Show Me Cool Magic by Jake Banfield

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a fun book in the end. it got off to a bit of a slow start for me when I realized that almost half of the book was taken up with information about staging a magic act rather than magic tricks. I started to wonder how many tricks there could be in the remaining few pages at this rate, but in the end there was a bunch of them, and while many of them are really for a young performer, and one of them was the same card trick twice, just done in a slightly different way, some of them are quite sneaky and sophisticated, so overall, I think this is a winner.

The tricks are varied and are explained by means of written instructions augmented by photographs, so in general it's clear what's happening. The trick section of the book opens with a discussion of basics covering card, coin, and 'mind reading' as well as magician's tools and troubleshooting - always good to have handy! It then lays out the tricks in three sections: openers, middles, and finales. Good to be organized!

The tricks themselves are fun. The openers include producing four aces out of a shuffled pack, reading your subject's pulse (not really - that's the illusion!), a body illusion, a vanishing pen - a neat and simple trick which is relatively easy to do with little practice. Once you've mastered that, you can also master the cut and restored shoelace trick! There is a total of ten tricks in the 'openers' section.

In the 'middles' are eleven more tricks, including the lie detector(!), jumping rings, stacked kings, pencil through a banknote, and how to make a coin appear to enter a sealed drink can! Yes, it can be done with some practice and trickery! 'Finales' brings a further nine tricks, including prediction and the always amazing cup-and-ball trick, with a surprise! In short, there is some thirty tricks here, ranging from simple, but effective, to rather more complex, but nothing that a willing child cannot do with some dedication and lots of practice. That's the real secret here: practice until you're confident, and once you master one trick, others will come a lot easier.

It doesn't matter whether you're planning on putting on a 'professional show' or you just want to learn some neat tricks to impress your friends and family, there is something here for all occasions. It's all about misdirection and illusion, and with some reading and practice, you can emulate the professionals. I commend this as a fun, worthy, and education read!

When We Became Humans by Michael Bright, Hannah Bailey

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Erratum:
On the introductory page What's a Human?' - in the section on hominins, the text reads, "Humans and are closest relatives are called hominins" I suspect it should read, 'our' closest relatives.

Written well by Bright and illustrated nicely by Bailey, this book tells of the evolution of humans over 65 million years - and yes, that's when the first mammals date back to! People often say that it was only the destruction of the dinosaurs in the penultimate extinction event (we're going through the ultimate one right now) that 'allowed' mammals to evolve to become today's dominant class of living things (aside from bacteria and viruses, that is. And beetles! LOL!).

I'm not sure I buy that. Dinosaurs, in one form or another date back to some quarter billion years ago, and they didn't start to become dominant themselves until a major extinction event from which they profited, in much the same way we profited. But could mammals have become dominant if Dinosaurs had not died out? I think they could, but there isn't any way to really know! perhaps a more interesting questions is: would humans ever have evolved if dinosaurs had not died out?

This books isn't about speculation though - it's about what actually happened as testified to by the abundant evidence we have for primate and human evolution from fossils, from genetics, and from other sources. This books starts tracing that lineage from the earliest mammals such as Purgatorius (sounds like a Roman gladiator, right?!) to Archicebus, to Aegyptopithecus. Here's a tip - any complicated fossil name like that which ends in 'pithecus' - that means it was some sort of ape or monkey. This one - the fossil of it, that is, was first found in Egypt, hence the start of the name.

A couple of others were Proconsul and Pierolapithecus. Yeah - not all names follow the same rules! Proconsul was a monkey but it cheated a bit because there was an ape in London zoo when it was discovered, that was named Consul, so this was named to indicate it came earlier than modern apes. Duhh!

In language suitable for younger children, the book explains clearly not only what we know, but how we know what we know. Evidence from anatomy, from old DNA, from comparing skeletons, and even from studying modern DNA and how modern organisms are related, can reveal a lot, when you know what you're looking for and have a competent scientific understanding. Those without such an education will draw false conclusions and even make things up. Those people are not scientists, and don't know what they're talking about. Stick with a solid 150 or so years of evolutionary science, a steadily mounting trail of reliable evidence, and a solid track record, and you won't go wrong!

Next up comes the earliest precursors of modern humans such as Australopithecus - there it is again. You now know the pithecus part, but what of the Australo-? Well, what sounds like that? Australia! That doesn't mean it was found in Australia, but that word - that prefix, means of the south. Australia's in the south and this specimen was found in the south - but of Africa. Ah you ask, so why isn't it called Africanus? Well, there is actually one called Africanus! Can't use the same name twice!

The names kept on coming. At one point there was almost no fossil evidence for human evolution; now, scientists are finding it regularly as they learn more about where to look. The book discusses these findings, including what these primitive people ate (and yes, by this point they were more like people than like apes), where they lived, and how they worked with tools.

The scientist sho study these things have found evidence of rock shelters where primitive humans lived the fires they made, and the tools they created. They even named one species 'handyman' - Homo for 'human' and 'habilis' for handy - that is, they were good with their hands. The name is often shortened to H. habilis - the first part always with a capital letter, the second part always lower case. They weren't handy because they lived close by and could come over and fix something for you at short notice! Once the 'H's started showing up, many more were found and this book does a great job of laying out the story, and illustrating how they might have looked - remember we have only the skeletons, so we have to kind of guess how they looked, and one guess is as good as another!

H. heildebergensis and the Neanderthals are discussed next, the mysterious Denisovans, and even the 'hobbit' people - H. floresiensis! But you know what? All of these have disappeared, leaving humans: H. sapiens, as the sole surviving member of our genus (the genus is the first bit, the H, the species is the second bit, the sapiens. If there's a third bit, its a sub-species. All modern humans, no matter whether they look exactly like you or a bit different, no matter what country they live in or what they wear or believe, or eat or do everyday, are this same species. There's a chart toward the end of the book laying out all of these human and near-human species.

The book discusses how this all began in Africa, how the giant mammals of the world died out, and how humans spread from Africa to occupy every content on the planet - the most wide-spread single species there is. Maybe apart from rats. And mice. And bacteria. And viruses! I guess that's quite a few of us, huh?! There's a nice map showing how humans spread across the globe near the end of the book.

We went on - as the book makes clear, to refine our tools, to invent the wheel, to invent glue to hold weapons together to go hunting and to protect ourselves, to beginning agriculture, to domesticating animals - including the wolf which we now keep as dogs - and to inventing video games. Wow! Actually the book doesn't say that last bit - I added it myself. Bu we learned how to make things and then trade them with other communities to get other stuff that we couldn't find or make. Then came trade tariffs. Actually, I added that bit as well!

We went far beyond that over time to grow into and create the complicated world humans inhabit now. The book discusses healthcare, jewelry, art, and monument building, and then writing came along, of course, so we could record everything we did in order to benefit future generations - and this book is one of those results! I commend it as a fun, interesting, educational, and very worthy read.

Bird's Eye View The Natural World by John Farndon, Paul Boston

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Erratum:
"Pampas deer grass" should be ‘pampas deer graze' I suspect on the South American page.

This colorful and educational book is quite literally what it says: a bird's eye view of various places of beauty and fascination in the world, starting in the Florida Everglades and going down over South America, out to a Pacific atoll, then across the Pacific to Uluru Rock in central Australia, up over the Guilin Hills in China, across the Asian Steppes, down over the Himalayas, through East Africa, across to Wales, on to Northern Scandinavia, back to the Irish coast, and then to France.

At each stop we learn about the animals and plants that live there, and a little about the ecology and how the land got to be that way at that location. It was unusual, fun, and very interesting, and hopefully it will lure readers into learning more. I don't think anyone who has read this book or anything like it can fail to see what horrible things we're doing to our planet and how urgent it is that we stop doing those things and rectify the evil we've already perpetrated. I commend this fully as a very worthy read.

The Classroom Mystery by Tracy Packiam Alloway, Ana Sanfelippo

Rating: WORTHY!

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

In what's looking like a series here, I got the welcome chance to review a second young children's book from the same writer (Alloway) and illustrator (Sanfelippo) team who brought us The Map Challenge which I positively reviewed yesterday. Who says Britain and Argentina can't get along? Okay, you got me. No one says that. I just made it up to get attention!

Seriously, this book explores ADHD in the same way the other book took a look at dyslexia. In this book, the main character is Izzy, who can't forget that someone stole the classroom rabbit's food. She has a form of ADHD and cannot focus on the math lesson. Eventually she gets everyone involved in the crucial effort to find that poor rabbit's crunchy snacks.

The nice thing about these books is that they don't pick on the one with the condition, nor do they put him or her in a negative light. Instead, they emphasize the positive, and it's because of her 'super powers' that come as part and parcel of ADHD that Izzy is able to recall things and make connections that others do not - so, yes, you got it - she solves the mystery!

As usual (so it seems!) in the back of these books are teacher and parent resource pages, advising on certain aspects of (in this case) ADHD, and discussing events in the story and ways to improve on some of the deficits of attention that may hamper an individual at times (and no, it doesn't involve medication!). I liked this book as much as I liked the first one. Izzy was actually rather endearing, and I commend this as a worthy read.

Kitchen Science Lab for Kids by Liz Lee Heinecke

Rating: WORTHY!

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

You can't have a poetical name like 'Liz Lee Heinecke' - and that last name redolent of my favorite Dutch lager, without a certain confidence that whatever she cooks up in the kitchen will be worth followinbg. Not that I've cooked up any yet, but I have my list of ingredients prepared so I can try at least a couple of them over the July 4th weekend. I;ve made jelly rolls before, but never a tie-dyed one, so that's on the list. Plus I need the food coloring for another project related to my 'The Little Rattuses' series!

This book here is dubbed the 'Edible Edition' but I'm not sure why - unless the print version is printed with vegetable ink on rice paper or something! I suspect it's because there are other labs, and this is the one working with actual food. Overall I found it enjoyable. It is full of great ideas for fun foods and drinks, but more than this, it offers some science tips on why foods bake, cook, ferment, rise, and otherwise behave the way they do when manipulated in our kitchens. This was a fun twist that I really enjoyed because knowing some science is never a bad thing.

This book covers simple projects like 'mere' decoration (that's not 'decoration of meres' but decoration of foods, BTW), to tastier treats like desserts, as well as drinks, main courses, snacks and sauces (again with the poetry!), so there ought to be something for everyone. All of these recipes are nut-free and other potential allergens are identified, so those fears are also addressed. The preparations are aimed at being child-friendly too, so there are advisories about potential problem areas where an adult might be needed or is required.

The recipes begin not only with a complete list of ingredients, but also any other items needed to complete it successfully, and each step is laid out with a photograph so you can make sure you're staying on track - assuming you can keep your mind off sampling those ingredients along the way! There's a richness of recipes and no frugality of finished foods to enjoy when you're done. It's fun, easy to follow, great to look at, and it's educational! Who could ask for a more useful book than this? I commend this one as a worthy read followed by a worthy eat!

Spring Skies Over Bluebell Castle by Sarah Bennett

Rating: WARTY!

This story sounded intriguing to me since I was born and raised in Derbyshire where it's set, but it fell short of the glory of a great story and it happened quickly. The language was far too flowery for my taste for one thing:

“As she stepped down onto the creamy marble floor of the imposing entrance hall, a blast of cold from the open front door sent a shiver through her, and she was glad for the thermal vest hidden beneath her silk blouse. A strip of Wedgwood blue sky showed over the rooftops of the buildings across the street.“

Creamy? Imposing? Silk? Wedgwood? At least she spelled Wedgwood right so credit where credit is due, but this was way too much, especially when most of it was all in one sentence.

And this is how we meet Lucie Kennington, who works for a high-end art gallery and is suspended in a most unrealistic way when an art piece she brought to the attention of the gallery is apparently stolen by being switched out for a fake. This made no sense to me since if she wanted to steal it, then why the hell would she ever bring it to the attention of the gallery in the first place? She found it hanging unsung on someone's wall and recognized it for what it was. If she were going to be dishonest about it, she would have offered the owner a few pounds for it and made out like gangbusters in the profit. If their beef is that it was stolen, not necessarily by her, then the problem is security, not the woman who found the piece.

So she gets suspended while an investigation takes place, and immediately this turns into one of those 'weak women fleeing back to her home town - or in this case to the countryside' which is precisely the kind of chick-lit story I detest. I foolishly picked this one up to read thinking it might be different and intrigued by the Derbyshire aspect. I had little to nothing of Derbyshire in the part I read which was admittedly limited.

All I really got was dumb-ass Lucie and an even more dumb-ass family of landed gentry named after characters from Arthurian mythology (which has nothing to do with Derbyshire, BTW) dealing with a financial crisis in their castle. It's patently obvious she's going to get it on with Arthur Ludworth who "might just be the most handsome man Lucie’s ever laid eyes on." Barf. Arthur has 'shaggy hair' of course which is probably why she can’t wait to shag him.

Of course, Arthur's salvation is once more a painting which Lucie recognizes and which is worth a fortune. I'm guessing the art gallery will find Lucie completely innocent and beg her to return, for her only to thumb her nose at them now she's King Arthur's trophy wife.

I didn't like Luci or Arthur; they were both as dumb as a bag of dumbbells, so maybe that makes them a perfect match, but that really put the brakes on this story for me. Girl with a secret past afraid of being embarrassed, and too stupid to tell all to the man she's supposedly falling in love with? I'm sorry but 'dumb broads' are not remotely interesting to me, nor is the 'billionaire falls for the poor girl' kind of a story - which is what this is, close enough, and you don't even get the eroticism! LOL! I ditched it and was glad I did. There's better to be had out there than this; much better.

Secrets of the Great Fire Tree by Justine Laismith

Rating: WARTY!

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

I gave up on this one at about fifty percent in because the story was so badly letting down the exciting title that I couldn't stand it. If you're going to title your middle-grade novel 'secrets of' something, and include the phrase, 'Great Fire Tree', then you had better have something thrilling to back it up with, and this novel did not. It was pedantic and boring, and just seemed to ramble on in diverse directions paradoxically without really getting anywhere. Instead of Asian fantasy we got a mundane school bullying story, and a farming story. I gave up on it because I could see no hope of it improving and I was bored to tears. I can't commend it based on the fifty percent that I managed to get through.

The story is of Kai, who is left largely on his own when his mother is forced to go and work in the city. It's just him and his pet pig - that's really being fattened for the kill. He gets the idea that if he can unlock the secrets of the Fire Tree, he can bring his mother back home. I was willing to set aside what might have been a more interesting story of Kai growing and learning how to handle things without magic, but when instead I was expecting a good Asian fantasy and didn't get one, I was disappointed.

I've read and enjoyed Asian fantasies before, so I do get that eastern fantasy isn't the same as western fantasy, but even within that context, the story seemed to take forever to get anywhere, and even when it was going places, it seemed to be all over the place - everywhere in fact, except the magical world promised by the blurb. By the time I quit this tale, not only had any secrets failed to materialize, story failed to even look like it would impart any. My patience can only be stretched so far, and this one exceeded it. I cannot commend it based on what I read.

Athena's Choice by Adam Boostrom

Rating: WARTY!

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

I liked this story initially, but I had several problems with it: some of the writing was a bit off, the story moved slowly, the main character seemed really quite stupid at times, and the premise of a stolen genome was really thin. Even so I might have been willing to rate it positively, but the ending was such a let-down that I honestly can't bring myself to commend it was a worthy read.

The basic story is that of a future world which is highly technological and idyllic, and in which men are completely absent, having died out as a result of a plague which inexplicably seems to have afflicted only men. The story tells us that the plague attacked the Y chromosome in several different ways, which was why it was so successful, but it fails to address the fact that the Y chromosome is largely a degraded X chromosome, so it begs the question as to why this plague didn't affect any women? Why didn't it affect male animals? The chimpanzee genome is almost identical to the human genome, so did all the male chimps die out too? Again, it's never even mentioned, much less addressed. Closer to home, the question of what happened to transgendered people is completely ignored - like they don't exist or worse, don't matter. This was a bad no-no.

Equally bad was a complete failure to address how this had affected the world of human society and industry. While I don't doubt that there are women who would be thrilled were there no men around (and sometimes I don't blame them quite honestly!), I can't imagine that every woman on the planet would have been happy that no men were left. How did that affect life? How did they start to recover? Given that men are so pervasive in business and sports and so on, how did it affect those things? Women can of course fill any role that a man can, but that doesn't mean they come to that role with the same experience as the men who had been, prior to their disappearance, doing it on a daily basis, so what happened in the interim, until the slack was taken up? Did robots fill in?

On that score, this world, replete with AI, seems inexplicably devoid of robots and by extension (so to speak) of male sex dummies! Did every woman become lesbian? How? Why? Did the women immediately start trying to work out how to clone more women? How did that fare? Were there setbacks? Fights? Civil war between women? None of this is addressed. It's like the loss of the entire male half of the population was a complete non-event! While that's amusing to postulate, in practice, it needs addressing. The thrust of the story is not about that, so I didn't expect reams of backstory on the topic (that would have been boring), but to fail to address it at all, not even in passing, in casual remarks here and there perhaps, is inexcusable.

Anyway, after so much time without men, there is a movement and a scientific project that's been going on for five years, to recreate the male genome. It's not explained how come there isn't anywhere a computer file, hard drive, set of disks, or textbooks or anything remaining as to the male genome.

Given that the male genome is almost identical to the female one, it isn't explained why it's taking so long - except for some vague and farcical hand-waving about the virulence of the virus, and the fact that the genome must be robust enough to counter it, but this made little sense. If it attacked only human males and all human males died out, then the virus had to either die out along with them, and so would not be a problem, or it had to find a reservoir in which to survive and in time, to evolve. If it evolved, it would be a huge and ongoing problem, threatening even the female population! None of this is addressed, not even in passing.

One of the biggest problems in these dystopia type of stories is the failure to address the rest of the world. Did all humans die out or was it just in the US? If so, there are already males in other countries! Did even the males on the International Space Station die out? Those on remote islands? Even if they did, other countries are probably working on bringing men back and at the very least, they certainly have the genetic information available, but this story behaves as though the US is the only country on the planet!

Unfortunately, that's the blinkered tack that far too many of these futuristic stories take, and it makes the story seem really dumb. None of that was adequately addressed. I don't imagine for a minute that if all men disappeared, suddenly every country would get along and throw away its nationality to join together and make a world alliance. People aren't like that, not even women. If the US Republican women can't bring themselves to join the US Democrat women in issuing a condemnation of the president's repeated misconduct (at best) towards women, how can you expect women from entirely disparate nations to ever agree on anything like a world government?

Even without all of those issues though, the big problem with this novel was that the main character repeatedly came off as being less than sharp. She kept having dreams in which an urgent message was imparted to her. Now admittedly in keeping with this kind of a story, the message was vague to the point of uselessness - and frustratingly and irritatingly so - but this doesn't change the fact that something urgent was going on, and yet Athena never once reacted to this like it was an issue. She just let it wash over her like nothing was wrong, no problem existed, she was not somehow chosen to resolve a supposedly serious issue, and so on. This made her look stupid to me, like some sort of lackadaisical country bumpkin who just didn't get it.

Like I said, it didn't help that the dream warnings she kept getting were annoyingly vague. It's so reminiscent of other stories or movies/TV shows I've encountered where the psychic gets warnings of an impending murder or a disaster, yet they never get detail enough to stop it. Instead of "Stephen Davidson is going to be murdered by David Stephenson on the corner of Fifth and Main in Big City with a knife at two in the morning on Tuesday the eighteenth," all they get are the most worthless and vaguest of details and it's really irritating.

It would have been far more interesting had the warnings been specific, but something else had prevented the protagonist from getting the problem solved, but this was not such a novel. This one was of that same, vague, irritating nature, and given where the warnings were coming from, they ought to have been much better, but the worst part about this was again Athena's complete lack of motivation. She was so passive throughout, that she herself was annoying.

The reason that the premise was thin with regard to the genome being completely gone was several-fold. First is the ambient ignorance that seems so pervasive when it comes to how information is stored in a computer. There seems to be this crazy notion that if the information is copied, it's not really copied, but instead it's actually removed from the original and shifted entirely to another location. This isn't how copying works.

The problem here seemed not that someone had copied the genome, but that the genome was gone: i.e. erased. It is possible to delete the information, but deleting normally doesn't actually delete it, it simply marks the location as vacant - so it can be used for other storage, but unless the storage has been significantly overwritten since the deletion (which is how it's truly deleted), it's quite possible to recover it.

Having said that and in view of some information that became revealed later in the story, it's possible the thief did erase the information, and in such a way that it was impossible to recover it, but never once was this mentioned, nor was it explained how this thief got by the AI watchdogs. Instead, there was just this bland and blind assumption that it was gone and there were no backups, which was profoundly stupid. Of course there are backups, and unless the people operating the system are complete morons, the back-up is off site and in a secure location, preferably on a different medium that does not permit electronic outside access. So for example if you have some songs on your computer and also stored on disks, then if they're accidentally erased from the computer, you can restore them from the disks.

Now if even one person had simply asked, "It was deleted? Can't we recover it from off-site backup?" and was given a definitive "No!" (because the backup had been tampered with, for example), then the story would have made a lot more sense, but no one, not even the police captain in charge of the inquiry, ever asks this. It was a glaring hole through the whole story, but nowhere near as glaring as the fact that this whole thing was a charade, but I can't go into that without revealing a plot point (not that the plot ever pursued that point - which accounts for my dissatisfaction with the ending, an ending which just sort of fizzled out).

There were some oddities in the text here and there, such as when Athena who has of course never met a man, views them fantasy-like as having rough, calloused hands and strong arms. Whence this idea of what men were like? Maybe she read it somewhere? The thing is that it doesn't say that in the text, so it leaves this question hanging as to how she knows - or more accurately, why she has this bizarre idea of what a man is like. It's never addressed, nor is it addressed why Athena, evidently a lifelong lesbian, is suddenly fantasizing, completely out of the blue, about strong men.

At another point in the text I read the word "brusk" - except that it's not a word. The actual word is 'brusque', which comes to us from the French, via the Italian, via the Latin (as always it seems!) from a word meaning a brush, so it's really apt, but you'd never know that from 'brusk' which sounds like some sort of snack food for a teething toddler. It would seem that the misspelling used here is disturbingly becoming acceptable. The problem with such linguistic languor is that we lose the root of the word, and our language becomes poorer for it.

At another point I read, "The sky had turned from dark black to dark blue" but isn't dark black just...black? Another kind of oddity arrived when I read, "At the bottom if the box lay a small, pink, sapphire object." The problem with this is that sapphire isn't pink. Sapphire is a precious way of saying of aluminum oxide and it can come in orange, purple, and yellow as well as the more commonplace blue, but if it's red, then it's not a sapphire, it's a ruby! So whence the pink sapphire? No idea. By 'sapphire-like' was the author talking about the shape of it? But 'sapphire' isn't a shape, so I have no idea what was meant there.

One more thing I found confusing was when Athena, looking out of her apartment window one morning, spies a river of delivery drones so thick it obscures the pedestrians below it on the street. The thing is that in this world, everyone apparently has 3D printers in their home to make things, such as clothes, and even breakfast, so why is there this massive need for delivery drones? What are they delivering - masses of printing 'ink'? This seems to have been one more case where this world hasn't quite been thought through, and it happened way too many times. That and the thin plot and lackluster main character really disappointed me, and I therefore cannot commend this story.

Wildflowers, Part I: Allaha of the Mountain by Aurora Lee Thornton

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata:
"....the witch go the fire started." Got?
"staunch the bleeding." Stanch
"Brisbane grit his teeth" gritted
"My business here is done. I will leave on the marrow." Morrow?

My problem with this book (apart from it being a part of a series!) is that it never went anywhere (which begs the question quo vadis the series?!). I managed to read about 25% of it before giving up because it was uninteresting to me as well as annoying. It simply rambled on and on, spending far more time on world-building than ever it did in telling any actual story.

This is part of my problem with series. I typically do not read them because of precisely the problems this one had. The first book in a series is inevitably not a story, but a prologue - and I don't do prologues. Once in a while, a series comes along which does work well and which can justify itself. I've read series which are engaging and which make a reader want more, but often those kinds of stories feel bloated and padded, as well as lethargic and pedantic, and this is how this one felt to me.

The somewhat illiterate blurb tells us that "Allaha is a knight of the Order of Aisha, Fallen of the Mountain. She - like her fellows - is stoic and reserved, trained to fight against demons and their ilk. When she triggers a vision that kills a renown oracle, she is set on a quest to complete the prophecy." That 'renown' should have been 'renowned', but authors don't get to write their own blurbs unless they self-publish, so I typically don't hold them to account for that kind of thing.

For me, the problem here is that the quest never really gets underway despite the endless traveling that these people do. On top of this, the difference between Allaha and an actual knight is, well, day and night, because she never does anything! Not once does she fight! I'm not a fan of endless blood and gore, but you'd think at some point early in the story the author would want to unleash Allaha to show us just how good she is, but no. It's like Allaha is on Quaaludes.

In the part that I read, it was never explained what Allaha's title meant either. Aisha is her god - apparently fallen, but I have no idea what that meant, or why she was still worshipped or considered to have any power if she has fallen. Or was it Allaha who has fallen? I dunno. It was never explained in the part I read. I have no idea what it meant that she was 'of the mountain' either. She often announced herself as Allaha of the Mountain, and everyone seemed to understand what this meant no matter how far she traveled. Even when she was on another mountain entirely, nobody ever asked her which mountain she referred to, or what that title meant, which I felt was a bit much, frankly.

The travelers with Allaha are: Tamara, who is a young woman of the Menori people, who are apparently like the Romany, or maybe itinerant traders? I dunno. Again, it isn't explained. She was also a 'hamalakh', which is a sort of psychic lie detector or trouble detector. Other than that, she was an enigma who we never got to know.

The problem with all of this was that she was alternately referred to as Tamara, as the Menori girl, and as the hamalakh, which initially made it difficult to keep track of who the author was referring to. I had this same problem with the others in the group who remained equally unexplored enigmas even after 25% of this novel, yet annoyingly larded with nouns.

The most annoying of the group were Hibu and Tibu though. Hibu was a sorcerer from Jeongwon, so he was referred to by name, by nationality, and by his profession - again, three initially confusing titles. Tibu wasn't a name but a nationality. His name was Karejakal, also referred to as Karej, and he was a young cat person. So...even more confusion there.

In addition to this we were introduced to multiple new characters every few screens, who came and went like the flickering pages of one of those print books that animates a scene as you let the pages flash by in rapid sequence. It was hard to keep track of anyone. I still have no idea how Allaha came to be playing den mother to any of these people because none of this was explained, or if it was, I missed it somehow. Perhaps that was my fault as I shall explain now.

The novel is a bunch of flashbacks related by Allaha who is evidently being held prisoner. The book starts with her, and then is told in flashbacks, which I personally detest, so every time we start getting into the story, it's brought to a screeching halt for an eyewitness update on Allaha's condition, after which we return to our story in progress. It was annoying as hell. I quickly took to ignoring the Allaha chapters and simply followed the story which made for far better reading, although as I hinted above, perhaps the story of den mother Allaha was related in those portions I skipped. I don't know, and I really don't care at this point.

I was on a cruise ship a few months ago, and they showed free movies every evening, but during the viewing, the idiot cruise director would literally stop the movie and spend two or three minutes rambling on about events taking place on the ship, as if those of us halfway into the movie actually cared. If we had cared, then we'd have been at those events instead of comfortably sitting there trying to enjoy this movie! It was so irritating, and that's what these constant stoppages to get an Allaha status update were like for me.

The author seemed curiously dedicated to keeping us updated on Allaha's unchanging body status, too:

• "Her body was covered in scars and bruises"
• "She was covered in scars and bruises"
• "old scars and colorful bruises"
• "Her body was covered in scars and bruises"
• "She had new scratches and bruises "
• "The scratches and bruises still hurt "

This was another irritation. Did the author really think that after the first two times we honestly needed these almost word-for-word repeated updates on her physical condition? Apparently she did.

There were other such oddities and annoyances. At one point I read, "She had light red hair, almost more of a dark pink." Seriously? To me, light red has always been pink and dark pink always been red! But I'm a guy and as such am not quite as attuned to nuances of color as women seem to be, so maybe I'm missing something. I don't think I was missing something when I read, "The beds were compressions cut into the ground." I think the author meant 'depressions'? Also, I read, "We know the Zhos; they would not let one of their go free" which should read, 'theirs go free' or maybe 'their number go free'?

Another issue I had was with the phonetic representations of speech. I prefer it to be simply described, with maybe an example given here and there, but for the most part just to have the text in plain unadulterated English. I really don't like this sort of thing: "Come in trou da inn ten" and "Tat it tis." I've made only one exception to this, but in general, my personal preference is to just say they have an accent rather than try to phonetically represent it. Maybe that's just me, but in a novel which was already filling with annoyances, one more didn't help.

The other thing which was really annoying was this other character named Goric, who was a demon, and who floated along as a disembodied head. He was evidently the resident stand-up comedian of the group, but he wasn't funny. He truly became an irritation in short order. None of this helped me to enjoy the story at all. Nor did it make sense for the blurb to tell us that Allaha is "trained to fight against demons and their ilk" and then have her tolerate this one who was apparently tied to the sorcerer, aka Hibu, aka the Jeongwonee.

This group, for some reason which escaped me, was supposed to be figuring out how to stop this darkness that was coming, but there seemed to be no urgency to their 'quest'. This god Aisha whom Allaha worshipped evidently was of no help (because she was fallen?). The sorcerer was useless. No one they met could advise them at all. They were supposedly heading for an oracle, but they travelled literally for weeks and weeks through scrub desert, meadow, jungle and mountain and never seemed to get any closer. Everything that happened to them seemed solely for the purpose of adding new characters, tribes and communities to the world rather than actually moving the story along. To me, that was a major problem with this story and with series in general, and I can't commend this one at all.

Sticks and Stones by Melissa Lennig

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is another inventive and creative book for kids which will teach them creativity and self-reliance - things which will last far longer than any toy they can make or buy. But more than this, it helps eke out a tight budget and also gets kids outdoors. Time away from that video screen is never a bad thing. On top of this, we need more engineers - especially female ones. Who knows? Working with their hands and seeing how to turn ideas into a working finish product could well lead them into a useful and rewarding career. At the very least they will have a love and appreciation of nature and the outdoors.

In this book they will learn how to use outdoor materials to build a shelter and a fort (outdoor survival and history right there!) as well as bridges, dams, and fences. There are large and small scale projects including simple things like making ochre paint from rocks and a marshmallow roasting stick. It's never a bad thing to lure them in with something offering a treat if it hooks them on learning rather more complex projects! And picking up basic manual skills will build confidence and inventiveness which will grow their mind.

The book includes a score of projects and also, most importantly, includes a wealth of safety advice. I commend this as a worthy, educational, and useful read.

100 Things to Recycle and Make by Fiona Hayes

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a sweet and fun book with lots of easy-to-follow construction plans. It's divided into sections, so pretty much whatever suitable item you have around the house can be made into something, whether the material be cardboard boxes or tubes, egg cartons, paper plates or even items from nature. Each section has a score of items to make, so you'll never be stick for something to make although you may be spoiled for choice!

I enjoyed reading this and while my own children are a bit old for a book like this one now, they loved this kind of thing when they were younger. Working with the hands improves the brain, and allows children to think outside the box - quite literally, seeing it not as a box, but as something to be created and then played with and enjoyed.

Entertaining your kids doesn't necessarily mean trip to the store to buy something expensive and made from plastic which eventually is likely to end in some ocean somewhere, killing wildlife. This is a sane and creative alternative, and very easy on the budget! It brings not only immediate rewards to children, but also sets them up with confidence and self-reliability for their future. I commend it fully.

Draw Like an Artist: 100 Flowers and Plants by Melissa Washburn

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was an amazing book on drawing that does exactly what it promises to do: it supplies easy to follow step-by-step realistic line-drawing examples for creating 100 flowers and plants that look amazingly realistic.

Starting out with the most simplistic of initial images, the authors shows you how to refine them in five, six, or seven simple steps to turn it from a crude blob outlining what you want, into an ornate flower, of from a spike into an detailed leaf, and so on. Page after page of these examples painstaking outlined (and then filled in!) in simple steps. Yes, they're drawn by an artist, but I'd be willing to bet that any budding artist who works through this book, follows the advice, and copies these examples will be turning out an end result that looks remarkably like the images depicted in this book. I commend it.

Celestial Watercolor by Elise Mahan, DR McElroy

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was the second of two art books reviewed today that I cannot commend. Usually, I enjoy art and crafts books and find them useful and educational, and far more often than not, review them positively because of this, but this one felt like it was uninterested in talking about art, and far more into rambling on about astrology and seasonal Moons. I didn't feel like the book title represented what was going on here, and I was not impressed at all by what was going on.

The astrology treatise occupied over a dozen pages, followed by a short tutorial on actual painting. After that, it went on a jag about the new Moons which ate up another dozen pages without imparting a word about painting technique until, again, a short tutorial appeared at the end of that.

The book did offer some basic introductory information about watercolors, paints, papers, some techniques, and so on, as you would expect from a book of this nature, but after that it really wasn't much help at all. All of those pages passed by filled mostly with a bunch of folklore and fairytales that had nothing to do with painting.

The ebook version I had was annoyingly 'sticky' in the sense that certain pages (not always the same page) brought the book to a screeching halt and no matter how many times I tried to swipe, the page wouldn't change backwards or forwards for about twenty seconds, and then suddenly it changed. I couldn't even tap on it to bring up the slide bar at the bottom of the screen to change pages that way, so I was literally stuck on that page until something clicked internally in the iPad or the app and it swiped.

It was really annoying. I tried this in both Bluefire Reader and in Adobe Digital Editions and had the same problem in both apps, so unlike a print book, the ebook will not allow you to quickly page through to find a specific page. Overall, I felt - or rather I would have, had I paid for this rather than been able to see it as an advance review copy - that there was very little value for money to be had here! I cannot commend this one.

Draw 62 Magical Creatures and Make Them Cute by Heegyum Kim

Rating: WARTY!

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

This book was rather disappointing for me. While it does offer step-by-step examples in drawing creatures, that's literally all it offers. There is little to no text, and no pointers, hints or tips. There is no advice about materials such as those which art books typically offer in my experience, or information on style or technique in terms of approaching your drawing.

All you get on each page is a set of half-a-dozen or so simple steps to start, add to, and finish your creature or folk-lore person, and then there are some suggestions, in the form of additional drawings, on how to make it look cute, which to me didn't always succeed, but that's a matter of personal taste.

So overall, if you don't mind emulating existing drawings, but being largely in the dark about methods, this book might work for you. For me, I do not like the minimalist approach which some might argue is lazy or cynical. To me it felt more like it was offering nothing more than basic patterns to copy, and I was not impressed. Having seen other, much more generous books on art, I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Teen Titans: Raven by Kami Garcia, Gabriel Picolo

Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
p110 "I don't feel like taking right now " should be 'talking'

This is the first day I can post this because of an embargo, although I see scores of reviews already out there from other reviewers. Oh well! Anyway, Raven is a DC comics character who is almost the same age as the mature author of this YA graphic novel, but given that, and unlike authors unfortunately, comic book heroes never die and are paradoxically constantly reborn. Raven is being rebooted here yet again as a high-school senior and it's a major fail for reasons I shall go into shortly.

This is written by the author of Beautiful Creatures, something which it turns out, isn't a good idea. The story had annoying issues pretty much from the off, such as the whole vudu thing, which doesn't ever work for me. I just can't get with any spirit who can be bribed with spirits.

Plus despite the reboot, the story offered nothing new - only tired and outdated tropes: the new girl in high school, the school bitch, the creepy guy who instantly latches onto her and is entirely inappropriate, her "instadore" response to him for no reason at all, and this despite several warning signs that the guy is a creep. Authors are just so obsessed with adding a "romance" (I use the term loosely) that they're quite evidently willing to do anything, including selling-out and otherwise cheapening their main character, just to get it on.

If you haven't read the comics before this and you missed the pretty decent TNT live-action television series (which is how I came to be interested in this comic), Raven's name is Rachel Roth - and no, we can't get away from DC's tedious alliteration! Sorry! Her new male friend's name is Tommy Torres! Barf! Her backstory is that she's a 'cambion' - the offspring of a demon and a human mother - some might call her the antichrist!

In this new rebirth, she's a teenager who survives an MVA that kills her prospective adoptive mother, and in another trope, robs Raven of her memory. She's taken in by an aunt. Why this didn't happen first - why she was about to be adopted by a stranger instead of moving in with an aunt who is family - remained a mystery, and no explanation for that was forthcoming. Since this is New Orleans, naturally, her 'aunt' is a vudu priest, and her aunt's daughter Max evidently has supernatural powers although there was little evidence of that here.

Max is short for Maxine, and I found myself wondering, "Who named their kids Tommy and Maxine, seventeen years ago?" No one I know of! Thomas was 36th on the list of most popular names in 2002. Maxine wasn't even in the top 100. Clearly the author, admittedly stuck with 'Raven', expended no thought whatsoever into the naming of her other characters, but these things matter, especially in a book about magic and demons! These are not even the original names from Raven's earlier incarnations: they were apparently dreamed up by the author.

On top of this, I have to say that Tommy comes off as a complete creep the way he's written here. He passes her a note in class essentially demanding that she meet him in the gym, and she passively goes along with it. She doesn't even know this guy. She hasn't interacted with him anywhere near enough to get any sort of vibe let alone a good one, much less be full-frontal crushing on him, so this debased Raven for me right from the outset.

It ruined the story, which was supposed to be about Raven trying to figure out who she was. As is so often the case in these YA efforts, the story instead became that of Raven melting like ice cream in the heat emitted by the torrid Tom cat. His grand gesture was to bring a bag full of candy bars to the gym rendezvous, like Raven was some sort of retard who couldn't figure out which she liked best on her own and so desperately needed this Tom foolery? This whole event had the vibe of some sick guy trying to lure kids into his panel van by offering them candy. It was downright creepy.

As if that wasn't bad enough, later we get a guy (who at first I had also thought was Tommy because of the average to below average illustration) asking Maxine for a kiss right in front of Raven in the school hallway, and neither of the two girls thought there was anything wrong with that. This is at the same time as Tommy is trying to 'move in on' Raven like he wanted to own her, yet she's never remotely suspicious about any of his behavior even though she's pretty much paranoid about everything else, and is also going through a time when she's hearing voices? It all felt unnatural and far too forced.

I have to confess, at this point, that it's possible, due to laxity in illustration, that I'm confusing one male character - Tommy - with another - a guy who has the decidedly odd name of 'name' backwards - Eman. The two looked so alike and were so interchangeable that I honestly couldn't tell the difference to begin with. Part of this problem was that the Eman (it's right there in the name how masculine he is: Eman and the Masters of the Wombiverse!) was not even a character in the story worth the mention, so rarely did he appear. It took me some time before I realized that I might have been confusing the two of them until I was about two-thirds the way through the novel, but even if it's true, it didn't make any difference because they were so interchangeable. All it actually meant was that there were two dicks instead of one and that Eman was just as bad as Tommy was.

As the school prom draws closer, one of the two (I guess Eman?) was going on and on about the girls buying roses (which are sent to the boys to ask them to the prom), and putting his arm around Maxine's neck uninvited. Despite being clearly told "No" several times, he keeps on trying to force the issue, offering to give them money or to buy the roses for them. Tommy was definitely a dick at this point, evidently willing to pimp the girls out, convinced that they do protest too much!

This wasn't remotely funny, and a female author - even a YA author - should know better than to do this to a female character - especially when she fails to have that female character react negatively to a clear #MeToo moment. This author is obviously out of touch and is a part of the problem. This is why I don't like YA relationships because they're usually so very poorly done - as badly as this one was. They're sending the wrong message in any era, let alone this one today.

I honestly don't know what the hell the problem is with YA authors; I really don't. They will gasp in horror when they hear of the latest abuse of women even as they're actively writing the next one in their latest book. The whole lot of them, with few exceptions, ought to be shipped-off to sensitivity training for sure. The problem is even spelled-out in this very novel, and still no one gets it. Max has made it clear to Enama that the answer is "No!" yet he will not, we learn, leave her alone. If Tommy had known Raven for years and they were friends, that would be one thing, but he doesn't. As he tells Raven earlier in the story, he's new to the school too. So no. Just no for either of these "relationships."

On top of all of this, we have the tired and antique trope of Raven tripping and pretty much falling into Tommy's arms. I felt almost literally nauseated at that point because it is so pathetic and such a tired and douche move by an author. He of course grabs her hand and almost drags her into the school like she's a child in desperate need of his guidance and protection, but I guess this is how this guy wants 'his woman': passive, compliant, and child-like, so he can own and manipulate her at will. This attitude is rewarded, because Raven falls for him, showing what a moron she is, too. Wrong message to send.

So the worn-out YA trope of the new girl in school, which I don't like because it's been done to death, and the ancient trope of a guy coming into her life to validate and rescue her, I can do without. New guys can be as much a curse on a story (particularly one by a YA author) as they can a blessing. In this case it was quite clearly a curse, unsurprisingly. Tommy was in no way needed for this story, and yet there he was. On top of those inexcusable issues, the problems Raven has with her memory seem curiously random: she can't remember her favorite song or candy bar, but she knows math and cooking?

But on with the story. Oddball things seem to happen around Raven for which she has no explanation. She can hear the thoughts of classmates which doesn't freak her out as much as you might imagine it would. Curiously, wearing earplugs drowns out the voices. I didn't get why that was, since she was clearly not literally hearing them. Maybe the earplugs had a psychological effect? Who knows? This story isn't deep enough to go into things like that, since there's a hot romance to cold brew.

Later, from unwilling interactions with the annoying, trope school bitch, Raven discovers that she can also have a physical impact on other people, like making this same girl trip over or choke on some food after she's said something mean. There's also another voice which she hears from time to time, like it's her conscience or her advisor. "Raven? Can you hear me? It's Trigon.

This ARC copy (which in my case was an ebook) seemed odd to me in that there were red lines around the borders of the pages. I don't know if this is a development thing - part of the creative process which will be removed from the final edition, or if it's actually a part of the finished book. I just found them annoying. Gabriel Picolo's art work was curiously basic, too, like he didn't care enough about this project to make any real effort. I mean it was okay in that it serviced the text, but it was certainly nothing spectacular and as I said, it really made the two guys indistinguishable for the most part.

Why there were references to Dracula, I do not know, but Raven has a copy of Bram Stoker's novel and it has notes inside that are in her handwriting. We're told it was her mother's favorite book, but it had nothing to do with the story, so maybe the author wanted to try and add some sorely needed literary cred? It didn't work. Neither did the inexplicable dichotomy between Raven's failure to remember even simple things - a memory which doesn't seem to be returning - and this blooming and seemingly endless growth of her powers. It was a bit much. Plus it's so amateurishly one dimensional.

Raven seems to be using only the sense of sight, not that of smell, hearing, or touch (though it's touched on, so to speak, in passing). I imagine someone who has lost their memory would be rather more attuned to her senses, drinking in everything, and hoping the experience will trigger locked-up memories, but no, not really. Not here, anyway. Again, the story is too shallow and limited to explore something like that.

Next she's 'astral projecting' - so we're told - in that she was, while sleeping, able to see this sacrificial plea for help her 'aunt' made at the local cemetery. So, another power popping up out of nowhere for no apparent reason. Again, it seemed so random. Whenever she needs a magical power, there it is at her fingertips! And she's an instant expert in using it!

This leads to her aunt declaring that Raven's powers are developing faster than expected, only a short while after this same aunt claims she has no idea what's going on with Raven. How would she? She and Raven's mom were estranged for a long time, but that doesn't explain why the aunt, now seemingly so concerned, apparently had never wanted to get in touch with Raven after her mother had died, to the point where Raven was going to be adopted by someone else. None of this made any sense.

Rather like the movie Carrie, based on the tedious Stephen King "novel" of the same name, this one once again fails to be original, and uses the same trope of a climax at the prom. By this point I was only glad it was over and I didn't have to read any more. There are so many ways this novel could have broken new ground, liberated young super-powered females, and set standards, but instead, it chose to wallow in worn-out and threadbare YA trope with the requisite weak, female main character. It abused the main character every bit as much as those macho male-authored comics which star improbably pneumatic and skin-tight costumed super hero women, and call them girls, yet doing it this way is so much more insidious isn't it? This is why I can't commend this comic at all.

The Big Book of Twisted Fairy Tales by Sue Nicholson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Personally I think 'twisted' is a misnomer for a quartet of stories about honesty, kindness, responsibility, and teamwork, but it wasn't my choice! Rest assured that the stories are only twisted in the sense that they're changed and updated in relation to the originals.

Cinderella, whose original story revolved around a shoe fetish, loves dancing of course, but what's she to do when everyone except for her seems to be getting new shoes for the newly-opening dance school? Cindy puts her best foot forward however. This story is aimed at teaching about generosity and kindness. Unlike Cinderella, Beauty has her wish granted, and is given a pony which she names Flick, but (and here actually is a twist!), the beast isn't the animal, it's Beauty! She neglects her charge and the horse charges away! Will her parents have to pony-up for a new ride, or will beauty become more stable? This story aims to teach responsibility.

One of the fun things about these stories is how the characters each appear in the stories of the others. They not only exist in the same world, they live in the same town! One of those other characters is Jack who, like two beans in a pod, is just as irresponsible as Beauty, and who ends up destroying the family's crop. This story is about honesty, though. Will Jack fess up and will mommie bean him for his behavior? Last, but not least, is Snow White, who unaccountably isn't white in this story, so "yeay!" for diversity, but "huh?" for logic. Snow's problem doesn't exactly dwarf the others, but it is serious. She's one of the best soccer players, yet she's paradoxically not a team player! Will she also learn her lesson or will there be a penalty for her behavior?!

I liked these stories and commend them as a worthy read for young children, offering useful lessons.

More to the Story by Hena Khan

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was a story about a family living in Georgia, which to be fair is aimed at a younger and more feminine demographic than I represent, but I typically enjoy stories about Asian families; not always, but preponderantly, which is why I requested this one. Unfortunately, I couldn't get with it, and I DNF'd it about half way through because it was becoming less and less interesting to me and seemed more and more like it was going nowhere.

I only read as far as I did because I kept on hoping that something would happen, but nothing ever really did. Worse, there seemed to be no promise of anything interesting happening. All we got was day-to-day family routine and while, to me, that's interesting to begin with, in the long run it becomes boring if nothing else is going on. On a point of order: "Bob’s your uncle" isn’t the equivalent of "way to go" - it’s more the equivalent of the French word "voila!" or in English "ta-da!" or "and there you have it!" or "QED."

The story tells of four Muslim sisters: Maryam, Jameela, Bisma, and Aleeza. The story focuses on Jameela, whose ambition it is to go into journalism, but her focus is very small - only on local things and low level activity. She never seems to look for a bigger picture. Even this limited focus became completely skewed when Ali, a first cousin, arrives from London, and starts attending Jameela's school. It seems that all she can focus on then is him, and it was at this point that I started losing interest as I saw that Jameela was no different from any other girl in any other such story, and that this one really had nothing new to show me or bring to the table. Since I DNF'd the novel I do not know where the relationship went, if anywhere, but that problem was that the author had written this story in such a way that I really didn't care.

The problem was that in introducing this guy, the author had ripped the story from Jameela's hands, No longer was it about her, but about her in relation to him, so she became his appendage instead of her own person. This is why I lost interest in her. Even before this, Jameela's ambition was to write a story to make her father proud. This was a problem because she was always chasing after his approval, especially when work took him away from home for an extended period, so even before Ali came into the picture, Jameela was an appendage of her father's.

I truly detest stories which have titles in the form of "The _____'s Daughter" where the blank can be some profession or whatever - such as 'The Undertaker's daughter' because books like that devalue women from the very title on. This book felt like one of those, which was simply missing the demeaning title: "The Asian Dad's Daughter" or "Ali's Love Interest" or something. Or, given that this novel was rooted, for some reason, in Little Women, perhaps its title should have been "Belittled Women"? Maybe Jameela changed later in the book, but the author left it far too late for me, since I'd lost all hope and faith in her by then.

Regardless, I cannot commend a story like this where the main female character isn't so much striking-out determinedly along the road less traveled, but instead is being swept along by traffic on the main road to the nearest mall and she doesn't even care. I wish the author all the best in her career because she has talent, but this story was flat for me. I truly wish there had been more to it.

Dad, I Love You Because... by Rhea MacCallum, Laura D. MacCallum, Fabrice Florens

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Written by the MacCallums and illustrated by Fabrice Florens, this is a little late for Father's Day - but better late than never! It would make a great birthday present or Christmas present, or just at the present present! Aimed at young children, and populated by a mixed-family of cute animals, this finely-illustrated little book lists out one reason after another why dad is special. I liked it and commend it as a worthy read as a gift from a young child to whoever they call dad!

Daughter of Athena by A Rose

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata:
"She knew it would earn her a lecture from Jackson if the she ever saw Amara do that" - the 'she' should be a 'he' and the 'the' should be omitted.
"Its bright blue eyes glinted off the sun" - surely the other way around?!
"Amara tried to get up and move but found her hands, chained to the floor." That comma doesn't belong there. It should be placed after 'move'.
"Let me go, there is a dragon I need to slay," is a run-on sentence.

This novel is written in a rather innocent style which initially charmed me, but over time it became rather more disagreeable to read, and after about twenty percent I DNF'd it because this simplicity of writing wasn't entertaining me at all. I found that the narrative was superficial, with no history and no depth and often nonsensical, so it became far less charming as it went on, and I was asking questions which the story didn't seem interested in answering.

I couldn't have put it better than one reviewer who gave this a five-star review while telling us next-to-nothing about what it had done to earn those stars. In one part of the very short review, the reviewer said, "... Amara the dragonslayer hunts and kills a dragon and the story starts to unravel from there..." and that's exactly what it did: unravel. I rather suspect the reviewer meant to say it 'unfolded' from there, but what it really did was unravel, so she inadvertently got it right.

The story is set in a future post-apocalyptic world where, for reasons which go unexplained, Chicago, which was evidently burned to the ground by dragons, was rebuilt in stone, because dragons apparently can't melt stone, although this claim is overturned when shortly after the story begins, the main HQ of the dragon-slayer force is pretty much burned to the ground by a dragon, despite it being built from stone. Worse though, the story failed to address the fact that Chicago was largely built of stone to begin with - at least when it came to the main buildings downtown - since it is such an old city (by USA standards). It would hardly have been burned down as described. Yes, the newer stuff is glass and steel, but even that incorporates huge amounts of concrete (which is for all practical purposes, stone), and most of the older large buildings are stone, so none of this made sense to me.

It made less sense as to why the rebuilt Chicago would be renamed Athena. There is no precedent for this. If the story had been set in Athens, in Georgia, I could see it maybe being renamed Athena, although even that's a stretch, but renaming Chicago? The city was named after a wild onion that grew abundantly in that area, and has had that name since the late seventeenth century. There would need to be a really overwhelming reason to change it so drastically, and maybe that would even happen, but the problem is that we're not given any reason why it did happen, just the credibility-straining bare fact of the name change, and it doesn't work. It simply makes it seem whimsical and random.

There were lots of errors in the text, some of which I've documented above. There were other oddball issues such as when I read, "Even though Emery was attractive, she did not trust him." I don't get the connection there! Are we supposed to trust people just because they're attractive?! Why would his attractiveness (or otherwise) have any bearing on his trustworthiness?! At another point, I read, "Their bodies did not have scales in the drawings, making their skin look like that of a snake." Well, snakes actually do have scales! At another point I read, "...men took point in the front." Taking point quite literally means assuming an exposed position in front! It's a tautology to say that someone takes point in front! I quite understand that mistakes appear in novels. We've all been there, but the sheer number of them in this story was a major reason why the writing lost its charm for me.

A major problem with the future presented here is that this one city (Athena) is totally divorced from everywhere else in the world, like it's the only place that exists. It isn't, but it feels that way. This is all-too-often the problem with this type of novel. It's not been properly thought-through: the author has focused so tightly on the little story that unfolds in this one location, and hasn't given an ounce of thought to how this apocalyptic scenario would have played out on the world stage. This insularity: that only the USA matters, and in this case, that only this one city matters within the USA, is really a problem not just in this story, but in a much wider context of how a person's mind works. If you get into a mentality that none of the rest of the world is important, then it's a serious delusion that I'm not in favor of promoting, not even in fiction. On top of that, it makes for a very claustrophobic story. What happened to the government? The police forces? The military? We get no explanation. It's like all of that somehow disappeared along with the cities of old. It makes the story sound very artificial.

Related to this is the total isolation of one city from another. We're told that the area between cities is a wasteland where no one wants to live, but when Amara, the main character, is kidnapped, she's transported to a thriving community that exists within sight of the city. No one in the city ever noticed this? Despite this, and despite there still being people around from Amara's dragon enforcement bureau, or whatever it's called (I forget), no one traces the attack back to this community despite their use of 'Hummers' to travel back and forth on their attacks.

Worse, Amara never tries to escape despite being completely free to do so. She never attempts to report back to her people in the city and tell them what's going on, and we're given no good reason for this; yet we're expected to believe she's the best there is at what she does. She even participates in another attack on her own headquarters in which she takes part freely, and has no remorse about it! Her motivations do not work.

I didn't get the Hummers, either. The last Hummer rolled-off the production line in 2010. Are we to believe these gas-guzzling catastrophes were still hale and hearty almost a century later? That would be like driving the Ford Model T today as an everyday run-about rather than a classic car. It's too much of a stretch. Here's the thing: if everything that wasn't stone was razed to the ground, then so was all of the gas and oil infrastructure, so whence the gasoline that the Hummers run on? Where does it come from? Who processes it from oil - and where does the oil come from in the first place? How does this tiny community which kidnaps Amara, pay for itself? Hummers get only some ten miles or so to the gallon, maybe a little better at a relatively low speed on the highway, but not rumbling over rough terrain in a post-apocalyptic world, so they'd need a lot of gas, and it's like the gas magically appears from nowhere.

Maybe it does because there was another component of this story which was the magical abilities. Amara wasn't born. She was somehow created in a genetics lab, and endowed with special abilities. How magic was inbred into her is again unexplained, but what's worse is that she almost never uses her magical abilities, which are ill-defined to begin with. Maybe there are limitations on them, but we never know, since it's never specified what she can and cannot do. To judge from the endless times she seems unable to employ magic, it would seem that it's so limited and weak as to be pointless, so why include it at all? It doesn't help her fight dragons. It doesn't help her avoid being kidnapped, or to escape when she's briefly confined. It doesn't help her to solve any mystery she was faced with during her captivity in that first 20% of the novel. And she's supposed to be the best there is?

There's a weak love interest which, as usual in YA novels, has zero basis. We're offered no reason why Amara, genetically engineered so she isn't distracted from her dragon-slaying purpose by anything, including men, starts falling for this one guy. There's no reason for it. There could have been, if the story had had a little more depth. There could have been something about this guy which really resonated with Amara, but we're not given that or anything else to explain it, so the rationale wasn't there and the relationship is forced, as it is in nearly every YA story I've read.

At one point I read, "He had almost died in her arms, they were forever bonded from through experience and she couldn't leave without knowing he would be okay." In addition to being a run-on - and slightly nonsensical - sentence ("from through experience"?!), the problem here is that she barely knows this guy and has had her limited acquaintanceship with him for only a short time. There's no way she could realistically feel this way about him unless she's a moron, and especially not since she's genetically-programmed not to have such crushes!

The fact that she's genetically engineered is a problem in itself. Even today, we cannot genetically-engineer a healthy human let alone a super human, so how would this be possible in a post-apocalyptic world a mere eighty years into the future? How did such a devastated society manage to rebuild so quickly and get so far ahead of even where we are now? It makes no sense!

Maybe by now you can see my problem with this: the basic idea was great and the author has some real story-telling potential. I wish her all the best in her career, but no matter how good an idea is or how charming it starts out, if it keeps on racking-up one improbable assertion after another, as this one did, and if it fails to build a solid foundation, it's not going to win me over. This one faield to do that, and for the reasons I listed, I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Dolly Parton by Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Daria Solak

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I've been following this series of biographies for a while and rarely does it take a misstep, so this was pretty much a guaranteed winner. Written by Vegara, and illustrated flamboyantly by Solak, this book takes a look at entertainer Dolly Parton's life. Parton has had 25 number ones on the Billboard Country Music chart, and just as many gold, platinum and multi-platinum awards, as well as a record number of top ten country albums.

She started out young and dirt poor, and her voice and talent carried her to stardom, which she did not let slip from her grasp, converting her fame into long-term business ideas that kept her comfortable (and more!) even when her popularity wasn't always what it had been. This book aimed at young children tells of her life in simple and straight-forward terms, always moving the story forwards. It's short and sweet and I commend it as a worthy read.