The Curse of the Bruel Coven by Sabrina Ramoth

Rating: WARTY!

This story comes larded with a lot of trope, but it is YA, so that's par for the course unfortunately. There's very little under the sun that's new in YA, especially when it comes to supernatural tales. The story is short and fast-paced; perhaps too fast for some readers, but I liked that it did not not ramble and meander. If it had, I probably would have DNF'd it.

While this novel avoided some of the pitfalls in the genre, it could not seem to keep itself from falling headlong into the middle of others. For those reasons - which I shall go into shortly - and for the fact that it is the start of a series, which means that at best, it's only a prologue and not an actual story, and so has no resolution, I can't commend it. It's not exactly a cliff-hanger ending, but it's close. I will not be pursuing this series.

The first cliché to curse this story is that of the orphaned teenager suddenly coming into a realization and/or suddenly coming into her powers. "Vivienne Davenport is an ordinary teenager - at least, she thinks she is. Then the untimely death of her mother reveals a family secret. She's adopted... and her real mom is a witch." Yeah. Not a story-killer of a cliché, but there's certainly not anything new or original on offer here. Someone who is the most powerful, yet least experienced is a tautology and a tired trope in this case.

On top of that, there's a curse that only the special snowflake child can lift, despite everyone telling her it's unbreakable: "Buried deep within her family’s history of magic is a deadly curse that has plagued them for generations." That's a bit much and it sure isn't resolved in volume one!

The inexplicable thing here, about the story so far, is that despite no one - but no one - wanting Vivienne to know about her family history, and despite her having been been protected from the curse Harry Potter style by living away from the magical world with relatives - her adoptive mother inexplicably left a photo of Vivienne, as a child and in the arms of her birth mother, in a family photo album. That made zero sense to me, but it was this author's rather hamfisted way of bringing realization to Vivienne and launching her into her quest.

So Vivienne travels to New Orleans (at least it's not Salem - barf! - but it's still trope as hell) with her best friend, unimaginatively named Savannah. Savannah accompanied her for one cheap and clichéd reason only, which I shall get to at the end of this review. Vivienne quickly discovers that her birth mother has been kidnapped.

The idiot blurb writer gets frantic at this point and tosses the usual dumb-ass questions at the potential reader: "Can Vivienne become the witch she needs to be? Or will her newfound powers prove too much for her to handle?" We know they won't otherwise how is the author going to pad this out into a series?

Then the blurb writer lies, as usual: "She will soon learn that all magic comes at a price." No, it doesn't. It even tells us in the novel itself that spells cost something, but what it shows us is that just like in the Harry Potter stories, no matter what spell is cast, it costs nothing to the caster. The magic is tediously trope. There's nothing new or inventive. It's all about the four (non-)elements: air, earth, fire, and water. The protagonist, of course, is fire.

At one point I read how the Moon is tied to silver, the Sun to gold, but there was no explanation as to why. The protagonist complains that she's "still not really understanding his explanation." I'm not either! The Sun is arguably a gold color, but there's quite literally no metallic gold in the sun. That element - a real element - isn't created until a star explodes. Likewise I doubt there's much silver on the Moon, if any. Believe it or not, for an airless body, the Moon is 60% oxygen - all of which is bound to metallic and other elements in the Moon's interior. Pretty much all of the rest of it is silicon and aluminum with traces of calcium, iron, magnesium, and titanium. The color of the Moon is merely a reflection of the sun and it's not even a silver color! So whence this linking to those valuable metals? It's nonsensical.

Vivienne is launched on a crash course in practical magic which, unlike Harry Potter, she masters improbably quickly, and is magically lighting candles, throwing troubled guys into walls, and levitating, in no time. We learn that she, not Aubrey, a cousin, is now the high priestess of the coven - a coven here being six, not thirteen for reasons unexplained. The grand priestess though is Vivienne's grandmother who is consistently referred to as Grand’Mere. Now that word isn’t missing a letter so why the apostrophe?! I dunno! Another mystery!

The magic was a joke. In addition to the trope herbs and candles, and that crap, the spells were cast in Hallmark rhymes which made me laugh. It made no more sense than Harry Potter casting spells by waving a stick and chanting two Latin words. The obvious question is: what language did they use to cast spells before Latin came along? And if it worked, why switch to Latin? In the case of this story, how did they cast spells back in medieval times if they couldn't rhyme in modern English? LOL! It felt cheap and cheesy, and truly juvenile.

That wasn't the worst thing though. In this genre, the whole thing about magic is that it's supernatural - outside, or over and above nature yet the author says at one point, "you can’t override nature. If something is too far gone, you can’t bring it back. It goes against the rules of nature." But isn't that precisely what magic does?! How is levitating complying with the rules of nature? How is turning something invisible, complying with the rules of nature? How is moving an object with the mind complying with the rules of nature? This made zero sense. The author had not thought it through.

There were some writing issues where the author, in her haste, had unfortunately juxtaposed words amusingly, such as when I read, "A sudden tightness wracked my chest when I saw the photo of Mom and me sitting on her dresser." So while they had once sat on the dresser, someone photographed them doing it?! It's a minor quibble. We've all been down that authoring rabbit-hole. At another point there was a misuse of a word when I read, "I shoved Nanette’s magical satchel into my jeans pocket." What she meant was sachet, not satchel. You can't fit a satchel into your jeans pocket!

A bigger problem was when I read things like: "I hopped into my metallic blue Jeep," or "Sebastian's Altima screeched to a halt behind us." Apparently it's important to the author that we know he has an Altima, because she mentions it twice. Why? I don't know and I don't care, nor is it relevant that she has a metallic blue Jeep. I don't get that approach to writing that at all. If the make and color of the car are important for some reason, then yeah, but here? Not so much! It's overkill and comes off as obsessive.

At one point I read that someone's voice "crackled" - when the author quite evidently meant that it "cracked." That's auto-correct for you! But these were minor issues which were not a big deal when compared with the problems in the writing, such as when Vivienne displaces her cousin Aubrey as high priestess of the coven. Aubrey doesn't take this well, and her incessant snide remarks about Vivienne's powers - or lack thereof - were so frequent that they quickly became tedious to read.

There was a certain amount of manhandling of the females going on here, too. If they were close family, then this would have been understandable, but Vivienne and Savannah had literally just met these people, and barely knew them. There had been no time to bond, yet the guys are inappropriately familiar and it became a bit creepy to read.

You thought I'd forgot about Savannah, huh? No! Early in the story, Savannah loses her phone at Vivienne's bio-mom's house, and it's when they go back there to recover it that they discover she's been adbucted. At the end of the story - way too late for it to matter - they recover Savannah's phone and yet no one suspects for a minute it might have been cursed or had something else done to it. These people are morons. And again, way too late for it to matter, Savannah is dispatched home for her safety, regardless of the fact that nowhere is she safer than right there with the witch coven in the protected home right where she was.

At the end of the story, a little is made of the fact that Vivienne hasn't heard from Savannah - calling to confirm that she made the hour-long drive home safely. Vivienne idiotically dismisses it as Savannah's phone having lost its charge, despite the phone having been barely used. I have a theory that volume two, as is de rigeur for a series, is an exact copy of volume one, except that now it's Savannah who has been abducted rather than Vivienne's bio-mom. I have no way of knowing if this is true and I don't care to find out, but that's my guess.

So the cheap and clichéd reason that Savannah (who had very little to do in the story, and who could actually have been dispensed with entirely) accompanied Vivienne was to become the new maiden in distress for volume two. Barf! Two volumes and two instances of a female being the weak link - and from a female author? That's as shameful as it is pathetic. I can't commend this series.

The Fine Art of Invisible Detection by Robert Goddard

Rating: WARTY!

This sounded great from the description, but about halfway through, it turned into one of those pathetic little horror movies where the girl is running from the indestructable and unstoppable bad guy, and I quit right there. It's not a YA story - the protagonist is a commendable 47 years old, but once she began behaving like a YA screamer girl (sans the screaming, thankfully) I had to get out of there. On top of that, the story was already plodding, to the point where I was starting to become bored and listless with the 'not going anywhere any time soon' plot, even before the idiot scene that proved to be the final straw for me.

Umiko Wada works as an assistant to a private detective, but after a visit from a mysterious and well-off woman, her boss is killed in a suspicious hit and run, and Umiko decides to pursue the dangerous investigation, hopping to London, the USA, and Iceland, but every time she moves, we get a crumb of a clue, and that's all. And naturally it's all tied to a bad event in her past because all these stories are.

Finally she heads to a mysterious property in the middle of nowhere on Iceland, and they take an inappropriate rental vehicle in bad weather. Magically their trip coincides with a visit from the bad guy, who kills her companion. Umiko commendably hits him with her vehicle, but instead of making sure he's dead and taking his own four-wheel drive vehicle while rendering her own unusable, she takes off in her own useless car, leaving the bad guy to inevitably resurrect and follow her. That was enough for me. It's so trope and it tells me the protagonist is a moron, and I have no intention of pursuing cliched novels about stupid women. I can't commend this based on what I could stand to plow through.

Juliana by Vanda

Rating: WARTY!

This started out in first person which is irritating to me at best, but it started chapter one, set in 1941, and had a single paragraph talking about people waiting in line as fans of this actor, and the narrator says, "But wait; I'm getting ahead of myself. All that came much later." It switched to a new screen, started chapter one again and went into a flashback. I decided "No thanks!" right there and then, and I quit.

Something this badly written and with flashbacks and in first person is not for me. I can't commend it. I don't think this author understands the use of a charcter history. She seems to feel that she needs to include everything in the book instead of using it as background to round out the author's own understanding of the character. And the last thing I need is to start the first paragraph of a story I'm hoping to enjoy only to have it brought to a screeching halt while we travel even further back in time for a boring and tedious history lesson. No. Uh-uh. Not for me. I have better things to do with my time than to read a dithering story that has no sense of self, and no idea how to proceed.

Glistens by Chess Desalls

Rating: WARTY!

This is three strikes and out for this author. This story is about fairies, and kudos that the author has the guts to call them fairies instead of pussy-footing around it with with mealy-mouthed alternate titles, but the problem with this sort of a story is a mistake that far too many authors, including this one, make: that were supposedly in the comany of these magical and fantastical creatures, yet they're depicted not as otherworldy, but exactly like humans! They have the same hopes, dreams and ambitions as we do. They go to school. They have a class project. It was so pathetic and the project this one fairy gets - protecting a fellow fairy - was so predictably pathetic that it failed for me. I can't commend this as a worthy read. The best I can say about it is that it was short, so I didn't fell like I'd wasted as much time with this as I might have otherwise.

Lantern by Chess Desalls

Rating: WARTY!

This really was a non-story - very short, about a girl who wanders stupidly in the woods around her home, gets lost, and encoutners a lantern which is lit by some sort of a tiny person inside the lantern. It was boring and went nowhere. And it's suppsoed ot be itnroductory to a series? Yawn. Shrot as it was, I barely had the interest to follow this to the end, I sure as hell am not going to read a whole series on this tedious topic. Since when is a sixteen year old obsessed with scoring candy on Halloween? Scoring a boyfriend I could see. Scoring drugs or booze, maybe, but candy? Honestly?

Bed and Breakfast and Murder by Patti Larsen

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those murder mysteries that's so pathetic I don't give it the time of day, but once in a while I like to punish myself by trying to read a sample of one of those genres I so despise, if only to make sure my take on them really is as bad as it seems, and this one served only to confirm that. It is well known that standards are laughably low for this genre, but even by those rock-bottom criteria, this one was a fail with juvenile humor, OCD fart jokes, and one-dimensional characters, the main one of which was consistently obnoxious.

The story is your typical unimaginative clone of every other such story: Fiona Fleming inherits a B&B and just for good measure, is also is fleeing New York City precisely because she's a failure. It's the usual garbage: she loses her boyfriend and her job and flies the coop like the worthless little chickenshit she is, yet somehow she stupidly imagines that she can make a go of a business venture despite being a disaster on two inevitably shapely, manly-man-attracting legs. Yawn.

Why female authors so delight in depicting worthless women is a source of unending wonder to me. Does it somehow make them feel better about their own lives? I don't know. I can't think of any valid reason for so many female authors to take such delight in ruthlessly killing off the dreams of so many weak female characters. That's the only real murder mystery here. There's certainly nothing new, original, or inventive to be had from this genre: it's just another unqualified female meddling in police business that she has no business interfering with.

It's first person voice, so it sucks for that alone, and it's just stupid: idiotically written and going nowhere fast. I couldn't stand to read more than a few pages of this piece of trash without gagging at how bad and unrealistic it truly was. So no: I am not wrong about this particular genre, because every time I give it a chance, it turns out to be exactly as I feared it would be.

Symbiont Seeking Symbiont by Jennifer Foehner Wells

Rating: WARTY!

Allus Jenson is part of a pirate crew in a spacecraft that is forced to land on a barren planet for repairs. While this is in progress, Jensen, like a moron, wanders off and encounters a species of sentient bacterium which effectively gang-rapes her in the sense that this group of them take over her body without her permission. That's it. That's the entire story! Barf. I'm not sure how much the author actually undertsands about bacteria, and this was not a worthy read.

No Good Deed by MP McDonald

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a rare worthy read. The story has been done before, but this take on it was an unusual one in my experience. In 2001, Mark Taylor is in possession of an old still frame 35mm camera, and he discovers that it creates some images which he never pointed the camera at, and those pictures when developed, show acts of violence, death, and terrorism. That same night, he dreams of those images. This gets him into trouble, because on the morning of September 11th that year, he calls in a desperate plea to try and prevent tragedy and finds himself abducted to solitary confinement, interrogation and torture as an enemy non-combatant.

I hope our security services are better and smarter than the ones depicted here, because I had some issues with that, but eventually Mark is freed through lack of evidence, and is left to try and pick up the peices of his destroyed life. The crux comes when he starts using his camera again and finds that it has taken more pictures of yet another terrorist attack to come. The question is, does he dare report this one?

There was only one glaring writing issue that I picked up on, and I see this frequently: "The paramedic wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his uninjured bicep" No! Unless the paramedic - who sure as hell should know better - actually incised into the man's upper arm, selected one of the two bicep attachments that link the biceps muscle to the humerus, and wrapped the cuff around that, then he wrapped the cuff around the guys biceps! It's never used singularly except in an anatomical context. The biceps is the msucle that bulges when you flex your arm. The bicep is one of the two ligaments that attaches the biceps to the bone. Every writer should know this, but increasingly, I'm seeing many of them fail, thinking, I dunno, maybe thinkign biceps is the pural that applies to both upper arm muscles, so if you're talking about only one of them, it must be bicep? I dunno. I do know writing standards are falling, for sure.

That minor quibble aside, and in general terms, I liked how this was written, although there were parts I skimmed because it seemed that a particular motif, especially the interrogation, went on way too long. There were other bits I found uninteresting, but I liked the ending and overall I enjoyed the story, so I commend this as a worthy read. That said I am not into series and this is part of a series which I do not intend to pursue.

Deus Ex Mechanic by Ryann Fletcher

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known this book had the word 'chronicles' associated with it, I would never had considered reading it, but the interesting cover illustration distracted me and the plot sounded engaging, so I missed that somehow, and launched into it, getting to about two-turds the way through it before I fully realized it was going nowhere - precisely because it's a series. Book one is a prolog and I don't do prologs because they're boring and don't tell you shit. I wish I had back the time I wasted on this one. The book description is completely misleading.

The concept is ridiculous to begin with - steampunk in space? The spaceship has boilers which is the stupidest thing I ever heard. I even put up with that in hopes I would get a good story. More fool me. Having loved the character of Kaylee in Firefly, I was primed for the character of Alice - a mechanic. In fact this whole story is a Firefly rip-off in many ways. Violet is the captain of a pirate vessel which operates on the run from coalition vessels, raiding them and distributing food to rebel bases and selling-off what they can to make some money.

On one such raid, they kidnap Alice to get her to fix the ship's boilers(!) intending to release her later, but eventually she ends up - as we knew she would - on the ship as a crew member, and so starts the relationship with Violet. This is the dumbest relationship ever, with them getting it on and getting off and it falling off so metronomically that it became tedious to read it. They were like 13 year olds, and to pretend non-violent Violet was a pirate captain was stupid.

The story wasn't god-awful, except when I read of one character Violet met:

"Hiya. I'm Jhanvi," she said with a thick southern drawl

This is on an alien planet, and she has "a thick southern drawl"?! Ridiculous!

Of course everyone on the crew is the best there is. Alice is the best mechanic; Hyun is the best doctor; Kady is the best engineer; Violet the best captain. Barf. They should have named the spacecaft the Mary Sue. I reached a point, not quickly enough unfortuantely, where I could not stand to read any more of this, and I ditched it. Can't commend it.

Off-Grid Living for Beginners by Emma Nora

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from a review copy I received from the author for which I thank her.

I enjoyed reading this author's Raising Backyard Chickens even though I have no desire to raise backyard chickens. Similarly, I enjoyed this one, too, even though I do not plan to go off-grid. I just like learning about alternative lifestyles!

This book is a very general introduction to the pleasures and pains of off-grid living, and though a bit disorganized and sometimes repetiive in parts I felt, it does give you a really good overview of how to disentangle yourself from the regular life that most people lead - at least in so-called 'first-world'civilizations. Of course there are many communities throughout the world that are off-grid whether they like it or not.

But if you're thinking of leading that lifestyle, this is a great place to start. It takes you through all the issues and pitfalls in a short read (about 120 pages) that will get you thinking along the right lines for a successful transition. It also includes an extensive reference section listing other works that can provide more - and more detailed - information.

The book is divided into eight chapters, the first of which exhorts readers to consider and understand why they might be thinking of living off-grid. Chapter two talks about learning from the mistakes of others, and chapter three discusses how to prepare yourself for off-grid living before you actually start any move off-grid. Four discusses acquiring a suitable property and the questions you need to answer when considering purchasing land, and five taks about options for building a home on the property, for which there is a variety of solutions. Six goes into the transition to, and integration into, your off-grid lifestyle, and seven discusses how you might make a decent living in your new status. Eight discusses making the most of this life. In short - the whole thing is covered in a general outline with pointers, hints, tips and resources for further reading.

The book doesn't go into excessive detail. This is aimed to open your eyes to the challenges you will face. It will give you a good grounding and get your brain focused on what's important, and what needs to be resolved. On that score, one thing I felt was under represented was medical care. In the US, medical care isn't free, and if you go off grid, unless you still retain some sorrt of regular employment, you will go off insurance as well as off grid. Simultaneously, you will by this new choice of lifestyle be potentially more vulnerable to sickness and injury if you're out working the land in all kinds of conditions, perhaps using farm machinery, so this I felt was not covered adequately, but I think the author thought of everything else!

One thing that felt a bit off was on the one hand talking of disconnecting from a life that can very easily be harmful to the environment and integrating into a more eco-friendly lifestyle, but on the other hand, and at the same time we're talking about felling trees and burning the wood as fuel, and this is one surefire way to remove a carbon sink (the tree) at the same time as we're putting the CO₂ from that tree back into the atmosphere. But of course you have to balance that against an assortment of other choices you've made which may well be placing less of a burden on the environment precisely because you're off-grid. I felt that a word or two about that balance would have been nice.

I encountered one or two grammatical issues which were minor and understandable. The first I noticed was when I read about the kind of home you might choose to live in. It said, "The eco capsules are more adventitious..." and I felt that was the wrong word. I think the author meant 'advantageous'. In a similar case, I read, "The soil the house is built into is isolating," and I think the author meant 'insulating'. Later I read, in a discussion of clean water, 'drinking water and potable water - but these are the same thing. Potable means it's suitable for drinking. Bu you know, we've all been there!

In the same section I read that the author considered "25 gallons per person" (of water) was a good working figure, but there was no time-period associated with this. Obviously 25 gallons a day is way too much, and 25 gallons a year not enough, but I don't know if this was supposed to be over a week or a month or what! In that same section, I read, "...overall you will need to filter and purify what you want to drink. You will need to boil and filter the water you want to drink." which is repetitive. But as I said, these issues were few and far between and were not importnat when compared with the value of the overall message.

I commend this as a worthy read.

A Ring Bear? by Christy Brown

Rating: WORTHY!

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

It's always fun to take a youthful misunderstanding and run with it. When he hears he's going to be the ring-bearer at his aunt's wedding, what really hears is that he will be a ring bear. He struggles for some time with the delightful help of his kid sister, to figure out how to be the Bear of the Rings, but eventually he cottons on and all is well. This was a fun story, with sweet color illustrations by Juan Rodriquez (not that Juan, the other Juan), and I commend it as a worthy read.

I have to say this was unreadable in the Kindle format. Kindle, to me, means turning something into kindling and that's what happens with Amazon's crappy conversion process. Unless it's plain vanilla text, do not subject your work to Kindle. It will ruin it. I read the PDF version of this and it was perfectly fine.

Miranda Queen of Broken Toys by Andrea Tripke

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a fun picture book, beautifully illustrated by debut author and German-born artist, Andrea Tripke. It tells the fun and heartwarming story of a girl who dared to be different. Instead of being hypnotized by the shiny and new, Miranda finds joy in the downtrodden and broken - toys that are unwanted, are lost, or are missing bits. She creates a welcoming home for them, and becomes known as the Queen of Broken Toys. Her life seems to be set in its ways until a new person shows up looking for a lost toy.

I have to say this was unreadable in the Kindle format. Kindle, to me, means turning something into kindling and that's what happens with Amazon's crappy conversion process. Unless it's plain vanilla text, do not subject your work to Kindle. It will ruin it. I read the PDF version of this and it was perfectly fine.

I commend this as a fun, visual treat, and besides, where else can you find raspberry tea and tomato-and-cheese-sandwiches?

Beowulf by Andrew BF Carnabuci

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a new translation of Beowulf - arguably the most translated Old English work out there. Dating - possibly - to around 1000AD, the time of Ethelred the Unreedy, and Cnut, this was ancient even in Shakespeare's time, and it tells a poetic (in what served for poetry at the time - not like modern stuff) tale of Beowulf (whose name gave the untitled work a title) and his three great battles against Grendel, Grendel's mom, and against the dragon.

It's really the story of a curse brought upon warriors for their philandering, because it turns out that Grendel is the child of King Hrothgar, and the dragon is the child of Beowulf himself, both of them the offpsring of their dalliance with Grendel's mom, whose real name is Lulabelle. Just kidding. She goes unnamed. In fact, as a female, she's lucky to get a mention since this is all about manly men, sterling feats, and lusty living.

You may be familiar with the story from that execrable 2007 CGI movie starring Angelina Jolie, Robin Wright-Penn, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, and a gratuitus John Malkovich, which while loosely following the story, was so wrong on so many levels. Grendel's mom wears high heels? Really? I know it's a macho tale of not backing down, but literally nobody blinks? Really?

The real story does often meander away from the main action into tales of Beowulf's achievements, but this is how it was back then, a sort of merrily plodding, repetitive, alliterative story-telling which got there eventually by hitting all the career high-spots of this legendary man's man and his cadre of steely warriors. It also uses the phrase, 'lord of the rings'! I guess that's where Tolkien got it from.

The only issue I had with this was that the embedded links from the text to the glossary/reference section were a bit flaky in that if they were close to the edge of the screen a reader risked swiping the screen to the next or the previous one when tapping on the link, rather than going to the actual reference. The reference section and bibliography is extensive though, running to 25 screens on my iPad.

Also, I read my books on a black screen with white text to save on battery power and the dark-blue reference numbers were hard to read against the black screen. This wouldn't have mattered except that the reference you jump to is part of a list of them; it's not to a single reference, so I couldn't tell for sure which particular reference in the list I had jumped to, and therefore couldn't be sure, when I tapped back, that I'd end up exactly where I left! That made for a fun read. The content list was likewise hard to read for the same reason - and it had, as usual, the listed items too close together to tap confidently to jump to a particular chapter. Double spacing between lines would have helped considerably.

That aside though, I liked this translation and I commend it for anyone interested in this ancient tale, for all are punishéd, and never was a story of more dolor than this of Grendel and his Modor....

Wrapped in the Past by Chess Desalls

Rating: WARTY!

This was a weird story about a time traveler who takes his family on a trip back, purportedly, to the deserts of the Middle East where they meet the "three magi" following the star to Bethlehem. This is such a literal interpretation of the Biblical story and it's not even accurate, even if we pretend for a minute that the story was true. This legend appears only in the gospel of Matthew, which Matthew didn't write, and nowhere does it say there were three dudes.

There are three prized treasures mentioned, but that doesn't mean there were three magi each with one treasure. Nor is there any solid indication that they were literally following a bright star in the sky. It merely says that they saw his star in the east (not in the west, note!) and have come to bow before him. They could have been astrologers who looked at a chart saw some sort of a sign and headed out with no star visible in the sky whatsoever. The best guess is that (assuming there were real) they were Zoroastrian priests. Zoroastrianism, coming out of what's now Iran, has had a significant influence on the development of Christianity.

The thing about this story is: how did this family happen to light down in the very place where these dudes were traveling? The desert is not a small place and although there were trade routes, they were vague. There was no highway to follow. This family had no idea where they would be along the route, even assuming that they were following one. They didn't even know which year this took place nor at what time of year, so the improbabilities were rife. Add to that the morphing yacht turning into a camel and the convenient fact that the father has taken very little time to master the common languages of that place and period, it was too much. It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to consider this to be realistic fiction.

Jenny Greenteeth by Aubrey Law

Rating: WARTY!

This is one a series of short stories that are presented as prequels to the Black Annis story by this author that I read and enjoyed a while back. They're free downloads, but they were really not very thrilling because first of all they didn't mean a whole heck of a lot to me. I don't recall any of these characters from the Black Annis story, although it's been a while and a few books since I read that. On top of that, the story is so short you can never really get into it.

One of the problems with this for me was the same problem I'd had with Black Annis in that there was a significant gross-out factor to it, and there's only so much disgusting description I can read without becoming truly tired of it. The problem here is that gross-out was all this particular story seemed to be! It went into some detail about Jenny Greenteeth's foul habits and depraved diet and her abominable abdominal activities, and it really lost me in the sense that my eyes were glazing over after a paragraph or two of that, and yet still it went on.

The story was about four wizards - who I didn't know and had zero investment in. Their fates were immaterial to me, so there was no excitement or engagement. Anyway, they set out into the swamp to take down Greenteeth, who apparently used to be married to that Bluetooth guy. Just kidding! Why they were after her, I do not know, other than that she was simply gross, maybe. The thing which strikes me about these 'magic' stories is that they are so dated in their philosophy.

I mean, Greenteeth lived "in a bloody swamp," as Michael Palin might describe it. She never left and only preyed upon those who entered, so all they had to do was fence it off, and the problem was solved. But they stalk in there, using old school magic, and get their noses bloodied eventually. Why not just conjure up a tactical nuke? Or a black hole to swallow her up? Their techniques seemed laughably quant.

So for a variety of reasons I can't commend this as a worthy read.

The Song Machine by John Seabrook

Rating: WORTHY!

Read nicely by Dion Graham - although I could have done without his singing and his attempts to portray a woman speaking - this audiobook looks at how hit songs are made. It covers a wide variety of topics and a lot of the history of hit-making, but its focus is largely on the last few years, and I have to say there seems to be a strong bias toward recent solo female artists, for some reason, and I mean bias in coverage, not in praise.

One problem with the coverage is that it's very tabloid - we get sketches with some detail here and there, but never anything in any real depth. The author writes for a magazine and for all I know these chapters are merely a collection of articles he wrote which have simply been shuffled together for this book, but the result - however it came about - is like a bubblegum song version of the music industry - light, shallow, frothy, without too much musical depth.

For all that, I was entertained and informed by it, but there were times I wanted better, less shallow, and less one-sided coverage than I got. It felt like he was trying to keep the hit-makers happy and cared little for the singers. On the other hand, I must confess I have little regard for those who can only sing. I much prefer an artist who can write and play, as well as belt out the finished song, but those people get scarce coverage here.

It's bothering that an older white guy who seems very retro in his social attitudes, is so up in the business of female artists of color, often denigrating them in the process, while seemingly fawning over the record producers - the ones with the real power these days, who are also all guys, often white guys from Sweden. Apparently this system works because we read that 77% of the profits in the music business go to 1% of the artists. This explains a lot of very rich artists these days, but whether that's what the world wants or needs is another matter. It's disturbing that far less than 1% of the songs that are out there in any given year are the ones that bring in nearly all the revenue.

The book also covers the changing landscape of hit-making from when a talented artist wrote, played and sang their own material to the modern era where hits have become as much science as art, and where as many as half-a-dozen or more exerts are brought in to craft various portions - even tiny ones - of what's essentially a scientifically-designed song. The bulk of the book is about that latter part, and there's heavy coverage of white producer "Doctor Luke," who admittedly has generated a lot of hits.

Of course not all hits are made that way and I wish this book had covered a wider variety of songs, producers, and artists than it does, but it was nevertheless an interesting story as far as it went, and certainly an educational one for me. That said, coverage of the topic is in many ways almost random and quite spotty, and it's largely of the reporting kind - there's no real analysis of the material going on here, and as is often the case in works of fiction produced in the US, this non-fiction book produced in the US is pretty much all USA all the time. It really doesn't recognize that there are other places in the world - except in process of mentioning the Swedish producers who have influenced US music. That said, the US music business is a huge portion of those billions I mentioned earlier.

From the nineties to the twenty-teens, world-wide revenue from the music business plummeted from almost thirty billion dollars to about half that. This book examines the reasons for that slide, not least of which is of course Napster and subsequently its business replacement, Spotify. Apple's iTunes did the same thing back then to music, that Amazon has since done to fiction, which is crashing the price of a work down to 99 cents. So was it Napster which did the damage, or Apple's rock-bottom prices, or both, along with other causes? Probably a mix.

Of course the problem with putting out an audiobook of this nature is that it begs to have the songs - or at least snippets of them included for listening, especially if it's a song you may never have heard, even if you've heard of the song. Why that wasn't done I do not know, but in a sort of a 'review' book like this, I doubt it was a copyright issue. You don't need to include all of the song, and fair use certainly should permit a snatch of some music when you're actually writing about how it came to be.

But then this book is what it says it is: it's about the hit-makers, not the hits, so I guess you take it or leave it, but with these caveats, I commend it as a worthy listen. If you have access to Netflix, there's a very short series on there titled 'This is Pop' which has nothing to do with this book, but which covers some contingent topics and which makes a great companion listen, broadening your scope a lot.

By Wind by T Thorn Coyle

Rating: WARTY!

The biggest problem with this story is that the author has actually drunk the Flavor Aid, and she believes everything she writes: the magic, the aroma therapy, the healing power of crystals, and so on. That's all bullshit, and it wouldn't even be so bad if she didn't preach her religion instead of writing a novel.

Worse even than this is that the story is so tediously lethargic that it drags and drags, and drags and goes nowhere. I dropped this at 30% because literally nothing interesting had happened except for endless Cassandra-style wailing about, as John Fogerty put it, a bad moon arising. In short, up to when I quit, there was no story and what there was instead was awful.

I mean, for example, Brenda, the leader of the 'coven' has a closer-than-a-sister best friend whom she's known for years, yet not once has she confided in her over this bad feeling she's been having until she's pretty much forced into an 'intervention' of sorts! How close can they be when Brenda won't even call or drop her best friend a text? It's tell one thing, but show another all the way here.

The plot, such as it is, is that new age garbarge shop owner Brenda, 'has a bad feeling about this' but what 'this' is, she can't say. She supposed to be a witch, but none of her purported magic, nor that of her 'coven' is of any value whatsoever since no one can tell her anything useful. Plus, she's hearing voices. This woman is in dire need of lithium and psychotherapy.

The other metronomc voice in this tediously tick-tock story is of her purported lover-to-be, Caroline, who is, of course a magical crystal saleswoman. The problem is that at 30% these two had barely even said 'hello'. The blurb asked stupidly (as usual) "Who - or what - stalks Caroline?" Well that would be her control-freak husband who Caroline is apparently too stupid to ditch despite all the freedom she has. The blurb boasts, "Brenda and her coven must act swiftly, before the coming storm blows them all away." Given how ineffective those losers are, it ain't gonna happen. This story was truly bad and boring.

City of Shattered Light by Claire Winn

Rating: WARTY!

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

I had high hopes for this story which seemed to promise two strong female leads, but once again, as they so often do, the book blurb failed to give an honest description of the story, so it was more of a lose than a Winn for me. It was slow to start and seemed very repetitive. I was ready to ditch it after chapter one, and I would have, except this was a review book, so I felt I had to give it a chance. It did pick up somewhat in chapter two, but even so, it never got going. It was such a long, repetitive slog that I grew bored with it.

It was a very pedantic 2-Person PoV story tick-tocking tediously like a metronome between the two main female characters' perspectives that it was putting me to sleep. At least it wasn't first person PoV, but the tedium was strong with this one and by 52% I'd had enough of the repetitive antics of supposed hero "Riven" and her hi-tech non-love-interest "Asa" that I could stand to read no more. I cared nothing for either of the characters or for their fate, and their supposed love story was dead in the water from the very start.

Asa Almeida is the 17-year-old heir to a hi-tech empire. Riven Hawthorne - which is a thoroughly stupid name, is a lowlife street crook who talks big, but consistently achieves nothing. She's supposed to be a no-nonsense girl who is a dead-shot with her antique pistols, but despite having two clear-cut chances to kill her arch-rival (in the half that I read) she fails both times and one failure leads to another. Riven is thoroughly incompetent: all talk and no traction, and she has no spine. Asa, who is supposed to be smart, is a complete dumb-ass and she persistently proves it.

The 'winterdark' MacGuffin in the story appeared to be a direct rip-off of William Gibson's 'wintermute' which is an artificial intelligence character in his novel Neuromancer but since in this story it really is just a name without, apparently, anything behind it (not in the part I read anyway), I guess it doesn't matter what it was. The other side of this coin is tha tthe auhtor evidently hasnlt ehard of a farady cage whcih woudl ahve made her little device undetectable at dradiofrwuencies

The writing had issues, too. I read, for example, at one point: "No doubt the rumor mill would love to grate her to a pulp. A mill grinds, it doesn't grate. Unless of course it hasn't been oiled in a while.... At another point I read, "The phoenix ruffled its wings." Nah! I’m guessing it ruffled its feathers! Then again: "Riven willed herself to be impassable," was used when the author needed 'impassive'.

Some of the technology wasn't very well thought-through. For example, Asa has a suit that she can use to make herself invisible, but this author - as do many sci-fi writers, sci-fi movies, and TV shows - conflates invisible with undetectable. Visible light is only one minuscule portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and trapping that doesn't trap everything else, from gamma rays at one end to Am radio at the other. The suit wouldn't have worked, and the author even seems to admit this at one point where one of the guardbots stops and scans her. Clearly it detected something. The author also seems to forget that Asa's body is in motion, and emitting heat. Both of these things can be detected. The suit itself by its very use is emitting electronic frequencies.

A smock was actually developed that used tiny cameras to transmit an image of the scenery to the opposite side, so it made the smock close to invisible, but not quite. The thing is that even something like this is still actually there. If a bright light shone on it, it would cast a shadow of sorts, and any radar pulse aimed at it would bounce back faster and with a different 'feel' to it from her body than, say, the wall in front of which Asa was standing, so there was so much wrong with this that it was laughable. For a young kids' story it would have been fine, but not for grown-ups, not unless you're going to say it has magical powers (like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak) rather than hi-tech powers.

For me, the worst part was that the story quickly became bogged down in Riven's tedious, endless, and leaden-footed non-attempts to escape the absurdly one-dimensional criminal city, where every single thing is rotten to the core, and every single person is evil and amazingly good at finding and defeating Riven. It made this story truly boring. I can't commend this at all.

Raising Backyard Chickens by Emma Nora

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I'm no more planning on raising chickens in my yard than I was pigs, but just as with that book, I read this one out of curiosity, and I was not disappointed. It's a fun book, full of useful and even unexpected information for anyone planning on producing their own eggs. Of course, you will need a chicken for that; God knows I've tried without one and I've never got it to work!

Don't be put off by the cartoon cover: this is a serious book and contains lots of useful information, along with tips and nested hints, and you won't have to shell out a lot to buy it..... Unfortunately it seems to be available only on Amazon, a corporation I refuse to have anything to do with for a variety of reasons, so I guess the yolk's on me as they say.

The chapters are as follows:

1. The Basics of Raising Backyard Chickens
2. The Science of Raising Chickens
3. Training Your Chickens
4. All About Eggs
5. Special mention - Chicks!
6. Learning to Source the Best Eggs
7. Maintaining the Pecking Order
8. Grooming

It oughtn't to be necessary to remind readers that chickens are living and sensitive animals which will require frequent attention along with attendant watering, feeding, and cleaning. They require safe and comfortable housing and close observation for potential health issues. It is not a part time job or to be approached with an amateurish state of mind. It's essential anyone planning on engaging in this pursuit should read a good book on the topic, and preferably more than one, and be prepared to put in the hard work. If you don't, you will have egg on your face....

There are issues you may not have considered if you've been idly thinking about getting a few chickens for the back yard: such as considering local bye-laws and your neighbors, and there are concerns that even were you cocksure about this, you may not have had these make it through the chicken mesh of your mind, such as bullying among chickens, as well as potential problems introducing new birds to an established flock, and so on. If you plan on selling the eggs, or you plan on exhibiting your chickens, there are tips to help you make those plans fly, too. It even teaches you how to pick up chicks - although that might not be exactly what you had in mind....

I personally have no experience raising chickens, so I can give only my opinion, but I'm no dumb cluck, and it seemed to me that this book was competent, serious, appropriate and a great place to start. It felt like it would get a person well on the right path to having success with this project and so I commend it as a worthy read.

Elves on the Fifth Floor by Francesca Cavallo, Verena Wugeditsch

Rating: WORTHY!

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

It's a little early for a Christmas story, but I liked everything about this short picture novel from the intriguing title to the entertaining and cute tale, to the playful text by Cavallo, and the charming illustrations by Wugeditsch. It was original, quirky in a good way, and amusing. The only problem with the ebook was that Amazon did its usual job of mangling of the format in the Kindle edition - turning it into the kindling it's well known for in my experience. This is one of many reasons why I will have nothing to do with Amazon. For example, the page numbers appeared in the midst of the story including on one amusing occasion where I read the following:

The young man had pulled out his cell phone and was dialing a number.
74
Who...

It made it look like the number he was dialing was 74! The Net Galley viewer presented it much better and was beautifully laid out, but it was in double page format that doesn't work on my phone, which is where I typically read my books. I don't know if this is going to be available in a Kindle edition, but if it is, I recommend strongly against buying that version. The lines were chopped unequally, so some parts of the text would cover the left half of the screen whereas other lines would go the full width of the screen. Drop caps do not work and were messed up. Pictures and text were poorly adjoined. The formatting was, as usual in Kindle when it's anything other than plain vanilla text, messed up to put it politely.

I couldn't read the Net Galley version on my iPad since Net Galley snottily refuses to make its app compatible with older devices, but I was able to try it on Blue Fire Reader and in Adobe Digital Editions, and it was perfectly fine in both of those. So there, Net Galley! Take that! LOL!

The story was wonderful. It was a family of two parents and three kids, who were moving to a new town because of the resentment about their family and marital choices in the place they used to live (which I'd hazard a guess was Texas, especially the way things are going down here lately). They have a small apartment on the fifth floor and make the most of it. One parent, Isabella heads out the next day to begin her new job as a mail carrier at the town's post office. The other, Dominique, stays home with the kids.

When the kids write a letter to Santa about changing plans for a Christmas present, they wonder if it will get there in time, so they're surprised to get a speedy reply in the form of a magical letter from Santa himself! It enquires if it might be possible for some elves work from their home on Christmas Eve, in order to make sure all the presents get distributed in time. Naturally they accept, and this is how elves come to be on the fifth floor, but in a place like this where adults are not known to be overly friendly, the arrival of new people, and the activities on the fifth floor become problematical!

However it all works out in the end. That's not a spoiler! You knew it would! I liked this for its off-kilter take on the world, and for its enthusiastic story-telling and I commend it fully as a worthy read.