicably turns to rampant explicit (be warned) passion with almost no overture. The book is very mature (or immature depending on how you view it!) in a lot of language use and explicit situations, so it's not your usual PG-13 YA book The characters are all in their twenties, but appear much younger if judged from their behavior and speech patterns. It's like they're a bunch of stalled frat boys instead of super hero team. Evie also has a kid sister who is thoroughly obnoxious and pays no price for her attitude or her behavior. It's wrong. Worse though is that this teenage kid has a drinking problem that no one takes seriously.

Starting early in the story Evie is forced to step-up from side-kick to hero - or rather, hero impersonator - since (aided by a glamor from another guy whose super power is magic) she has to stand in for Aveda when the hero is injured and doesn't want to show weakness in front of her fans. It's all about fans and rather than care about what TV or news media might say, everything in this story inexplicably hinges on some chick who writes a blog and is so two-faced about it that it's not even a secret, yet no one ever calls her on her manic approach to blogging about Aveda, not even Evie, who is supposedly so protective of Aveda and her reputation.

No matter what the blogger "prints," the team continues to suck up to her and give her exclusive interviews. It was just stupid, and ridiculous to present her as the only voice in town worth listening to. Her big blog story (as this kicks off) is the zit on Aveda's face. Yeah, if this were really a young teen book, I could see that flying, maybe, but no, this is a grown-up book (supposedly), and it just felt stupid and thoroughly inauthentic, especially since it just went on and on, entirely ignoring what she'd just done to save the city. If that had been used as an example to show shallow, but mixed with other reports, that would be one thing, but it would seem that shallow is all this novel has on offer. Despite my really wanting to read this initially, I was about ready to kiss-off the story right there when finally the zit meme was done with, so I kept reading. More fool me.

Naturally Evie's latent power starts surfacing as her impersonation of Aveda drags on long past it's sell-by date, and there's a conflict, but by this point I was so tired of the poor writing and Evie's complete lack of a backbone that I couldn't stand to read any more. I moved on to a middle-grade audio book, and liked that significantly more even though it too, had problems. I guess I should have realized from the title 'heroine' as opposed to 'hero' that this novel would be all wrong for me. Not that I'd prefer to read a book about guys, but it bugs me that women have to be heroines, whereas the guys are heroes. Why not all heroes? Why does the female have to have a specially reserved title? She can't be a hero? And before you jump on that, the word 'hero' has no gender, or if it does and we go by the earliest use, it was the name of a priestess!

So in short, this is a big no: it isn't ready for prime time, it tells the wrong story, misleadingly so given the book description, and it's poorly written.

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.

Palace of Lost Memories by CJ Archer

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook - evidently the first of a series although I did not realize that going into it, which annoyed the hell out of me. The 'After the Rift Book One' label on the book cover was hardly intelligible in the ad offering the audiobook for sale at a discount, so I didn't notice it. I picked up the book because it sounded really interesting. Had I known it was first in a series I probably would not have picked it up because I would have known that it was inevitably a prologue in which no mystery was solved and the story would have gone nowhere beyond world building. Very few series really get me interested in following them. Typically, they're too long, too boring, and too unimaginative and derivative. I don't want to read the same story over and over with nothing but a few tweaks in between, which is what series are for the most part.

With a title about a palace of lost memories a reader naturally expects something mysterious and a resolution, but neither appeared. The story moved excruciatingly slowly and had way too much dillydallying, and instead of a mystery it came across as a romance, which I for one didn't appreciate at all. Nevertheless I kept listening in the hope that something interesting would show up to explain why all the denizens of the palace had memories which had been blanked prior to the point when the palace showed up. I never got that, and the story ended rather abruptly without even addressing the lost memories portion of it. It was teased several times, but it never was really discussed and it sure didn't get resolved because this is a series and the author has to stretch it out to milk the readers for as much cash as she can. I do not appreciate that, and I do not support books like that.

The book began - and despite being first person it was read pretty decently by Marian Hussey - with the mystery of a large place suddenly arising out of nowhere with no sign of anyone building it. That ought to have caused a sensation of curiosity and even fear among the locals, but inexplicably it didn't. Everyone just seemed to accept that this was normal despite the story having done nothing to introduce or establish any magical elements or precedents.

What was even more odd though was that no one seemed to have ever heard of this king or his palace or at least knew nothing about him. It was like a magical palace plopping down from nowhere was a normal thing in this neighborhood. What, no one owned the land it appeared on? No one had an issue with that?! No one - not even the local nobility - knew anything about the king or his past so they could fill in the blanks for the palace personnel?

The only mystery that this story focused on was that of a Lady - the king's fiancée, evidently - being poisoned and the only person who could cure her was the father of the main character, Josie. Josie was a midwife with physican skills who assisted her father, a doctor, but who was, as we were constantly reminded, ineligible to be a doctor herself because she was a woman. This is how Josie lucked-in to become a persona grata at the palace, yet despite her frequently coming through for them with treatments and cures, the king never once upped and changed the law so that she could be a doctor. That was something I'd expected to happen in this story, and I was disappointed that it didn't.

The other oddity about the novel was that Josie and her father were supposedly well-known and liked in the town which at times seems like a village and at others like a city. For example, despite being beloved and knowing the town like the back of her hand, at one point Josie perceives that she's being followed and runs off, switching directions randomly to escape and ends up lost in a very sordid part of town, where apparently no one knows her and she doesn't know this area at all! It made no sense given the cozy view of the 'village' we'd had before. Worse, the guy who is following her is purportedly not a bad guy, yet he doesn't lift a finger to help her in her predicament. Again, it made no sense.

The book description, evidently once again written by some dickhead who never read the book claims, "In the search for the truth, Josie is drawn deeper into danger, and the answers she seeks might shake the very foundations of the kingdom." No, she's never actually in any danger until the very close of the book, and that's resolved before you can even start to feel concerned for her. Besides, she's the main character and she's also telling the story in first person, so how can anything harmful possibly befall her? That's one more reason why first person is typically a fail for me. And nothing happens that even remotely threatens the very foundations of the kingdom. Once again, the blurb lies.

Add to all of this the rather dull characters and it makes me want to yawn. Josie's love interest, Captain Hammer may as well have been a hammer for all the emotion he exhibits and Josie is hardly any better, showing herself not to be smart, but to be impulsive and foolish as often as not. It's not someone I want to read any more about, and I lost any interest I'd initially had in the mystery of the lost memories. Do I want to keep reading a series that fails to actually address the main topic the series is supposed to be about? Do I want to be led by the nose, continually betrayed by an author who baits one thing and switches the entire story to another? No! I can't commend this as a worthy read at all.