Tales From Nature: Bee by Magali Attiogbé

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a fun book for young kids to learn about nature - and they will need to learn if they're to make up for our incompetence in managing this planet. Notwithstanding the idiot denialists, climate change is already significantly and adversely affecting our lives, and it will only get worse as long as those in power do nothing about it. If our young people can understand what a precious home we inhabit and how important every little thing is, then maybe they can save us from our own addled and stubborn stupidity.

Books like this can help with that by inculcating in children a deeper understanding of nature and thereby a solid respect for it. In this book we follow a bee as she (not 'he' as the book blurb mistakenly claims) goes about her daily business of collecting pollen for food, and nectar for making honey, which is stored for use when pollen isn't available. A huge portion of our food supply is dependent upon the health and industry of worker bees. We will ignore this at our peril.

Again this was designed as a print book with fold-out flaps which do not exist in the ebook version (obviously!), so I was unable to get a complete picture of how the book itself will work, but the ebook version was informative and colorful. However, the page numbering was off. The last page wasn't 10, but 8, which was one page less than previous page. Page 10 was unreachable, so the book seemed to end rather abruptly. Not being the kind of reviewer who merits a print version, I'm forced to assume I saw the whole book, and I can confirm that what I did see is a worthy read!

The Woods by Rob Hodgson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

How can I not want to read a book that's named after my family? No, it's not really named after me, you silly goose, but the book isn't about geese, either. Or about woods - excepting in that it takes place in the woods. It's really about foxes versus rabbits, and while foxes are supposed to be cunning and crafty, you'll find that maybe the rabbits can teach them a thing or two, especially since the foxes aren't too smart.

I read and enjoyed this author's The Cave and if you're familiar with that, you'll realize he likes to put a twist in the tale if not in the tail, so expect one here! The foxes, one tall, one small, one round, all clowns, are hunting rabbits, but they're not having much success no matter where they seek out these liberated lagomorphs. Observant children might be a bit better at spotting rabbits than the foxes are. They can even emulate the foxes by maybe climbing on a chair to simulate climbing a tree, and crawling under the table to simulate crawling through a tunnel.

It's all about fun, and like The Cave this was a fun book. I commend it as a worthy read for young children. No rabbits here indeed! I don't know what the foxes were rabbiting on about....

Friend or Fiction by Abby Cooper

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is an odd and lethargically moving story about young Jade whose father is in remission from cancer, and who is so lonely and at a loss in life that she invents a friend for herself through writing down all the pertinent details in her notebook, unfortunately not many details are pertinent to Jade, and she never seems to grasp the import of this. Consequently I grew a strong dislike of Jade the more I read of this and by eighty percent in, I could not stand to read any more of her and I quit the novel.

In writing in her precious notebook, Jade creates a best friend named Zoe, who is so close to her that the two can almost read each other's thoughts. They get along famously, and have the best times together; then Zoe appears in real life, moving into the house across the street, just like in Jade's original story. Jade discovers that whatever she writes in the book happens in her life with Zoe.

The biggest problem with this book for me is that it never went anywhere. Jade did the same kind of things every day even after Zoe showed up. She went through the same motions, and never seemed to grow; never seemed to change. It was Zoe who began to change, going beyond what Jade had written for her. And that was part of my problem with Jade. She was so annoyingly self-centered and focused on her own needs. I kept thinking, hoping, she would start to see the light, but she never did and by eighty percent it had grown super tiresome reading the same story over and over again.

Everything was about Jade and despite getting multiple signs that things were wrong with her relationship with, and control of Zoe, Jade was too dumb to figure it out. Zoe has only what things Jade has written - nothing more, nothing less, and even when Jade learns this she makes no effort whatsoever to set things right. Zoe herself never seems to think there’s anything wrong with this relationship. This held true way past the halfway point in the novel and by then this repetitive pattern was mind-numbingly tedious.

Perhaps the worst thing about Jade though was that she was so selfish that she never thought of using her magical writing ability to help her family. Her kid bother has some issue which is clear from the endless drawings he does of fighting a nameless 'bad guy'. The odd thing is that no one ever thinks this is odd, and Jade shows no interest in that or in helping him by adding something to her magical notebook to ease his concerns. Neither does she once think of helping her father, who admittedly is in remission from his cancer (presumably the 'bad guy' the boy is fighting in his pictures), but who is far from free and clear. It never even crosses Jade's mind that maybe she could fix this - she doesn't even experiment just to see. It's really deadening to read about someone whose mind simply doesn't function intelligently.

Another thing which bothered me is that Jade's English teacher, who commendably encourages Jade to write, actually read one of her stories about Zoe - and this was after Zoe had appeared in real life. Her comment was, "I think it’s so clever how you incorporated our new student into your story," but never once does she ask Jade if Jade had asked permission to write about Zoe. Not only was it really not clever incorporating a real living school friend in a fictional work, it was disturbing that the teacher never even offered so much as a cautionary note about incorporating classmates into your fiction without permission. It’s not like Jade was six years old. She was beginning the pathway to maturity and definitely needed some guidelines about what’s permissible and the importance of choosing the liberty not taken.

Jade is not a very proactive girl. She's very much passive, even when it comes to writing things that she thinks will help her relationship with Zoe. She came across as very shallow and not capable of standing up for herself, even when this really creepy guy at school steals her notebook and refuses to give it back to her for a whole weekend. She simply lets him have it, and never complains to anyone about it. He gives it back to her after the weekend, but she has to ask for it. Her passivity here was disturbing.

If this guy had been her best friend, that would be one thing - there would have been some level of implicit trust, and I could see then that she might let him get away with it, but she didn't even like this guy - in fact, she actively disliked him, yet she let him walk all over her. That's not the kind of girl I like to read about. I don't mind if a character starts out this way in a novel but I expect to see something happen - some change start taking place and when there is literally none in four-fifths of a novel a reader is highly justified in considering DNF-ing the book. I resented the fact that I had trusted the writer to make things happen and so kept reading. I will never get that wasted time back.

There were the usual technical issues with the kindle version of this novel caused by Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process which will, I guarantee you, mangle your book if it has any pretentions beyond being plain vanilla in format and layout. This was obviously another book aimed at the print market without a single thought given to the ebook version, and it showed.

Admittedly it was an ARC which hopefully will improve before publication, but this ebook had multiple issues. A common one is that text lines would randomly end before they reached the right side of the screen and then resume on the next line while other lines go the whole way across the screen as you would expect, and I'm not talking about naturally short single lines, I'm talking about lines in the middle of a paragraph ending prematurely like they have a hard carriage return in the line.

Additionally, there were random letter V's in the middle of the text. I ahve no idea what that was all about but it's typically what will happen when your print version has page headers (such as book title on one side and author name on the other for example). Kindle will put these right into the text, because Amazon doesn’t care. Never has, never will. Why the book would have a single letter 'V' as a header, I do not know, but this frequently appeared in the middle of the text on a line on its own, breaking up the flow of the test, such as:

V
needed a little more time. Maybe you couldn’t rush real happy feelings.
But maybe you couldn’t write them into happen
ing, either. ≈
"I’d like to make a toast,"

Don't ask me what that 'almost equal to' math symbol (the wavy equals sign) is doing there! That was a common occurrence, and I can only assume it’s a section marker where the author used ≈ instead of the more technically correct §. Authors use all kinds of things to denote a break in the text, but Kindle didn't respect this here and it rarely does, so instead of appearing on its own line in the center of the line as it ought, it appeared as you see it above along with the random bolding of that penultimate line!

If Kindle can screw up your ebook, trust me, they will. This process also mangled chapter headings. You cannot use drop caps and expect Kindle to know what to do with them. Amazon will mangle them with relish. So, for example, chapter three was titled 'More Than Zero', and it began with the word 'The' but the 'T' was a drop-cap, so this is what Kindle did to it:

More Than
Z
3
ero
He lunch-is-over bell rang. Still clutching my
T
notebook,

Now that there is some seriously professional mangling. You have to hate literature to design a conversion process that will trash-up a chapter heading/beginning as badly as that. And no one does it better than the Amazon juggernaut. Again, DO NOT submit a novel to Amazon for conversion to ebook format unless it is pure plain vanilla text. Anything more than that, Amazon will destroy it because Amazon hates anything that looks individual or artistic. This is why they have their own format instead of using the standard format. It's because they want to control and homogenize everything, even how your novel looks. Barnes and Noble have their own issues, believe me, but at least they don’t predictably trash your writing. Yet Amazon rules. Go figure!

The Kindle conversion process also likes to randomly bold text as I mentioned, and even turn it red for reasons I cannot explain. The red text in this book appeared right before chapter one began. The random bolding appeared throughout the text as in the example above, where "ing, either. ≈" was bolded for no good reason.

Note that these are technical issues and nothing to do with the story itself, but I think a publisher and an author ought to take it upon themselves to give the ebook version a once-over to see if Amazon has ruined their novel, because Amazon does this routinely in my experience. This is one of several reasons why I personally will have no truck with Amazon publishing my work.

But judged on the story alone I cannot commend this as a worthy read. It was too slow and showed no sign of going anywhere by 80%, and that's when I decided I'd read mroe than enough to give this one a fair chance.

Red Dove by Sonia Antaki

Rating: WARTY!

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

Not to be confused with The Red Dove by Gerry Hillier or The Red Dove by Derek Lambert, this Red Dove (illustrated by Andrew Bosley and subtitled "Listen to the Wind") tells the story of a young Lakota Sioux girl named Red Dove, who lives on a reservation in the Dakota Territory in the early 1890s. She is a child of a white Irish father and an American Indian mother. The blurb tells us that food is scarce, yet the opening few paragraphs detail a hunting trip during which the girl and her half-brother Walks Alone are looking at a whole posse of turkeys, one of which Red Dove brings down with an arrow even though women are not supposed to hunt so we're told.

One issue I had with this book was that it is supposed to be about a strong female of the Lakota Sioux, but if felt like an ordinary story, and there were no references anywhere to any other Sioux women except for the main character's mother. There have been scores of strong American Indian women, including tribal leaders, who lived around or before the time this story takes place, yet we hear of none of them. For example, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where Custer led a bunch of the Seventh cavalry foolishly to their deaths, is mentioned in this story more than once, yet none of the female Lakota who fought in t hat battle get a mention, and there were at least three of them: Minnie Hollow Wood, Moving Robe Woman (a Hunkpapa Sioux who is credited in some accounts with dispatching Custer), or One Who Walks With the Stars (an Oglala Sioux woman). The leader known in the west as 'Crazy Horse' is mentioned, but his wife, Black Shawl, never gets a word. It's like, despite this novel being about a Sioux woman, Indian women are excluded from the story. It made no sense to me.

Note that Lakota women were not the only ones who fought in battles. There were other American Indian women of other tribes who also fought at Little Bighorn or elsewhere. These women were not shrinking violets. They were tough and self sufficient, and very strong. Names that come to mind are Buffalo Calf Road Woman, a Cheyenne woman whose rescue of her brother at the Battle of the Rosebud was instrumental in turning the tide in the Indian's favor. She also fought alongside her husband at Little Bighorn, and is credited with knocking Custer from his horse. Pretty Nose was a female Arapaho war chief who fought at Little Bighorn.

So anyway, there clearly was no scarcity of food if there are so many turkeys to be had, but these two kids are nevertheless sent off with strangers to a Catholic missionary school where they're treated brutally. Now I get that American Indians have been - and in far too many cases still are - treated appallingly, but the problem I had with this book is that it's relentless in its brutality, with no leavening whatsoever, and it's also unrealistic. It's unrealistic in that this girl was of an age which back then would have been considered 'ripe for the plucking' by the unscrupulous and brutal white men with whom she comes into contact, yet she is never once sexually assaulted or even threatened by it.

Naturally you don't want those horrific details in a middle-grade book, but to not even hint at what a precarious position a girl like her would have been in seemed inauthentic to me when other forms of violence against her were depicted without reserve. The fact is that (according to a 2010 Department of Justice study) over four out of five American Indian and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence, over half have experienced sexual violence and of those, almost all of them experienced it at the hands of a non-tribal member.

The truth is that Native Americans are more than twice as likely to experience sexual assault and rape than any other ethnic group in the United States, and this is today in our supposedly more enlightened times. To avoid this topic in a book set back when there were neither rules nor any sort of moral compass to enlighten and dissuade men from abusing American Indians is a grave failure to face the facts. It's disingenuous and the Sioux women deserve better. The author isn't native American, and while I don't consider that a disqualification by any means, I have to wonder if she perhaps she did not think this idea properly through.

The novel seemed to drag for me, made worse by the never-ending brutality, and while Red Dove is shown as escaping at one point from the Catholic school she fails to get very far before being captured. After that, she suffers the 'white savior' trope in which a white kid helps her out, so she's not really demonstrating "that her greatest power comes from within herself" as the blurb promises.

I think her agency is further diluted by the introduction of a ridiculous level of the supernatural. For me this cheapened Red Dove's story considerably, and made her look like she was mentally unstable. I think a novel without the supernatural, where the girl was shown to have delivered herself from evil as it were, but without need for spirits, and men, including her grandfather, telling her what to do, would have made for a much stronger story. The book also mentions conscription at one point in the narrative, but there was no such thing between the end of the civil war and the start of World War One in the USA to my knowledge.

This book was evidently designed as a print book with no thought given to the ebook version, so the use of drop caps, which I personally do not like, managed to screw-up the layout of the book after it went through Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process which will mangle your book if it's anything more ambitious than plain vanilla. On more than one occasion, the drop-cap was removed from the start of the first sentence in a chapter and deposited at the start of the second line, so at one point, for example, I read, “he sun sank low behind the hills, the air carried a chill, Tand the sky shimmered from gold to pink.” Here you can see that the 'T' that should gave begun the sentence is appended instead to another word that presumably started the next line in the print version. That line, beginning with ‘Tand’ was a half line below the rest of the text as well.

Many parts of the novel seemed like they had hard 'carriage returns' built into the text, so while some screens had the text run from one side to other as is normal, other screens had the text ending mid-screen and dropping to the next line. It made for a scrappy-looking book and both author and publisher need to take responsibility for checking these things. I personally refuse to publish with Amazon, but if you're going to do that, you need to watch them like a hawk because they will ruin your book's layout if they're not watched like a hawk, as this example proved handsomely in its ugliness.

So all these things together made for a very unsatisfying read for me, and shortly after the white savior came riding to the rescue, I gave up on it. That was around eighty percent, when Red Dove began having out of the body experiences. Sorry but this as not for me and while I wish the author all the best in her career, I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

The Complete Food Substitutions Handbook by Jean B MacLeod

Rating: WORTHY!

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

If Jean B MacLeod who can stand against her?! I was interested in this book, but having looked at it, I confess that I'm wasn't sure how to review it. The problem isn't that there is anything wrong with it, it's that the book is quite literally what the title says. It is the complete book of food substitutions! It is an alphabetized list of a huge number of food items, many of which I have never heard of, with alternative items that you can replace them with in recipes, if you don't have the original or if you want to change it out for whatever reason. The book covers the globe with entries from literally every continent except Antarctica, which admittedly isn't known for its vegetable or meat products!

So without tasting a significant sampling of the recipes, all I can say is that the author has done some serious work here, and that from the substitutions I recognize, it looks like they will work just fine. That's not to say a substitution is always meant as an exact replacement. Sometimes the substitution is so close to the original that it's an obvious replacement and shouldn't really affect anything, but other times the replacement food is different or even quite different, so the aim is more to replace the texture or effect of adding this particular ingredient rather than replace the taste. The thing is that this book gives you choices so you can maybe find a cheaper ingredient, or one you're not allergic to, or one that fits your dietary requirements. The choice is yours! And that's the point! Most items have several options, so you can readily play with them to find something you will like.

Once again, I think the book was designed as a print book because there is very little use made of electronic linking. It's in alphabetized sections, so you can tap the letter in the contents and go to the start of that particular letter's entries, and you can tap from that same letter header for any section to return to the contents page, but one thing I noticed is that quite a number of items in the list will say something like BITTER ALMOND OIL See OIL OF BITTER ALMONDS, and there is no link to tap to go there. That would have been a nice feature.

Given that people sometimes put fake entries into lists like this so they can prove it if someone copied their list, I half wondered if, under 'FIG LEAVES' it might say, 'See LOIN CLOTHS', but it didn't! I was a little disappointed in that, but fig leaves are a legitimate food item here, so that would have meant missing an entry and thereby making the book rather less complete! So I understand, really I do! Maybe the author has an even more sneaky one hidden away somewhere else!

But overall, I liked this book, and I commend it as a complete food substitutions guide.

The Missing Barbegazi by HS Norup

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Helle Sidelmann Norup is Danish by birth and it shows in this work which would have been handled differently by am American author (assuming one had even thought to write this). The story is original, to begin with and not derived from some long line of stories rooted in a tired old fairy-tale, like so many US middle-grade authors do, but more than that, it's realistic and inventive, playful and fun, and tells an engaging and interesting story.

It's fiction, of course, but it would be so easy to believe something like this could happen or even has happened. Not being American, the author felt no compulsion whatsoever to set this in the USA, which an unfortunately large number of US authors seem to think is the only place in the world where anything worth writing about can take place. With an attitude like that pervading our literature, it was no surprise to me at all that we finally elected a president who is xenophobic and seems to think there's nowhere else on this planet other than the USA that merits any attention at all. Believe me, this book is a breath of fresh air in middle-grade writing.

Barbegazi are beings from the folklore of the French and the Swiss. The odd name comes from the French barbe-glacée, which literally means 'frozen beard'. Tessa - the main character in this story - grew up hearing of the barbegazi from her grandfather, who has recently died. Her grandmother isn't taking it well. Tessa feels that if she can locate a barbegazi, and prove - at least to herself and her grandmother - that her discredited grandfather wasn't deranged, it will help her grandmother to recover.

Well, guess what? She does find one! She finds a whole family of them and the family has a problem. Tessa is only too happy to help them out, but the problem is: barbegazi don't trust humans! Tessa will need to learn and grow, and take on her shoulders some adult values and traits. And she's equal to it!

She knows a lot about the barbegazi from her grandfather, but when she needs to know more, she reads the notes her grandfather left. Oh my - a girl who is shown to be intelligent by her actions, not from the fact that a lazy author simply told us she reads books! What a pleasant novelty! This is how you write a story about a smart young girl! You don't say she reads books, you show her studying a book to find answers! This author gets it. Far too many authors I've read do not.

I liked this story from the start, and though I'm far from middle-grade, it maintained my interest throughout. It was original, realistic, thoughtful, and fun. Tessa was shown authentically: not perfect, not a genius, not a dope, not cowardly, not super-powered, not squeamish or squeal-ish - just an ordinary girl who has a few things to prove not for herself, but to help others. This author nailed it completely, and I'm happy to commend this as a worthy read and a fun novel. It's one of the best I've read this year so far, middle-grade or otherwise!

The Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn vol 1 by Waki Yamato

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Erratum:
"Beatiful black hair" on p220 Beautiful is misspelled.

The original Tale of Genji was written by someone with the honorific of Murasaki Shikibu. She was a Japanese writer and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court during the Heian period, and she lived around 1000AD. She was strictly speaking not a 'Lady'. The 'Shikibu' referred to her status as a relative of a high ranking official in a ministry, so 'Lady' is an approximation. Murasaki seems to have referred to the wisteria plant and its color which the Japanese probably did not differentiate between.

No one knows her real name, but some suspect she may have been Fujiwara no Takako. She was married for two years before her husband died, and later retired from court with her daughter. In between those times she wrote an ongoing 'novel' about a fictional character in the Heian court, known as The Shining Prince, and commonly referred to as 'Genji'. This guy was a bit of a playboy (as this pull-no-punches manga reveals), who having lost his mother early in life seems to have pursued a need to replace her with a lover who had her qualities.

He fell in love with his stepmother, something perceived as forbidden, but she's not the only one. Every few pages he finds another woman who inspires powerful feelings, yet every one of them seems inappropriate for one reason or another - that she's an older girl with whom he grew up, so there are sibling feelings involved, or that she's a lower class woman who lives in a small house in the city, and on and on. It's like he can only love she who is decidedly wrong for him to love!

I enjoyed this story and I'm now inspired to actually go read the original (in translation of ocurse! LOL!) that's been sitting on a shelf to my right as I sit typing this, for several years. The author published this manga some time ago and it has been rereleased to coincide with the opening of “The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated” at MoMA in NYC. To prepare for writing it, Waki Yamato traveled to the locations where the Heian court had existed and visited museum exhibits to see the kind of clothing they would have worn.

She even was able to don one outfit and have photos taken so she could see how it hung and moved. The effort was worth it, because the artwork is beautiful. My only problem with it was that the drawing style tends to render characters to look very much alike and it was at times confusing and a little harder to follow the story when one new character after another was whisked in and out.

The design of the book was a bit confusing too. This was an ebook, which slid up and down the screen on my pad, not left to right. It began at the front of the book rather than at the rear, as many manga do, yet the page had to be read from right to left, not the western left to right, and this was really confusing to begin with because some of the panels made little sense until I figured out what they had done here! Also page numbers are not visible, and there is no slide bar to navigate the whole book so you can't tell at a glance where you are in it. You can only see page numbers if you tap the screen twice or during the actual swiping form one page to the next.

This was also a bit annoying, especially since, in swiping up to the next page, if you accidentally started too low on the page it would bring-up my iPad's nav bar which then necessitated a tap on the center of the screen to dismiss it. That was also annoying! So not the best design for an ebook, but I'm guessing it was as usual, never designed as a ebook, but as a print manga which was then crammed into ebook format without much thought to practicality. Publishers really need to get on the ball with this and decide what it is they're publishing these days! A book cannot be all things to all formats! That aside, though, I really enjoyed the story and the art, and I commend it as a worthy read.

The Humiliations of Pipi McGee by Beth Vrabel

Rating: WARTY!

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

I started out really liking this book, but it developed two major strikes against it. The first was that the ending really went downhill into complete unbelievability for me, so the last twenty percent or so was an unpleasant read. That wasn't the worst part though. The worst was that the main Character Penelope McGee, never ever seemed to learn!

I don't mind reading about a dumb female character if she turns herself around, or if she has some other qualities that come to light, but "Pipi" never changed. As the story went on, she proved herself to be actually worse than anyone she had a vendetta against, and on top of that she proved weak, unassertive, and just completely lackluster, willing to betray friends, family, anyone, to get what she wanted. She was not a nice person and had little thought for the consequences of the poor choices and decisions she persisted in making.

The basis story is that in her last year of middle school, she unilaterally decides she can wipe her slate clean and start high school with a fresh outlook. She determines, against the better advice of her friends to whom she pays little heed, that the only way to do this is to seek vengeance on everyone who wronged her, and try to wipe out her humiliations. She talks like this will be redemption, but she really doesn't act like any of it is. It felt like a real shame to me because some parts of the story were really good, and there was this one nose-piercing scene which mede me laugh out loud, but such meager leavening in a book that is otherwise sinking does far too little to improve matters.

On top of this, her story is presented against the backdrop of what has to be the worst middle school in the entire country. There is no discipline there, the teachers are all either bullies or idiots, and there is absolutely zero parental involvement whatsoever. It's not surprising then that there was open and unchecked bullying going on in this school, which the teachers never did a thing about.

One of the teachers openly bullied the girls, yet there never were any repercussions, for example with parents making complaints about her. The principal of the school was female and all this was going on under her watch, so what message does this send about female competency? It was a disgrace. It was so unrealistic as to be more of a caricature than anything that felt real.

Pipi herself was also a caricature in practice, because everything presented in this story was either stark black or it was glaring white. there was no subtlety here; no shades of gray. On top of that, Pipi had to be one of the most self-centered and ignorant characters I've ever encountered. It was pretty obvious that one of the main characters was gay and Pipi never figured this out at all. She was so self-focussed and self-obsessed that it never occurred to her that other people might be real people with feelings and secrets and problems and worries.

On a technical level, this book was not helped by submitting it to Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process. Personally I refuse to have any truck at all with Amazon for a variety of reasons, but one repeated problem I see with review books that come to me in Kindle format is that they have evidently been submitted to Amazon with far too many expectations for the end result, and the ebook comes back looking like a mess. If the publisher or author doesn't vet the resulting ebook for quality, the review ebook gets sent out to reviewers looking like a disaster.

I see this a lot with a variety of books. In this particular instance, there were page headers and page numbers blended into the body of the text. There was random bolding of text here and there, and all of the images at the start of the book were sliced, diced, and julienned. Kindle does this routinely. You cannot submit a book to Kindle for conversion unless it is the plainest of vanilla - nothing fancy, no images, no text boxes, no page headings or numberings, no tables, charts, or anything remotely fancy. Essentially it must be just plain vanilla text, otherwise Amazon will completely mangle it for you.

Here's an example. At one point I read the following:
Ricky glanced around, nodding at me, then sat (this part was bold. The text line ended here)
next to Tasha. (this was on the next line and was regular text)
Tasha even wore makeup today—something she rarely did—her lipstick and eyeliner a bright turquoise blue. When I asked her about it, she (this was the next couple of lines, all bolded)
said Eliza showed her how to do it. (this, the next line, was back to regular text).

On another page (evidently page 107!) I read this:
It’s just how I pictured Freya.” 1 07 Tasha grinned.
There were also random examples of a bold lower case letter 'f' appearing in the middle of the text like so:
"The dots disappeared.
f
I called Sarah over and over,"
I have no idea what that was all about.

So technical issues aside, I cannot commend this as a worthy read when it has such a limp and misguided main character who never seems to learn her lesson and yet for whom everything magically works out in the end? No. Sorry but no! That's way too much fiction for my taste!

Sun Kisses, Moon Hugs by Susan Schaefer Bernardo, Courtenay Fletcher

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a warmly-written kids book which offers way to feel close to someone you love when they're not right there before you - or when they may even be far away. Told poetically by Bernardo, and illustrated equally poetically by Fletcher, it advises turning to nature - which is usually a good idea provided we don't destroy it first. It was a fun read and I commend it.

Brilliant Ideas From Wonderful Women by Aitziber Lopez

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a great book championing women who invented something or greatly-enhanced something yet who have received little or no credit for it. The only one in the entire book I'd heard of was Hedy Lamar so shame on me! But now I know better!

This book is aimed at a young audience, but it's educational for anyone and everyone, and it's important to realize and properly understand that it wasn't white men who did everything in history. Nor was it all white women, so having someone of color in here would have been better, but for now, I'll take this. Maybe volume two will fix that other discrepancy.

This was an ARC, so there were some errors in it which I presume will be fixed before the final edition comes out. I list them here as (hopefully!) a help to the author and publisher. The section on Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar®, talks about nylon as being natural, like silk, but it isn't! It is organic in that it contains carbon, but that's not the same as saying it's natural. Nylon is very much artificial.

Page 23 ends the description in the middle of a sentence. It would be nice to have the rest of that sentence! This same thing happens on p30 where it seems to suggest that Mary Anderson invented the windshield rather than the windshield wiper! In this context, and from what I've read, the tram operator wasn't stopping repeatedly to clean off the windshield, but driving with the front windows open because of the sleet. This is how Mary came to the conclusion that a windshield wiper would be a good idea.

Note that I don't merit a print copy for reviewing, so all I get is the ebook, and in that context, there is an issue on page 26. The ebook shows only one page at a time, not a double spread, so swiping to this page made it appear as though it was a continuation of something from a non-existent previous page. It was only when I swiped to the next page that I saw that the title section for this double spread was on the second of these two pages. This isn't obvious and is in fact confusing in the ebook. On p27, where the article actually begins, there is also a grammatical error where it begins, "Helen's initially wanted to study..." There's an apostrophe 's' too much there, it would seem!

On page 28, Maria Beasley's birthdate is completely wrong. She could hardly have invented an improved life raft used on the Titanic if she was born 35 years after it sank! Should the date be 1847 instead of 1947? I don't know since I couldn't find a birth date given for her, but 1847 would make sense. Finally, on page 32, there's a Spanish phrase at the end of the description, which appears to be a Spanish translation of the start of the previous sentence. I don't know what that's all about (given the author's name perhaps the original of this book was written in Spanish?), but it certainly doesn't belong there in an English edition!

Those issues aside (and believe me I understand how easy it is to make goofs like that - we authorial wannabes have all been there!), I commend this as a worthy read and an educational read too.

The Art of Modern Quilling by Erin Perkins Curet

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I had no idea what quilling was - never heard of it, which is why I was interested in this particular volume. It turned out to be quite fascinating. It's a skill that can be - I assume since I'm not a quiller myself - learned quite readily with some practice, and it requires little in the way of equipment to pursue this. The results are charming if they're to be judged by what this book contains. On that topic, I have to observe that this author seems to have an inordinate fondness for butterflies, but they were very pretty, and there is much more contained here than just alluring lepidoptera!

The most elaborate item she demonstrates is a clock face to which was attached a clock mechanism to create a wall-hanging, working clock. The work involved seems to my not-even-amateur eyes to be heavy and requires a dedicated crafter, but the result is quite stunning. I have to say though, that the utility of it to me was lessened by the fact that the clock had so many components and was so colorful that it was more likely to befuddle than enlighten anyone who was trying to decipher the time of day from it! As a hanging decoration however, it was truly eye-catching.

I think I was most impressed by the jewelry the author constructed. The paper is curled, glued, and treated with some sort of fixative so it's not just raw paper. She created a pair of dangling earrings which were rather bell-shaped and quite pretty, and she made a necklace out of quilled hemispheres of paper glued together to make spheres, and threaded onto a string. The end result was remarkable. Not that I plan on making any of this myself, but I can't help but admire the skill and work that went into all the things she made. They were solid, colorful, beautiful to look at, and very attention-grabbing.

There's a quilling article in Wikipedia if you want to learn a little about the art, but if you want to learn how to actually do the art, then this is definitely the book to go with. The author has clearly mastered this, and has gone beyond mimicking things - as anyone would do when developing her skills - and she has moved on into a fascinating and creative world of her own. I commend it for a captivating and instructional glimpse into a world I had not known even existed.

Colorways: Acrylic Animals by Megan Wells

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I've reviewed several books about art and painting over the last few months. I don't consider myself an artist by any means, but I have dabbled, and it is a topic which fascinates me and in which there is always something to learn - especially if you're a writer and want to imbue your stories with a little realism. It doesn't hurt to absorb some advice from established artists in books like this to sort of sprinkle yourself with a bit of authenticity to use in your writing projects. Plus the books are interesting in themselves. I'm always happy to learn how artists do what they do and get such appealing works out of the seemingly paltry source materials of some colored pigments and some brushes. It's really quite magical when you think about it. The paintbrush as a magic wand! Paint as fairy dust!

This book is firmly in the acrylic camp, and it takes a loose and playful approach to painting animals. This artist definitely has fun, and the art here isn't about absolute photographic realism, but about conveying a sense and feeling for the animal subject and making it stand out, in both how the basic image looks and also in the colors it employs including some collage techniques in one image.

The subject titles are amusing. We have complementary cows, pointillistic pandas, tetradic llamas, and vibrant flamingos. The titles are a hint to the technique the author/artist is going to use and the shades and hues of paint that are going to be employed in it, because each exercise follows a slightly different strategy to reaching the end goal, although there are certain rules about building-up the painting which are common to all. The level is beginners, so if you're just starting out, have a little experience, or have never picked up a brush before, this should still work for you. I don't think anyone is so advanced that they can't learn from a new talent!

There was one section on painting a giraffe that I found interesting for several reasons. The author shows her work - like anyone taking a math test should do! - so you can see the steps to the result, and sometimes looking at those early images, I wondered if I were painting this, would I have stopped there and not gone on to 'finish' the work. Is a work of art ever finished? I guess it is if the artist thinks so, but there are different places any individual can stop and say it's done, so it was interesting to think about that. Another reason this was interesting is that the giraffe image was laterally reversed in the final picture. I think someone got an image the wrong way round, but it didn't detract from the effect of seeing the resulting finished-image after following all the steps to get there.

The book is replete with hints, tips, suggestions, and most importantly, encouragement, and the whole works well together to give anyone a solid grounding in expanding their range and ability if they're looking for a leg up. I commend it as a worthy read. Each time I read something like this it makes me want to go pick up some supplies at the art store and get to it! Fortunately for my kids' clothing and dietary needs I restrain many of these impulses! But setting yourself up with some basic brushes and colors doesn't cost that much these days, and you can paint on pretty much anything you want! Grant Wood's American Gothic was painted on "beaverboard" which is more like cardboard than it is like canvas! So grab this book and get to it!

The School of Numbers by Emily Hawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a comprehensive and fun book with quite a few tips, pointers (indicators - not the dogs, which I found a bit disap pointer ing...), and hints along the way, and it covered a surprising array of mathematical concepts from simple math to powers, and from geometry to negative numbers. It even finally got me a visual that clarified in my mind why the so-called Monty Hall problem makes sense!

This 'problem' is where a person offered a choice to open one of three doors (or maybe boxes). One of the options contains a nice prize, the other two contain a booby prize or nothing at all. The person chooses which door or box to open, then the host (Monty Hall in the original show, although the problem predates his show) opens one of the booby prize doors showing you that it was wise not to choose that one. Then he gives you the option to change your choice. Should you change? It seems counter-intuitive, but the fact is that you will more than likely improve your odds of winning if you change. Many people (even some mathematicians) find this hard to believe. I did initially, and even when I decided that changing your choice was the indeed the better option, I still couldn't get my mind around why! Now it's clear thanks to this book!

But the book contains much more than that, and it explains things clearly and simply, with good examples, and little exercises for the reader to follow (with the answers!). There were a couple of errors in the book - or at least what seemed like errors to me, but math isn't my strong suit, so maybe I'm wrong. I'll mention them anyway. There was a section on geometric progression which used the old story of starting with one grain of rice on a chess board, and doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square. It's a great demonstration, but on page 47 it's seemingly implied that a chess board has only 62 squares! Wrong! Eight squared isn't 62!

The other issue was on tessellation (I told you this book was comprehensive!) which is a fascinating topic and really only a fancy way of saying 'tiling', but it suggests that triangular tessellation requires adding 6 walls whereas hexagonal tessellation requires only 3 and this is what makes bees so smart? I could not get my mind around that concept at all - not the smart bees, but the walls. I had no clue in what context this was supposed to be true. I mean if you draw a triangle and want to add another triangle, you have to draw only two more walls, and there's your second triangle making use of an existing wall from the first. If you have one hexagon and want to add another, you have to draw five more walls!

If you have two hexagons side-by-side, you need to draw four walls to make another, whereas if you have two triangles, you need draw, again, only two walls to make a third! Admittedly, if you have three existing hexagons, making a shallow cup shape, then it's true you need add only three more walls on the concave side to make a fourth hexagon, but with three triangles, depending on how they are joined, you still need add only two walls - or perhaps even just one wall. Now maybe I am missing something or maybe the concept that was being conveyed here wasn't worded very well for clarity - or was over my head(!), so like I said, I may be wrong but it seemed to me this needed something more to be said!

But that was a minor issue and I'm happy to commend this as a worthy read and a great math tutor for young minds.

Maria Montessori by Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Raquel Martín

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was another in a series of which I've read and reviewed several, nearly all of them positively. This is about a woman who brought a fresh perspective to education, starting with children who had some sort of mental impairment. Back in her day (her real work began at the turn of the century) these children were not well-cared-for and were written-off in terms of assessing their capabilities and futures. Montessori changed this and showed that with the right stimuli, these children had capacity far beyond what they were typically consigned to in life.

The book doesn't cover everything. Notably missing is Montessori's own child which she had 'out of wedlock' as it used to be called. She chose to remain a single mom because had she married the father, she would have been expected to give up her work, which she refused to do. Is this something that very young children need to know? I guess that's up to the parent/guardian and what they think their child can handle, but it's not necessary to include it in a book like this, although her son did end-up assisting her in her work when he grew older.

The book was informative, well-illustrated, and told a good - and true! - story. I commend it as a worthy read.

Heavy Flow: Breaking the Curse of Menstruation by Amanda Laird

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I've long been glad I have only one X chromosome to deal with, and this book rubber-stamped that for me! The author takes on the myths and nonsense surrounding menstruation, and straight-talks her way through it, setting a few things to rights as she goes. I could have done without the more fringe elements of the book, which fortunately were rare. The author references naturopathy a lot, and that, as far as I'm concerned is pseudo-medicine, as Britt Marie Hermes's website will confirm https://www.naturopathicdiaries.com" (or any competent doctor!), but that was a small part and I had no problem with her observations and recommendations elsewhere.

The book discusses, in depth, the menstrual cycle and the body parts it affects, down to biochemistry and hormones. It spares no important detail, and it explains everything in clear language, discussing every aspect and dispelling any vestige of perceived shame, embarrassment, negativity or any other bad feeling about a perfectly natural event that is in fact not a curse, but a vital sign which can help a woman to understand her body and get the best out of it including, unless you're sadly unlucky, an improved outlook and experience during "that time of the month".

I watched a short documentary on Netflix recently, titled Period. End Of Sentence and directed by Rayka Zehtabchi. This was before it went on to win best short documentary in this year's Oscars so I wasn't just jumping on the paddy wagon! It highlighted yet another aspect of how badly women are done to when it comes to ordinary - although fortunately in this case not quite everyday - experiences that women undergo, and for me it highlighted why books like this one are important and ought to be read by anyone, regardless of how many X's they carry or how they perceive themselves regardless of the X factor in their chromosomes. An enterprising woman in India, Aditi Gupta, used crowdfunding to create a comic book talking to young girls about menstruation. "Menstrupedia" has now been translated in multiple languages. It's another step toward breaking this ridiculous taboo over a perfectly natural bodily function.

This was a Kindle edition and also an advance review copy, so hopefully the technical problems I found in it will be fixed before it's 'out there', but just in passing I should mention that once again, Amazon's crappy Kindle process turned yet another book into kindling in places. In the section, "THE PHASES OF THE MENSTRUAL CYCLE" a table showing follicular and luteal phases was completely mangled by Amazon's conversion process. You absolutely cannot have anything fancy in a book or novel if you're going to put it through the Kindle mangle, because Kindle will slice, dice, shred and julienne it, I promise you.

In addition to this, I also noted, about 30% in, this random text that didn't seem to be connected to anything else: "years to be different from the period that you have in your twenties or after childbirth." Much later in the book, there was the partial sentence "...prioritize food over supplements. Fresh," which ended right there, abruptly and was then followed by two screens of another mangled table which I assume in the print book is an inserted box. This was followed by the rest of the beginning sentence, "healthy food should be the first source...." Again mangled courtesy of Kindle.

There was another case, which I saw several times, where the page header became incorporated into the text, again courtesy of Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process, so the text looked like this:

when a Chinese medical textbook
Managing Your Period Pain 177
recommended cannabis flowers to ease symptoms during menstruation.

Again if you're submitting the book to Amazon, you need to strip it of anything fancy or even remotely fancy. No page headers, no page numbering, no inset boxes, no plethora of fancy fonts. Just plain vanilla all the way is the only thing Kindle can handle in my experience, and it sometimes has isses with that, too. This is one of several reasons why I will have no truck with that mega-corporation any more.

There may have been other quirky instances of text mangling that I did not notice or that I forgot to record because I was engrossed in the reading! There was at least one instance of a misunderstanding. Around 80% in I read, "...it's only going to increase that inflammation, which in turn may increase pain and discomfort. It's like rubbing salt into the wound." But the reason salt was rubbed into a wound wasn't to increase pain or to torture, it was to sterilize the wound, so I'm not sure this metaphor is apt. On the other hand, it is used commonly to mean, 'make things worse', quite contrary to when it's used to compliment someone as in 'you're the salt of the Earth'. English language is totally screwed-up; that's part of the joy of being a writer who uses it!

But technical issues aside, I really enjoyed this book and consider it not only a worthy read, but an essential one. It made for fascinating, sometimes disturbing, but always educational reading.

What Do Machines Do All Day? by Jo Nelson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

The title of this book amused the heck out of me so I had to request it and see what was up. The book is about various scenarios (the farm, the building site, the mine, the mall, and so on), and in each section we learn about several machines you might find there and what these machines do.

I have to say the initial picture, introducing the scenario and showing all the machines, was a bit busy and hard to take in at first glance, but perhaps this was intentional because there is a breakdown after that page which shows the individual machines and vehicles and explains what they do (in first person voice!), then you're challenged to go back and find them in the big picture. I imagine young children will have fun with this and enhance their seek and find skills to boot, which is never a bad thing.

The text was simple and straight-forward, and the drawings were somewhat stylized to keep them simple too. They were very colorful. It would have been nice had there been a word about safety here and there, and oddly, my ebook ARC version of this (I don't merit a print book!) was doubled - so when I got to the end of the book, it started over again, and was therefore twice as long as it needed to be. Presumably that will be fixed in the final edition.

Overall I thought this was a fun book and a worthy read for young children.

Wish by Chris Saunders

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a fun story about sharing, written for young kids. The artwork is spectacular and really caught my eye. The story itself is poetic and brings a reader right into the unfolding tale.

The cute rabbit on the cover manages to end up with three wishes and doesn’t quite know what to do with them, and so seeks advice from friends who relate what their own wish would have been. In the end, each of them gets their wish through a very generous lagomorphic donation and they, in turn, share their dream with their friend, so everyone is rewarded. It’s a short, easy read, a fun story, and it’s a story with a message that’s beautifully illustrated by the author. I commend it as a worthy read.

The Cave by Rob Hodgson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was an entertaining story about a persistent wolf and an anonymous denizen of a cave. The amusing wolf is hungry and quite sneaky. He tries several schemes to lure out whoever is in the cave, but without success. He ought to wish the success would forever evade him because when it doesn't, he discovers he really didn't want to meet this cave-dweller! It was nicely-drawn and colored, and the story carries a valuable lesson to the effect of being careful what you wish for! I commend it as a fun story for young children, especially if they like surprises!

Catwoman Vol 1 Copycats by Joëlle Jones, Fernando Blanco, Laura Allread, John Kalisz

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a nicely done comic, written and illustrated by Jones in partnership with fellow artist Fernando Blanco, and colorists Laura Allread and John Kalisz. I liked this version of Selina Kyle: perky, confident, realistic, and not overblown into some pneumatic caricature. The writing was sensible and fun, and the artwork excellent.

She would pre-fur to live in relative obscurity at her new scratching-post away from Gotham, but unfortunately Catwoman cannot find the peace she seeks because of a cat nipping at her heels - or rather, several of them. There seems to be a veritable plethora of cat-women here. Why? Is it some sort of Meow-Too movement? Will the real Selina please stand and arch her back?

Making a feline for the answer, the real Catwoman stray-cat-struts her way boldly into the fray to tear down this caterwaul and see what's on the other side of it. I commend this as a worthy read.

Bright Start - Feel Better Daddy by Nancy Loewen; Hazel Michelle Quintanilla

Rating: WARTY!

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

After the bad experience I had with a companion book in the "Bright Start" series, I really thought this one was misnamed. Bright start is exactly the opposite of what I had, and this volume was no better: there was an appallingly long opening time for the book to even come up on the screen at all, and then a comprehensive inability to swipe from the cover to page one. As before, this was this was on a new iPad using Adobe's Digital Editions reader.

I'd beee looking forward to this having been sick myself a couple of weekends ago, but after my experience with the companion volume, I was not about to waste any time on this, so after trying to swipe to page one several times with no effect, I DNF'd this one just as I had done with the companion volume. I cannot commend a book, clearly designed for a print version, and to which zero thought has quite evidently been given for the electronic version. It's impossible to read, much less enjoy as an ebook.