Fierce Winds and Fiery Dragons by Nan Sweet

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a great little novel (part of the Dusky Hollows Series, which runs to something like eight volumes as of this review, and only $3 each in ebook form as of this writing, so definitely buy-able!) which I enjoyed immensely even though I'm not remotely its intended age group - or gender, for that matter. It had a lot of writing issues, mostly towards the beginning of the book, but in the end it proved a point I've made several times in this blog: that I'm willing to put up with a novel that's significantly less than brilliantly written if the author gives me a good story! The odd thing about this author is that she appears to have no website, and there are other authors that might be easily confused with her. There's a Nanora Sweet, for example, and a Nancy Sweetland, so there's a delightful bit of a mystery here!

This is a good story. It's different and inventive, and has some cool writing and plotting in it, and when Ivy and Carrie end-up dragged into the alternate world, the story takes hilarious and gripping turns. This is why I loved this book and was willing to put up with a significant number of writing issues. It was completely adorable. This other world, the world of King Glome and Princess Minerva was thoroughly captivating, and the way Carrie won over the snotty princess was brilliant. Ivy's story was equally enthralling, and when she came out with lines like, "Change of plans. I'm going to hurt you." It made my day. I read that part on my lunch break and despite being interrupted several times, I came out of that lunch break completely refreshed and smiling. I owe Nan Sweet for that, so I am volunteering right here and now to be a beta reader for any book she writes! I don't make that offer often, and it's not like any author ever takes me up on it, but there it is. I don't care!

But I digress. As ever. Anyway, the story is about ten-year-olds Carrie and Ivy, who are asked, as a class project, to take care of an egg. Anyone who takes good care of it gets to skip some class work, and if you take care of it over a weekend, you get to skip two periods of class work. Ivy isn't the slightest bit interested, and Carrie is so upset by her parents breaking-up that she's not even there that day, but both of these girls end up sharing an amazing discovery about the egg, and finding their narrow world expand beyond their wildest imaginings because of it.

As a public service announcement, I have to inject a note of warning here. At one point, I read, "They lived in a small town and never locked the house up" to which I have to say, b>these people are morons! I don't care where you live, it's never safe to leave your property unprotected, especially if you're sleeping in said property. But this is a story, not a documentary or an advisory brochure, so this is as valid a thing to write as anything, I guess!

The story is beautifully written for the most part, but there were, as I said, issues. For example, Nan, Sweet as she may be, has a serious problem differentiating 'its' from' it's':
"...without it's fleece-blanketed box..."
"...had brown tufts of fur around it's face..."
"... sitting on it's haunches..."
The rule of thumb is if you cannot substitute 'it is' and have the sentence make sense, then it's 'its'!

Not many people know this, evidently, but ancient animals such as pterodactyls and pteranodons were not dinosaurs. they were pterosaurs. And the past tense of 'tread' is 'trod'. And speaking of birds, or of flying creatures at least, " blue top-not" really needs to be " blue top-knot". "...when Carrie and Ivy pet her head..." should be 'petted', and so on.

There were many other issues, including ones where a spell-checker won't help, such as this sentence: "... few holes were starting to show at the seems..." which should have read, 'seams'. There's also an issue with the creature named a 'gollivant' - this is rendered as 'gallivant' in one or two places. This is a case where a spell-checker will actively work against you! Another problem was an issue of confused verb tenses as in, "...few young ones pointed and grunting as if she were in some kind of zoo..." where 'grunting' ought to have been 'grunted'.

Other issues were more general in nature, such as where one character's mom, who is a nurse, is described as wearing a hat. Nurses tend not to wear hats these days - not in the US, unless it's some oddball religious order hospital perhaps. Indeed, when I worked in a hospital and drew a cartoon for some event the nurses were putting on, I was told that nurses are trying to get away from that image, which I fully supported and understood, but this was a cartoon, not a life-like depiction. There are conventions in cartoons which these people evidently simply didn't get. needless to say I was quite obviously working in the wrong place!

Since this blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, I have to raise another interesting writing issue which wasn't so much out-and-out wrong, as a case of "how could this be written better?" In order to keep her egg warm, Ivy is described as, "Pulling an afghan throw that her great Aunt had knitted out of the closet." Most people knit these things from wool or some sort of synthetic yarn, but more power to this aunt if she can knit something from a closet! Better wording might have been: "From the closet, she pulled an Afghan throw which her aunt had knitted." But you can write that off as being too picky if you like.

But these, for me, were pretty minor and picky. They may irritate others more than they did me. For me, it was the quality of the story that matters. I'd rather read one where there are some issues, but the story is great, than read a really technically well-written novel which is boring or stupid. It all comes down to whether it's a worthy read, and this one is, beyond question. Despite not being the target audience, I'm honestly interested in reading more of these adventures. I loved the way each main character, Carrie and Ivy, had their own story, and in the alternate land, one was rather scary while the other was really funny. it made for a refreshing read as we switched back and forth to follow the progress each made in this new world.

I fully recommend this book.

Sugar Skull by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

Sugar Skull (not to be confused, believe it or not, with a score of other novels of the same name) is the last of a trilogy of graphic novels, which I unfortunately read first, not realizing this was part of a series (X'ed Out, The Hive, and this volume)). It made no sense to me and the ending was a complete bust, essentially telling the reader they had wasted their time because this trilogy went literally nowhere. The library didn't have the middle volume, and when I picked up volumes one and three, I thought they were separate stories in the same world! Graphic novel creators, I've noticed, are extraordinarily bad about indicating that a novel is part of a series and they're even worse at indicating which step in the series the one you're holding in your hand actually is. Even having read the first in the series, however, it still didn't make this one any more sensible or became any more accessible.

The initial problem with this for me was, not having read the previous two volumes, that I had no idea that the main character had a cartoon fantasy running in his head. Even knowing that retrospectively and reconsidering this novel, it still made no sense, but at least that knowledge explained some of the weird switching between ostensibly unconnected (and ultimately nonsensical) story lines.

The basic story is of a man, Doug, who's really a kid who won't grow up, pursuing adolescent fantasies of being a rock-star or an artist, instead of getting his act together. Maybe he could actually have been a rock-star or an artist, but he simply doesn't have the wherewithal to pursue any career, so he wastes time in his fantasy world, lolling around, doing no work, unable to make any effort, and going nowhere. To his credit, he got off the booze, but he's really not good at staying off it, and he appears to have no idea what's wrong with his life.

He's a father who fled when he learned his girlfriend, Sarah, was pregnant. Despite her extensive and repeated efforts to contact him, he meanly stonewalled her consistently. She's done fine without him, as he learns later, and she has no desire whatsoever to have him back in her, and especially not her kid's, life.

Doug himself has been married, but is a serial cheater, so no sign of maturity there either. In a further insult, the band he was with actually took off after he left (no word on whether there was a connection between these two events!), and while one of the guys in the band still has affection for Doug, the girl outright and uncompromisingly rejects him as bad news. She evidently knows something we're just learning!

In his fantasy life, Doug goes by the name of Tintin backwards, and looks like the veteran cartoon star. The fantasies are unremarkable though weird, and they convey little, and they really achieve nothing for the reader or for Doug himself, but he cannot let go of them or grow out of them. He gets beaten up at one point by Sarah's psychotic ex-boyfriend, and even this doesn't make an ounce of difference to his life. In short, why would anyone care about this guy or what happens to him? I didn't, and I cannot recommend this.

X'ed Out by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

X'ed Out (not to be confused with X'Ed Out Part II by Kevin Lofton, or with The X'ed-out X-ray by Ron Roy and John Steven Gurney) is book one of a trilogy (X'ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull. As usual for me, I came into this ass-backwards and read the last one first, couldn't get the middle one at the library, and read the first one last, so my take on it is a bit skewed (but when isn't it?!). The problem with graphic novels (and also with some non-graphic series) is that they offer no help whatsoever in determining which volume goes where. There was no indication on either of the two volumes that I did read to offer guidance that it was even a part of a trilogy, much less where each appeared in the order. I had actually thought these were two different stories based int eh same world. Wrong.

Doug is delusional. Seriously so. he has a fantasy world running in his head that is very nearly as real to him as is the real world. He wakes up one night to find a hole in his wall and his dead black cat leading him off to a fantasy worlds inhabited by his alter ego, a Tintin rip-off named Nitnit. It gets worse from there, with Doug reliving his past, meeting hostile lizard men who are conducting a breeding program using human females (how that works is a complete mystery).

Doug is quite evidently misogynistic, and also a spineless loser who is so self-obsessed and indolent that no one could possibly love him. he blows one chance after another to do something with his life. I didn't like this story (so-called) at all. It made a vague kind of sense, but overall, for all practical purposes was too overblown to make an real sense, and there's too much going on to ever get resolved even in three volumes. The artwork was colorful and, well, it was colorful. It was also flat, inanimate, and unappealing. I can't recommend this, and had no interest in going on to read the middle volume.

Wolverine's Daughter by Doranna Durgin

Rating: WARTY!

I was completely mislead by this, although that was no fault of the publisher or the author - except in the fact that titling a novel Wolverine's daughter is asking to mislead people. I thought this was to be a story of a daughter of the Marvel comics character Wolverine, which would make an awesome story if handled right. Reality check: it is not! It's not even a story. It's nothing more than a prologue to the real Wolverine's Daughter novel of the same name, and I don't do prologues. The Wolverine's Daughter novel is a story about some cave-dwelling humans in prehistory.

This prologue to it was so larded with cliché as to be pretty much a Jean Auel parody. There is the roving band of Cro-Magnon 1 wannabes on a hunting trip. There are predators, both animal and human. The human predators are slavers who have every clichéd trait, right down to their rotting teeth. There's the misfit in the bunch who saves the day by means of some 'brilliant' thinking. That's it. A five-minute read, a handful of pages, and a boatload of cliché. I do not recommend this. It's a rip-off IMO.

Supreme Blue Rose by Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay

Rating: WORTHY!

In this beautifully illustrated futuristic time-travel graphic novel, Diana Dane, an investigative journalist who is out of work at present and not able to afford all the meds she believes she needs, has a weird dream in which she's informed that she should not trust Darius Dax. Curiously enough that's the name of the man she meets during her appointment the next day. Dax hires her for a considerable sum - with even more on offer should she succeed in locating what it is that Dax seeks.

It's not an object he wants as much as it is a time and place, but in ignorance of this, Diana is driven away in a stretch limo by an enigmatic chauffeur to investigate what as reported as an airplane crash. Dax doesn't believe the press. Diana, who looks strangely like talented artist Tula Lotay (who incidentally illustrated this novel!), is expected to unearth the truth. Her problem is that her dreams seem to be bleeding into her reality. Or vice-versa. Wait, is that Diana's dreams or Tula's? I honestly can't day! But maybe that's just a result of time being periodically revised?

This novel penned by Warren Ellis was entrancing and haunting with a bit too much mystery, but definitely an alluring lead-in to what is at least a seven volume series.

Tortured Life by D Watters, C Wijngaard, N Gibson, J Wijngaard

Rating: WARTY!

This graphic novel tells the story of a guy named Richard Carter who lives in the infamous Whitechapel region of London, and who is undergoing Hikikomori - a Japanese word describing someone who has withdrawn from society for six months or longer - sometimes years.

Because of this reference to a Japanese cultural phenomenon, I mistakenly began to think this was set in Japan, but as evidenced by the fact that character is Caucasian, as is his ex-girlfriend and all of his friends and colleagues, and even a passing priest, I was forced to conclude that this was merely a reference, and nothing to do with the story. It wasn't until later that his name and place of residence was conformed.

Richard has undergone this withdrawal because of something awful which has overwhelmed him, and today he decides he's going to kill himself. He had a Schrödinger experience one day which precipitated all this and in it, he saw a cat lying in the street, at first dead, then alive, then dead. After a while he let the horror of it go, but then he has the same experience with a bird, and the visions become worse and start showing up with people that he sees. He's predictably saved by a young woman who dresses, shall I say, less than conservatively, and who is named Alice McNelly.

Shortly after Alice's arrival, Richard finds himself pursued by a beast from hell which only looks, vaguely, like it was once human. The beast's speech was awfully hard to read. Too small and blurry, red on black so I pretty much skipped reading those parts, especially when I realized what a juvenile mentality this chraracter had. He's also amused by bathroom humor. There's a weird part around page 65 and 66, where the image frames seem out of order. First the bad guy is in the toilets kicking open the doors one by one, then he's heading for the toilets, then he's back in there again kicking open the doors.

Richard's a slim guy, but he curiously appears to put on weight at the bottom of page 70. Maybe the bottom of page seventy just makes characters appear overweight?! Does this panel make me look fat?! I got to about page 140 of this 160-some page novel and could stand to read it no longer. It made some kind of sense to begin with, but then it took the road to weirdsville and never looked back.

It ceased making any sense, it became disjointed and unintelligible (this doesn't even include the illegible ramblings of the red skeleton man), and it persisted in endless gore, which never appeals to me. If you like all of that, then this is for you, but I cannot in good faith recommend this as a worthy read.

Vampirella Feary Tales by Nancy A Collins and Gail Simone

Rating: WARTY!

Given that this was a graphic novel with standard 'okay' art work, written and illustrated by two female artists/writers, I expected better and didn't get it. It was still women as meat, romping around in their underwear with poor dialogue and unimaginative adventures. Vampirella gets dragged magically into a fairy tale book, except that these fairy tales are horrifically twisted - hence feary tales.<./p>

There are five stories in this first volume and the series runs to at least four more volumes after this, but my interest ended with this one. I can't recommend it. I know it was supposedly a celebration of forty-five years of Vampirella, but this is 2015, and we deserve a lot better than Vampirella as vapid meat. And so does she.

The Roll-Away Pumpkin by Junia Wonders

Rating: WORTHY!

Is a Pumpkin considered kin folk of a pump? Is there some significance in the initial letters of this story's title spelling "trap"? Neither of these idiotic questions will be answered in this book, but that's no reason at all not to love it. I enjoyed and positively reviews Junia Wonders's Boy and the Very Lonely Pony back at the end of June 2015, and this story was equally charming.

The artwork here is by a different artist, Daniela Volpari, but it's equal to anything on the other book. Indeed, it has its own charm, and is very elegantly executed. The story is simple and perfect for the young age group this book is aimed at, and highly suitable for the fall, which is not as far away as you might think.

A young girl loses control of a pumpkin - and I'm tempted to say if I had a dime for every time that's happened to me..., but that's all pie in the sky, and it doesn't help to be prideful about it because summer comes before a fall, as we all know.

In a chase rather reminiscent of the ending to an old Benny Hill show, not only the girl goes running pell-mell after her errant pumpkin; pretty much everyone she passes during her frantic chase joins in with her, until a veritable parade of people is in pursuit which is perfect since today was actually supposed to be the local vegetable parade, and what better way to end all the exertion than to sit down with a nice bowl of fresh pumpkin soup? Orange you glad it all ended without anyone becoming browned off?

I recommend this delightful story.

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

Rating: WARTY!

This was such a pathetically dull story, and read by such an awful reader that I made it through only two disks on the audio book and could stand to listen not a phoneme further. There was one part where it got really interesting, which kept me going briefly, but that was soon blown to shreds by the deadening text which followed quickly afterwards. And where in hell the author dragged that title from has to be one of the great mysteries of the 21st century. A novel about ice and snow, and cold and an Ice Queen is titled Breadcrumbs? Definitely a Whisky Tango Foxtrot call-sign on this one.

The basic story is about Hazel - an adoptee from India who prefers to hang out with her best friend Jack (yuk - yet another unimaginatively mundane male character named Jack. Barf, etc.) than to do "girly stuff". Hazel is evidently overweight, and the subject of bullying - from the very boys with whom Jack hangs out at school. There's an entire story there which was lost because this author evidently couldn't see it. As for Jack(-ass), he couldn't see anything wrong with his friends hazing Hazel, and basically tells her to get over it. What a jerk. The true tragedy here is that Hazel evidently has no life without Jack in it. As for the story, it had no life at all. It was pedantic and tedious, and the narrator Kirby Heythorne's reading voice was god-awfully dull.

The problem with Hazel is that she is one of the most boring characters ever, with no motivation and an obsession with Jack which is pathetic if not scary. She's not likable and she doesn't change - not in the part to which I listened anyway. She has nothing to offer to win our hearts or minds.

The interesting part for me was where Hazel met an old childhood friend whom she had not seen in four years - a lifetime for an eleven-year-old child. When Hazel arrived at her home, her friend was in the kitchen doing homework whilst her slacker uncle (supposedly a screenwriter LOL) was baking cookies. The girl's uncle told Hazel that he was encouraging his niece to invent a story which he could steal and turn into a screenplay which would make him rich.

They began to elaborate on the original idea, and the story became quite engrossing, brief and sketchy as it was. Unfortunately it was over all-too-quickly, and we went right back to the brain-deadening tedium of our regular programming, which is where I said, "Check please, I'm outta here!". I wanted to switch to the other story and pursue that instead, but of course that option wasn't available so I couldn't avail myself of it!

This is based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and things turn towards the fantastical as this novel progresses (according to the blurb), but that was nowhere near enough of an attraction to lure me any further notwithstanding that I had liked the "screenplay" they'd discussed on earlier. I cannot recommend this story based on what I suffered through, and especially not in the mind-numbing audio version.

Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson

Rating: WORTHY!

Read lamely by Cassandra Morris

I started listening to this on an audio book which I accidentally happened upon at the library (try accidentally happening upon an ebook at the library or in a book store! Doesn't work, does it?!). I liked the story (although not the reader's voice) so much that when I saw it on sale at Amazon, I snapped it up and finished reading it in the ebook version.

Tiger Lily is an alternative interpretation of the J M Barrie book about Peter Pan. I guess the all-encompassing and highly-protected copyright of the Peter Pan story is over now, otherwise this book could never have been written, which would have been a real shame.

This story is told by Tinkerbell, but from the Indian "princess" Tiger Lily's point of view instead of Wendy's and Peter's. Indeed, Wendy in particular, but also Peter are quite minor characters, except that Tiger lily falls in love with Peter and feels betrayed when he meets Wendy towards the end of the story, and he effectively cold-shoulders Tiger Lily.

As I said, I started listening to the audio book, but the narrator's childish voice was really hard to stomach, so when I saw the novel on sale at Amazon, I bought the ebook, returned the library audio book, and finished reading it on my phone! It was seriously good. The way the author captures and interprets the mentalities and motivations of the various players, including Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, Hook, Smee, Peter, and the mermaids is remarkable. The story really drew me in despite the awful reading.

I never read the Peter Pan book, which was actually titled "Peter and Wendy" and was taken from a portion of an earlier story book and transformed into a play and then a novel, and finally a sequel. I only know the story from the Disney movie which I watched once with my kids, but it would seem that the movie followed the book quite closely. Now I confess I'm tempted to read the 'original' book.

Tiger lily was supposedly a princess, although how that works within a native American setting is a mystery. There is a precedent though: Pocahontas was referred to as a princess since she was the daughter of a chief. There was no chief worth the name in the Peter Pan story that I recall, but in this book, Tiger Lily was an orphan who had been adopted by a cross-dressing shaman known as Tik-Tok.

In the original, the only interaction Tiger Lily had with Peter was when he rescued her from the pirates after she was kidnapped. There never was any other relationship between them. In this book, she negotiates with the pirates and is willingly used as bait to trap Peter and Wendy on a rock as the tide rises, so the pirates can drown them (neither Peter nor Wendy can swim). Tiger Lily feels betrayed and rejected by his favoring Wendy over herself, although she's hardly blameless.

It's a pretty good read, which surprised me a bit. I didn't expect it to be so good. There were one or two really oddball sentences, such as this one, which made no sense at all: "I’ll meet you at the bridge, midday, not tomorrow night but the next" They’re going to meet at midday at night? Weird! Those were mere hiccups though, and overall, this was a very worthy read.

King #1 by Joshua Hail Fialkov

Rating: WARTY!
Art: Bernard Chang
Colors: Marcelo Maiolo

This is a dystopian romp featuring the supposed last human on Earth. Despite this, he actually works for a living – his job being to try and head-off alien incursions onto Earth, which is absurd, because Earth is not entirely populated by aliens or mutants, or mythological beasts and gods.

The story (if it can be called a story at all) was very short, which was a blessing, because it really wasn’t very interesting. It was really nothing more than a testosterone-infused blend of conflict and fighting, smarth-mouthing, and bitching about stuff throughout. It didn’t make for an appealing story at all.

The monsters he took on were uninspired and not entertaining. Karate robot bear? Seriously? I couldn’t find anything to like here and I can’t recommend it.

Muirwood The Lost Abbey Vol 1 by Jeff Wheeler, Matt Sturges, Dave Justus, and Alex Sheikman

Rating: WARTY!

The July smack-down continues with Goshena and Lady Marciana Soliven up for consideration. Just like with the Marvels (Captain and Ms) yesterday, both of them smacked themselves down. No winners today!

Comoros is the home of Lady Marciana Soliven, daughter of King Brannon. She's known as Maia, and she lives perforce with Lady Shilton, the current Queen's mom. This is a land where both magic and reading are forbidden to women. Maia can read and she has a connection to the magic, but she has been stripped of her title and imprisoned in her "home". We meet her the day she has visitors, and has to clean herself up for them after having barfed profusely.

It turns out that her father, who banished his daughter the same day he banished his first wife, has need of her now. She has the power and the medallion. She's the only one who can go to the abbey and repeal the malaise which has gripped Comoros since her father threw out the magicians. Now she must go, escorted by an assassin who is supposed to protect her, and find the cure for her homeland.

The map of Comoros look very much like a map of western Europe, with a portion of Scandinavia, and Great Britain and Eire tossed in for good measure, but with the rest of Europe and Asia cropped off. The art work was interesting but not particularly special. For me this story has little to offer that's original or interesting. It's your standard wizard fantasy.

I can't recommend this based on what I've read in this one volume, but Net Galley, which supplied this from the publisher, has a new scheme going on here by which subsequent editions of the series are made available to reviewers as they are released, and I signed up for that, so I'll review the next one when it's available and see if things improve.

Goshena: Queen of the Big In-Betweena by Chuck Bright

Rating: WARTY!

The July smack-down continues with Goshena and Lady Marciana Soliven up for consideration. Just like with the Marvels (Captain and Ms) yesterday, both of them smacked themselves down. No winners today! The art work was black and white line drawings by by Maureen Burdock - was functional but not really appealing to me. Story was tedious. I mean really tedious.

Goshena is supposed to be some sort of handmaiden of the afterlife, whose job it is to collect bodies from the grave and walk them over to the other side. She's objectified to the max even though she's drawn be a female artist. With her latest acquisition, Goshena seems to have a problem in that maybe this guy was murdered by his significant other. Why this is a problem from her perspective isn't at all clear.

The story, told in several "chapters" was barely acceptable right up to the point where Goshena picks the guy up, but immediately after that we got a series of chapters where there was a confused mess of things going on. Some disembodied voice from the fog was talking to the guy who was smart-mouthing while listening to his mom and dad at the graveside, bemoaning his fate.

The story went completely into the toilet at that point. There was far too much text, average to poor illustrations, and nonsensical writing. The text was a problem because on the iPad in Bluefire Reader, it was all but illegible because it was far too small. I wouldn't recommend reading this in ebook form. It was passable in Adobe Digital Editions, but only on a reasonably large monitor. I can't speak for the print version.

The story did nothing to engage me or to draw me in. I quit reading it about one third the way through because it simply wasn't interesting to me, nor was it amusing or entertaining. I honestly can't recommend this one.

Boy and the Very Lonely Pony by Junia Wonders

Title: Boy and the Very Lonely Pony
Author: Junia Wonders
Publisher: Gmür Verlag (no website found)
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Divin Meir (no website found)

This is an odd and quirky story about a lonely boy, but nonetheless enjoyable for that. By the way, before I get started, the text in particular, but also the illustrations are a wee bit small to appreciate on a smart phone (although it is do-able), so I'd recommend the print version or reading this on a pad or tablet.

The boy is largely confined to the house, and therefore enjoys gazing out of the window for the beauty of the world outside and for anything else of interest which he sees out there. This is how he first encounters the pony, which to him looks quite sad.

When the boy is getting ready for bed, he notices that the pony is looking back at him, and each seems to recognize that something is missing in the other. Seeing the white pony glowing in the stark Moonlight, the boy feels compelled to go visit.

At least the boy can go outside. The pony can't go anywhere. Not until the boy rides it and they escape the confining boredom of the pasture and take a night-time tour of the local district. As the sun comes up they return home as friends and fellow travelers.

I liked this book for its simplicity and the gorgeously colored images. I recommend it.

My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett

Title: My Father's Dragon
Author: Ruth Stiles Gannett
Publisher: Dover Publications
Rating: WORTHY!

It's unusual for me to write a review so long after reading the book, but this one was so short and weird that it was hard to forget what it was about. It's an amazingly fantastical adventure wherein nine-year-old Elmer Elevator bravely sets out to make early acquaintance with his destiny, and ends up almost as much by luck as by judgment, rescuing an imprisoned young dragon who naturally becomes his friend in the doing.

It's a bit of a scary adventure in the jungle, which Elmer, who lives in Popsicornia, has to reach by way of Tangerina. On Wild Island he predictably meets up with wild critters who aren't exactly friendly, but Elmer, having learned of the dragon's plight on the island from an alley cat with whom he teams up, loads up his back pack with useful items like chewing gum, a comb and a hairbrush, lollipops, magnifying glasses, toothpaste and brush, seven hair ribbons, an empty grain bag, and food, supplemented by tangerines, but of course I won't spoil it by revealing where he obtained those....

The cool thing about Elmer is that he's all about smarts and trickery. He never resorts to barbaric fisticuffs or brawling, and he always manages to outwit his foes no matter how big and scary they might be, or whether they be rhinos or tigers, monkeys or crocodiles. It's quite a remarkable book given that it was originally published seventy years ago.

This book is a very fast read and is the first of a trilogy (Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Bluelandfollowed it), so there's more to come after this one is done. I recommend it.

The Adventures of Miss Petitfour by Anne Michaels

Title: The Adventures of Miss Petitfour
Author: Anne Michaels
Publisher: Tundra Books
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Emma Block

This is a highly whimsical book with a delightfully British tone. The author is Canadian, and though I don't normally care what authors look like, I have to say that I have seen a picture of her and she has an awesome look to her - like a character from a novel herself! It's written I assume, for younger readers, but it delighted me. It reminded me of several other books even as it proudly exhibited its own unique take on life. There's an element of Gail Carriger in it, also a touch of TS Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. It's sparsely illustrated in a child-like style, but the pictures are perfect for the story. The text is large, so the novel is very short. It consists of several stories linked only by the characters, so you can comfortably read them in any order.

Miss Petitfour has several cats: Captain Captain, Captain Catkin, Captain Clothespin, Clasby, Earring, Grigorovitch, Hemdela, Minky, Misty, Moutarde, Mustard, Pirate, Purrsia, Sizzles, Taffy, Your Shyness (although not necessarily in that order) and they are a lively bunch who like to travel with her by table cloth to the village, the cats clinging to each other's tail.

If you've never traveled by table cloth, I do advise it, but please remember that you must match the table cloth color and pattern to the needs of the day, and that you have to be prepared to visit only the stores to which the prevailing wind takes you on any given trip. Thus enabled, the five stories are these:

Miss Petitfour and the rattling Spoon - when Miss Petitfour runs out of marmalade, it's a crisis with which I fully empathize, and which must be addressed forthwith!

Miss Petitfour and the Jumble. Every five years the village has a jumble sale, so you know it must be high time to open the junk cupboard. Or is that wise?

Miss Petitfour and the Penny Black. The Penny Black is a very rare and extremely valuable British stamp from the Victorian days, and is the pride of Miss Petitfour's collection, so what do you think will happen when it happens to blow out of the window on a snowy day?

Miss Petitfour and the Birthday Cheddar. Adventures on birthdays are particularly adventurous when you're a table cloth short of a picnic, and there's a chilly river nearby.

Miss Petitfour and the "Oom". Miss Petitfour hears an Oom! While she has definitely not lost the Oom in her life, she does hear two of them. What on Earth is that noise and does it have anything to do with the confetti factory? Miss P and the cats find they must abandon the annual festooning festival to go in search of odd noises.

The novelty of the stories for me tended to wear off a bit the more I read of them, but this is probably a case of familiarity breeds discontent. I found myself wondering if I had read them starting with the last first, whether I might have found the first less adorable than I did and the last more, but of course there is no way to do that now! I recommend this book as a really fun read, but you might want to pace yourself and spread the stories out over several days so you don't become a dissatisfied glutton for them. Maybe keep the book in the bathroom and read a story each day, or read them to your kids one per night? The bottom line is that we need stories of this nature and I'm glad we have them and that I read them. This is a worthy read.

ODY-C Volume 1 By Matt Fraction

Title: ODY-C Volume 1
Author: Matt Fraction
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Christian Ward.

I had some mixed feelings about this and in the end didn't feel like it was something I wanted to pursue as a series (I'm not much of a series kind of person!), but I was very glad to have read this one volume just for the experience and for the art work. It was the art work, in the end, which made me consider this a worthy 'read'.

This graphic novel takes Homer's Odyssey, and renders all the characters as female (or as something part way between male and female), and sets the action in space, but otherwise follows Homer's text quite closely. Therein, I think, lay one of the problems, because the text is very obscure and clearly had to be edited for a graphic novel, which tended to make it even more obscure, unfortunately. The story was bent to fit the original Odyssey - regardless of whether it scanned as a story - in this new context. It was hard to follow because there really was no flow to follow.

The ship's captain is Odyssia, and she and her crew of female warriors are embarking upon the journey back to Ithicaa after taking down Troiia. The problem is that the 'gods' (or whatever their replacements are supposed to be here) decide to mess with these people. There is no motivation given for this in this story, and so we have Odyssia and her people slamming up against one obstacle after another just on whims.

So the story not so great, but the psychedelic art work was amazing. The colors were brilliant, the imagery stunning, and every page a bath of brilliant hue and strong line. It's worth seeing just for that. The story did serve to explicate and conjoin the images, so it had its purpose, even though it often made little sense to me. Perhaps if you've read the original, which I haven't, you will get more from this.

Overall, though, I rate this a worthy view more than a read, but you might want to try just one, as I did, and make up your mind after that. I read this on the iPad, so I can't speak to the quality of the coloring in print form. I hope it's as good as the electronic version, because if it isn't, you'll be missing a lot.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Title: The Velveteen Rabbit
Author: Margery Williams
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by William Nicholson.

Everything I know about one-sided relationships I learned from The Velveteen Rabbit. Not really, but some people might genuinely feel that way! This is a pretty cool short story (~4,000 words) dealing with mature themes for young children.

"...once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” Doesn't that say it all? If you are at all familiar with the concept underlying the Pixar Toy Story movies, you will also understand what a complete rip-off they are of this 1922 classic. Toy Story itself was rooted in an earlier Pixar short, an Oscar winner titled Tin Toy. In some ways, this novel also foreshadows Watership Down.

Because I grew up outside of the US and because of family circumstances and income brackets, I actually had never even heard of this story until well into adulthood. I only just now read it because it was a free book from an on-line vendor, and therefore a golden opportunity to see what it was all about. You can read it for free here.

The plot is simple - a rabbit made from velveteen (an imitation of velvet) and stuffed with sawdust (as they were wont to do back when this book was written) feels rather unloved after Christmas day. It's only when the boy's primary toy goes missing (the rabbit is innocent, I swear!) that our velveteen friend is allowed to step up and become the new favorite.

From that point on there's no looking back, but even as he is loved, the rabbit still feels less than whole. In a real sense he's handicapped, and not by his being a stuffed toy, but because he's effectively a paraplegic, having no use of his back legs, which are essential to a rabbit not only for running, but for defense. He only realizes how handicapped he is when he encounters real rabbits during a trip into the forest with his owner.

The rabbit learns from a venerable toy horse that a toy can become real if he is truly loved. Until then, he is just a toy, and like women in the workplace (whose opportunities are thankfully improving these days), the chances for any given toy to move up are slight. Fortunately for this rabbit, the opportunity falls right into his lapin, and he and the boy become the closest of friends. Even this costs the rabbit. As the months go by, he starts growing old at a far faster rate than the boy does. His velveteen sheen is lost and his body parts start failing. His whiskers are whisked away. He was warned about this by the horse, but he realizes that the horse was right: he doesn't care, because to the boy, he is still beautiful and loved.

The problem arrives on hot wings: scarlet fever, a much more serious illness in 1922 than ever it is now. Make note of this all ye who think the past was somehow cleaner, better, brighter, whatever, than is today! There is no vaccine for what was once known as Scarlatina, but antibiotics currently work since it's actually a form of strep infection; however, scarlet fever caused two deaths in 2011, so it is no less deadly now than it was when this fairy tale was written, given the right circumstances.

The doctor, who is rather clueless, advises the parents to burn all the boy's toys. Unless the toys are going to be given to other kids, burning them isn't going to do a darned thing! Does the doctor somehow think that the boy will re-infect himself with his own variety of the bacterium? If no one else became sick, it's run its course in this household. However, this was 1922, and the rabbit is collected up and bagged with the rest of the toys, but there's an escape clause, and it doesn't involve rabbit claws. I'll leave the details to blossom for you as they did for me. To cut a short story shorter, the rabbit rabbits!

I don't have any emotional investment in this story, not having read it as a kid, but I do recommend it. Within its parameters, it was realistic, charming, inventive, warm, and quite remarkable for its time.

Foreverland is Dead by Tony Bertauski

Title: Foreverland is Dead
Author: Tony Bertauski
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

The blurb really did its job here because it drew me in and for once in a rare while, I wasn't disappointed, although this novel is obviously intended as the beginning of a series (actually I later discovered it isn't even in the first volume of an ongoing series, but you didn't have to have read the first to get the most out of this one), and I don't do series unless they are really, really compelling. This one was a worthy read as far as it went, but I felt no compulsion afterwards to read more about this setting or these characters.

The story begins with half-a-dozen teenage girls waking up in some sort of dormitory, and not a single one of them can remember who she is. Their heads are shaved and they discover labeled clothing under their beds, which is how they arrive at their names, but they don't know if these names are really theirs anymore than they know if the clothes are really their own clothes. Everything is very basic and spartan, with a limited amount of food, and winter is evidently on its way, so even though they appear to be on a ranch or a farm, rationing seems like a good idea.

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The girl who is evidently named Cyn takes charge, and the obvious plan is to walk out of here back to civilization, which can't be that far away, right? One problem with that: each of the girls has some sort of device embedded in her neck, right below her skull, which pains them increasingly as they try to cross boundaries, and which eventually knocks them out cold.

Om the wall under Cyn's bed, she discovers a host of scratch marks by which someone has evidently been keeping track of how many days go by. There are a lot of days. The farm seems to have been surrounded not only by a fence, but by wilderness, of a kind which is creepy to say the least, Also, there is a dead adult. Her decaying corpse lies on the path to a shack in the trees, to which there seems to be no ingress.

One of the girls is not a part of the group in the dorm. She wakes up in the house, to which none of the other girls can go. Her head isn't shaved, but she has no more idea who she is than they did. At first she befriends the other girls but soon retreats to the house where she barricades herself in. This is how the status quo stands when a strange mature guy turns up out of the wilderness, accompanied by a young man who is as dangerous as he is vacant. At first the guy seems friendly, confused, in need of help, but slowly he begins to assert his maturity. What the heck is going on here?

I found this novel engrossing, intriguing and entertaining. I should warn you that it reads a bit slowly at times and you want to yell at the girls to get a grip and get organized, and get moving, but aside from that, it was a decent read - and that's all I ask for! It seems a bit obvious after a while what's going on, but it takes some time to get there and be sure of where we are. The question is, is what seems obvious really the truth, or is it just another delusion? The novel is well written overall, and the descriptions of winter chilled me. I am not a fan of the cold! There were some instances of typos or poor grammar, but nothing egregious or outrageous. I recommend this novel as a worthy read.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Title: A Wrinkle in Time
Author: Madeleine L'Engle
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WARTY!

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You know when you visit an author's website and the website advertises itself with a novel which was published over a half century ago: Madeleine L'Engle's Website - Author of A Wrinkle in Time, that something's rotten in the state of Uriel. If that's not enough to warn you off, there's always the Newbery medal sticker, there to dissuade would-be readers like a health warning on a pack of cigarettes. That's the experience I had with this 'classic'.

The main character, Meg Murray is a thirteen-year-old with some issues. She's part of a highly improbable family where the father is absent and the children are all precocious and advanced beyond their years. The mother's only characteristic seems to be that she's "beautiful' although why that's important or even relevant is never explained. She's also a scientist, but this evidently is less of a feature than her skin. Meg has a younger brother named Charles who is way smarter than he should be for his age. She has two younger twin brothers as well, Sandy and Dennys.

This novel actually starts with the classic line from Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's novel Paul Clifford published in 1830: "It was a dark and stormy night." Meg is a nervous Nellie when it comes to storms, and also given to romanticizing poorly understood events out of all rational proportion. This neighbor Mrs Whatsit becomes a thieving dangerous "tramp" (tramp used here in the sense of 'hobo', not 'loose woman')

Meg's mom seems to have no problem whatsoever when her kids, Meg, and the five-year-old, wander the house in the middle of the night making themselves cups of cocoa or drinking milk. In fact, she joins them, and the hell with school in the morning. Isn't that beautiful? It’s at this time that Meg learns of the tesseract, but mom, who reacted strongly to its mention, refuses to explain what it is, because now she's all concerned about Meg getting to school after her sleepless night.

Making up intelligent names doesn’t seem to be L'Engle's strong point; thus, another character is named Mrs Who, and another, Mrs Which. It is these three who offer to help Meg find her father, although why they offer this to Meg and not to Meg's mom is a mystery.

The only humor in the novel is the poor writing, which evidently isn't bad enough to make old Newbery turn in his grave such as this ambiguous phrase: "Meg made her bed and hurried after it." I wasn't sure if she took so long to make the bed that she had to rush through everything else because she was out of time, or if the bed had left the building Elvis-style, and Meg was hastily following. I suppose it could have been that she hurried out after the cat which had left the room earlier, but that's just a wild guess!

When reached the part about magical centaurs, I simply put the novel down and walked away. I couldn't stand to read any more of this tedious and poorly written drivel.