Tales of Brer Rabbit

Rating: WARTY!

I found a set of audio disks at the local library which are produced by a publisher called Rabbit Ears. At first I thought they were all stories about rabbits, but they're not. They're a bunch of old folk tales and fairy tales which are read by celebrities, but there are only two stories per disk and a lot of music which you may or may not like, so you get little for your outlay, which is why the library is so wonderful!

The first story is Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, and the other one is Brer Rabbit and Boss Lion, both of which are read by Danny Glover. Both stories are about twenty minutes listening time, but would have been a lot shorter with no music! I'm guessing that's why the music was added. I'm not a huge fan of Danny Glover, but I liked him well enough in the Lethal Weapon movie series and the second of the Predator movies. Unfortunately, in this, he's acting more like a stereotypical actor from one of the seventies Blaxploitation movies, and for me this was not remotely entertaining.

He was significantly less animated in the second story, but it still did not entertain me. Obviously these days, stories about Brother Rabbit are not aimed at people my age, but historically, these stories including, believe it or not, the Tar Baby story, have a long tradition. Some commentators tie the stories to slavery, but there are traditions of such stories among American Indians and other peoples. Note that 'tar baby' is considered to be a racial slur.

If you really like these two stories, or you really, really like Danny Glover, and you're desperate for something for your children to listen to, then this might work, but I can't recommend it for as short as it is or as poor as it's told.

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Rating: WORTHY!

This is pretty special - a novel about Hercule Poirot (not to be confused with poi rot!) in which Hercule Poirot almost doesn't appear and in which the motive is uncovered by a young schoolgirl rather than Poirot himself! Don't confuse this one with the score of novels by other authors with this same now way over-used title.

This is the fifth of Christie's novels I've reviewed, nearly all of them Poirot stories, and all (including this one) save one I have rated as worthy reads. The one I did not like was Death on the Nile. The others that I considered to be worthy were: Murder on the Orient Express, The Unexpected Guest (which was taken from a play Christie wrote rather than an actual novel, and was not about Poirot), and Lord Edgeware Dies more commonly known as Thirteen at Dinner.

This story actually flirted with receiving a 'warty' rating (hey, in the middle of warty, there's still art!), but what saved it was the female politics, and in particular the amazingly entertaining schoolgirls Jennifer Sutcliffe and Julia Upjohn. These two were even more entertaining in the televised version starring David Suchet, which departed from the novel rather a lot, especially in bringing in Poirot at the beginning. In the novel, he is entirely absent for the first two thirds of this story, which takes place at Meadowbank School for Girls, fictional, but the most prestigious preparatory school for girls in the entire country.

Christie is known to have grown to detest her character, Poirot, yet she continued to serve up stories featuring him because she felt some sort of duty to her readers. I can't help but wonder if this is perhaps why he is so conspicuous by his absence from this one. Perhaps when she wrote it, she was really having a bad time finding anything to like about him, and decided to see how far she could take the story before she had to draft him in. In this instance, it was by a rather unusual means that he came onto the scene.

The start of a new term brings the usual minor issues, and one larger one. The principal, known as the headmistress, is Miss Bulstrode, and she's ready to retire if she can find a replacement who is worthy of overseeing Meadowbank. She has two fellow teachers in mind: Miss Vansittart, who is a veteran at the school and her prime choice, but newcomer Miss Rich is a serious contender.

Things seem to be fine until the gym mistress, a bit of a busybody, is discovered murdered in the new pavilion. In the TV series, she's impaled by a javelin, but is merely shot in the novel. How uninventive! As more murders occur, and the reputation of the school starts rapidly downhill, other questions arise. Why as Princess Shaista kidnapped? What is so important about the new pavilion which continues to draw some evil perp there? And why isn't the tea being served already?!

I enjoyed this novel and recommend it.

The Daughters of Palatine Hill by Phyllis T Smith

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"listened to the laugher" should be, presumably, " listened to the laughter" While the former does make sense, it seemed, in context, to be more the latter that was required.

I began this advance review copy thinking it was about Julius Caesar's family, but in fact it was about the successor to Caesar, Gaius Octavius, popularly known as Octavian, who ruled in Rome's second triumvirate after Caesar was assassinated in 44BC. He defeated the other two legs of the triumvirate when it started breaking apart, and routed Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra 7^th's fleet at the battle of Actium, after which the latter two committed suicide, MA by falling on his sword, and Cleo not by a snake bite as is popularly believed (and to which this author evidently subscribes), but by taking poison. Their story was actually rather Romeo and Juliet-esque in its comedy of error. But this novel isn't about them unfortunately.

Palatine Hill is the center one of the so-called seven hills of Rome. It's close by the Tiber, and has been settled since around 10,000BC. Technically there are only four actual hills of Rome. The other three are really promontories of a larger mass. Palatine, from whence comes our word 'palace', was actually where Livia, wife of Octavian, lived. She is one of the three women which this story follows, the other two being Octavian's daughter, Julia the Elder, and his 'adopted daughter', Cleopatra Selene, aka Cleopatra 8^th who started out as a prisoner of war, her brothers all dead, and went on to a career which outshone her mother's, yet she's nowhere near as well-known. Go figure. History isn't so much written by the victors as it is the romantics! LOL!

These women all feel threatened in one way or another. Julia is set to wed Marcellus, who is a complete dick, but fortunately history shows us she did not have to put up with him for long. She is shallow and juvenile, and I found her uninteresting. Cleo understandably lives in fear of being killed off, since she's a prisoner of war for all practical purposes and risks being murdered if she's seen to pose any threat at all. She turned out to be as shallow as Julia was depicted. Perhaps the most interesting is Livia, Julia's step mom, who immediately shows herself to be a thoughtful and practical woman who knows how to play the political game even though, ultimately, women had very little real say in their lives in this world.

There were some errors in the historical information. For example, at one point, Julia says, "I stood there in my night shift", but Romans did not have a négligé, pajamas or 'night shifts'. They wore their underwear known as a tunica, taken from the Greeks (not literally! LOL!), or they would even wear their entire daytime outfit to bed, even the wealthy ones, so this seemed a bit out of place. Maybe tunica is was what was meant here. Another issue was also tied to Julia - she kept on fretting that her father was in Spain and wouldn't be there to 'give her away' on her wedding day, but this was not a tradition in Roman times.

If anyone could be said to give a bride away, it was a married woman who had not been married more than once, and the groom was supposed to 'wrench' his bride from her in a symbolic ritual representing taking ownership of the young virgin. Roman ceremonies were not like modern western ceremonies. Even the cake was not a cake as we perceive it, with white frosting and so on, but an offering to the gods of a grain 'cake', which was subsequently eaten by the bride and groom. For all we know it was some sort of a granola bar in effect! The bride did wear white (assuming her family could afford anything truly white), but the marriage ceremony was really a transfer of ownership of the bride from her family to the groom, and dad took very little formal part in it. The bride was supposed to travel to the groom's home signifying a break from her family and a joining of the groom's family.

Of course that did not mean that all relations with her family were severed, but in this case there is no divide at all and everything stays the same. Julia hangs around the First Citizen's home, which in this case is somewhat understandable because the groom evidently lived there too (she was his cousin). Given how wealthy Octavian was, it's hard to believe that the newly married couple did not have their own home. Worse than this though, she was invited to important meetings, which seemed highly unlikely given how women were viewed in Rome - pretty much solely as incubators for their husband's male heir.

There are always exceptions of course (as Boudiga all too briefly taught the Romans), but women were not considered to be part of the Roman men's political world any more than they were part of the military one, and while some of them no doubt shared many confidences with their husbands, it's highly unlikely that a fourteen year old girl, even one married to an relatively important man, would be invited to a power-brokering meeting! This is one of many problems with telling a story in first person PoV. If one of the three characters telling this tale in round-robin fashion isn't present, we can't know what happened, so you have to have women going to meetings to which, realistically, they would never have been invited, and there goes suspension of disbelief.

The blurb (which I know typically has nothing to do with the author thank goodness!) tells us: "Always suppressing their own desires for the good of Rome, each must fulfill her role." This is a despicable lie! There is no point at which any of these women suppresses her own desires. The entire story is precisely about them yielding to desire at every opportunity! It would have been truly boring otherwise. I do agree, though, that Livia is "astute." She's definitely my favorite. The other two are too juvenile and self-absorbed to be interesting.

It's thoroughly dishonest though, to claim that Julia has to deny "her craving for love and the pleasures of the flesh" Far from it! She indulges shamelessly, although her purportedly erotic scenes with her husband are really not very interesting. "Can they survive Rome's deadly intrigues?" Of course they can! What a dumb question! Why do blurb writers always write such patently absurd questions? Of course the hero succeeds. Of course the quest is successful! Of course true love wins! Of course the villain is brought to book. Do the blurb writers really think we're on tenterhooks because we don't know exactly how this will pan out ninety-nine times out of a hundred - especially given that this is historical fiction about real people, all of whom we know the fate?!

I ended up getting about 30% into this before I gave up on it because it was simply not interesting. Aside from Livia, the other two girls had nothing going on in their heads but sex and guys, which was ridiculous. Even Livia was really nothing more than an appendage of her husband, with no thoughts going on in her head that were not directly tied to him or how much she missed him. It wasn't credible and it was insulting to women. These women appeared to have no friends, no interaction with other women (not even the female slaves!), and nothing on their minds other than men, which means they failed the Bechdel test dismally!

I remain convinced that the real women who bore these names were a hell of a lot more interesting, had a lot more going on in their minds, and would have made a much more interesting story than these three fictional versions ever could, so I cannot in good faith recommend this as a worthy read unless you honestly enjoy books about shallow and unappealing women.

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Rating: WARTY!

I'm sorely tempted to say that you can't beat a novel with a title which suggests that the author is the villain (Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson), but my ongoing quest to find a readable classic continues to be frustrated! I recall reading at least part of this young adult novel when I was a lot younger, but since the only thing I remember about that is a couple of Scots dashing around in the heather, I don't think it made an impression on me. I found it looking forlorn on the library audio bookshelf, and decided to revisit it. If mony a mickle maks a muckle, then maybe another little read will have a big impact? Sadly, no!

I started out quite bemused by the novel, both for its antiquated language (of course it wasn't antiquated when it was first published in 1886 in installments no less!), and for the quirky narration by Jim Weiss, who is not even Scots for goodness sakes, has no idea how to emulate a Scots accent, and who seems to have only two voices, sassy and sissy. In the voice avoiding to Tim, all Scots except for Davy Balfour are in the first category. Even without the voices, though, I would have found this novel a thoroughly unworthy read.

Davy was quite simply a chronic whiner, and his story was tedious in most places, describing far too much detail and far too little action. His entire life in this novel, it seems, consists of him repeatedly losing his money or making bad bargains with it, and wandering the Scots "desert" trying to get back to his evil uncle and reclaim his inheritance, threadbare as it is. He would have actually been better off had he made it to the tobacco plantations. He might have become rich there.

I know this novel is not written for modern audiences, but I reserve the right to judge classics the same as any modern novel, and by this judgment it failed to entertain me!

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of three novels by Agatha Christie that I intend to review this year, the other two being Murder on the Orient Express, and Cat Among the Pigeons. I enjoyed all three of these in the ITV television series starring David Suchet as the consummate Hercule Poirot, but my experience with the novels was not the same. This one I really did not care for. It was boring. Note that I already favorably reviewed Christie's The Unexpected Guest in July of 2013, and Thirteen at Dinner in November of 2014.

The murder doesn't take place until about half way through the story, so the entirety of the first half is prologue. I'm not a fan of prologue! Some of it plays into the story, but most of it seemed to be nothing more than Christie running off at the mouth painting character studies and contributing nothing to the plot at all. It was awful. The same could have been achieved with two or three short chapters.

This saddened me, because this particular audio book was read by David Suchet, and he did an excellent job. I had never heard his real voice until this novel! But the tedium, particularly of the interactions between the girls in the opening chapter, was deadening. I detested each and every one of those women and had no issues with any of them being bumped off!

The story was highly formulaic in quintessential Christie manner. She cannot write a travelogue story without having her stock characters. These consist of several Brits, including a young woman and an old crotchety woman, a couple of Brit guys, and then there are "the foreigners" which always consist of an American, an Italian, and at least one other foreigner, preferably French or German. In addition to this there is the trope Christie ending which improbably gathers all of the characters together at the end so he can lord it over them with his brilliance. This, for me, was the most irritating part of the TV series, and it was so unrealistic as to be ridiculous. Seriously, would all of these people put up with this every episode, including the murderer? Not on your nelly!

Poirot is actually in danger of being charged with impeding a police investigation, too, since he has knowledge which leads to the arrest of the perp, but which he inevitably conceals until the last minute, and the police inexplicably indulge him every time! In this case, there were no police, just Poirot and some high-up in the Brit consulate or something, I forget which from the TV show, and I didn't listen far enough to meet him in the audio book. The essential plot is that a woman introduces her fiancé to a Lady who isn't so much a Lady as a spoiled brat. She steals the man and marries him, and the jilted woman takes to stalking the happy couple including following them on their honeymoon to Egypt. No one thinks to ask how this impoverished woman could afford a vacation to Egypt and a cruise on the Nile. If they had, they might have rooted out the killer earlier.

The new bride is found shot, and witnesses are being bumped off left, right and center before Poirot figures it out. There are the usual Christie red herrings, of course. All in all it's a bit improbable, but not a bad story in the TV version. The written version not so much. I can't recommend it.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of three novels by Agatha Christie that I intend to review this year, the other two being Death on the Nile and Cat Among the Pigeons. I enjoyed all three of these in the ITV television series starring David Suchet as the consummate Hercule Poirot, but my experience with the novels was not the same. This one I really liked, though. Note that I already favorably reviewed Christie's The Unexpected Guest in July of 2013, and Thirteen at Dinner in November of 2014.

This one contains many of the tropes Christie routinely employed in her detective stories, including the usual array of foreigners: one Italian, one American, one French or German, and assorted Brits. It includes the young good looking guy, the young good looking girl, and the old crotchety woman. There is also the stock Christie signature ending whereby Poirot gathers all his suspects together at the end and slowly eliminates each until the murderer is identified. This to me is the weakest link, because none of these people would put up with this, and the police certainly would not. Fortunately for Poirot, the audience is already captive aboard the train, and there are no police here, only an official from the railroad. The role of official is usually played by a police officer, but there are other people who act as stand-ins, such as government officials. Here it's the railroad guy who lends Poirot authority as an agent of the railroad.

This story is so old that you very likely know the outline if not the filler, so I'm not going to launch into a detailed review here. The basis is that a truly bad man is traveling on the Orient express with a large assortment of other people. The express is full, which is unusual for the time of year. Poirot has encountered some of the passengers before he gets on the Orient Express, and meets many more aboard. The train hits a snowdrift and is stuck for several days. The night the snowdrift is encountered, the bad guy is bumped off, and Poirot naturally takes it upon himself to solve the crime. He has a harder time of it here than he usually does because of the nature of the death.

The victim was traveling under a false identity. He was stabbed twelve times, but the stab wounds offered no consistency: some were violent and deep, while others were shallow and weak. Some appear to have been delivered left-handed, whereas others were right-handed. There were some 'clues' which appeared to be false, whereas others appeared to be real, and the result of mistakes made by the perps(s).

The passengers are interviewed one by one, and Poirot slowly picks away at their stories until the rather unusual truth is revealed. I liked this story and the characters, and I recommend it.

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential by Brian Ashcraft, Shoko Ueda

Rating: WORTHY!

Now this is girl power!

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool is a cool book in itself. It details, with great research, copious photographs, and a lot of historical and trivia information, the power of Japanese schoolgirls and their sailor outfits through the history of Japan and in particular since World War Two.

There is barely avenue of popular technology or cultural endeavor upon which Japanese schoolgirls haven't made some sort of mark. After a brief history of the uniform, the book takes off and explodes into discussions of how the schoolgirl sailor look became an icon, and transported these girls into whole genres of movies, and into pop music where the Japanese approach to creating a band was very different from western approaches.

This influence was felt in electronics, when these girls commandeered pagers and turned them into text machines, and then exploited cell phones when those came out, driving the development of the cell phone cameras which we take for granted today. They made their mark on fashion (and not just in the world of sailor suits!), on art, on magazine content, on manga, and on anime.

The story is told here with interviews, trivia, lots of illustrations, side bars, and lots of color - not all of which is pink by any means! It was a real education and a fascinating book for me. Your mileage may differ! Now my only problem is to figure out how to exploit this knowledge in my writing! I recommend this book as a worthy read!

Deception by Working Partners Limited

Rating: WARTY!

Here's another middle grade book which disappointed me. The main problem is that it was set in 1569 yet it read like it could have been written about events taking place yesterday. Obviously you don't want to write a novel in the actual language which was used over four hundred years ago, but you do want to try and imbue your writing with a little bit of antiquity. This one didn't feel that way. Worse than this, it's written in first person PoV, and worse than that, it's written as diary entries. These never work for me because they're patently unrealistic, recounting exact details and word-for-word conversations. It constantly throws me out of the story in disbelief. Worse than this, the author is so focused on including all her research in detailing daily events in Elizabethan times that the story loses all immediacy and urgency which is the whole point of using first person PoV (not that I agree there is a point!).

This is a series which, judged by the titles (Assassin, Betrayal, Conspiracy, Deception, and so on), is intended to run to twenty six volumes. I can't think of anything more tedious than that. It's penned (and I mean that in both senses of the word) by anonymous writers who all contribute under the pseudonym of 'Grace Cavendish', the main character. She's a young maid of honor who is supposedly a pursuivant - an investigator for Queen Elizabeth. 'Pursuivant' didn't actually mean that, and in Elizabeth's time was far more likely to have still been used in its French version, poursuivant.

Even if it were as the writer claims, and while the head of state was a woman, in 1569, they didn't even have adult women in any positions of responsibility, much less running around investigating anything. They would certainly never have had a young girl doing so, especially one who was so dis-empowered that she had to sneak around deceptively to get anything done instead of being allowed to pursue her investigations, None of this made any sense. Neither did it make sense that a woman of nobility, such as Lady Cavendish supposedly was, would have to kow-tow to, and live in fear of the "common" women who were employed on the palace staff.

In 1569, Elizabeth was in her mid-thirties and had been queen for over a decade, yet here she's portrayed as a petulant, ill-tempered brat who lacks control, and who has less maturity than the youthful story teller! Nonsense! Elizabeth was coolly navigating the waters of avoiding marriage - at this point to a French Valois - and dealing with the Pope's rejection of her as a valid monarch. She was hardly the spoiled child we see here.

Though this is supposedly set in late 1569, in the grip of an icy winter, at this time in that year, three Earls from the north of England were leading a rebellion against Elizabeth. They were trying to install Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne in England, yet we're expected to believe that the sole thing bothering a petulant and spoiled Elizabeth was the introduction of a new silver coin? I'm sorry, but I cannot take this series seriously or pursue it. I guess I'm just not pursuivant enough!

Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B Cooney

Rating: WARTY!

Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of ward-winning novels, but this one, which won the Josette Frank Award in 2003, started out really well and I enjoyed it, but as soon as the main character took up residence in the palace of King Menelaus, the story fell completely flat and became a tiresome read. It is aimed at middle-grade children, so we shouldn't expect too much of it, but I think children have a right to expect enough from a novel, and I felt that this quite simply did not deliver. Even the title was a bit of a downer, which struck me as strange.

Some people have described this as an historical novel and it is, technically speaking, but it's also one of those novels written for children which puts the child at the pivot of events, and I typically find those to be the disingenuous and annoying braggarts of the literary world (whether written for children or for adults for that matter).

The story is supposed to be that of Anaxandra, who we join at the age of six, the daughter of a minor pirate lord of some non-entity of an Aegean island. She is a devotee of Medusa, and often prays to her for help and guidance, although Medusa was not actually a god. She was one of the Gorgons, a race of monsters. Why anyone would pray to such a creature is unexplained in this novel. This young girl is taken as tribute (so she believes) by king Nikander (note that my spellings may be off because I listened to an audio book, so I have no idea how the author spelled these names in the printed version), and grows up to middle-grade age with the royal family as a companion to his handicapped daughter Callisto, but his small island is raided by pirates who slaughter and destroy. Anaxandra manages to survive this and at one point amusingly frightens away some pirates by putting an octopus on her head and pretends that she is a displeased Medusa come to wreak havoc upon them. These pirates are pretty dumb, let's face it, and so they take off, and Anaxandra buries her dead king.

Just when she thinks hope is lost, King Menelaus of Sparta arrives with his fleet, and fearful of being taken into slavery, Anaxandra pretends she is Nikander's dead daughter Callisto. Menelaus adopts her into his own family, perhaps because they both share red hair (a color which is brought up with nauseating frequency). For me, here is where the story became uninteresting and fell completely flat. Contrary to popular consciousness, Helen (of Troy), wife of Menelaus, is portrayed not such much as a raging beauty as she is a royal bitch, and Paris is portrayed as a complete fop more worthy of being named Narkissos than Paris.

The problem with this part of this novel is that it's taken to the level of caricature, and so was as uninteresting to me. It lacked all and any attempt at nuance. As such, it wasn't entertaining at all. This is where the story became tedious to me, with page after page of commentary on what a bitch Helen was and what a poseur Paris was. It was tiresome, unimaginative, and uninventive, and it was at this point that i quit reading it. How it won an award, I do not know because Anaxandra had so many opportunities to become a really powerful character, and the author let all of them slip through her fingers.

Additionally, Anaxandra was one of the most emotionally dead characters I've ever encountered. There was no concern on her part for example, from the fact that she had been forced from her original home, or from seeing King Nikander, of whom she was very fond, die along with - evidently, her adopted sister Callisto, or form seeing her adopted mother, who was very kind to Callisto, being taken into slavery by the pirates. We never even got a description of her adopted mom's grief from losing both her husband and her daughter. At one point Anaxandra did consider going into the palace during the raid to get to Callisto, but her effort was half-hearted at best, and her complete loss of interest in Callisto's fate thereafter was shameful. Could the author not at least have had her find her sister and bury her too?

It was this complete lack of a clue about how real people children react and behave coupled with the sheer boredom later, which turned me off this book. How can any author,m even by accident, make the story of Helen and Paris boring?! I've never heard of the Josette Frank Award, but I have to say that standards must be low if this one won it. I can't recommend it.

Interview With the Vampire Claudia's Story by Ashley Marie Witter

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a fan of Anne Rice, nor of vampire stories in general (although I've made one or two exceptions), and I never read Interview With the Vampire, but this story looked appealing. I did see the movie, which was okay, but nothing special for me, so I had a vague idea of what was going to happen. This novel is essentially the same story as Interview..., but it's told in graphic novel format and from the PoV of Claudia, the young girl who is adopted by the two male vampires and who is played by Kirsten Dunst in the movie (the two male vamps are played by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt). Now there's a dysfunctional family!

This version really digs into the psychology of Claudia, exploring her feelings and fears, and her understandable frustration and disgust with her mind maturing whilst her body remains that of a child. What a horrible fate. What a awful prison in which to be trapped! Doomed from the start because there is no way to win in this scenario, Claudia slowly grows to hate Lestat while perhaps hoping for a life with Louis which, while practical and appropriate from a purely chronological perspective and perhaps even a moral one, can never practically happen. Perhaps if they had lived three hundred years earlier when it was considered normal for children of Claudia's age to be married off? Perhaps if Louis had some spine? There's no happy answer to be had here.

You can feel the claustrophobia creep in from all the ragged edges of their lives. Claudia is strong and forceful - a sharply delineated counterpoint to the weak and vacillating Louis. She's the one who makes things happen and finally rids them of Lestat - or does she? This story does not end well for Claudia and we knew this all along, even if we wanted to hope for a better outcome for a juvenile vampire.

Ashley Marie Witter's story and art work are enjoyable. The art is simple and sepia toned, except for the blood, which makes it quite effective, even shocking at times. The vampire gore is restrained and sparse. I have issues with vampire stories which generally fail their own logic even within their own framework, which makes the stories truly dumb and unappealing to me. I have issues too, with two-hundred-year-old vampires finding anything of interest in a sixteen year old school girl, which is one reason I detest vampire stories in general. This one rather turned the tables on that, though. Instead of having a dirty old man lusting after a virginal juvenile (Edward, I'm looking at you, and don't you dare sparkle at me like that), this one went the opposite way and had a younger, but maturing vampire falling for an older one. I don't know how old Louis was, but the age difference between him and Claudia probably wasn't two hundred years!

There's another issue with vampires, too, which wasn't well handled here. They are eternally youthful, meaning that their cells regenerate. This is part of the canon, so it's fine insofar as it goes, but then in this story, Lestat gets injured and the injury failed to heal. I didn't get the 'logic' behind that. Those issues aside, though, I really enjoyed this retelling and I recommend it.

Smoke by Dan Vyleta

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Lizzy makes a comb of her fingers, and runs it through Thomas's tangled her" should be "tangled hair"!
"is not the walls he inspect but the floors" 'inspects, but'

There's something paranormal going on here. The problem is that we never learn what it is! The story begins in a British boys boarding school - a very strict school where the upper class children are brutally pushed towards purity. Those who are not pure in thought and deed are outed by the appearance of smoke and soot from their own bodies - visible signs of falling from grace, which leave almost indelible stains on clothing. You can't hide from your sins in this world, but it wasn't always like this. People just believe it was. Curiously enough, upper crust folks don't seem to have the same problem with sin that the 'lower classes' do.

I was drawn in almost immediately to this idea, but about half way through, the story changed from gripping and enticing to sheer boredom. It suddenly ceased completely to be appealing and became a real chore to keep reading. After the first couple of chapters, which I wasn't that fond of, the story really picked up, and from that point on, I didn't look back until it came to a screeching, grinding halt in London. It never took off again.

There were the usual formatting issues with the Android smart phone crappy Kindle app, which are nothing to do with the publisher or the author. The Kindle app doesn't like drop caps or formatting! Please note that this was an advance review copy so there may be changes which render my comments irrelevant or outdated by the time the published copy arrives.

The author did have a strange way of expressing himself at times, such as in this clause: "...and his look at Julius is like a dog's that has been beaten." Odd (to me at least!), but not disastrous. The story was told in third person, which I prefer, but the tense seemed to shift between present and past, which was annoying, and between multiple first person PoVs in some scattered chapters, which was more annoying! I didn't get the point of this, especially since it's a real distraction from the story. Other those issues, it was easy to follow, so non-Brit readers should have no trouble with this one, if they don't mind the occasional obscure reference, such as "...breaks open the coach like a conker," or the use of 'flannel' instead of washcloth.

A conker is a horse chestnut seed. The seeds are large, like the chestnuts you roast at Christmas time, but they're more rounded and a beautiful, rich brown color. British kids drill a small hole through the center and suspend it on a string. The "conker" then then be used to hit another such conker held by a second kid. This proceeds by turns until one or other of the conkers is cracked, thereby rendering victory to the intact conker, which can go on to other contests. British kids are weird, what can I say?!

There was one other oddity which struck me. Maybe other readers won't care about it, and I can't say it's a problem, but it just seemed odd to me, so I mention it because my blog is about writing as well as reading. Here's the exchange, between a servant and the young lady of the house:

"He looks at one as though he means to search one. Down to one's petticoats. Strip one of all secrets. It isn't a pleasant look."
But Lizzy only shrugs. "I don't mind. I haven't got nothing to hide."

I have no idea how servants spoke back then, but it struck me as odd that Lizzy was so grammatically correct and "upper crust" in employing the term "one" when she begins speaking, but then descends to what might be termed stereotypical "servant speak" by employing "haven't got nothing". Maybe this is perfectly fine, but it sounded weirdly contradictory to me.

The best thing about this novel initially, was that it kept moving into new territory, each marked by a new part in the story. We started in part one in the school, and then in part two, we moved to Lady Naylor's country residence for the Christmas "hols", where Thomas and Charley, the main male characters, learned interesting things about the smoke, and met Livia, the other main character. Soon they had to move on and not everyone wanted them to get where they needed to go, which was London. The journey down to London, part three, was fun, but as soon as they arrived, the story came to a shuddering halt. There was page after page of literally nothing happening, and it became truly, deadeningly boring.

Normally I would abandon a novel at this point, but I was really curious about the smoke and soot, so I pressed on, only to meet disappointment after disappointment. We learned nothing about the smoke - not how or why it arose, not why some people were immune to it, not where it came from or how it might be beaten. Not even, really, what one of the mysterious protagonists hoped to do with her secret plan. Instead, the story simply fizzled out in bleak inevitability, and it was not even remotely interesting. I was very disappointed after a truly promising start. It was like the story simply gave up! It felt to me like the author ran out of ideas or never planned on resolving anything in the first place. This is the main reason why I cannot rate this as a worthy read, but it is not the only one.

I am not a fan of first person PoV. It's very limiting voice as this author admitted by bouncing in and out of it. For me, it's typically nauseating, and especially so in young adult stories. Some authors can carry it, but the chances of failure are multiplied by the number of first person voices there are. In this novel, as I mentioned, there were many such voices, and they were completely random. In the end, they bogged down the story and stretched it out tediously. I quickly began skipping them because they contributed nothing aside from irritation, and they reduced the story to a tedious walking pace. Completely by-passing them caused me no problems in following the story - none at all. That speaks volumes!

This novel was a slow read to begin with, and it would have been improved enormously if all of the first person chapters had been deleted. It would have improved significantly further if parts four, five, and six had been condensed to a half dozen chapters instead of endlessly dragging on for interminable page after endless page. I can't recommend this one at all, not unless you want to read the first three parts and then move on to something else. This is actually a classic illustration of why I don't do stars. A novel to me is either worth reading or it isn't. I can't rate one two-fifths or four-fifths worth reading because then I'd be recommending this one and that wouldn't be honest! This was not a worthwhile read and I resent the time I wasted on it.

The Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

Rating: WARTY!

How cool is that title? I hate novels which fail - utterly and miserably - to live up to their title and this was one. Note this is not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Diana Norman, which I have not read. This is one of those historical, if not hysterical, novels which forgets that it's supposed to be telling a story and instead regurgitates the author's extensive notes. Pages and pages were wasted with extraneous detail and long rambling conversations which were utterly irrelevant to the main story and served solely to let the author show off. This alone turned me off the story, but there was less. Much much less!

There never was a Thomas à Becket. It was Thomas Becket. It wasn't until long after his time that some moron decided to add the à. No one in his time would ever have used that form, yet this author does. This is one of many anachronisms. I don't expect a story set in 1171 (or whenever), to use the language from that time period, but neither do I expect an historical story to be written in thoroughly modern English with thoroughly modern sensibilities. It was ridiculous.

I listened to the audio book, and the most hilarious thing was when the reader described someone eating "pasties." This word is pronounced PASS-tees, not "pastries" without the 'r'. It's a type of pastry eaten in England, but the way this reader read it made it sound like the guy was eating those stick-on nipple covers which showgirls use. I laughed out loud, and the sad thing is that this is the best part of the entire novel.

The blurb has this novel of medieval England as "A chilling, mesmerizing novel that combines the best of modern forensic thrillers with the detail and drama of historical fiction." It's not. It's neither chilling nor mesmerizing, and while I applaud the desire to put a strong female character into a medieval novel, it's hard to do convincingly, and this one didn't work for me, especially since the story unfolds as slow as molasses in an Alaska winter.

The premise is that the church has sent a woman from Italy to investigate a series of child murders in England. This is absurd. Why would anyone care about children being murdered in medieval times? They wouldn't have cared in England, much less in Italy. It's entirely wrong, I agree, but this was the attitude back then. No one cared that much! I felt the story would have been stronger if there had been more behind this motivation, and there really wasn't. Basically, all the author did was say, "This is how it is!" It was unconvincing at best. There's a big non sequitur lurking between the fact of female physicians extant in Italy and the dispatch of one - by the church! - to investigate children going missing in England.

The attempt to give the visiting physician some street cred by having her save the clergyman's life felt way too forced and was also unconvincing. If the visiting physician had been Arabic (and therefore would pretty much have to have been be male) I might have bought the CSI stuff. If it had been Chinese and female I might have bought it, but the way this was launched didn't float my boat. There's a big difference between saying, hey, Italy allowed female physicians, and saying, hey this Italian female doctor is a whiz at solving murders and therefore is going to England! The church detested women in any role other than mistress, and they positively abhorred science. Galileo was censured and Giordano Bruno was burned by the church just a couple of hundred years after this novel is set, so this was too much of a reach, and was a DNF for me.

I DNF'd it because it was so awful. The idea of a learned woman, especially one who is a forensic scientist, having to go undercover in England to avoid accusations of being a witch is a truly compelling one, but the only execution here was that of a good idea for a novel.

The Heretic's Wife by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

Rating: WORTHY!

Having got through and enjoyed Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII not long ago, this one sounded like it might be entertaining. The version I listened to was the audio book read by Davina Porter. She did an acceptable job.

Set at the time when Henry 8 was trying to talk the Pope into letting him marry Anne Boleyn (which turned into a disaster for both, but did spawn Elizabeth 1), this novel focuses on booksellers who are purveying the English translation of the Bible, something which the idiot Pope had declared illegal. They took their censorship seriously back then, and death awaited anyone who flouted the Catholic global dictatorship.

Unfortunately, this novel moved way too slowly for me, and dithered and dallied when I wanted to get on with the story. There is no logical or rational reason why historical fiction should routinely run to four, five, six, seven, eight hundred pages! What it is which drives authors to do this, I think, is that they hate to waste all the research they did and consequently feel like they have to cram it in somewhere. Worse than this, they feel they have to draft-in every historical person they can think of from the period, which is nothing more than tediously pretentious name-dropping and turns me right off a novel. It's like a kid's time travel movie where they run into famous people like Benjamin Franklin (it's always Franklin isn't it?!). It's celebrity worshiping gibberish and it simply doesn't work.

I've raised this issue before of book titles which take the form "The _______'s Daughter" or "The _______'s Wife." On the one hand, I agree that they're quite provocative titles, carrying as they do a suggestion of rebellion or at least misbehavior. On the other hand they seem to me to be insulting titles, implying as they do that the woman in question is no more than a possession of the man. I've reviewed about four such novels prior to this one, and they were batting a .500. Now the balance is tipped negatively and I think I am no longer inclined to pick up any more such titles, lackluster as they've been!

What finally killed this particular one for me was the (relatively) modern language and idiom. It kept kicking me out of the story. I think it would have been tedious to have read this in the same English which Shakespeare knew, or in which the King James Bible was written, but there had to be a happier compromise than this one. In the end, I couldn't get into it and I can't recommend it based on the portion I covered.

Of Better Blood by Susan Moger

Rating: WORTHY!

"Four times a day I drop the baby." That's about as powerful a first sentence for a novel as you can get. This is the kind of novel (of which I read an advance review copy) that makes it worth plowing through a host of drab and sub-standard ones. This one took me to a new place, and that's what it's all about. Set in 1922, sixteen-year-old Rowan Collier immediately takes the stage - and quite literally. She's an actor in a "play" designed for the sole purpose of promoting eugenics. Note that while I loved this novel, I never said it was easy to read, or that there were no horrible things in it. Be warned.

The novel is historical fiction, but it is historical. The main elements of the tale told here are fictional, but the Aryan roots running through it were not only a tragic fact that led right into Nazi pogroms, those same dangerous, unscientific, and idiotic beliefs run through a certain segment of society today, hidden only under a thin veneer of civilization.

This is yet another first person PoV novel - and with flashbacks, to boot! Normally I don't like either of these, but in this case it worked. It wasn't intrusive. It didn't keep reminding me that I was reading a novel, and I'm grateful to the author for that. The novel was not only readable, it was captivating. The two main characters, Rowan and Dorchy are illuminated with the consummate artistry of a medieval scribe. You cannot help but want to know everything that happens to them. I would pick this novel up intending to read a quick chapter, and find myself still sitting there, glued to the screen, five chapters on.

Rowan first appears as an actor, after a fashion, and dropping the baby doll is her job. She has to show to the audience how incompetent and inept - how unfit - she is as a human being, but this is not how life began for her. Rowan began life without any handicap, not even poverty, but now she has one, thanks to polio, so naturally she plays a teenage handicapped girl in this play performed at a fair. Even today religious ignorance would have children prevented from being vaccinated against this this scourge with the same horrific results Rowan endured.

There's no sympathy for her condition, or for the condition of the character she plays, Ruthie-who-drops-a-baby. Even off the stage the people she's with think of her as thirteen-year-old incompetent Ruthie. The play is titled "Unfit Family" and is clearly written by an ardent fan of the eugenics movement. Just as things were getting interesting, though, I was suddenly snapped back to 1914, which I resented! The seesaw whiplash effect pervaded the first few chapters, but soon, and surprisingly, I grew used to it. It takes quite a bit to have a first person PoV novel, with flashbacks, and make me like it, so this was a good sign!

Despite the crippling scars polio left her with, or more accurately, precisely because of these scars, Rowan is an exhibit of the New England betterment Council, of which her sister Julia is an avid member, as was her dad, who has not been home since he went off to fight World War One. The problem is, she's not a member in good standing, and that isn't meant as a sick pun. She's really a possession, now. In her father's absence, which might be better described as his non-benign neglect, and her sibling's cold indifference to her kid sister's plight, Rowan ended up not staying at the hospital where she had been slowly making a recovery, but at a cruel and sick home for "the crippled" where the only treatment she got was maltreatment. Being a prime exhibit of what's wrong with humanity was, therefore, actually a step-up from that, for Rowan.

Rowan's real recovery begins when she meets Dorchy, a feisty carny girl, who brings Rowan out of her shell and the two become firm and fast friends. But the deck is stacked against these two, and life hasn't done dealing them spades yet. Their story continues and seems to be downhill until a remarkable turn-around enters, stage right, engineered solely by the girls and some friends. This is both a heartening and a heart-breaking read, but I think this - or something like it - ought to be made as compulsory as sterilization was for those "unfit" children. They who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Eugenics had some surprising adherents, such as Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Linus Pauling, Marie Stopes, Robert Heinlein, HG Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, and George Bernard Shaw, and some not so surprising, such as Adolf Hitler. By the time this pogrom had been curtailed in the USA - and not until the 1970s, believe it or not - some 60,000 people had been sterilized. This is an engrossing way to learn a little about those pernicious and self-serving attitudes, even if it is fiction.

The real story here though is young adult power. Rowan and Dorchy are their own law and their own powerhouse. Refreshingly, the author seems to have instinctively understood this and left them to it, and it worked. They didn't need some guy to validate them or fix them or save them. There were some guys, and one was even named Jack, but they were friends, and that's all they needed to be. This story was about Rowan's strength, and about her admirably taking charge of her own destiny, and anything that buried her in a romance would have destroyed the power of this story. I whole-heartedly recommend this as a worthy read.

The Shrinking Man by Ted Adams

Rating: WORTHY!

Based on by Richard Matheson's novel, and illustrated by Mark Torres, this is Ted Adams's view of the story. Set in 1956 to begin with, Scott Carey, a six-foot tall guy who was exposed to some sort of chemical when he was younger, is out on a boat when he gets exposed to a chemical fog, and from that point on, he begins shrinking at the rate of one seventh of an inch per day, which means he has barely more than five hundred days before he's dwindled to nothing.

I have to say I really didn't like Scott, who was small even before he ever began to shrink, but you don't have to like a character to enjoy a story about them, and I really liked the way this had been translated to imagery. It bounces back and forth between the recent past, when Scot was trying to cope with the beginning of his condition, and the present, when he's only five sevenths of an inch, and had less than a week to go. Normally I don't like these 'switch-back' stories, but in this case it wasn't so bad. The present part was far less interesting than the past, even though it ought to have been more dramatic and engrossing. In the present, Scott is trapped in the basement and desperately trying to climb the fridge to get to a pack of crackers, and is also trying to fend off a black widow spider. Hey, she was a widow, maybe she just wanted to marry him?

This preference for the past story was despite the petulance of the shrinking Scott. At first he noticed no change, but then as it started to become clear he was shrinking, there were trips to doctors who could do nothing for him evidently, even though they seemed to understand what was happening, and his life began to fall apart for him. The explanation for the shrinking was a bunch of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo of him losing nitrogen and creatinine and other such things, but the doctors never really explained how that worked without him getting sick, and the reason for this is that it wouldn't work without him getting sick!

His higher brain function at the very least would be severely degraded with such shrinkage, especially as it went below the normal human range. Maybe his shrinking brain actually did create issues, because Scott's treatment of his wife and child was inexcusable. All she did as love him and support him throughout this, but he increasingly rejected her and at one point took off with a circus midget! None of this is endearing. Note that there was no issue with the midget's brain being relatively small because she hadn't shrunk to it. Instead, she had grown into it. It was normal and ordinary for her, and her intelligence was perfectly fine, whereas Scott was daily losing parts of his previously normally-functioning brain.

This is the problem with shrinking character stories. The writers of such stories (and note that this is a criticism of Matheson's original story) give no thought to the real consequences of shrinking. Let's skip over problems with the fact that this would have to be a highly coordinated loss of literally every component, even solid, rigid ones such as as bone, reducing in perfect lock-step, and go to the issue with him at five sevenths of an inch, where even mild air currents would blow him over. His climbing to the top of the fridge is portrayed as though he was still of normal proportions and regular weight, but this would not be the case. He wouldn't even be injured from a fall because his mass is so low. He would pretty much float down! But an annoying sliver on a broom handle to us, might end up as a stake through his heart!

On the other hand, his mass is so low that his shrunken muscles would be barely strong enough to function, even in pulling his reduced weight up the thread. He would probably have the functionality of a person who had been severely afflicted with polio You can't shrink a human-sized person down indefinitely before something gives out! Yes, there are some very small mammals, as indeed there are humans, but these have grown into their situation, not shrunk to it from something larger. Essentially, this is one good reason why insects are nothing like us, or more accurately, we're nothing like them, since they were here first. As his size continued to shrink there would be a point where his veins would be too small to admit passage of his corpuscles, and he would suffocate - assuming he wasn't so small at that point that air molecules couldn't effectively fill his lungs!

But scientific issues and some quibbles aside, it's fun to read a story like this where a person is thrown into what is, effectively, an alien world. That makes for the best kind of story, and please note that the quibbles are actually with the original story, not with this, which is a fine graphic representation of it and one which I think is a worthy read, as long as you're willing to let the impracticality slide! I recommend it.

Whistling Women by Kelly Romo

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Four shiny black Buick’s" doesn’t need the apostrophe
"...at least FDR. is trying..." FDR isn’t an abbreviation like Dr. or Ms., it's initials, so either it should be simply FDR, which rightly or wrongly is my minimalist preference, or it should be F.D.R.
"nauseas" misspelling of nauseous
"...in his stripped vest..." should be 'striped vest'
"Beat’s me" should be "Beats me"

This novel (of which I got an advance review copy) is set in 1935, the year when Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California, and Harlem had race riots, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater was completed, and the Dust Bowl hit, Jews lost citizenship in Germany, and the FBI wiped out the Barker gang, the first canned beer was sold and alcoholics anonymous was founded, Lawrence of Arabia died and parking meters were brought into use by Oklahoma city. 1935 - and already there were too many cars!

It’s also set in San Diego, the birthplace of California, home of the largest naval fleet in the world, and takes place during the California Pacific International Exposition. The exposition really took place in 1935, and it did precisely what instigator Frank Drugan hoped it would - it attracted over seven million visitors and brought almost thirty eight million dollars into San Diego's economy at a time when the entire USA was still in a sluggish recovery from 1929. No one knew at the time that the economy would get its biggest boost from the second world war and the USA would become a superpower.

Yes, there was a nudist colony located in the sunken Zoro garden, but it was populated with performers, not actual nudists, and both men and women wore a covering on the lower half of their body, but yes, there was a macaw! Fittingly, this place which housed "pretties", and which brought in more money than any other exhibit at the exposition, is now a butterfly garden, still housing pretties, but much more honest and innocent. In the fictional version, the fenced in nudist colony is populated by real nudists who benefit from the admission price which funds their colony. You could also say they benefit from the exposure - in attracting new members, so to speak.

Author Kelly Romo has taken the real events and woven them with a fictional tale to produce a truly well-written and engaging story about alienated sisters, once close but now torn apart by awful events with which we’re teased until we slowly learn the truth by the half-way point in the novel. Although it’s clear long before then what happened, we never learn all the twisted and intriguing details, which are doled out throughout the second half of the novel. The novel is gorgeously written with all of the important characters sketched sharply, even if briefly. The relationship between Wavey and Addie is complex and beautifully sculpted. It's mirrored in the relationship between Wavey's daughters Rumor and Mary, two girls who are counterparts to their elders, Rumor matching Addie, and Mary matching Wavey, their names, one fairly common and one rare, being switched between the generations and the personalities.

This is very much a woman's story, and is the better for it. Although it isn't first person (and is the better for it!), it's told very much from Addie's PoV, and to a lesser extent, Rumor's. Neither Wavey nor Mary really get their own story, appearing only in relationship - and often very much as a foil - to their respective sister. Indeed Wavey is painted more in hues chosen by her sister and her daughter than ever she is from her own palette. Men appearing in the story are almost universally bad influences or downright bad people. With only two exceptions (and one of those is highly iffy), they are not men to be around, especially not if you're young, female, and defenseless. Even when one appears to be a decent and positive influence, we find his foundation to be as unreliable as the sand on the beach.

Both Wavey and Addie are different women, but strong in their own way. Rumor is a force to be reckoned with, and although younger than Mary, is significantly more mature and self-possessed, very much a catalyst. This story would still have been worth reading without all the secrets and intrigue, but of course without that, the estrangement, which is the spine of this body of work, would have been lacking.

While I loved the novel overall, there was one slight annoyance: Wavey's " fractured blue eyes". It felt like if I read that phrase once, I read it a gazillion times, although it only appeared on maybe eight or ten occasions in one form or another: fractured, splintered, prisms, and so on. Once was more than enough when it isn’t really explained that well. From a reference to cracked ice and to prisms, I took it to mean that they were two or more shades of blue, colored like a kaleidoscope, but pale like ice. The problem as that this wasn't exactly clear to me. I found myself wondering if it was a metaphor. Did it mean that they were sad? Does it mean they fracture light like waves in the ocean, which is where her name came from? Or did her name come from a wave hat? We never learn. Does it mean the eyes were as broken as their owner? That they were cold and impenetrable like glass, and unforgiving? The fact that the sharp description of Wavey's eyes was so vague in meaning made the repeated use of this term all the more irritating, but this was a minor point when compared with the engrossing sweep of the overall story.

Wavey isn't forgiving of Addie's behavior, even though she claims she is, but it’s fine because Addie isn’t forgiving herself either. Wavey doesn’t trust Addie around her kids, believing that her sister was corrupted by her stint in the orphanage, and then more so by her time at the nudist colony. This rejection crushes Addie. Wavey's kids think they have a reasonable handle on things, but they really don’t. Only Wavey knows the whole story, and the question running like a snagged thread through this tale is whether or not these four girls can handle what really happened, bring it all together, and make a new life which includes all of them.

In the end things come together in a pleasant and satisfying way, although not necessarily in a way you might predict for a story like this. I absolutely adored it. Both Addie and Wavey are outstanding characters, but they are not the only ones who leave a mark on you. Addie's friends at the nudist colony are a story in themselves, especially Daisy, who is Addie's roommate, and Daisy's son Sal. There's one other person, who seems to play only a minor role, but whose character is sketched ever more sharply as the story rolls on to a breath catching ending. I was thrilled to read this and recommend it highly. Like one of Wavey's neighbors, who is abruptly turfed out of her bungalow because she can’t make the rent, or like one of the older women who is dismissed from the colony because she's no longer the youthful, healthy crowd-pleasing specimen of femininity she once was, I'll miss the people I'm leaving behind as I move on to the next novel on my list! This is my first Kelly Romo. It will not be my last!

The Mystery Woman by "Amanda Quick"

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book I happened upon a the library and I found this story - set in the nineteenth century - intriguing and the voice of the narrator to be extraordinarily seductive. Indeed, it as the sexual quality of the voice which made the story more appealing initially, but curiously by the halfway point, the voice had become cloying and tedious, and no longer held appeal. It was a bit of a weird experience. As for the author, her real name is Jayne Ann Krentz, and she uses the 'Quick' pseudonym for her historical dramas, of which this is one - the second in the "Ladies of Lantern Street" series. I haven't read the first.

Krentz is a prodigious writer and has a host of pseudonyms - a ridiculous number, in fact: Jayne Castle, Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass. She sold the original name to a publisher for ten years! That strikes me as absurd, especially since 'Jayne Castle' was actually her birth name. To me it's dishonest to present yourself as someone else for the sake of selling a novel in a genre different from the one you write in under your own name. It's as dishonest as pretending your publisher is independent when it's really just another imprint upon which Big Publishing™ has firmly stamped its own imprint - not that this happened here. This is the first book I've read by any of those names, and it wasn't a positive impression. Note that I only made it through half of this novel before I gave up out of sheer boredom.

Beatrice Lockwood has some psychic power - quite strong, but limited in comparison with the powers we typically read about in paranormal stories. Why she has it goes unexplained in a story where it's never actually used for anything significant. She can sense some of the history of an object just by looking at it and opening up her sensitivity to it. She was part of an entertainment duo, but went into hiding, functioning as a paid companion. As the story begins, we discover, along with Beatrice, that her old partner, Roland Fleming, has been murdered, and some Russian-accented assassin is now looking for Beatrice. This guy evidently recovered material from the home of the victim which is now being used to blackmail a woman named Hannah, who happens to be the sister of Joshua Gage, an ex-spy for the government. Consequently, he takes an interest in Beatrice, unexpectedly helping her to save her female companion from a kidnap attempt, which was why she was hired as a companion in the first place. The two form an alliance to track down The Bone Man who is evidently behind the murder.

The story was really interesting at first, but after that initial flush of excitement, it settled into a really slow courtship, and the murder and mystery took a complete back seat. It was truly sad. I was really into it to begin with, but then there was nothing to hold my interest. It was like reading someone's diary which after the initial excitement becomes diarrhea because it turns out that their life is less interesting than your own and kind of stinks, to boot. I can't recommend this.

Lillian's Right to Vote by Jonah Winter, Shane W Evans

Rating: WORTHY!

Yes, it's definitely Jonah month on my blog. I've not only reviewed two novels with characters named Jonah, I now have a young children's picture book penned by a Jonah! This one is about exercising your right to vote. I remember some time ago someone coming to my door trying to 'get out the vote', and I expressed my refusal to do so, and she tried to lecture me that it was my duty to vote. No, it's my right to vote. It's my duty to exercise that vote or withhold it according to my conscience, and that year I was not going to hypocritically vote for person A simply to deny person B, when I couldn't stand A or B!

Lillian is a black female senior citizen - based on real life Lillian Allen (no, not that Lillian Allen, the other one) - and even though it means climbing this huge hill at her age, she is going to vote. When she looks up that hill into the blue sky, Lillian sees more than an opportunity to share in governance; she sees her great-great grandparents being sold in front of that same courthouse, where only white men were allowed to vote.

As Jonah Winter's writing is stirring, Shane Evans's artwork is rich, and intriguing, carrying an illusion of texture, just as the voting system carried an illusion of equality. It doesn't matter how impressive it is that a law was passed way back in 1870 denying exclusion based on race, color or previous condition of servitude, if the right people make the wrong decisions, the vote is lost.

This was the fifteenth amendment to the US constitution - the constitution which the founding fathers supposedly did such a brilliant job on! If the white folks in power could find a way to prevent the colored folks from voting, they found it and used it. They still do. Poll taxes may no longer be valid, but other methods are used now. Because the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, women didn't get the vote until the nineteenth amendment, half a century later!

Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, this book makes for a really good read. It's an important piece of history and well-worth reading to your children. I recommend it, but what I would like to see is a book like this about true empowerment, because despite bullshit web sites which claim to show that one vote is important, it really isn't. Lots of one votes pulling together are very important, but one, by itself, in an election where there are thousands of votes, makes no difference, not when your only voting options are limited to those with money, and essentially to an unchanging binary "choice" between A or B, since few who don't kow-tow to those two major parties ever get elected. It makes no difference even if your vote does count if it's really a vote for those who kiss the asses of lobbyists for big business - monkey business which can and does derail pristine legislation.

What I'd like to see is a story about how a child can grow up and become an honest, independent representative, voting for what's best for the nation regardless of what vested interests try to rationalize.

Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical by Sherie M Randolph

Rating: WORTHY!

Florynce Kennedy died at a ripe old age on the winter solstice of 2000. She had led a long life of feminism, black activism, and radical advocacy. She didn't lead a perfect life (no one does!) and this author doesn't try to pretend she did, which is nice. It's nice that we see Kennedy in all her glory - and lack of it - but one thing I missed was context. The author writes this as almost a series of cameos or vignettes of Kennedy's life, but it's oddly divorced from her times. We're catapulted from one instance to another, rather like character David Rice in the 2008 movie Jumper, with nothing in between and with changing backgrounds none of which are really explored in too much detail - or any at all in some cases.

That said, we do get a choice series of snapshots view of Kennedy - a woman I would never have heard of were it not for this book, and I would have been the worse for it. We see Kennedy organizing and protesting, or attending meetings or organizing them, and we see her unjustly arrested by racist police, and starting up some organization or other, including her own law firm as a black female lawyer in an era of appalling racism and white male chauvinism. In 1940 there were only 57 black female lawyers in the entire USA. By 1950, two years before Kennedy passed the bar, there were only 83. She was a rough in the diamond.

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We learn that Kennedy was one of five daughters in a relatively well to do - but still appallingly poor - family in Kansas, and pretty much her earliest big memory is a gang of white men coming to the door and trying to intimidate the Kennedys into moving from their own home, which Wiley Kennedy, the girls' father, owned outright. Her mother was a strong, independent woman who had no more problem standing up to these men than she did leaving her husband to better her life and that of her daughters, even when her husband wasn't a bad guy. It was this mom who informed Kennedy on the kind of woman she herself wanted to be, and she took this and ran with it when she moved to New York City and put herself through law school against the odds (yes, she's the tiny black face hidden away down the row of white male faces in her law class in one photograph included in this book) and determined for herself what kind of life she'd lead, even if it meant, at times, supporting violent radicals.

It led her into law, into representing the challenged and trodden down, and into deciding that the law wasn't going to do enough (or even anything!) by itself, which is when she got "radical" and started speaking up. The thing is her views were radical then. They're mainstream now - that skin color and gender should not be relevant when it comes to pay and fair treatment. That the big picture is a much better one to keep in mind than endless minor details when it comes to reforming injustices, and that you cannot divorce one struggle for equality from another when you're dealing with an entrenched and biased authority structure.

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This book not only misses a chance to place her in a solid context, it also really leaves us in the dark about the woman's personal life. We learn of her marriage and divorce, and of the absconding with over fifty thousand dollars by one of her law "partners", a sum which Kennedy worked for twenty years to pay back, but we really don't get a lot of the person except i'on the context of her radicalism and activities. I think that the book suffered for that; it would have been nice to have seen more of the woman that underlay the activism, because as interesting and important as that was, it wasn't all that she was. For example, Kennedy acted in a least two films: 1970's The Landlord, and 1983's Born In Flames, but you would never know that from this book.

That said, this still worth reading, even if we get somewhat obscure quotes from Kennedy of this nature: "...law school made me see clearly for the first time how the law was used to maintain the bullshit rather than to change things, that justice was really a crock of shit." I don't know if she meant by that, that those who make the laws maintain the bullshit, or the law itself maintains it, because that's exactly what law is supposed to do - not bullshit per se, but status quo. It's the lawmakers who are at fault if the law fails to do the job properly. The actual laws themselves are precisely intended to define and maintain status quo! A Lawyer ought to know that! But this is a minor quibble.

Another such quibble is this one weird sentence: "In the summer of 1964, Kennedy was one of several black and white women..." Forget the oddity of the ideas of a "black and white woman" - that's just ill-advised grammar - but this sentence was intended to convey that a group of woman, not all of the same race, attended a function. A majority of white people might well assume that the women were white, so once we know that Kennedy is among them, we know the group is composed of black and white people, but this appeared right after a bit on Kennedy's frustration with some fictitious attackers being characterized by race! It seemed like an odd juxtaposition to specify race here when it was the problem beforehand! Again, a minor oddity related to writing.

So, overall, I consider this to be a worthy and informative read, whether or not you like the subject of this biography or agree with all of her views!

A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

Rating: WARTY!

This is a Sherlock Holmes knock-off without Sherlock or any of his better traits. The main character here is Charles Lenox, who is far more sluggish than Sherlock Holmes, and has no close confidante with whom to share his speculations. Indeed, speculation is all he seems to have, because although he notices clues and picks up on things others do not, he also fails to make much progress, plunging this novel into the doldrums in the middle third. He has several suspects, but we're never really given any information as to why he suspects them - or if we were, I missed it somehow. He seems to have selected them on basis of opportunity alone, with the two slices of bread in this MOM sandwich - means and motive, not in play at all. Hence he spends too long sitting around speculating, and very little time searching for further clues, or pursuing other inquiries. It quickly became tedious to read.

He also has no killer instinct. At one point he's questioning a suspect who has a burn mark on his arm, yet he fails to ask him about it - supposedly, we're told, because he feels the man will not answer truthfully. He resolves to ask him later, but offers no reason - other than, it seems, the author's desire to withhold clues from the reader - as to why he might be more truthful later when he's more confident of getting away with whatever deception he has going, than he was then. His pursuit of enquiries with other suspects and knowledgeable individuals seems lackluster and half-hearted. The comparison with Holmes matches on pretty much all fronts except for the most important ones: he's tall, he's thin, he smokes, he's of independent means, he loves solving crimes, and he has a smart brother, but practically, he's not a patch on Holmes and nowhere near as interesting, but every bit as fristrating.

I got the impression that this was taking place in January. Although no date was specified, there was frequent mention of cold and snow, and no mention of approaching Christmas, yet when it came to sunset, it was noted that it was approaching at five pm, whereas in London in January, sunset is at 4pm in the early part of the month, increasing towards five pm, but never quite getting there as the month drifts by. With smog and overcast, snowy weather, the sunset wouldn't change of course, but it would grow darker earlier. It could have been February, of course, but it was a little odd to have no idea of when it was other than the year.

There was a problem with the timing at the end of chapter 31 as compared with the start of chapter 32. In 31, we're told that dinner lasted two hours and then, according to the text, dancing began almost immediately - at least, there is no indication that any significant time passed, much less a whole hour, but in 32, we're told that the ball commenced an hour after dinner. Maybe the events in the penultimate paragraph of 31 occupied an hour, but it didn't feel like it. It's no big deal, but it does jar in a novel where readers are predisposed to look for anomalies!

After a second death, Lenox helps to obliterate all the evidence by moving the body! How irresponsible is that? Yes, I get that crime scenes were not considered inviolable as they rightfully are now, but to have Lenox do this - indeed, instigate it - makes him look like an idiot. He has no right to interfere with police business like this. It makes him look like a meddlesome busybody which isn't something you want to do to your hero in a novel like this.

It was at this point, slightly over two-thirds the way into this story, that I quit reading it. I had been slowly losing interest for the previous third, and this was the final straw that made me decide I could be reading something more engaging and more fulfilling. Life is too short to spend it reading something that doesn't wholly engross you. By this point I had no interest in any of the characters, and no interest whatsoever in whodunnit.

I cannot recommend this unless you're into really slow novels that take forever to get to the point.