To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Title: To Kill a Mockingbird
Author: Harper Lee
Publisher: Audio Partners (website not found)
Rating: WORTHY!

Ably read by Roses Pritchard.

I picked up this book because I finally couldn't stand not knowing what the big deal was about a two-kilo mockingbird. I guess I misheard the title...just kidding!

Set in the mid 1930's during the "Great Depression" (but written in the late fifties and published in 1960), this story is told from the PoV of Jean Louise Finch, who was known as "Scout", but it's told in retrospect, by an adult Jean, remembering events years ago. Jean's mother was dead, even back then, and she lived with her father, Atticus, a lawyer, and her older brother, Jeremy, who was known as "Jem".

Harper Lee denied that the novel was autobiographical, but her own father was a lawyer, she had an older bother, she hung out with a new guy in town who lived next door, and there was a boarded-up house nearby about which they made up stories. Many events in this story actually occurred in one way or another, although they were modified for this story.

The Finch family lives next door to the reclusive Radley family, and because of this, they make up stories about the Radley's - a family which both scares and intrigues them. During this time, a local black guy, Tom Robinson, is accused of assaulting a white girl - which back then, and especially in the south, was a pretty much an automatic death sentence whether the accused did it or not.

Atticus forbids his kids from watching the trial, but they sneak into the 'colored seats' up on the balcony. By some careful legal footwork, Atticus eventually shows the court that Mayella Violet Ewell, the girl accusing Tom, and her father, Robert E Lee Ewall, are lying. It was Bob who beat Mayella, not Tom. Despite this, Tom is found guilty, and is later shot 17 times when he supposedly tries to escape from prison.

This story borrows a lot from the real-life Emmett Till case, which was equally messed up, with exaggeration and dissemination on both sides. The sad thing there is that while nothing happened (at least not through the courts) to the accusers in that case, the accused paid heavily for this event - which constituted rudeness at worst and a misunderstanding at best - with his life, in an horrific torture and murder episode in the early hours of one morning - and the accused was only fourteen years old.

This story ends in Bob Ewell's death after he launches a cowardly attack upon Jean and Jeremy as they walk home late one night from a school Halloween pageant. Why Atticus even countenanced their being unescorted given the preceding campaign of threats and intimidation which Ewell had launched against Atticus and his home is a mystery and an appalling example of irresponsible parenting.

I don't know if I would have enjoyed this had I read it rather than listened to it. It was entertaining to begin with, then got boring, then became entertaining again. Roses Pritchard did a good job or representing the older Scout reminiscing.

The story isn't a really great story, and some negative reviews I've read call it out correctly in some regards, but to me a story is either worth reading (a five-star) or it isn't (a zero-star represented by a one-star since zero isn't an option). Yes the characters were a bit flat, and yes it was a very black and white story in more than one way, but did it entertain me? Yes!

Another complaint I read was that there was no character growth, but to me, character growth is over-rated! I don't need a character to grow in a story (unless they're really awful to begin with in which case growth is a requirement!). All I need is for the characters to be entertaining. Indeed, some stories which have entertained me well are enjoyable in part because the character doesn't change. In this case I neither expected it nor needed it, and I considered this one a worthy read - or more accurately, a worthy listen.

Fagin the Jew by Will Eisner

Title: Fagin the Jew
Author: Will Eisner
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a great graphic novel which takes a look at the story of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist from the PoV of Fagin. Note that I come into this having never read Olvier Twist - an omission I shall now have to make good, I guess!

Will Eisner, who actually has a book award named after him, was disturbed by how 'dishonest Jew' bigotry had grown from roots in stories like this and Shakespeare's Shylock character from The Merchant of Venice. Dickens was not anti-Semitic, and he was aware that his novel had caused issues. He sought to correct the erroneous view he'd created, but he was too late. It had already taken root in society.

We're introduced to Moses Fagin (why Eisner chose to refer to him as 'Moses' rather than 'Moishe', I don't know) as a youth and follow his sorry life, seeing his ambitions and dreams fall apart in the face of a harsh reality made worse by Fagin's own bad choices. Eisner draws a distinction between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazim Diaspora in England, the former coming from Portugal and Spain, the latter from Germany and Poland. Both groups migrated to escape anti-Semitic pogroms, but while the former were in general, a rather well-off and elite society, the Ashkenazim were people of the land, much poorer than the Sephardics.

Fagin falls into one problem after another and ends-up serving ten years hard labor in 'the colonies'. He returns to England with an entirely different outlook on life, and finds that he can make a pretty penny by employing children as thieves, and then fencing the stolen property. This is where the story joins up with the Dickens original.

This is illustrated as a sepia-tone novel, and it's well written, and well thought-out. The artwork is really good and very endearing, and the story makes for engaging reading. I recommend this graphic novel.

Dark Secrets, Deep Bayous by Meg Hennessy

Title: Dark Secrets, Deep Bayous
Author: Meg Hennessy
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Entangled Publishing. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. My thanks to Entangled for allowing me the opportunity to preview this novel.

Set in Louisiana in 1815, this historical romance centers around land and love, lost sisters and lost property, contract marriage and piracy. It begins with a prologue which I skipped as I do with all prologues. If the author doesn't think it's important enough to get its own chapter (or at least share one) I don't think it's important enough to waste my time on.

I started out liking this novel because it seemed like it had something reasonably new and interesting to say, but unfortunately it quickly descended into nothing more than a litany of quickened heartbeats, intakes of breath, and over-heated skin. That's fine as far as it goes, but for me it simply doesn't go far enough unless there are real characters beneath that hot skin, breathing real words after those sharp intakes of breath.

Aurelie Fentonot started out as a worthy contender for an engrossing and proactive female, and she was not the usual pale-skinned waif either, so these were two strong points in her favor, but they were far too quickly overwhelmed by how weak she became whenever she was around Jordan Kincaid - the man to whom she was conjoined in a contract marriage.

There were good reasons for the marriage, and some serious rules which both parties agreed to follow when they entered into this arrangement, but from that point onwards, instead of developing a mature relationship that could have led to real love and trust, we got adolescents in heat, and this took away everything that the initial pages had built-up so beautifully.

One thing I found intensely irritating was the interjection of French phrases all over the place mixed in with English. Aurelie is purportedly from France, but of course she speaks perfectly good English nearly all the time. Indeed, she must since this is an English language novel(!), but the constant pop-up of French phrases just drove me nuts. It was as irritating to me as those web site pop-ups that get in your face right as you've begin to read something interesting that's now obscured. I felt it was a mistake because it served only as a constant reminder that the author evidently felt the need to re-establish her character's French credentials every few paragraphs when these had already been admirably established.

I struggled on with this for a long time after I felt I should give up on it, but I found myself skimming more and more paragraphs, and in the end decided I needed to just quit and move onto something which could not only attract my interest in the first place, as this one did, but then also hold it as firmly as the trope romantic male holds the trope romantic female, as this one didn't. I cannot in good conscience recommend this unless you're really just looking for a completely calorie-free romance (and recall: the calorie is a measure of what it takes to produce heat!).

The Sweetness by Sande Boritz Berger

Title: The Sweetness
Author: Sande Boritz Berger
Publisher: She Writes Press
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

I don't see any value to recommendations in the front of an ebook. In the print version they may sway a potential reader leafing through the pages in a book store. They would not sway me because I don't know any of those people, so their opinion carries no weight, especially since nearly all of them appear to originate from within the author's own community.

All they did was to make me wonder why they could find no one outside of that community to recommend this, or even if they actually asked - and if not, then why not? To put these in an ebook strikes me as ridiculous, because no one leafs-through an ebook. It's not even possible until you actually buy it! By then, of course, you already have the ebook in your possession, presumably because you already decided to read it, so what, exactly, is the point of these very limited recommendations? I don't know! I do find it curious, though. I think it's a symptom of the fact that print publishers have not actually begun to properly grasp the possibilities and the implications of the electronic book universe.

Set in World War Two, this novel follows the lives of two girls, Rosha in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius, and Mira in New York City, USA, who are cousins separated not only by the Atlantic ocean, but by a whole lifestyle. Mira is trying to break into the fashion business, whereas Rosha is in a country where the value of life is rapidly going out of fashion, especially if you're Jewish, Romany, gay, or otherwise classified as a person of vilification by the Nazis.

I think it might have been easier to enjoy this had I not recently read the real thing, Bedtime stories, and events from the Rear Case described by Anne Frank, which for me, I admit, set a standard that's going to be hard for anyone to surpass. I simply could not get into this novel no matter how hard I tried. It did not draw me in, nor did it engross me or make me want to turn pages. I could not find any compelling reason to pursue the story. I did not find myself interested in the characters.

In the interests of full disclosure, let me confess right here that I have no more respect for the fashion industry and those in it than I do for the cosmetics industry. I really don't. Both businesses are a grotesque insult to, and an abuse of women. I find them shallow, self-centered and petty, so Mira's story was pretty much a non-starter for me!

I could have become interested in her had there been something to spark such an interest, but there was not. Indeed, I found it very shallow, if not callous of her to be pursuing her petty interests safe in NYC, when her family in Europe was in such grave danger. Rosha's story was much more interesting, but even there, it was nothing new. I've read her story many times before, and there was nothing about this one to captivate me.

First of all, unlike with Anne Frank's case, this is fiction, and even though it has roots in reality, for me it needs to offer a lot more than just being another retreaded World War Two tragedy/drama if it's going to garner for itself any traction. When reading a story like this I have to ask: why was it written? What is its purpose? Was it because the story in question, over all others, has something new and original to impart to us? Or was it simply written because stories of this nature so readily sway a certain readership, and often garner awards for themselves not necessarily for any literary merit, but because of their very nature alone?

Yes, those events in Nazi Germany were awful almost beyond imagination and credibility, yet they were nonetheless true. The problem is that whilst it's easy to say that we must never forget, and never allow that to happen again, everywhere we look in the modern world, genocide does still happen: in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in the Sudan.

Unless you have a really original and striking story to relate - something which offers us a different category of interest than that which has been offered before (which IMO this novel does not), then it seems to me that it's quite wrong to continue to demand that we focus on the events of a half-century ago when there are much more recent, just as horrible tragedies which are in serious danger of being all-too-quickly forgotten. It seems to me that writers do the memory of those people from World War Two just as much a disservice as they do modern victims of equally horrible pogroms, by pouring out so many fictional accounts which offer nothing that's not already been trampled well down to the level of the insipid and the mediocre by scores of other heedless and ill-placed feet.

We must never forget, of course, what happened back then, but the saying remains true, that familiarity breeds contempt. So I have to ask: how easy is it for people to let their eyes slide away unseeing when presented with this plethora of stories focused on essentially the same thing? How much does it simply inure us against feeling anything for those real victims, to have fictional stories routinely trotted-out like a troupe of circus ponies? Does it not make more sense to for us to remember them by being keenly aware of the fact that whilst those people are lost to us forever, the mentality which hurt them so badly has not been lost? It's today's horrors upon which we must focus if we're to truly honor they who died the same way, albeit more than half a century ago.

It is for these reasons that I cannot recommend this novel.

The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby

Title: The Tale of Murasaki
Author: Liza Dalby
Publisher: Doubleday
Rating: WORTHY!

Murasaki Shikibu was a real person, who left us a diary and a novel - the earliest novel ever written of which we still have evidence - titled, The Tale of Genji hence Liza Dalby's own title. This novel (Murasaki's, not Dalby's!) was written almost a thousand years ago in what's now known as the Heian period of Japanese history. We only have it today because it was so popular in her own time that many copies were made and passed around. In modern terms, she would be a best-selling author even though she made not a single grain of rice off this novel.

Murasaki was not the only woman of that period who is remembered, curiously enough. There were several others, such as Akazome Emonis who was a waka poet, Lady Koshikibu, who was a contributor to a collection of stories titled Tales of the Riverside Middle Counselor, Izumi Shikibu, a poet whose mother (Michitsuna no Haha - her name is not known so this literally means Michitsuna's mom) wrote The Gossamer Diary, and Sei Shōnagon who wrote The Pillow Book. What a stunning group of women these were! Talk about strong females: these women were strong enough to last a thousand years and more!

Murasaki's success was in and of itself is quite remarkable, but she was distinguished in other ways, too. She was all-but unique in the fact that she could read and write Chinese, a prized skill found almost exclusively in men at that time - a time when women were not considered smart enough for "book learning"! This was important, too, because this was a period during which the Japanese were quite sycophantic about Chinese culture and language.

Most of the women mentioned above were not given, at birth, the names by which we now know them. These are nicknames or titles, describing them in terms of other things - such as a relative's occupation) rather than their family names or their given names. According to wikipedia, Shikibu is taken from her father's employment at the Ministry of Ceremonials, and Murasaki may have referred to the color of the wisteria flower. No one knows for sure what her real name was, but it may have been Fujiwara Takako (Fuji also refers to a violet color), which is the name I use here.

Fujiwara grew up pretty much with the same expectation of her that was held for all women of her time: that she would marry and produce male children for her husband. She had other ideas, however, and had a very strong personality and a real interest in and facility for learning. Her older brother was not very good at picking up Chinese, but Fujiwara, who would listen in on his lessons, mastered it. She was widely read and a good conversationalist.

As it happened she did marry, to an older man, and produced a daughter, but shortly afterwards, her husband died, and she wound up entering the royal court as a lady in waiting while someone else raised her daughter. This seems particularly odd to us today, but it was not considered out of the ordinary in her own time.

She spent some significant time at court and her relation of those days in this novel is as charming and engaging as it is revealing of court politics and antics. I loved the completely natural pace of the novel, the connection with the changing seasons, and real insight into Japanese minds from a thousand years ago. The novel is an easy read (not at all like modern historical fiction), and draws heavily upon actual historical sources with some creative fiction tying it together, written by someone who not only actually knows what she's talking about, but understands it completely. I recommend this highly.

La Princesse de Clèves by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne

Title: La Princesse de Clèves
Author: Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne aka Madame de Lafayette
Publisher: Read a Classic
Rating: WORTHY!

I feel like I should write this in French, mais mon français aspire! (See what I mean?) Originally published in March 1678, in France as La Princesse de Clèves, and possibly written by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, aka Madame de La Fayette, this novel was a huge success in its day. And it had a less nonsensical cover than this modern edition does. Seriously - the title in half English and half French, the accent which should be on 'Clèves' is missing, but the dot over the 'i' in 'Princesse' is warped so much that it looks like an accent? What was the cover designer smoking that day? Old book covers?

The novel's main protagonist is 16-year-old Mademoiselle de Chartres, who is maneuvered by her mom into marriage at the court of Henri 2nd, to La Prince de Clèves. This is her best prospect financially and socially, but it isn't, of course, the one she would choose for herself. Had she that choice, she would have aligned herself with the Duke de Nemours, a dashing young man with whom she falls in love and he, it seems, with she. They do not pursue this affair physically, but instead meet irregularly, when he attends her "salon" - regular social gatherings which she holds in her new position as La Princesse de Clèves.

The duke falls afoul of a scandal for which he is blameless, but for which he assumes responsibility in order to protect another. The princess at first believes him to be guilty, but learns later that he isn't. It's also at this time that her husband, who loves her dearly, realizes that she's actually in love with someone else, and she admits as much to him.

This causes an onset of the wilts and the vapors for the Prince, who takes to his bed and dies, but not before extracting an evil promise from his wife that she will not pursue any relationship with the duke. The latter pursues the princess even more ardently now that she's a widow, but she rejects him and enters a convent.

I like this novel not because it's a great novel. Far from it: it's the worst kind of chick-lit, but it's ancient chick-lit and that's what makes it interesting to me. It enables us to get inside the mind of a woman from well-over three hundred years ago. We're treated to few such insights and that's what makes this fascinating as far as I'm concerned.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Title: Les Misérables
Author: Victor Hugo
Publisher: Diamond Book Distributors
Rating: WARTY!

Graphic novel illustrated by TszMei Lee, edited by Stacy King

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Written in 1862 and covering a period of seventeen years, ending thirty years before the date of publication, Les Misérables tells a miserable story which has some of its roots buried in actual events. Unfortunately, this was a miserable presentation of a French classic which made little sense to me.

For inexplicable reasons, this French tale was rendered as a Japanese manga in every sense of the word, meaning that instead of starting at the beginning, at the top of page one, on the left, and proceeding through incrementing pages to the end, it began at the "end". Actually it doesn't even start on page one, but on page fifteen. In order to make sense of it you not only have to read this starting at the end, but also you must read the panels backwards, too - right to left - just like a real Japanese manga.

This made absolutely zero sense to me, especially since I was reading this in ebook form. Seriously? It was actually confusing because I started reading it at the beginning as any westerner would do. Page 302 (the printed page number) appeared on page 42, and 281 was on page 63 while page 283 appeared on page 61! It was only as I realized that the story and the frames were out of sequence that I discovered what had been done. Yes, the comic does explain this in some detail if you're into reading the small print, which I am not. I honestly didn't expect to have to read the instructions on how to read the novel before I read the novel!

» Indeed! «

I have no idea why English language comics are presented in this way. It's insupportable, and especially so in ebook format. I mean, if you're going to be completely ass-backwards about it, why not start reading the panels at the bottom instead of the top?! Why not print the thing in Japanese? It makes just as much sense to me as what was done here, but the real question to be answered is: do they genuinely want to get the classics out? If so, then why are they robotically trying to recreate something from one milieu and hammering it blindly into another, hoping it will eventually "fit"? I honestly don't buy that this is the right way to go about it.

That said, the graphics were not bad - no color, simply line drawings (but I did not get at all the grey gingham patterning). The story wasn't entertaining to me, not even read backwards. Actually reading it the way I did begin to read it, made it seem much more of a dramatic (if a little confusing!) story than it did when I started reading it as it was intended to be read. Go figure!

I'm sorry to say though, that overall it was neither particularly gripping nor impressive. I know Hugo's novel was a lot more text than this rendition of it is capable of reproducing, but it seems to me that Hugo's text could have had a better outing than this. So in view of all this, I cannot recommend this graphic novel.

Between Two Worlds by Katherine Kirkpatrick

Title: Between Two Worlds
Author: Wendy Lamb
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a story of real-life Inuit woman Eqariusaq, aka Billy-Bah, and her husband Angulluk, who lived in Etah, in north western Greenland. Set in late 1900, the story intertwines the life of Eqariusaq with that of the polar expeditions of Robert Peary. It's told in first person which normally I detest because it's so artificial, but once in a while a writer can make it work, and Kirkpatrick seems to be able to do that: employing this technique without making it obnoxious in the process. While I do thank her for that much, I have to wonder why she chose that method instead of using the method an Inuit woman would employ to tell a story to her own people, which presumably is not first person past!

Eqariusaq had spent a year with Peary's family in the USA when she was much younger, and so could speak English well. When a ship arrives looking for Peary, Eqariusaq and her husband, and some other of her people travel with them to a land some sixty miles across the ocean where they believe Peary is. They also hope that the hunting will be better over there: a place to which they cannot travel unless the ocean is frozen. Why they chose not to stay on that side of the ocean is unexplained, and made no sense to me. Perhaps they are really attached to their place of birth?

» Eqariusaq - Ekariusak - Ehkareeusak «

On the voyage, as is the people's custom, Angulluk trades his wife for a night to Duncan, one of the sailors. Eqariusaq is lucky, because Duncan is not a bad or brutal guy, and he is genuinely interested in the "Eskimo" people; however, this encounter gives Eqariusaq some ideas of her own! She advises Duncan as to what her husband is looking for, and thus enables him to trade goods for her for the entire week-long voyage, thereby garnering for herself a comfortable passage. She's evidently a smart girl, taking charge of her own destiny even within the limited choices she has.

This is a novel over which it's readily possible to have some mixed feelings. The fascination with learning of a new people (even through fictional means) does not sit well with the frustration and even anger of being reminded of the abuses heaped upon these people by western "civilization". The Inuit and Yupik people have had to suffer very many of these.

I have to say that one thing which is a personal peeve of mine is with the spellings! What's with all the q's? The Inuit had no written language, so it didn't matter how their words were spelled - as long as the spellings were consistent and rendered the pronunciation accurate within reason, but when a word has a 'K' sound in it, why put a 'Q' there? I have no idea. Perhaps linguists have "good" reasons for this within their own little world, but linguists often give me cause for bad language. There's a much bigger picture here, and their blinkered view of it makes no sense. Simple phonetic spelling is the only rational way to go about this. Why 'Eqariusaq' and not 'Ekariusak'? You got me!

The truly bizarre depth that this reaches is highlighted by the fact that Kirkpatrick, who created these names based, where possible on real Inuit people, and from which other names were also derived then had to supply a 'cast of characters' list with pronunciations precisely because the spellings are not phonetic and the pronunciation is not self-evident! So rather than 'Eqariusaq' or 'Ekariusak', why not go straight to Ehkareeusak, which is how it's pronounced? You got me!

This makes as much sense to me as translating Asian words into English and using bizarre spellings, such as spelling some Chinese words with an 'X' in them, but then pronouncing the 'X' as 'SH' or something! Or translating a Vietnamese name as Nguyen, but then insisting that it be pronounced 'Win'! That way lies insanity. And yes, again, I know that linguists have their own bizarre "rationale" for this, but I don't care! The bottom line is that it makes no common sense because it's not the spelling that's the crucial thing, here, it's the pronunciation! That way lies understanding and the way it's being does leads only to obfuscation. We have more than enough issues dividing peoples in this world without artificially piling them on.

But enough about that. Let me say that I fell hopelessly in love with the Eqariusaq depicted by Kirkpatrick. I have no idea - no one does - how close the depiction was to the real person, but if I'd met her, I'd probably have fallen for her too. Just look at that face! She was a revelation, and she was fun and sweet and brave and interesting. And she lived her own life on her own terms. I salute her and recommend this story highly.

The Kiss of Deception by Mary E Pearson

Title: The Kiss of Deception
Author: Mary E Pearson
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

The Kiss of Deception shares its title with another novel billed as: "Swat-Secret Werewolf Assault Team 3 Everlasting Classic Manlove" which is why authors should take care in their titles! The way to sales is to distinguish your novel, not conflate it. But that's the problem with Big Publishing™: when you go that route, you effectively lose control of your work with regard to title, cover, and other areas.

That said, I had doubly-mixed feelings reading this one. I started out, even in the first page or two, wondering how long I was going to be able to continue reading it, because it began so poorly. That's not a good feeling to get on page one, and it's definitely not one with which you want to imbue your reader. After that, though, I began to get into it and enjoyed it, and that's when the author put several major roadblocks in my path.

The first of these was the nonsensical triple first person PoV telling of the story. This was amateur and confusing. One first person PoV is too much unless it's done really well, and I can see how a princess might do this, but to also have the prince who is chasing her, and the assassin tell the story in their own first person PoV? It doesn't work, and I call bullshit on that one. When authors use more than one 1PoV, they typically title the chapters with the name of the person who's narrating, but this isn't done here, and it makes for an unholy mess. It would seem that the reason this choice was made was that the author wanted to screw with your perception of which was the prince and which was the assassin, but both characters are so useless that in the end it makes no difference. They both, in their own ways, assasinate her after a fashion, and she deserves it!

I tried to ignore these and read past them, but by the time I was about half-way through, I couldn't stand to read any more of this pathetic romance novel. And that's what it is: a Harlequin-style romance in the final analysis. It's certainly no adventure novel. It's not a fantasy novel, and it's not even historical fiction. Indeed, and as the author herself kept telegraphing, this isn't historical at all. Quite the opposite - which means it made even less sense.

So what were these roadblocks? Well the first was one which I detest most of all: switch and bait. I know with Big Publishing™ you lose control of important aspects of your work (like book blurbs for instance), but I felt I was promised an adventure with fantasy elements, and a strong main character. Instead, I got this sad little romance in place of adventure. I thought I was getting a strong female character who knew her own mind and was not afraid to go after what she wanted, but instead, I got this wilting violet whose heart goes all a-flutter whenever trope triangle guy #1 (his name is irrelevant) gets close. I am serious. The number of times her skin flushed and her heart hammered was truly nauseating.

This princess isn't a strong female at all. She's weak, selfish, sad, cowardly, dishonest, capricious, thoughtless, and pathetic - and the laughable thing is that even taken as such she still isn't credible. We're given snippets of her history here and there, and I'm sorry but that tomboy history doth not a wilting violet make. On the contrary. Neither does a mature woman, which is what she's presented as (even though she's seventeen years old) fall in love the instant she meets a guy. This was truly one of the most pathetic females I've ever encountered in fiction.

The second major roadblock was a totally unbelievable "love" triangle. This princess runs away to a distant city to avoid her arranged marriage, and starts living life as a waitress, and the prince she was to marry - one whom she had never set eyes upon, chases after her even though he didn't want to marry her either. Why? His motivation is entirely absurd, because he has none. He had no more interest in her than she did in him, so where is his drive to find her? It's nonsense.

It wasn't as if trope guy #1 was anything. He was supposed to be a prince of the land, but he came off as a country bumpkin and not just a country bumpkin, but a really stupid one. How would any self-respecting princess find such a man attractive? Well the author has that covered! He's tall. Yep. that's it. Oh, and he has a broad chest, because you know it's a capital offense for a YA chick to find any guy attractive if he's shorter and doesn't have a broad chest.

The real problem here however, is that we have yet another female author portraying a female main character through whom she advises her young and evidently impressionable female readers that it's okay for a girl to be involved with a guy who does not respect boundaries, who cannot take "No!" for an answer, who stalks the girl, and who enters her home without permission. That's unforgivable, and female authors who write stories like this ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Far from being offended by this behavior, this loser princess doesn't find any of this even so much as creepy, let alone objectionable. She rewards it with a kiss. I don't know: maybe she's so preoccupied by flushing like a public toilet and in coping with more flutters than your typical aviary hosts that she doesn't notice his obnoxious behavior? She is truly one of the limpest, saddest, most worthless female main characters ever.

Trope guy #2 (and he deserves that epithet) is even worse if you can get your mind around that. He's an assassin sent to kill the princess, yet he consistently fails to do so. Again, there is zero motivation for his failure. This novel simply is not credible. The really laughable thing is that this guy, the assassin, has more respect for the princess than the prince does! How hilarious is that?

Add to this the fact that this princess outright lies to her best friend about something critical, and that the only thing she can ever talk about, or even think about, is getting a guy, and this really puts this entire novel in the crapper.

At the risk of a big spoiler, I also didn't get why there were kingdoms, and this absurd 'first daughter' religion, and why the most advanced technology was swords. Given what the author has gone out of her way to telegraphing so loudly, none of this setting made any sense at all, which was yet another roadblock for me. That's all I am going to say about that! In short, this novel is pathetic. I rate it WARTY! It had a lot of potential, if it had been handled right, but it turned out to be the worst one I've read this year so far.

Dragon's Gate by Laurence Yep

Title: Dragon's Gate
Author: Laurence Yep
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: WARTY!

Read by George Guidall who does a decent job.

This novel was about a Chinese kid emigrating to the USA to escape the Fu Manchu who were after him in his native land. He thought he was heading for a life of riches, but he was so wrong.

He figured he'd have the easy time, but he ended-up working on the transcontinental railroad. I thought this meant that we would actually learn something about what the workers did, but we really didn't. This novel consisted of one long tirade against the appalling conditions, with every character bitching at each other and complaining bitterly, and even going on strike, but there was really nothing about the railroad. The entire story seemed to be confined to one winter, which added to the misery and all I learned was how the Chinese suffered - which I already knew - and were mean to one another.

A significant portion of the novel was set in China, where nothing interesting (not to me at any rate) happened, but it could have been set anywhere and delivered the same impact. The story in general was boring. Indeed, it had so little to do with working on the railroad that it could actually have been set anywhere, in any era, and told the same story of people being oppressed and treated as slaves. It need not even have been about the Chinese, so I was left wondering why this was written and skipping track after track because it was so tedious to listen to.

I can't recommend this. I'd rather have read a textbook about Chinese immigration, or watched a documentary, and instead read a different fictional story which held more of my interest. Jackie Chan's Shanghai Noon offers a similar message but is far more entertaining and just as fictional. Watch that instead!

Three Volume 1 by Kieron Gillen

Title: Three Volume 1
Author: Kieron Gillen (not to be confused with Karen Gillan!)
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: warty

Drawing: Ryan Kelly
Coloring: Jordie Bellaire
Lettering: Clayton Coles
Graphic design: Hannah Donovan

Note that this graphic novel is gory! It contains adult material, and is not suitable for younger readers!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

I did not like this graphic novel. The layout and art work were fine as far as they went, and the writing was technically fine, but I simply could not follow the story no matter how hard I tried to figure out what, exactly was going on, or where it was supposed to be heading. I found myself drifting and skimming in a place or two, but worse than this, the story itself drifted and skimmed, jumping from one thing to another and introducing character after character after character for no evident reason.

There was no real flow or logic that I could see. Each new character's name appears alongside them in their first panel as though the writer actually knew it was going to get larded and confusing. I soon stopped paying attention to who was now appearing on stage because I doubted I would see them again after the next couple of pages, and this probably didn’t help in trying to divine a coherent narrative from what was happening in each panel.

The general story concerns three Helots, two guys and a woman who are set upon by the Spartans for no apparent reason. One of the three (Klaros) happens to be an invincible warrior who is "in disguise" as some sort of employee on a farm(? I don’t know - it wasn't clear) run by Terpander, an air-headed smart-mouth who is apparently married to Damar (I don't know - it’s not clear), who is also apparently pregnant, although that wasn't clear to begin with either.

Klaros predictably if inexplicably leaps bloodily to their rescue, and the three are then the subject of pursuit by a veritable army of Spartans. No reason is offered for Klaros's beneficence, or for the dedicated pursuit - a pursuit which seemed improbable given that Klaros had initially killed everyone who was wearing a red cloak in his vicinity. The rest of the story consists of the three escapees agonizing over their lot in life, and trying to avoid and out-run their pursuers, as new characters continue to pop-up like hungry hippos every couple of pages.

There's one scene reminiscent of the 300 where Klaros makes a stand, and the result of this I openly laughed at. The entire story is gory - lots of spears through body parts, severed heads, and blood spurting. This wouldn’t have been so bad had there been other things going on to engage my attention, but there really wasn't anything going on. This story has nothing really to do with 300, so I'm not sure what the deal is with this. I honestly can’t recommend it.

For those who are interested in the technical side of things, there are copious notes in the final pages detailing how this story came about and also some of the history of the time period in which it's set, but even given my interest in the technicalities of graphic novel creation, I’d have been more impressed with a more gripping story and no notes than I was with the way this was actually done.

Born of Illusion by Teri Brown

Title: Born of Illusion
Author: Teri Brown
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

The problem I had with this novel is that nothing happens in it. Nothing interesting, new, or different, anyway. It’s supposed to be a story about a mother-daughter team who have a magic/psychic show in the 1920's. The daughter, Anna van Housen, is the magician, and her rather abusive mother, Marguerite, is the fake psychic. While Anna is a capable magician (of the illusionist variety, not the really magical variety), her mother is an out-and-out fake, assisted by Anna in pulling the wool over people's eyes during their stage shows. The two of them are scam artists and conduct private seances which they use to criminally bilk the grieving out of money. Anna apparently sees nothing wrong in this.

For reasons unexplained, Marguerite treats Anna like dirt, employing her as a servant far more than she loves her as a daughter. Anna is rumored (by her mother) to be the daughter of Harry Houdini (although throughout, I suspected that this was a lie), who happens to be in New York at the same time as the van Housens. The non-twist here is that Anna actually can read minds and communicate with the dead.

In a mind-numbingly boring development, Anna acquires for herself two, and exactly two (no less, no more) men, a 'bad boy' and a 'good boy'. Yawn. The two are, for all practical purposes interchangeable, although the more serious of them, the 'good boy' who has the absurd name of Cole, is the one with this supposedly dark secret which turns out to be nothing. It became tedious beyond words to read how many times she looked into his dark eyes or had her heart skip a beat, and I habitually flipped off every single page upon which either of these two tired tropes put in an appearance, which may mean I missed a plot twist here and there, not that there was much plot; as I said, nothing happens in this novel. Oh, Anna does get kidnapped, but she's an escape artist and she almost immediately escapes. That's it for high adventure.

What about the writing? Well, it wasn't badly written in a technical sense, but I felt no compulsion driving me to read this. When I had to put it down for whatever reason, I had no thoughts along the lines of "when will I be able to get back to it?". I did not miss it when I wasn't reading it; that's how I know how thoroughly unappealing it was. Here's one line which I thought utterly absurd: It's pure magic to see the sun go down in the west..."??! Because normally, of course, it goes down in the east. Seriously, I can see what the author was attempting here, but it was written badly. She should have written, "It's pure magic to see the sun set as the city lights come on...", but she didn’t. Here's another classic when Anna is tied up: "I might be able to release myself, but in the condition I'm in, it would take far too much effort and leave me unable to defend myself..." Seriously? She can defend herself better tied-up than with hands free? Wow!

In short, I honestly cannot recommend this novel, and I certainly won't dishonestly recommend it.

Sacajawea by Joseph Bruchac

Title: Sacajawea
Author: Joseph Bruchac
Publisher: Audio Bookshelf
Rating: WARTY!

Tsakakawias had many variations on her name, which wasn't her original Shoshoni name anyway, but since, as far as I can tell, Tsakakawias is closest to her native name - the one she became most commonly known by in her own time - that's the one I'll use here. Other variants are the one which Bruchac, ill-advisedly, in my opinion, uses, along with an alternative, 'Sacagawea'. See wikipedia for more details. Note that the Shoshoni claim that 'Sacajawea' was actually her Shoshoni name, and that it meant 'boat puller', but that makes no sense at all to me. Why would a child be named boat-puller?! No doubt she aided Lewis and Clark since their boats had to be pulled against the current many times, but Tsakakawias had this name long before she was teaching those two how to survive in the wild.

Note that no one knows what Tsakakawias actually looked like. The purported model for the image on the US dollar coin minted in 2000 was a Shoshoni (or Shoshone) named Randy'L He-dow Teton who graduated from University of New Mexico at the same age as Tsakakawias was when she died. He-Dow looks nothing like the image that actually ended up on the coin, so even two hundred years later, the insults continue! I think we can be reasonably certain that the image on the novel cover doesn't represent Tsakakawias either, especially since both the woman in the cover image, and He-dow herself are significantly older than Tsakakawias actually was when she quite effectively lead Lewis and Clark to their triumph.

This audio book was read by Nicole Littrell and Michael Rafkin, and these two people were one of the two main reasons I could not stand to listen beyond chapter one of this god-awfully read novel. Why two people who sound like they're Irish would be hired to read the tale of a Shoshoni woman is mystery enough in itself. Are we supposed to understand from this that there no Shoshoni people who can read? I know there are only 12,000 or so Shoshoni remaining in the world, but I seriously doubt that. Even an Irish narration would have been okay had not these two readers apparently conspired to tell this story in the most irritating sing-sing voice imaginable, as though they were reading a nursery rhyme to a four year old. I seriously felt nauseated by it after one chapter and could not go on. Instead of this abysmal disk, I recommend simply reading the wikipedia article on Tsakakawias as I did just now (for the second or third time!).

The truth about Tsakakawias is that she was a Shoshoni woman who was born in what is today Lemhi County, Idaho. She was kidnapped by a rival tribe before she reached her teens and was shortly afterwards sold to a trapper from Quebec, named Toussaint Charbonneau, who had already bought one native American wife. Thus she was "married" at thirteen and pregnant shortly thereafter. Her name is not a Shoshoni name but a Hidatsa name tsakaka wia meaning 'bird woman', given to her by her kidnappers and contrary to popular culture, it was pronounced not with a soft 'g', but more like tsa-ɡah-ɡa-wea with no stress on any syllable. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived to build Fort Mandan in 1804, they began seeking a guide to travel the Missouri with them, and as soon as they learned that Tsakakawias spoke Shoshoni, she and her husband were on-board. It fortunate for them that she was, otherwise they would have perished, lost their diaries, and had nothing to trade for the fine otter-skin cloak they took back to President Jefferson, for which I'll bet that Tsakakawias garnered zero credit.

She died at the age of 24, and Bruchac, who claims native American "blood" himself, owed her more than this. OTOH, are there any Americans who don't claim native American blood - the blood of the peoples who were systematically slaughtered and marginalized when this nation was colonized? Not that the native Americans were any better since they were routinely at war with one another and, as you can see from Tsakakawias's own story, were not above kidnapping children. The bottom line is that there are precious few heroes in any story of the annihilation or the brutal treatment of one people by another, and it's truly sad that the few genuine heroes we do have - ones like Tsakakawias - are treated badly, marginalized, or rendered as a fairy tale even by those who should know better. Tsakakawias deserves better treatment than this audio insult, and the fairy-tale story-writing which evidently inspired and informed it.

Daughter of Camelot by Glynis Cooney

Title: Daughter of Camelot
Author: Glynis Cooney
Publisher: Mabon Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Errata in galley ebook:
p92 "There was a distant clash of a symbol..." should be "There was a distant clash of a cymbal..."
p97 "...reflecting he thick gold..." - "...reflecting the thick gold…"
p104 "…stone alter…" should be "…stone altar…"
p108 "…the horrors of loosing those I loved most." should be "…the horrors of losing those I loved most."
P110 "…as if seeking out it's own…" should be "…as if seeking out its own…"
p135 "I never knew a feeing..." should be "I never knew a feeling..."
p193 "Shall I swear and oath?" should be "Shall I swear an oath?"
P362 "My tongue felt think in my mouth…" should be "My tongue felt thick in my mouth…"

I have to remark that I found it a curious coincidence that I was reading two books about twins simultaneously (Erasing Time was the other one). This one is the "Empire of Shadows" series, book one, and I recommend it! You can download the first three chapters for free. I was unable to find this book on either Barnes & Noble or on Amazon so I have no idea how you'd actually go about buying it. I honestly think that Cooney made a mistake with the title of the novel, since there are several others already hogging that title. Another writing issue! When is it wise to change your title as opposed to determinedly going ahead with the one you set your heart on?! I'm facing this very challenge with a novel I'm trying to finish (and have been trying so to do for some time!).

But back to the twins! I felt when I started this novel that if Cooney knows her craft, it cannot be that there's no reason for twins to be featured in this novel. I had the feeling that Deidre was going to replace Rhys either because he dies or because he is captured or incapacitated, and Deidre takes up the sword without anyone knowing she's not Rhys, but I read the entire thing and nothing like that happened, so I was left wondering: why twins? The other side of that coin is of course, that it's nice to have a novel which features twins but made no big deal out of it. Perhaps real life twins would appreciate that.

Anyway, Deirdre is the daughter of a chieftain and she's a tomboy. Why did I use that term? What does it even mean? Is there such a thing as a tomgirl? A queengirl? A hengirl? A henboy? I suspect not! But we meet Deirdre sword-fighting with her brother (using safe swords, but going at it). It's their birthday shortly, and Deidre is granted a new horse as a present. This struck me as bizarre; did people really celebrate birthdays back in sixth century Britain? I somehow doubt it, but that's just my feeling. So herein lies the writing issue of the day: just how historical do you make your fiction?!

Deidre receives bad news, however. She's fourteen now and it's long past time for her to be presented at court where she fears she will die of boredom sitting in sewing circles and listening to gossip. She demands adventure, but she ain't gonna git it. Or is she?

I don’t know if Cooney did this knowingly, or if it was purely accidental, but on p79, there's a choice paragraph right at the top of the page where she writes, "…lambskin satchel…looked at me sheepishly…". I couldn't help but smile at that. If Cooney did it on purpose, then I love her dearly because it’s so sneaky. If she didn’t, then I can only reiterate that writers need to be aware not only of what they write, but also of how it will be read! (And especially how it will be read by people with minds that are as warped as mine is!)

Cooney seems to take a lot of liberties with the era in which this novel is set. I don’t know if this was deliberate or if there is some confusion about what fitted where (or if I'm just ignorant of the era!). For example, she talks about armor as though the knights of King Arthur's time were just like in the fairy tales: clad with shining silver armor, awash with gallantry and chivalry, but "King Arthur" (or whoever it was who gave rise to his legend) was little more than a warlord or a chieftain. There may have been chain-mail available in Wales at that time, but there was nothing like we saw, for example, in the TV series Merlin.

Religion, too, in that era, was a melting pot of paganism and Christianity. The latter had barely begun to creep in via the Roman occupation, which ended before the Arthurian era, and which wasn't well represented in Wales, so it was hardly likely that King Maelgwyn would have been off at a monastic retreat at that period in history. Again, that's just my PoV and I could well be wrong. One final whine: I find it odd that they have to go to the village fair to buy horses! Surely a chieftain would have his own breeding herd? He wouldn't want to be dependent upon strangers. However, you have to let these peeves go if you want to enjoy the novel, and so that's what I did!

Back to the tale, which I have to say became more and more intriguing and entertaining as I progressed. Talk of war fills the air (Sir Lancelot, among others, is fomenting against King Arthur, evidently) and Deidre discovers to her horror that she and Rhys will be separated. Rhys must travel to Camelot, whereas Deidre must accompany her sister Nia to the castle at Degannwy. Deidre is immensely resentful at this, but she's forced to adjust her attitude rather quickly. On the first night of the two-day journey they're attacked by thieves! The younger of the two knights who are supposed to be protecting them (and hardly more than a child himself) dies from his wounds. The older knight, Ioseff, who Deidre had maladroitly dissed earlier, proves himself to be a formidable opponent and the thieves are repelled, losing three of their number.

Deidre's friend Ronan shows up. He was tasked by Rhys to follow Deidre. They will be separated at the castle and he will have to reside with servants, but he doesn’t mind and Deidre is glad to have him close by. Nia gives her a gorgeous green dress which she has made for Deidre's birthday, which happens to be the very day they arrive at the castle. Deidre is shamed and embarrassed by her behavior towards Ioseff, towards her sister, and her scared behavior during the attack by the thieves. She apologizes to Nia and to Ioseff.

At the castle she realizes just how little she really knows about court life and conduct and the wider world outside of her relatively sheltered existence. And I have to interject here that "long horsy [sic] face" (or variations thereon) is a cliché that needs to die from being kicked to death by mules! On another non-sequitur, I have to remark how odd it is (not to be confused with 'oddities'!) to be reading about activities in the castle at Degannwy when I'm also listening to Kushiel's Dart on audio book, which has reached the activities in the Skaldi great hall during the "all-thing"! (Note that Kushiel's Dart is not a YA novel!

In case you're wondering, the Latin on p96 de profundis clamavi ad te domine domine exaudi vocem meam is nothing more than Psalms 130 verses 1 & 2. Note that there are no accents in Latin, so why Cooney uses them here is a mystery. It seems she wants to help with pronunciation, but if helpful is what you want to be, then why not have Deidre give the Psalm as well? You may recall if you follow this blog that I rail against slipping foreign phrases pretentiously into the text. They're useful if there is good reason, but as I said, I doubt that Catholicism would have entrenched itself so deeply into Wales in such a short time. But with regard to writing, here is a really good case where it could have worked quite well. By using the Latin and then having the character recall (or fail to recall) that it’s a psalm, it both provides a means of translation of the language, and it tells us something about the character. Note that I studied only two years of Latin, so I'm as far as from expert as you can get! Again this is all just my personal opinion!

I became somewhat disappointed in Gwen at the castle. I know she's only fourteen and a bit of a tear-a-way, but you would think she had a little more wisdom about her, being the daughter of a chieftain. At court, she is extremely foolish. She does not listen to advice and warnings, and against her older sister's stern advice, she starts flirting with one of the less reputable knights named Einion. This brings her into conflict with one of the other ladies at court - an outright bitch who evidently has the queen's ear.

On the other side of the coin, she is befriended by a woman named Sioned who recognizes a medallion Deidre wears - something which was given to her by an old crone during the visit to the village to buy her new horse. The medallion, we learn, is a talisman of a Welsh goddess called Rhiannon who is associated with a horse goddess called Epona. Sioned warns her, just as Nia did, to keep the talisman hidden at court because the King is highly Christian and she would be resented were she thought to be a worshiper of a pagan goddess.

Deidre runs afoul of one of the knights who isn't at all knightly, and consequently, she's very effectively kicked out of the castle. Sir Einion, who I detest, invites her to visit his own domain, Din Arth, since he's leaving, too. Deidre decides, based on something she overheard the night that Sir Tomas almost raped her, that her destiny is to follow Einion to Din Arth, to learn all she can about who is plotting against King Arthur and report back to her father. She sends Ronan off to relay her plans to her dad, and travels with Sioned to Einion's home, with great trepidation - and so she should considering that she addresses Queen Awel with: "Of course, Your Grace."! Nope. That form of address is reserved for the clergy. There was a time when Scots monarchs were addressed that way, but I'm not aware of any usage of that in Wales for the monarchy. Again I may be wrong; I'm hardly an expert on the Dark Ages in Britain!

On page 292, Cooney reveals herself to be yet another one among several writers I've read lately who doesn’t know that there's a difference between stanched and staunched! As frequently as I've seen that lately, it has become painfully apparent that the English language is changing under my very nose, but I refuse to use staunch in place of stanch! I will be a staunch opponent and I will stanch the bleeding of our English tongue!

The ending of Daughter of Camelot felt a bit weird for me, but it was a decently good one, as was the novel overall, despite my gripes above. (On that score, don't forget that this is a reading and writing blog so I would be doing readers a disservice if I avoided addressing topics that others might find digressive or even obsessive! As for rating this novel, I don’t do stars. A novel to me is either worth reading or it’s not (it's worthy or it's warty!). I don’t see how you can rate something, say, three-fifths worth reading! Nor do I see how someone can write a review that completely tears a novel apart (reviewing only a relatively unimportant two percent of it in the process!), but then still rates it two stars! That's just bizarre. I've read a review exactly like that on Goodreads of late (not about his novel)! But in summation, Hail And Well Met! I really enjoyed this novel and consider it a worthy read.

Key To Lawrence by Linda and Gary Cargill

Title: Key To Lawrence
Author: Linda and Gary Cargill
Publisher: Cheops Books
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Erratum
p18 "Corinthian columns crowned sprang up everywhere" - makes no sense!

Beware spoilers!!

Twenty-year-old Dora Benley is about to embark upon a first class transatlantic voyage upon the luxury liner Lusitania. A very suspicious man is watching her on the dock, and he later boards the ship. He seems extraordinarily interested in the package she's carrying. It’s a birthday present she's holding for her father's birthday on the voyage. Why is the stranger interested in an ordinary birthday present? Who ransacked her cabin trying to find it?

Cargill who writes technically well, based on first impressions and has set up an intriguing-sounding adventure, but it went nowhere for me. The RMS Lusitania was a real ship. It sank three years after the Titanic with pretty much the same magnitude of loss of life, yet it garners nowhere near the attention which the Titanic does. Why is that? The Lusitania is far more of a mystery than the Titanic was. It’s known that it was hit by a torpedo from a German U boat, a submarine which would never have been able to catch the Lusitania in a straight race, so fast was the ship (for its time), but the U boat just happened to be fortuitously (or disastrously, dependent upon your perspective) in the right place at the wrong time.

It fired only the one torpedo. The damage was sufficient to sink the ship, but also of such limited scope that everyone ought to have been able to get off the ship reasonably comfortably. However, shortly after the torpedo hit, there was another explosion - of something inside the Lusitania - which doomed it and some twelve hundred people on board. The ship upended just like the Titanic, the prow hitting the bottom of the ocean while the stern was was still high in the air and it sank within eighteen minutes. Unlike the Titanic which was swallowed by twelve thousand feet of bitterly cold ocean, the sea was rather shallow just eleven miles off the Irish coast where the Lusitania went down.

Where was the Royal Navy, which was supposed to escort the ship home to Liverpool through these dangerous waters? It was known that the Germans were in the area and targeting all suspect shipping around the British Isles. As Cargill points out in her novel, warnings had been issued by the Germans that all ships suspected of carrying munitions would be deemed to be targets. Indeed, one was published in some fifty American newspapers, including one right by the side of the advertisement for the Lusitania's upcoming voyage. The Lusitania was carrying some fifty tonnes of shells, and over four million rounds of ammunition, as wikipedia points out. Did the British want her to be hit, in the hope that the Americans would be drawn into the war? As I said, far more mystery surrounds the Lusitania than the Titanic. It was ripe for a novel!

I have to wonder about the propriety of Charles Klein propositioning Dora with a dinner invitation, and sitting with her at a table with her having no chaperon, but she's far more concerned about the mysterious stranger, a glimpse of whom is all she can claim in the sumptuous dining room, before she loses sight of him completely. I also wonder about the propriety of her 'powdering her nose' quite literally (at least, faking it) at the dinner table, as she uses her mirror to scan the dining room behind her. I'm not at all sure a proper woman would do such a crass thing in 1915. Perhaps Dora isn't so proper?!

Unfortunately with this novel, I was all-too-rapidly at the point where I had to question some of Cargill's writing. This is 1915, supposedly, not 2013, so why is Dora behaving like she's not from 1915? This isn't a time travel novel! I was willing to allow some 'artistic license' for the story, with Dora running around unsupervised and unescorted even though she was, legally speaking in 1915, a child, but Cargill takes this beyond what is reasonable. Dora is talking with men she does not know and has never met. She's running around with a guy who is over twice her age. Her parents are practically non-existent for all her interaction with them. They seem to take no interest in her, or her welfare, or her whereabouts, or in the company she's keeping! I know Dora isn't a nun, and this is 1915, not 1815, but Cargill's dispensation with propriety has gone too far for me to put any stock in its credibility.

It’s also unreasonable that Dora would hold on to that birthday gift in such circumstances. Ships like the Lusitania had a purser whose duty, in part, was to take charge of passenger valuables and lock them away safely. It makes no sense for her to be wrestling with where to hide the humidor and thinking of prevailing upon Charles to secure it for her when she could have turned it in to the purser and been done with it. For all she knows, Charles could be a part of the plan to steal it!

It makes no sense at all, either, for her to be receiving threatening notes, and to have her cabin broken into and ransacked, and for her to not even think of reporting these things and identifying the man whom she thinks is responsible. She's a first class passenger for goodness sakes! Back then, and rightly or wrongly, that meant something. This not only breaks, but completely shatters suspension of disbelief. I could see a story here wherein the shabby man whom she thinks is the threat is actually a benefactor, and it’s Charles who is the villain! There would be an entertaining story, but it appears that this story isn’t that one, since the man, often referred to as 'the Arab' by Cargill (talk about racial profiling!), fires a shot at her, and chases her. She encounters some of the very wealthiest passengers, a Vanderbilt amongst them, yet despite her state of dishevelment, not a single one of them behaves gallantly!

Despite a gun being fired aboard the ship, not a single one of the crew shows up or takes the slightest interest in what’s going on. This is beyond ridiculous! I'm sorry, but at this point this novel precipitously dropped from being attractive to being completely absurd. It’s inconceivable that such men would uniformly turn Dora's distress into a joke and make risqué remarks. It gets worse, from there, too. Dora is escorted into a supposedly private dining room where Cargill proceeds to trumpet how much research she did by dropping one name after another, every one of whom, male and female, consistently makes fun of Dora's predicament. This is purest bullshit.

Cargill writes almost as though the ship's manifest made zero mention of munitions, but that isn't correct. Some things apparently were hidden, but the ship's manifest did identify some munitions that were aboard. The ship was an auxiliary warship, and had been for some time. Indeed, Cunard had received a subsidy for building this ship and its two sisters, the Mauritania and the Aquitainia, on the understanding that in the event of war, they could be commandeered, armed, and used for military purposes as the Lusitania was indeed being employed. To imply that this wasn't so is misleading at best. Indeed, it was this very fact which triggered Germany to issue warnings that the Lusitania would be deemed to be a military vessel.

This story continued to deteriorate from there. We have "the Arab" hauling Dora from her cabin to a different one and then from there to a third cabin, with not a single person seeing or hearing them or Dora's cries. Despite having access to a port hole in the last cabin, Dora makes only one brief attempt to call for help and then she gives up and takes a nap! In that cabin, she can hear her parents outside the porthole quite clearly discussing her mysterious absence, yet never once does she call out to them. Clearly if she can hear them, they can hear her. All she had to do was to loudly call out that she was right there in the cabin, and that she had been abducted, and this whole thing would be over. Yet she stays quietly watching her captor build chemical bombs! I'm sorry but this is infantile.

She sleeps another night in captivity making no attempt whatsoever to break the glass or to call to passers-by even though she can hear them clearly. No one on the ship seems to think her disappearance is worth bothering with! No one considers that she might have gone overboard. The next morning the ship's crew runs a lifeboat drill (why so late in the journey?!) with scores of people right outside the porthole and never once does Dora utter a sound! I can only conclude that Dora is a complete Moron Sue and no hero about whom I'd want to read anything. She's finally discovered by Byrne, the guy who was whining to her about there being munitions on the ship, and she escapes her prison with his aid, but after she's free, she never thinks even for a second of contacting her parents to let them know she's safe! She never once considers going to the captain to tell him what happened and to warn him that there's a bomb aboard the ship!

This is about fifty pages in and by that point I'd had more than enough. This novel is beyond ludicrous and it's entirely unbelievable. It could have been a worthy story, but that chance was let slip and far from being worthy, it’s a definite, without-question warty tale! I have far better things to do with my time than to read this kind of crap.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

a Pride and Prejudice movie is reviewed on the Movie page

Title: Pride and Prejudice
Author: Jane Austen
Pages: 238
Publisher: Penguin UK
Rating: Worthy!
Perspective: third person past

Note: Spoil like you've never seen a refrigerator! (like you don't know what's in this novel anyway! Darcy and Elizabeth get married! There! I gave it all away!)

How could I not read this in the bicentenary of its publication? I'm reading this in an anthology of Austen's novels. See, I told you I had one, and you didn't believe me! Mine isn't quite the same as the one referenced above, but near enough. The cover picture is from mine.

Note that Gutenberg has a free ebook of this novel. It's also noteworthy that Marvel comics produced a graphic novel of this novel (which I've also read! Yes, I'm way ahead of you!)

Having gone into some detail over Pride and Prejudice in the movie section elsewhere on this blog, there's going to be little to say about the story or the plot since it starts out very much like the best movie of the book, the 1995 one featuring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in the main roles, so this must needs be a compare and contrast review. The story centers on the Bennett Family, Mr & Mrs, and their five daughters, from oldest to youngest: Jane, Elizabeth (Lizzie), Mary, Catherine (Kitty), and Lydia, and their interactions with the main male suitors Bingley (for Jane), Darcy (for Lizzie), and last but least Wickham (for anyone he can get but finally, for Lydia).

This book is something of a delight. It’s very different from modern novels (understandably, since it's over 200 years old!), and different again from American novels since it’s British. The Brits like to use single quotation marks to signify the spoken word their novels, and the grammar and word use varies considerably from that which is to be found in modern novels, even those which are written as historical (or perhaps more accurately, hysterical) romances. It’s not often you find words like 'celerity' in modern works, nor 'self-gratulation', nor 'whither', nor 'repine', nor 'eclat'!

Austen often has a (perhaps unintentional) turn of humor that I find delightful, as in chapter 17 where she has Jane and Elizabeth secretly discussing Wickham's revelations regarding Darcy, from which they're disturbed by Bingley's arrival with an invitation to the ball which he had promised Lydia he should hold:

The two young ladies were summoned from the shrubbery, where this conversation passed, by the arrival of the very persons of whom they had been speaking;

Summoned from the shrubbery indeed! Shades of Monty Python!

Even someone of Austen's propriety and stature isn't immune from grammatical error, or perhaps more accurately, error in clarity of communication as I discovered, also in 17, where we read:

Jane pictured to herself a happy evening in the society of her two friends, and the attentions of her brother;

When first I read that, I found myself wondering how Jane could have a brother when Austen has already made it quite clear that she had only four sisters and no other siblings. Having looked at this more closely, I can only conclude that the brother in this case is Bingley, the brother not of Jane, but of her two friends mentioned in the prior clause, so the sentence is somewhat more confusing on that point than it ought to have been!

Austen also seems inconsistent in how she uses the indefinite article before an aspirate. She writes 'a husband', but 'an hope'. This may be less interesting to others than it is to me, because to me it’s yet another reason to take interest in more antiquated writing styles, especially when found in the form of fiction. This antiquity of style is one of the charms of such novels. I almost end up feeling as though I'm a better person, and certainly I feel that I'm better equipped as a writer for having an acquaintanceship with such work.

I find myself wondering what rules she's applying as she writes, or if indeed she's applying any rules other than her own innate feel for English as she has it through nothing more than growing up a native to it in that era. Perhaps whatever rules she employs were so imbued within her having grown as she did, that it never crossed her mind that any rules were actually being employed at all, so innate is her grasp of the language. But how remarkable it is that we can have now this window into life 200 years ago, even as narrow and focused as it necessarily is! Perhaps you might want to research Austen's life and times. There's a Jane Austen wiki which may be a good place to start - or to which you can contribute if you wish!

One of the interesting phrases I found was 'he left the country.' when Austen means, of course, not that he left England, but that he left the countryside for the city. And on that topic, we find Jane in denial about Bingley after he has left, and Elizabeth rather angry at his behavior, but not so angry as she becomes when Collins proposes to her and will not take no for an answer. The 1995 movie has Collins storming off and proposing to Charlotte, which doesn't represent the novel at all. The 2005 movie does a better job on this score. And Bingley's sisters (of which there appears only one in the 2005 movie) do not steadily imply that Bingley, now back in London, is seriously interested in Darcy's sister in the movies whereas they do in the novel.

One item of interest occurred to me reading the novel, and that is exactly what Lizzie's dad might have meant in issuing his 'ultimatum' upon learning of Lizzie's refusal to marry Collins:

...Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.

Does he mean he will never speak to her if she does, or does he merely mean that if she marries and moves away, he will be unable to see her? I think we're supposed to take it as it's traditionally been understood, but perhaps Austen was playing with a little double-entendre here?

Whilst on this topic, I have to say here that the novel suggests a far greater friendship between Jane and Bingley's two sisters, notwithstanding the superior attitude of the latter, than either the 1995 movie or the 2005 movie would have you believe. The novel also indicates that Elizabeth's first two dances with Collins were much more embarrassing than they were depicted as being in the 1995 movie ('mortification' is the term Austen uses, followed by 'ecstasy' as the dances are over and Elizabeth is released!). The 2005 movie shows no problem there at all.

This novel was not originally intended to have the title 'Pride and Prejudice', it was to have been titled 'First Impressions', but as wikipedia points out, two other works with that title had been published quite recently as Austen was revising her work, so she changed it to what is in my opinion a far better title. It’s hard to see this novel under it’s original name! Austen perhaps took her title from words in a contemporary work by Fanny Burney, which Austen is known to have liked.

The title is all the more appropriate since the novel primarily addresses the clash between Darcy's over-developed sense of pride, and Elizabeth's hasty prejudice against him based on her first impression of his character, and of Wickham's despicable lies about him. Her prejudice shows strongly at the dance which Bingley holds at Netherfield, where Elizabeth is depicted as saying, in response to her friend Charlotte's suggestion that dancing with Darcy (now there's a movie title!) isn’t so bad: "Heaven forbid! That would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an evil."

Contrast that, then, with what she says whilst she's actually dancing with Darcy in response to a comment he made about her suggestions as to how conversation ought to be conducted during a dance:

'Both,' replied Elizabeth archly; 'for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.'

So now, it appears, she considers that the two of them have a lot in common, although Darcy seems to disagree. They spar over the pianoforte whilst the others play cards. Cards back then consisted of games such as Quadrille, which according to wikipedia is is a Spanish trick-taking game directly ancestral to Boston and chief progenitor of Solo whist, perfected in early 18th century France as a four-handed version of the Spanish game Ombre.

Another game was Cassino, which wikipedia describes as an Italian fishing card game which is the only one to have penetrated the English-speaking world.

Do you wonder at this point if I wonder if they're going to be 'violently' in love? That term is much abused, we find, and Austen herself is evidently quite aware of it. Consider this from Chapter 25:

But that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as often applied to feelings which arise from a half-hour's acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how violent was Mr. Bingley's love?

On Elizabeth's visit to Hunsford to spend time with her friend Charlotte, now married to Collins (ch 28) we come across yet another of Austen's charming phrases:

Here, leading the way through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind.

After their sparring over the piano, which is even more charming in the novel than in either movie (and which is better done in the 2005 movie than it is in the 1995 version), Elizabeth finds that visits by Darcy to Charlotte's home, where Elizabeth is staying, are much more frequent, but he says very little. This portion of the relationship is entirely passed over in the movies, which makes it harder to see from what quarter Darcy's deep passion arose.

The very heated exchange between then after Darcy proposes in the worst proposal ever, is not exactly spelled out, in terms of who said exactly what in the novel, so some of what appears in the movies is quite simply made up. But whilst the novel lacks something in this regard at this important point, it handles sufficiently well, particularly Elizabeth's personal ruminations immediately afterwards and the next morning when Darcy hands her a letter (he's stalking her out in the country where he knows she walks).

Darcy's letter hugely long and it's related in the novel with no paragraphing, running to 4½ full pages! Neither movie gives any indication of this., On the contrary: the letter they show is very short in comparison. Lizzie agonizes over Darcy's words about Wickham for two hours as she walks up and down in the outdoors, but she eventually arrives at the conclusion that Darcy must be right! Then she turns her attention to what he said about Jane. Why she does this in the reverse of the order in which the letter conveys this information must remain a mystery, I suppose, but we're forced to wonder if Austen was more fixated upon Lizzie's relationship with Wickham than she was on hers with Jane.

Lizzie is soon back home, but within a month or so she's off again in what's by far the best part of the novel (of course I'm insanely biased when I say this!) on her trip with the Gardiners to Derbyshire, a county in which I was born and raised. This is the location of Mrs Gardiner's home village of Lambton, which is conveniently close to Darcy's Pemberley. There is at least two Lambtons in England but neither is in Derbyshire. One of them is famous for being the home of the Lambton Worm, an ancient legend from which Bram Stoker took his inspiration for his The Lair of the White Worm. Wikipedia informs us that the home of Fitzwilliam Darcy was modeled on Chatsworth House, a beautiful place not far from my home town. It was this very house which was used (for exteriors only) in the 2005 movie.

Austen also has Lizzie refer to other places with which I'm very familiar: Dovedale to which I've also been several times, the Peak District, and finally, my own home town, Matlock (yes, just like the TV show, but we had it first!) which is part of the Peak District.

Moving right along now.... Lizzie and the Gardiners (sounds like a band name, doesn't it? "Here's the latest release from Lizzie and the Gardiners, Wickham if you've got 'em"!) are strolling around Darcy's home! This seems strange to me, but I guess it was perfectly normal back then for strangers to be shown around the homes of the ridiculously well-off. It's during this tour that Lizzie completely reforms her opinion of Darcy, and then, of course, she runs into him as she's going outdoors.

I think of the two movies, the better one for this portion is the 2005 version, even though it strays way beyond the bounds of canon. In it, a scene was added where Lizzie is looking at some truly amazing sculptures, one of which is a bust of Darcy. Yes, Virginia, men had busts back then, and proud of them they were, too! A non-canonical scene was also added where Lizzie is attracted by some beautiful piano-playing and finds herself watching Georgiana, without knowing who she is. Darcy suddenly walks into he scene and hugs her. He sees Lizzie, who runs, evidently thinking this is Darcy's girlfriend!

Eventually, the two of them talk outside, during a walk with the Gardiners, but Mrs Gardiner carefully engineers it so that she and her husband are way ahead of the younger couple. The ensuing conversation, awkward as it may be, gives Lizzie leave to further reform her opinion of this man. Her flabber, such as it is, has never been so gasted as when Darcy informs her that he should like for her to meet his younger sister, Georgiana, who is anxious to meet Lizzie.

Unfortunately. it's immediately after this is that Lizzie receives news from Jane that Lydia has absconded with Wickham! Darcy learns of this from Lizzie - much more humorously portrayed in the 2005 than in the 1995. he embarks upon his adventure to discover where Wickham is hiding in London. There is much more going on here than is ever portrayed in either movie, and once Wickham and Lydia are married off and out of the way, considerably more going on with Bingley and Darcy than is portrayed in either movie, although the essence of what happens is carried through there.

Needless to say - but I've begun so I'll finish! - Bingley comes back and proposes to Jane - although nowhere near as velocitously as the movies indicate, even the lengthier 1995 version, and eventually, Darcy and Lizzie have their walk, wherein they go into rather tedious detail about their roller-coaster history together, I have to say. Eventually they're both married off and exquisitely happy. Austen doesn't marry either of the other sisters, but takes pains to relate that, removed from the influence of Lydia, and living with the Darcy's, Kitty improves immeasurably and left with her mother, even Mary starts to come out of her shell.

Yes, there was far more detail than ever I was interested in hearing at the end of this novel, so while I still recommend reading this or another of Austen's works for their authentic period detail, and for Austen's occasional humorous and charming turn of phrases, I have to say that I'm not overwhelmed by her overall talent as a writer. There is too much detail of the tedious variety and it's gone into in places where less would have sufficed. There is almost no observation of the surroundings, and conversation can sometimes become obscure since Austen is not fond of indicating who is speaking at a given time, so that perhaps a whole page will pass of purest conversation, by the end of which one is no longer certain as to who said what.

I realize that this is how they wrote back then, but that renders my observation no less valid. I seriously doubt that, had Austen not written this, but a writer of modern historical romance wrote it exactly as the first edition bore it, it would not have anywhere near the acclaim it now has, and before it was published you may rest assured that some editor somewhere would have it with abandon if it came across their desk! It's worth keeping that in mind when we bestow praise upon it, but go ahead and read it and make up your own mind, because your opinion of it is all that matters in the last analysis. Overall I'm quite prepared to declare it worthy!