Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling

Rating: WORTHY!

It occurred to me that, despite having read all seven of the Potter canon many years ago, that have never reviewed them in this blog! The thing is that it felt stupid reviewing a series of novels which pretty much everyone in the western world (and many a one in the east) has read or at least heard of, so I decided to do a different kind of review for this series.

I always maintain that a writer can get away with pretty much anything with me; as long as they write me a story that's engrossing and has interesting characters, I will overlook plot holes and even a goodly number of spelling or grammar errors. Just entertain me. So the plan here is to look at the plot holes and other problems with this Harry Potter launch vehicle, and later with the other six books. In doing this, we'll see that despite some pathetic problems and hellish holes, and despite her views on transgendered people being less than intelligent, she definitely got the job done with her writing here.

The main character is now so well-known as a heroic figure that it may well have escaped readers what a loser he is. Harry Potter is one of the most selfish, lazy, and stupid main characters ever created, which we shall see as I work through all seven volumes. He has very poor self control, few smarts, and no work ethic whatsoever. He's completely unmotivated and he blithely squanders pretty much every chance he's given.

He will not take advice, will not learn, and flatly refuses to take the golden opportunities to educate himself that are endlessly laid in his lap. He shows little curiosity about the world around him, even though it is quite literally magical. Everything is laid out for him on a platter, yet he does nothing save waste his time and indulge in self-obsessive meanderings. He refuses to follow rules and refuses to ask for help even when it's there for the taking. Yet Rowling turned this guy into a hero!

To be fair to him, he did start out life in one of the most lousy ways imaginable, and we can thank that other loser at Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, for that tragedy. Dumbledore and Hogwarts consistently failed students, and Harry in particular, by offering a lousy education which ill-prepared them for the dangers which came crashing down on the school in volumes six and seven.

The first problem with this book is Harry's personal circumstances, and this is two-fold. This whole thing with Harry and his survival is centered around the protection of love - the love of his parents for him, and in particular the love of his mom, to stand in front of Voldemort's wand and take the deadly curse herself. This never made any sense to me. Not that a parent wouldn't do whatever it takes to protect their child - that's a given for any even half-way decent parent. This is a problem in itself, but not one I'm discussing right here. So what is it then? And why am I asking you, when this is my thesis?!

The problem is that Harry was not the only child in the world, and Lily was not the only mom. The story indicates that scores, if not hundreds of parents and children were killed, yet Jo Rowling would have us believe that not a single one of those parents loved any of their children like Lily loved Harry, and therefore not one of those parents could put a protective 'spell' around their child like Lily did. I call bullshit on that one - a big stinking pile of it. It's highly insulting to parents and yet this is the most basic premise of the entire Potter septalogy! Shame on Rowling for her implicit assertion that all parents save Harry's are deadbeat parents.

The corollary to this is that Harry has to be ensconced with his caricature of an aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley, and with their even more caricatured and fat-shamed son, Dudley. Now remember, the core of the story here is the protective love of family, yet these three wretched people thoroughly hate and detest Harry, so where's the protection? And if the protection of these two surrogate parents - who loathe their nephew - is sufficient (because they're family) to provide protection, how come so many others do not get that same protection when Voldemort revivifies himself? Again, it makes no sense and it's insulting! It's insulting to parents and even to the very definition of love!

Rowling herself is rather abusive here in that she's very unkindly equating obesity with evil. Obesity is an evil, health-wise, but overweight people are not automatically cruel and hateful people. Again, it's insultingly bad writing: make the antagonist fat and then you don't have to do the work of writing a realistic villain! It also bespeaks badly for Dumbledore, who was the one who dumped Harry into this predicament. Was he not watching over Harry at all, or did he simply not care that Harry was hurting every single day? Dumbledore was a selfish, clueless and cruel man, and it's entirely understandable how he could treat his sister and the rest of his family in the way that he did because he treated Harry in exactly the same way! No surprises there in this series!

I can't help but draw parallels here between what Harry suffers in this seven-volume series, and what the fictional Job suffered in the misplaced Bible story - misplaced because the book of Job really doesn't belong in the Bible canon at all - and especially not if you want people to think kindly of the Biblical god!

But there are parallels. Harry was bereft of his loved ones, he suffered every day, and he got no reward whatsoever in recompense. And Dumbledore, his god, let him suffer. He never lifted a finger to do anything to ease Harry's suffering, not in the eleven years before he arrived at Hogwarts, nor in the six years he knew Harry as a student.

Actually, if we're drawing Biblical parallels, Harry is more like Jesus Christ, spending his forty days (or in Harry's case, a decade) in the wilderness before he begins his ministry at Hogwarts, leading to his sacrifice to the evil Voldemort, so that evil can be defeated and the people can find salvation in his resurrection. Harry, Ron, and Hermione, became Royalty: HRH!

I found it odd - through amusing - when the letters began arriving. Clearly whoever was sending them knew that Harry wasn't getting them because they kept coming, yet never once did a letter pop into existence in Harry's hands in the privacy of his cupboard under the stairs so he could read it. What was that all about?! This is the first indication we get of how profoundly stupid witches and wizards truly are in Rowling's world (the issue of their absolutely idiotic attempts at "dressing like muggles" I will address later.

Harry's demonstration of magic was also an issue and is a contradiction in the Potter series. The first problem is that Harry can clearly do magic without a wand, so why was a wand even necessary? More on this anon! The second problem is that despite the ministry's restriction on using under-age magic, Harry never once is censured for it before he begins attending Hogwarts. Afterwards, he's censured unreasonably, even psychotically for it, even when it's clearly not his magic - as when Dobby uses it in book two, for example, or when it's for his own defense, as it is in book five. None of this made any sense.

Now you can argue that kids are allowed to get away with it before they attend magic school, but not afterwards, but this makes just as little sense (as we shall see shortly). In the meantime, I have to ask: why is there no magical kindergarten? Why must a child wait until eleven? The answer to that question lies in the British education system.

In Britain there used to be a written exam called the eleven-plus. Each year, kids who had turned eleven in the previous twelve months were tested to determine if they would go to an academically-inclined grammar school, or a vocationally-inclined secondary school. Thankfully that barbaric system has changed now, but Rowling is old enough to have known the older system, and she obviously took it to heart with the launching of a child into a new school at a tender age.

The issue though, is how on Earth do they ever keep this magic from the muggles when kids are randomly performing largely-uncontrolled magical feats for the first decade of their life? Obviously the answer is that it served Rowling's writing and dramatic aims, of course, but rationally, it's a huge hole! Yes, you can try arguing that obliviators went out and fixed things, but seriously? On that scale, and all the time? It's not feasible.

This whole thing is a mess, because we're told that magic isn't allowed outside of Hogwarts, but we're also told how jealous Harry's aunt Petunia became when Harry's mom Lily would come home from school and demonstrate magic to her family. How come she was never censured? And how come magical broom riding was fine outside of school, even for under-aged wizards, yet magical car driving is cause for threats of expulsion?! Plot holes is how!

I have to say I loved Rowling's playfulness and inventiveness with her magical world, silly as it was at times. This is one of the great joys of her stories and what made them seem so inviting and, on a superficial level, so real. I loved her naming conventions in many ways, such as Ron's rat's name, Scabbers, and Sanguini the vampire, and also the names of some of the stores in Diagon Alley - and indeed the name of the alley itself. I especially loved Flourish and Blott's, which I thought was magical for the bookstore. Some of the names fell flat though, and were more like the character names from the Clue game (which used to be called Cluedo in Britain).

One of the first things Harry discovers in Diagon Alley is that he's rich. This sudden acquisition of wealth was weird, to me. First of all, how did James and Lily ever get all that gold in such a short lifetime? Honestly? It seemed like a remarkable amount, and Harry wasn't very generous with it, was he? Yes he bought a bunch of candy on the train that day he traveled with Ron (although a lot less in the book than in the movie), but when Ron had crappy robes for the Yule Ball, Harry never offered to buy him a new set.

Clearly this was done for amusement, and it was funny in a simplistic way, but it really made no sense. These people are wizards, yet neither Ron's family, nor Ron, nor Harry, nor Hermione could swish and flick his robes into something more acceptable? Not credible!

For that matter, this was a wizarding world, so how was it that Ron's family were poor at all? They could turn a rat into a drinking goblet, but not a rock into a golden galleon? How would anyone know? And even if the wizard world knew a real galleon from a transfigured one, no one in the Muggle world would. Why were there no wizards who were making money (literally!) hand over fist?!

In fact, if real gold had a special aura, what was to stop a wizard performing "Accio gold" and extracting the entire world's reserve of real gold from the Earth itself? Again, a huge hole (as indeed it would have been if all that gold were removed!) that everyone was willing to overlook (if they even noticed it) for the sake of enjoying the story. Rowling's novels are shot through with this kind of illogical juxtaposition, yet few questioned it because they were so absorbed in the stories. More credit to Rowling for pulling the wool over people's eyes so expertly!

Now about those bwizard wands: we're told that the wand chooses the wizard, but we're never told how that works, why a wand is necessary, how the wand itself works, or what is the significance of the type of wood, the length of the wand, the flexibility (or otherwise of the wood), or the significance of the magical beast component which is inside it. If a unicorn hair carries the magic, for example, why not have one in your pocket and use that? Why must it be included inside a stick?! Despite the obsession with "wand lore" in volume seven, none of this is ever explained by Rowling - at least, not on the books anyway.

If a wand is necessary, how come some wizards can do magic without one? Some magical stories have got around this by simply saying the wand isn't necessary - it's just a beginner's tool to focus your attention until you can do it without the prop. This was not Rowling's approach, however. In Potter world, wands are important and are said to focus the wizard's spell, but it's really not until the last couple of volumes where Harry's wand becomes central to part of the story line, and even then it's rather overblown! Or just blown.

Apart from that last crucial story line, none of the wand business made sense, but everyone bought into it because it seemed to make sense within the wizardly world. This is actually the vital component, and readers accepted it because it just seemed right - a wizard has a wand - of course he does! Maybe the secret to a good magical story isn't to make sense, but to do just the opposite!

One thing which I actually hadn't registered until volume three, was that a pet or familiar was almost a requirement for wizardry, yet we never saw Hermione (nor any other wizard aside from Harry, Ron, Dumbledore, and Neville) with one until 'Prisoner of Azkaban' when Hermione bought Crookshanks, the cat which terrorized Scabbers. Clearly this was nothing more than a smart tool employed to focus attention on Scabbers. Crookshanks all but disappeared after volume three. But the value or utility of a familiar was never actually explained in any of the volumes despite Hagrid telling Harry that he had to have one, and even buying one for him as a birthday gift.

Platform 9¾ was another very cute and neat little device which made for a fun story by bringing the real world into the story so that kids could go there and imagine the magic going on unseen all around them. Practically, however, it made no sense. Why would the wizards gather at a very public and busy place and start walking through walls?! Why were they not given a port-key each? Why were older wizards not allowed to simply apparate to a point outside the Hogwarts grounds and be picked up from there?

The train never stopped on the way to Hogwarts. The only place it picked up passengers was London. The only place it stopped was Hogsmeade station, so did even those living in the north of Britain have to travel south just so they could travel north again? We were never told. Were there other means of travel, or is this yet another example of how stupid wizards and witches are? Plot hole!

Clearly the train was merely a rather ill-conceived if convenient device for furthering the story even as it made no sense in and of itself. In volume one, this purpose was to allow Harry and Ron to bond, and for Hermione and Malfoy to be introduced. And who doesn't enjoy a good train ride with a promise of something new and perhaps adventurous? I love trains, so this appealed directly to me as I am sure it did to others.

What I didn't get was why Malfoy wanted to befriend Harry Potter at the beginning, but then unaccountably became an implacable foe almost immediately afterwards. This took place on the train in the book, but on the stairs of Hogwarts in the movie, and it made no sense at all for me. I mean I understand the hatred. Malfoy was from a Death-Eater family which despised Potter for putting their leader, Voldemort, out of action. Why would their son even consider befriending him? Hole!

The sorting hat is a fun thing. I loved it the one time Harry went into Dumbledore's office and the hat said, "Bee in your bonnet Potter?" I thought that was choice. What I didn't get is the tolerance of Slytherin house at Hogwarts. It was legendary how evil that house was, yet it was permitted to exist and everyone in it was pretty much evil. This made no sense at all, rationally speaking. As a writing device, it did provide for the trope high-school conflict - not only for the quidditch games, but for rivalry between Harry and Draco, who stands in as a surrogate for Voldemort when neither Draco's dad nor Voldemort himself are there to present a threatening figure.

Another issue is Harry's scar. He has this lightning bolt on his forehead, of course, and it acts as a lightning rod for Voldemort, but this doesn't explain why Harry didn't get a jolt when he met Quirrell (another great name) in the Leaky Cauldron when he first came with Hagrid to Diagon Alley. You could argue that Voldemort was absent at the time, drinking unicorn blood in the Forbidden Forest, but if that's the case, why did Quirrell baulk at shaking hands with Harry?

This whole business of Voldemort hiding in Quirrell's head and getting away with it is a complete mystery. I find it hard to believe that Harry wasn't in agony from his scar every time he was anywhere near Quirrell, but his scar really didn't take its place (as almost another character!) until later in the series. For that matter how come Dumbledore, the purported greatest wizard ever, could not detect Voldemort - and neither could ex-Death-eater Snape? Snape (Professor Snape, Harry!) made no sense to me, but more on that anon.

If Dumbledore was sharp enough to detect that a robbery was going to take place at Gringotts and the Philosopher's stone was at risk, he surely ought to have detected Voldemort, but given that he had the "sorcerer's" stone, and knew it was at risk, there were two problems here.

First of all, why not remove the risk by destroying the stone? There was no problem with this later, so why delay? Assuming the delay was necessary, why were the protections which were put in place to safeguard the stone so pathetic that even a first year student could defeat them? Seriously? Obviously this had to be done so their royal highnesses Harry, Ron, and Hermione - could overcome them, but...plot hole! Plus, why could Voldemort not create his own? Wasn't he supposed to be a powerful wizard second only to Dumbledore? Why did Nicholas Flamel even need it to live to a ripe old age? He was a wizard! Could he not magically prolong his life?

The three-headed dog was a problem, I agree. I mean, how often do you run into one of those even if you're in the business? Yet not a single one of the other protective spells was an issue for any experienced wizard, dark or otherwise. Obviously for the sake of the children's story the protections had to be such that Harry, Ron, and Hermione between them could defeat them, but it was pretty sad and transparent!

Another rather clunky effort was when Harry and Ron go after Hermione when Quirrell sets a troll loose in the "dungeons" (how he ever got a fully-grown mountain troll into Hogwarts in the first place is conveniently glossed over, take note!). We can forgive the impropriety of two young kids running around - that's credible - but I don't get Hermione's confession afterwards. All she had to say was that she got stuck in the bathroom and the boys rescued her, which was the truth. I don't get why she came up with a complete lie - or why none of the teachers noticed she was missing from her classes! So much for magic!

And about that quidditch match where Quirrell tries to unseat Harry from his broom? None of that made any sense. Of all the opportunities Quirrell must have had to harm Harry, he availed himself of none of them and then he tries to hurt him in the most public place with scores and scores of wizards watching?! Plot hole!

The business of Voldemort inhabiting Quirrell, and Snape trying to prevent Quirrell getting the philosopher's sorcerer's stone is a complete mystery. Voldemort is right there. How can he possibly think that Snape is still working for him when Snape is defying Quirrell and saving Harry? This made absolutely no sense at all. Rowling herself realized this because she put a long and boring expository speech at the beginning of volume six, where Snape tries and fails to justify his insane and schizophrenic behavior to Bellatrix. Nonsense! Plot hole! You can't talk your way out of this with such cheap excuses! Voldemort killed people for far lesser offenses, yet somehow he fails to see all that Snape has done to protect Harry?

I don't get why Dumbledore chooses to return the invisibility cloak to Harry when he does. Does he not know that Harry will use it to break rules? Does he not care? Clearly it was a plot device to enable Harry to pursue Rowling's aims for the novel with impunity (and invisibility!), but it really made no sense to give an 11-year-old such a thing when he was in potential danger!

That's almost, but not quite, as irresponsible as sending first year students into the Forbidden Forest as detention punishment. How was this even countenanced?! And with Hagrid, too, who thought nothing of splitting up the group (although differently in the movie from in the book). Again this was a significant problem, but it served the writing and plot. I have to say I was never a fan of Hagrid. He was nothing short of a stupid and dangerous oaf.

Rowling never did explain how it was that Voldemort was reduced to an apparition after he turned Harry unintentionally into the seventh horcrux. Maybe seven is one too many? It's just one of many places where the fabric of the novel runs thin. On the other hand, it's also sad that the title of the novel was changed for the American edition because...what? Americans are too stupid to grasp what a philosopher's stone is? Shame on American publishers!

The problem with Rowling's characters is that she all too frequently overdid them and went straight into caricature - to say nothing of the fact that, while I admit she did not invent the trope, she is very much responsible for every novel that comes out these days where the magical orphan child is the main character. Ugh! Rip-off much? Authors are too afraid that if they stray from the path Rowling dictated their novel will fail? I'm sure Rowling didn't invent that path but she sure enshrined it.

You know one thing that I really don't get about Harry (actually there's a lot I don't get about him) is why he wears those eyeglasses. He's a wizard who lives in a wizarding world - yet there's no cure for short-sightedness? Hermione can repair his eyeglasses but not his eyesight? Madame Pomfrey can re-grow entire bones, but not fix short-sightedness - or for that matter, remove or at least disguise scars?! It makes no sense but once again, Rowling gets away with it.

I already mentioned that I was not a fan of Hagrid. He's a dunderhead who definitely shouldn't teach children, let alone be put in charge of them. Plus his history is bullshit. His wand was broken? Because there sure-as-hell isn't any way a wizard can ever get hold of a new wand is there now?! Not that wands are needed as we see repeatedly, and as Hagrid himself proved by using his umbrella - which was pretty much entirely forgotten after volume one.

Hagrid was supposedly expelled for the incident with the original opening of the chamber of secrets. The wizarding world has veritaserum available to it, yet they never used it on Hagrid? They never used it on Tom Riddle? They never used it on Sirius Black? Huge, huge plot holes. I guess the wizarding world isn't actually very much interested in the truth after all! Either that or once again they're abominably stupid people. This is the problem with magical stories. It's the same with time-travel stories! There is always an out and it leaves large holes in stories if they're not written really well.

Dumbledore is the biggest disaster ever. He tells Harry nothing, not even when he gets older and understands what needs to be done and deserves the truth. He lets Harry live for a decade with the most cruel and wretched people imaginable, because the protection of family supposedly works - with people who hate him? Bullshit! The torment doesn't end even when he gets to Hogwarts. Harry is bullied and abused my Malfoy (who wanted to be his friend?!), and is repeatedly the butt of jokes and taunts from other students, yet Dumbledore never once lifts even one finger to put an end to it or to help Harry out - and neither do the other teachers. And this is the same guy who gives a speech at the end of volume four about friendship and trust. Hypocrite!

Harry is inexplicably abused by Snape, who supposedly loved his mother, yet who clearly hates Harry and delights in bullying him every chance he gets, yet Dumbledore never once censures Snape (Professor Snape, Harry) or tries to protect Harry from him. On the contrary! He deliberately forces Harry to take occlumency lessons from Snape so he can be bullied more in volume five. Dumbledore is without question a bastard who is, in many ways, worse than Voldemort.

Draco is allowed to get away with abuse and bullying beyond anything which is even remotely tolerable in any decent school. He gets away with one thing after another, particularly where Harry is concerned, whereas Harry is brought crashing down for even minor or accidental infractions. None of this made sense, and was actually a solid example of really bad writing designed solely to pluck those heartstrings again. I came out of this seven volume series not liking Harry or Dumbledore.

So volume one rife with plot problems and holes and yet it became a run-away best seller. This just goes to show that if you write an engrossing story with endearing characters, you can get away with murder. It doesn't even have to be really original or make a whole lot of sense. A bit of invention, a bit of plotting, a few wild adventures and you'll get your audience. Rowling did and with huge success! Keep that in mind while writing your own stories!

The Alchemyst by Michael Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first of a series all of which I've read. Anyone who follows this blog (and I know there's one of you!) will know that I am down on series as opposed to down with series. They're almost universally disappointing, unimaginative, and downright boring, but once in a while one comes along that is different and has originality, and engages me throughout. This was one of those rarities. There are problems with it, but I enjoyed it despite those because it does have some interesting stories to tell and Michael Scott, for the most part, tells them well.

Sadly, he doesn't know what an archaeologist is, which is a problem since he likes to remind us that that the parents of the main two Characters, Sophie and Josh Newman, are archaeologists, when in fact they are paleontologists. Archaeologist don't go digging up fossils, which is what the parents do (so we're told in this novel). Paleontologists do that (among other things!).

The subtitle of the novel is "The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel," which has led some people to believe this novel is about him, but it's not. He's in it, but as the subtitle makes quite clear, it's about his secrets, not so much about him. So if you first learned of his name in Harry Potter, first of all, shame on you, and secondly, no, Michael Scott isn't Jo Rowling and this isn't Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. Don't expect it and you won't be disappointed. Besides, you're older now, and you should be demanding something more sophisticated! This book goes beyond that, into gods and goddesses from across the world, and as well as famous characters form history such as Flamel and Shakespeare, nearly all of whom seem to come from the same sort of historical era for some reason! There are osme form other time periods and not all of them make much sense, but this is fiction, remember?!

The basis of the novel is founded upon two things: a dangerous codex (note that it has to be a codex or a scroll - 'book' just doesn't have the oomph!) and twins with secret powers. Yes, Sophie and Josh are fraternal twins - why fraternal and not sororal? Pure genderism! But their twin-ness means they are important to the powers that be.

The main antagonist is John Dee, a charlatan and a scholar from the English Elizabethan era. This is a tired trope, but it's not too bad here. On Josh and Sophie's side is Nicholas Flamel, a seven hundred-year old Frenchman. He has charge of the codex, which can be used to end the world. Why he has not completely destroyed this book goes entirely unexplained. This kind of thing constitutes a huge weakness in this sort of a story. It's like Dr Strange hanging on to the time stone and claiming it's critical, but quite literally doing nothing with it (not after the first movie), and refusing to destroy it despite it being the thing which allows Thanos to destroy half the universe's living things (a flawed plan but let's not get into that). Of course, if this codex were destroyed, then the series would never have got off the ground, so that's really a poor position for a writer to put himself in.

Some might argue that Flamel needs the codex because he uses it to make gold from base metals, and to create a potion for himself and his wife Perenelle, which is what grants them immortality, but then you're arguing that after seven hundred years, he still hasn't memorized these 'recipes' - things he does once a month? For seven hundred years? You're arguing that he has never once thought of simply tearing out just those two pages, or copying them, and destroying the rest of the book?? This tells me that Flamel is a moron and every bit as evil as Dee is supposed to be.

The story begins with Sophie and Josh working for the summer in San Francisco, staying with their antiquated aunt, and working summer jobs down town while their "archaeologist" parents are off on a dig. Sophie works at a coffee shop which happens to be directly across the street from where her brother works - in a book store. Everything is fine until one day John Dee turns up with a couple of golems in tow, having finally tracked Flamel down (his mistake was to keep opening bookstores and using names like Nick Fleming!). Now Dee is demanding the codex. He gets his wish, but as Nick, Sophie, and Josh escape, Josh realizes that he has the last two pages of the codex, without which Dee cannot complete his sorcery. Really? But the chase is on!

Dee manages to capture Perenelle, and the other three resort to a friend of Nick's named Scathaich, a warrior woman who teaches martial arts. She's kick-ass, but she's in the story - and the series - far too little for my taste. The story pursues Dee and the codex and is very entertaining if you don't take it too seriously. I commend it.

The Magician by Michael Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume two of the series. In volume one, the two young heroes of the story, twins Josh and Sophie, traveled to France and met the aged Nicholas Flamel and his wife Perenelle (who was imprisoned by the bad guys in volume one and spends this entire volume on Alcatraz). This volume continues from there and in it, delving quite deeply into Norse mythology. Sophie begins to learn the use of fire magic, and Josh seems to have no magical powers at all, which affects her character throughout the volume.

Why the one has power - and that particular power - and the other none isn't really explained - not that I recall, but it's been a while since I read this so my recollection may be faulty. Josh does get a nifty stone sword later -which has its own power - and the gift of military knowledge. You can call 'sexism' on the girl getting the magic and the boy the martial gifts if you like, and you can certainly call out Josh for being a little whiny bitch in this volume. There are ways to make him consider going over to the other side without making him quite so obnoxious, but I guess the author didn't know that.

There's a lot more action in this volume since all the set-up has been completed in volume 1, and a lot of new characters show up including some Valkyries who have a grudge against Scathaich. I commend this as a worthy read.

The Sorceress by Michael Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

The title refers to Nicholas Flamel's wife Perenelle, who really comes into her own in this volume, which takes place largely in England, except the bits dealing with her escape - finally! - from Alcatraz, which seems not to be a tourist destination in this world. Josh loses his sword, Clarent, which Dee gets and unites it with his own sword, Excalibur, to create a new all-powerful weapon. Flamel and the twins meanwhile hook up with a Saracen named Palamedes which provides some military might.

More new characters are introduced, such as Gilgamesh of Epic fame, and meanwhile Niccolò Machiavelli teams up with Billy the kid of all people. That seems to be a serious mismatch. However, this story was also entertaining, so I commend it.

The Necromancer by Michael Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume four brings Nicholas Flamel, his wife Perenelle, and the twins Sophie, and Josh back to San Francisco where the story of this world of gods and immortals began. It starts off in high spirits as we learn that Josh and Sophie aren't the only twins. Scathaich has one known as Aoife, who kidnaps Sophie, who goes with her mistakenly thinking it's Scathaich. Meanwhile Dee is fleeing the Dark Elders who balme hi for his failure to get the codex in its entirety.

Joan of Arc and Scathaich meanwhile are still stuck in the shadow lands and end up alongside the Comte de Saint-Germain, Palamedes and Shakespeare. The swordless Josh gets his chance at fire magic form the master of it: Prometheus of course. The problem is that he's still somewhat disaffected and falls under the spell of Dee. Again, another adventure-filled and entertaining volume.

The Warlock by Michael Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

This volume brings more characters into the story, most notably from Egyptian mythology, such as Anubis, Aten, Isis, and Osiris, but also Hel, Odin's daughter shows up and is nothing like the character from the Marvel movie.

Josh and Sophie and reunited and a terrible hoard of beasts is unleashed by Dee. Sophie gets yet more magical tuition, and learns the Magic of Earth, and also that all magic is really one thing - there are no branches or divisions. Duhh! Even I knew that! She learns all this from her aunt Agnes, who has been suspiciously quiet about her own magical skills. This felt a bit like a betrayal on the part of the author. I mean, really?!

But once again an entertaining and inventive read which I commend.

The Enchantress by Michael Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

The final book in the series takes off right at the end of volume five, and twins, Sophie and Josh Newman travel back in time to a fabled city of the past where they meet their real parents - so they're told - Isis and Osiris, but you should know by this point that nothing is what it seems in this series. It's a bit like an episode of Mission Impossible where people keep pulling their masks off to reveal that they're really someone else.

Sophie heads off to destroy the ancient city which is required in order for civilization to flourish, and Josh sits on a pyramid, which sounds painful - but which might explain his pissy attitude - and discovers that Clarent and Excalibur are actually part of a quartet, which includes Durendal and Joyeuse. Who knew? There are lots of battles, double-crosses, feints and reveals, and so much talk of silver and gold that I expected Burl Ives to show up singing his Christmas song, but he doesn't.

Overall I consider this entire series to be a worthy read.

The Witches of Willow Cove by Josh Roberts

Rating: WARTY!

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

This book was a bit too much like the trope clones that came predictably rolling in post Harry Potter. Unless the author is really going to make an effort to bring something new to the table - something different, something original - then really, what's the point? I know this is aimed at middle grade (and read like it was) and I'm certainly not the intended audience, but to have witches waving sticks and chanting in Latin or worse, chanting in rhyming English, is so old and trite now that it's really not worth reading. Making your protagonist a female Harry Potter and doing the same thing with your villain isn't changing it up enough to get close to an original story.

The worst thing about this novel was the Salem angle. The Salem witch nonsense has been done to death and really, does it show any respect for the poor women who were murdered back then on the blatant religious lie that they were witches? No, it does not. It's shameful to keep dragging that out of the closet. For goodness sake let those poor women rest in peace. Even if the story had been brilliant, it would have tedious to read yet another witch story that tries to set its roots in Salem, but the story wasn't that interesting.

I didn't finish this, but the idea seemed to be that of a long-standing grudge, and so the question became: why was it so long-standing? Why didn't this evil witch carry out her revenge three or four hundred years ago? Why now? There seemed to be no answer to that, unless one popped-up in the very latter part of the story, and even if it did, what was the point of this revenge? It occurred to me that unless this person intended to reincarnate those victims from centuries ago in the bodies of her juvenile witch recruits, this revenge really offered her nothing, and even if she was planning on some reincarnation routine, the question of why now - at this time rather than a few hundred years ago still lacked a good answer.

So for these and other reasons, I quickly grew tired of a story that felt like one I'd read many times already, but under different covers and by different authors, so I did not finish it. I can't commend it based on what I read. There were too may tropes and too many clichés.

Elemental Thief by Rachel Morgan

Rating: WORTHY!

Read wonderfully by Arielle Delisle, this audiobook was delightfully not a first person voice book. The story was entertaining, original, and engrossing. It fell apart rather at the end with main character Ridley Kayne doing some dumb stuff, but overall I enjoyed the book despite it being part of a 'chronicles' series. I'm allergic to books that have 'chronicles' or 'saga', or 'epic' on the cover, and I typically avoid them like the plague, but this one was a very rare exception. It was not sufficiently exceptional though, to make me want to pursue this series. This one volume was quite sufficient.

Ridley and her father live in a world where elemental magic is all around, and it used to be employed by experts to make the world a profitable and enjoyable place, but a decade or so before the story begins, there was a foolish experiment done with the magic, and it caused the system to go haywire - rather like Earth is going haywire right now with climate change, caused by thoughtless, stupid, and selfish human activity. Yes gas guzzling SUV and pickup truck drivers: I'm looking at you. Although you're all amateurs compared with Big Business Republican Complex.

Since Ridley's father was a magical jewelry maker, his family has been leading a semi-impoverished life and though Ridley attends a high class academy, she's shunned by the children of the rich and elite families. Why her father can't continue making jewelry and just not using magic to do it, goes unexplained. Apparently he's retreated from that into selling antiques. That part of the story could have happily done without the trope shunning and bullying. It's so over-traveled in YA stories, and in this case it contributed nothing to the story at all, so why do it? It was just thoughtless and bad writing.

Of course since this is a standard YA story, you know Ridley is a special snowflake. Her magic comes not from nature, but from within herself because she's an elemental. People are supposed to wear a small metal device in their skin which prevents them from employing magic. People without such a device can be identified by drones, and they can be caught and punished, but Ridley cannot wear the amulet. Since the magic is within her, it's like she's allergic to the special metal in the device. She carries it instead, on chain around her neck - illegally so, but it prevents the drones from classifying her as an illegal magic practitioner. Why having this sitting on her skin rather than just under it works for her goes unexplained.

Ridley witnesses a murder but doesn't go to the authorities. She and her father are trying to keep a low profile and Ridley is also a thief - stealing from the rich to help the poor, and using her magic to break into the apartment homes of the rich and famous. But when her friend Shen is implicated in the murder in a doctored drone video, Ridley has to take action. Her situation is complicated by the fact that Archer (yeah, seriously, these characters were named Ridley and Archer), the trope antagonistic rich kid discovers that she stole a figurine from his family home, and now demands she get it back because it's involved in a life or death issue.

So while on the one hand I did like this and commend it as a worthy read, I had multiple writing issues with it, all of them rooted in the fact that it relies far too much on idiotic YA trope garbage instead of stepping away from that. It could have been a much better story, and this is why I'm not interested in pursuing this series. There were several things to dislike even while enjoying the overall story.

One of them was that Ridley really isn't a strong character. She ought to be, given what she does, but she's far too subservient to Archer and you just know there's going to be a romance there, which makes little sense given the reasons behind why she dislikes him so much. I don't like weak female characters - not when they're the main character. I don't mind if they start out weak and find strength as they go, but it seemed like just the opposite was happening here!

On top of that there's the ridiculous trope of having her father call his seventeen year old daughter by a pet name (Riddles - barf!). That happens way too much in these stories. Maybe some readers like it. I don't. If Ridley were two or four years old, then yeah, go with it, but when she's seventeen? It just makes her father look like an idiot and it demeans and belittles your main female character.

On top of that, Ridley didn't seem like she was very smart or inventive. She has this huge magical power on tap, but she never even considers using it to solve her mysteries: to retrieve the figurine, for example, or to destroy evidence that could expose her and many other magic users, or to prevent herself and her father from being kidnapped at one point.

If this had not been a series, experimenting with her magic might have been brought forward and made her a much more interesting character, but precisely because it's a series, this kind of thing - assuming it enters the story at all - is going to be farmed out over far too many volumes, and it will be weakened, and diluted into meaninglessness, undermining the while story and devaluing her character. This is one huge problem with series. I mean, what child wouldn't have experimented with her magic? Yet we're expected to believe that Ridley never did. That makes her dumb. The very antithesis of a special snowflake and an inherent contradiction which devalues the story.

There's one incident where she reflexively saves Archer's life by employing am impressive magical feat, but when she and her father are confronted by these kidnappers, she can't do a damned thing. Why not? It wasn't consistent. Does she love Archer, whom she professes to hate, more than her own father? Is that why she could help the one but not the other? It was little things like that which turned me off the story enough, that I don't want to read any more of this series.

One amusing thing is that with the audiobook, you can speed up the reader's voice and get through it faster. I didn't crank it up to the point where it sounded like a chipmunk is reading it, but my adjustment did, in this case, make the narrator's voice sound a touch waspish and snippy when conveying Ridley's behavior and speech and it was hilarious.

She sounded so frenetic and it amused the hell out of me. Maybe it's just me and my warped sense of humor, but there was this one point where Ridley was explaining about getting an extension to a school project and she said, "I asked for a week's extension, so he gave me a week's extension." I honestly don't know what it was about that, but it made me laugh out loud.

There were other, similar instances that amused or made me LOL, too, so that helped get through this novel and it was something I could not have done were this an ebook or a print book. Maybe I would have ended up not liking the book in a different format, and I sure as hell couldn't have read it in the car while driving! One takes ones little joys where one can, right? Especially in this tragic era of viral plagues. Anyway, I commend this as a worthy read.

The Tethering by Megan O'Russell

Rating: WARTY!

This novel aimed at middle-graders, read like a direct and unimaginative rip-off of Harry Potter. If that's what you want, then this is for you, but be warned that there's literally nothing new here.

There's the almost statutory impoverished orphan boy who has no idea he's a magician, and who accidentally exhibits magical powers. Here he's named Jacob, not Harry, and he learns that he's a wizard, so of course, he's spirited away to a special academy for witches and wizards, where there's a supercilious bully by the name of Malfoy - no, wait, in this version, it's Dexter. He's probably secretly a serial-killer-killer who darkly dreams.

There's the trope magic wand, except here it's called a talisman, and it doesn't have to be a wand. That's about the only real difference I noticed. Jacob has a special relationship with a tree(!) - in this case not a Whomping Willow, but a tree he heals and which then dispenses a twig to him that he uses as a wand. There's a group called the Magi (read Ministry of Magic), and there's a group called the Dragons (read: Death Eaters). Actually I got the impression that Jacob would probably end up joining them - either that or Hermione would - sorry, not Hermione! Here she's named Emilia and she is no doubt the finest witch of her age.

The novel is pretty sad: uninventive, unimaginative, offering nothing new. In it, magic affects electronic devices badly, just like in Harry Potter, but unlike in the Harry Potter stories, nobody seems intent on actually teaching Jacob to do magic. He's pretty much left to self-study, which seems to me to completely undermine the idea of an academy.

Maybe Potter-by-rote was the author's intention, but reading poor clones of existing books does nothing for me. especially since after two days at the academy no one has taught him a damned thing about how to do any magic. Despite this faux air of desperation that's created (that he must learn!), no-one seems interested in actually teaching him. He's sent off by himself to study a book containing magic spells, which are of course actuated by saying words in Latin. Seriously?

I never liked this garbage in the Potter novels. A lot of Rowling's writing made little sense if you began to analyze it, but at least she held it together and told a decently engaging story. This thing with the Latin though, was nonsensical throughout because it essentially said that there could have been no witches or wizards before Latin was invented as a language, even as we're supposed to believe that magic was ancient. Latin is certainly not world's earliest language, so how did witches and wizards (yes, this book insists on the same gender discrimination that Rowling did - but then Rowling thinks there are only two genders). Before Latin there was Etruscan and Greek. Before that was Phoenician. Before that was Egyptian, and before that Sumerian.

Although the terms 'witch', 'wizard' (both of which may derive from the same root) and 'sorcerer' are relatively new, dating back perhaps to the middle ages, the idea of wizardry dates back millennia - to ancient Egypt and beyond. The thing is: how did they ever cast their spells back then without access to the magic of speaking Latin? LOL! And if ordinary Latin words could cast spells even without a wand, how come the ancient Romans weren't known for their magical prowess? None of that makes any freaking sense.

This is why I can't commend this book as a worthy read. Middle-graders deserve better.

Thornfruit by Felicia Davin

Rating: WARTY!

The cover if this book is misleading because it shows the title as two words whereas in the book itself it's a single word. Shame on the cover designer. I loved the title just like I loved the idea of the book - a fantasy LGBTQIA story. Not common, and the uncommon is what often attracts me even when it's a magical fantasy, which normally doesn't attract me. I have to say I was disappointed with it though, particularly with the non-ending. I knew going into this that it was the first of a series, and me and series do not get along. There have been very few series that have made sense to me or kept my interest, but I do live in hopes of finding another that I will enjoy.

Alas it was not this one. It's depressing to be so often disappointed. The main problem is that the story really went nowhere and took its sweet time doing it, so all we got was a prologue, not a real story in and of itself. It ended on a sort of a cliffhanger and I can't forgive an author for that. Not when they say, "Hey! Pay for another book and I'll tell you the story I promised to give you in this volume. Screw that! It's too mercenary for my taste and I despise authors who do that. There was also far too many characters popping in and out of the story to try and keep track of, and they began to run into one another and become indistinguishable after a while.

Although the series name, "The Gardener's Hand" did not register at all because it had zero whatsoever to do with this volume from what I could see, I liked the title because it perfectly encapsulated the story of these two girls who meet in the fantasy land. They were an interesting couple to begin with, and for a while I was falling in love with them, but the more the story dragged on with nothing really happening, and it seemingly going nowhere, the more disillusioned I became, and in the end I honestly didn't care any more what happened to these two girls.

Despite intriguing me and leading me to read this novel, the book blurb, I have to say, lied! It begins by claiming that main character Alizhan can't see faces, but that's not true. She sees perfectly well, but she can't make sense of people's emotions from their faces. There is a real medical condition similar to this, called Prosopagnosia, but Alizhan doesn't quite suffer that. Her problem is that a face is simply a blank arrangement of eyes, nose and mouth, and she can read nothing from it. She can read minds though, so the blurb did get that right. Evreyet Umarsad aka 'Ev', is the other main character. She has no special talent and no friends because she's part Adappi - meaning her father is from Adappyr, and her kind are not well-liked. She lives with mom and dad in her mother's homeland close to the large port city of Laalvur.

Alizhan works as a professional thief and mind-reader for a city leading "family" headed by Iriyat who seems to have a soft spot for Alizhan, who has no idea of friends either until she begins to connect with Ev, and the two are drawn to each other. I liked that their relationship was a slow burn to begin with, but the more I read of the story the more I realized that this burn was so slow that it was nothing more than a fizzle. It goes nowhere in this volume, and I was truly disappointed that they failed to make a better connection than they did. I expected more and resented that the reader was denied this. That, the slowness of the pace, and the non-ending, are why I cannot rate this as a worthy read.

This is a problem with series. What ought to be said in one volume is puffed and padded, and spread out over three volumes and it becomes a tedious read. That's exactly what has happened here. The whole plot is of Iriyat's experiments on kids who are just like Alizhan despite her apparent attachment to Alizhan herself. It should not have taken a whole novel to get there and it really dragged at times. Just when I thought something was going to happen, or change, or move, we got served more of the same, and the story went into the doldrums again, becalmed with no wind in the sails. It was annoying and was certainly a case where 'rock the boat' ought to have been the watchword. I can't commend this and I'm done with this series and this author.

Show Me Cool Magic by Jake Banfield

Rating: WORTHY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi

Rating: WARTY!

I'd heard of this author from one source or another but never read anything by her that I can recall until I listened to this audiobook. I made it to slightly over halfway through before I DNF'd it because of the fact that it was by turns irritating and engaging. On the one hand there were parts that were inventive and amusing (it's similar in outlook to Robert Rodriguez's Sharkboy and Lavagirl, although more magical and less action-adventure).

My problem with it was that the two main characters were simply not likeable. Alice is dumb and petulant, and I was willing to put up with this if she started showing improvement, which she did, before having a major relapse. That was it for me. Oliver was completely obnoxious from the start and he never did grow on me. The story is set in a land where magic is used, and Alice of course is the one without magic. Yes, she was Alice Potter in Wonderland. Her father has disappeared and Oliver makes a deal with her to enter a different land where he knows her father is, but he cannot free him without Alice's help, so the two set off.

All rules of logic and normality are out the window in this land, and while that at times was intriguing, the more I heard of it, the more stupid it became. The real problem though, was that Oliver never once prepared Alice for what they faced. Even though he had been there before and knew exactly what to expect, he gave her, if anything at all, the bare minimum of information, and Alice was too dumb even to adhere to that. Oliver was just a jerk, period. For example, one of the few things he did warn Alice about was that she could not eat anything in this land, but he never brought any food along with them. Go figure.

He became a major irritant to me, and at one point Alice seemed to be wising-up to his major failings, but she never took him to task over his miserly dissemination of information and worse, she failed repeatedly to heed it, despite witnessing first-hand the consequences of ignoring it. She was stupid. Around the halfway mark I decided I could not stand to read any more about this couple, and that was that. I cannot commend it based on the fifty percent of it that I experienced.

Spellbound by Blake Charlton

Rating: WARTY!

There's not much to say about this that I didn't cover in the negative review of volume one of this trilogy. In volume two we abandoned Nicodemus altogether at least as far as I read, which was not very far because, despite a really quite engaging beginning, it rapidly descended into one of those love-hate romances which I despise.

It's set ten tears after the first volume, which struck me as very strange, and Nicodemus, the boy wizard who lived from the first volume, was barely mentioned, much less actually appeared in the part I read. After a great start, the story began obsessing on this healer woman named Francesca DeVega, who had interested me to begin with, but who then became involved in this 'roguish' pilot who reappeared in her life, and I couldn't stand to read this anymore. Based on my short acquaintanceship, I cannot recommend this, and I'm done with this dreary and unimaginative author.

Spellwright by Blake Charlton

Rating: WARTY!

I picked up the sequel to this without realizing it was a sequel - once again Big Publishing™ failed to disclose on the front cover that it was volume two of a trilogy. Despite this dishonesty, I started reading it and enjoyed the opening chapter, so I decided to get the previous volume - this volume - from the library and read that one first. I ended up enjoying it sufficiently to want to go back to volume two and continue reading that, although the entire story was rather ponderous and overall left a bad taste.

In this volume we're introduced to Nicodemus who is the usual hobbled wizard in this kind of story. In his case though it has a twist in that spells (for reasons which went unexplained) are wrought in the muscles of the body and involve words which then migrate to the hands where they can be used. Bizarre, yes, but that's how it was. So Nicodemus's problem was that he was dyslexic, and therefore could not cast spells reliably - and sometimes cast them dangerously. He was the Seamus Finnigan of this story. Harry Potter's Finnigan may well have been named after Seamus Finnegan, an Irish playwright, but Nicodemus was initially interesting to me because of this twist.

As is the case in most every wizarding story, Nicodemus was the savior of the world because of his 'defective' condition. He'd been rendered this way because some other wizard was sucking the magic out of him. Albus Dumbledore - er, the aging wizard - who has taken a special interest in Harry - er Nicodemus - of course keeps him in the dark, so when all hell breaks loose, Nicodemus doesn't have a clue and has to figure it out himself with the aid of his male and female companions, one of whom is a powerful wizard herself, and just like in Harry Potter, friends are being murdered, and Nicodemus has to go on the run. Unlike with the Rowling stories, this all happens in book one.

here's something I've warned about before. The problem with pronouncing the word 'shone' as 'shown' instead of pronouncing it like you'd pronounce 'one' ('shonn'), as many Americans do, is that sometimes it bites back. On one page, I believe in this volume, but perhaps in volume one, I read, "A wall of silvery text shown down from the other side of the door..." Clearly this was intended to be 'shone down'. Not 'shown', but when pronounced incompetently, leads to a different word and a different meaning! Beware the language, fellow writers! Rein it in before it rains on you (or at least that's what it will tell you is falling on your back...).

So apart from the dyslexia which I found interesting, there really was nothing new here that we haven't seen before. I was able to read all of this and get back to volume two, but things continued to go downhill, only more rapidly. On that basis, I'm going to rate this negatively because it really didn't live up to its potential, it was boring in parts and brought to the table very little that was fresh. I cannot commend it, especially in light of how volume two went.

Garden Princess by Kristin Kladstrup

Rating: a warty reading experience! See below:

I can't rate this entire thing because I couldn't really listen to it. I got it from the library on CDs, and when I tried to play it, the first five tracks didn't work, so that was chapter one unlistenable. Consequently I started at chapter two. The next two disks I barely heard because I was driving in pain-in-the-butt traffic and was more focused on that than on the disk. The fourth disk I had under perfect listening conditions, but it was also defective, so I decided to give up on this and maybe revisit it in print!

I couldn't see anything wrong with disk four except a minor scratch which didn't seem to account for the problems it had. I'd suspect that the lens on the player is dirty, but it played two and three without problems. It turned out that the first disk wouldn't play because there was what appeared to be a melted section of the disk - like it'd had a magnifying glass focusing sunlight on it in this one spot about a half inch in dimeter, which appeared very slightly bubbled. Just bad all around. Like I said, I may get back to this later in some other format!

The story, very briefly, is that Princess Adela who admirably wants to live a life before she settles down to marriage, and who is so interested in nature that she can't keep Botany at Bay! She notes that something seems amiss in Lady Hortensia's garden. Let's not get into how amusing the Lady's name is. It's actually not hard to see the issue: every flower is in bloom even though it's October. And no, the garden isn't in Texas! It's not that warm there in October. "Is it possible that Hortensia is a witch and the magpie an enchanted prince?" the blurb asks. Well I'm guessing the cover artist didn't read the blurb since he/she illustrated a Blackbird, not a Magpie. Ahem!

This is a peril of reading - so many formats, so little reliability! Ebooks can have formatting screwed-up (Amazon Kindle I'm looking at you), downloads can get garbled, print books can have torn and misprinted pages, disks can be damaged. Will there ever be a perfect reading medium that doesn't destroy trees, lard up the environment with plastics and other pollutants, or require boatloads of energy? I doubt it. Everything costs something. But you can mitigate effects by for example, using your phone to read ebooks instead of buying a dedicated reader such as a Nook or a Kindle, or by buying used print books - aka recycling! And recycle your own new print books to a library, a school, or to a place like Goodwill that can resell them.

The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"The guard held open the door. Enrique walks inside. Tristan was waiting for him" - seems to be a mix of verb tenses.
"clove of tins" - that's the round way wrong!
"A man from the Italian faction raised his fan. "500,000 to Monsieur Monserro." The Italian faction has a Monsieur?! Not a Signor?
"Enrique pulled a Forged spherical detection device -one of her own inventions -from his pocket. His or hers? Whose invention?
"...there are ways for the Sia formulation to act like a honing mechanism." Homing?
"a triplicate bee goddesses" wrong article.
"Am I pronouncing that correctly, Laila?" "It's Bruh-mah-ree" - these two lines are run together without a carriage return.

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

There was nothing on Net Galley from whence this came, nor appended to the novel itself to indicate this was volume one in a series. Had there been, I wouldn't have request it. I'm not a series person because I don't buy into the popular idea that the only thing better than one novel is three novels all telling the same bloated story. Publishers buy into it because it makes them money and it's getting to the point these days where it seems that you can't sell a novel - particularly if it's a young adult novel - to a publisher unless you can promise them a tree-slaughtering trilogy. This is why I personally have no truck with Big Publishing™ in terms of selling my own work.

I read this authors A Crown of Wishes over a year ago and had the same problem with that that I ended up having with this - a strong start followed by a slow decline into boredom as the story rambled on too long instead of staying on topic and getting to the point. If I'd known that Kirkus had reviewed this positively, it would have saved me some time. They never met a book they didn't like so their reviews are meaningless. Any time I see them gush about a book, I avoid that book like the plague on principle.

Set in 1889 Paris in an alternative universe where magic exists, and only two of the original four powerful magical houses of France remain, the novel follows the story of wannabe house leader Séverin Montagnet-Alarie and his ragtag band consisting of renowned stage performer Laila, artificer and socially-inept Sofia, botanist Tristan, and pretty boy, the Latin Enrique.

The group are thieves, and Séverin seems to think this will lead him back to greatness, especially when he's approached by Hypnos, an alienated childhood friend, and the enigmatic leader of one of the two remaining houses, who offers Séverin a way back to heading his own house for his help in acquiring something for Hypnos. This kind of story has been done before, but here it was given a glaze of bright paint that was fresh enough to initially render it quite appealing, but the more I read, the more translucent that glaze became, and the underlying mess bled through.

I was truly disappointed, but not altogether surprised, therefore by the ending which wasn't an ending. It was dissipated and rambling all over the place when it should have long before come to a satisfactory conclusion. It never did because this wasn't a novel - it was a book-length prologue and I don't do prologues. It never explained the title, either - or if it did, it went by so fast that I missed it. Yes, the crew wore wolf masks on occasion, but why? I have no idea!

I was truly disappointed in the author, and felt robbed of a good story by her. What we got in place of an ending was a cliffhanger, so this and the rambling story-telling turned the whole book around for me in a very negative way. While I'd liked the beginning, the book was way too wordy and draggy and started losing me in the second half, and that ending was the last straw. This is why I don't like to invest my time I reading long novels! This was nearly four hundred pages and only about half of it was worth the reading. The only thing it was missing was a good editor. I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

The Magic Misfits by Neil Patrick Harris

Rating: WARTY!

Neil Patrick Harris is an actor known for Doogie Howser, MD and How I Met Your Mother neither of which show I ever watched. He's also supposedly a magician, but I've never seen him perform. Maybe that latter interest is what made him write this novel aimed at middle-graders, but for me it wasn't very good. Read by the author, it was full of clichéd stereotypes and average writing as well as nonsensical events - that is, they made no sense even within the context of the novel.

The basic plot is about the adventures of a group of misfit kids who have various talents - like one girl is an escape artist and lock picker, and the main kid is a magician. So while I must give kudos to having a handicapped kid as a main character and having prominent, self-motivated female characters (I particularly liked Ridley), the story never rose above its poor to average roots. The villains, for example, including the main kid's uncle (I forget the names of these characters, but make no apology for that - they were very forgettable) were made villainous not through any real villainy, but by having 'greasy hair' or bad breath, or by being overweight. No. I'm sorry, but no.

The story was unrealistic in that there were opportunities for the kids to get the police involved, yet they never did. Obviously in a story like this you want the kids to resolve things without calling in the adult cavalry to the rescue, but if you're going to do that, you need to do the work to make it happen. You can't just lazily have it happen contrary to all logic and sense. For example, the main scheme in this story was this one guy's attempt to steal this huge diamond which for inexplicable reasons was going to be exhibited at this villain's funfair. There he would replace it with a well-crafted fake and Robert's your aunt's husband.

These kids had two golden opportunities to derail this scheme and they ignored both of them. The first came when they broke into the villain's hotel room and discovered the fake diamond. If they had stolen that, right then and there, his scheme would have been thwarted, but they don't even consider it. This tells me they're profoundly stupid.

The guy's bathtub was full of stolen property - wallets and jewelry, etc. They could have called the police on him there, got him arrested, and thereby saved the diamond, but they failed to do so. This tells me they're profoundly stupid. Later, at the show where the switch is to take place, they were all in attendance and could have called out that the guy had surreptitiously switched the diamond since, as budding magicians, they knew exactly how he'd done it. There were police right there, but never once did they utter a word. This tells me they're profoundly stupid.

The main character is an orphan who runs away from his evil uncle, and he knows hardship and hunger, yet later in the story, these misfits douse the main villain in breakfasts - lots of eggs, syrup and pancakes, I don't know where they got this from, (I guess I tuned-out on that part), but the fact that not one of these kids thought of what a waste this was when there were hungry kids who could have eaten it, turned me off the whole story. If they'd used food that was spoiled and tossed out by some restaurant, that would have fixed this issue, but the author was too thoughtless or careless to make that happen, evidently thinking solely of slapstick instead of how real kids in this situation would have thought or felt.

In short it was really poor, amateur writing, and because of this, I can't commend this one. It's also, I have to say, really annoying that celebrities get a free pass with Big Publishing™ for no other reason than that they're celebrities, even though as writers, they suck. Meanwhile there are perfectly good, well-written, original, inventive, novels from unknowns which are routinely rejected by these same publishers. Clearly they aren't interested in good books, only in fast bucks. That's why I will have no truck with Big Publishing™.

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Rating: WARTY!

It's my policy never to read books with pretentious words like 'Chronicles' or Cycle' or 'Saga' in their title, but this one slipped under my radar. It wasn't until I was almost finished with the novel that I realized it was part of 'The Raven Cycle'. Yuk! The thing is that while I did initially enjoy this particular volume, it was painfully slow, and when I discovered it was not even going to reach a conclusion, I began losing faith in it.

After I listened to the weak ending, I could no longer support it positively. If the author had moved things along, she could have included the entire four book 'cycle' in one volume, I suspect, made a great story out of it, and saved trees into the bargain.

As for me, I will serve the word! I'm not going to indulge the rip-off attitude of 'why write one novel when you can spin it into three or four?' which seems to pervade the fiction world these days. This is nothing but a conspiracy among publishers to milk money from suckers, and I refuse to be a part of it, which is why I personally will never write a series. Yes, there are one or two series out there which are worth the reading, but in my opinion they are as rare as a series should be. Not everything needs to be a trilogy. And yes, YA authors, I'm talking to you!

This story is about a young woman with the curious name of Blue Sargent, who isn’t a psychic, while her two eccentric aunts and her mother all are. Father is of course absent from her life, because god forbid we should have a YA character who has both parents in the picture and an otherwise normal life!

We meet Blue when she's out by a derelict church (sitting on a ley line of course) watching the ghosts go by. Blue can’t see them, but she has the ability to amplify signals for her psychic mom to pick up. It’s never explained why they need to go there to see these ghosts which technically aren’t ghosts, but premonitions of those people who will die in the coming year.

Blue never sees anything until this year when she sees this one ghostly guy. When she confronts him and asks who he is, he answers "Gansey." Later, of course she meets him and her mother warns her off him. Blue is instructed that he will die if she kisses him! Who knew Blue was really Poison Ivy?!

She meets him later of course, along with his three close friends. They're all students of the prestigious and snobbish Aglionby school. I only know that's spelled right because it's on the back cover. I listened to this on audio read by Will Patton, one of my favorite actors, and who did a great job. On audio though, it sounded like Aglin-B, like Zyclon-B - one of the gases used in the death camps by Nazis in World War Two, so I could not take that name seriously as a school! Sorry! My imagination gets out of hand often which, as a writer, is actually a good thing!

Anyway, the first of these friends is the unimaginatively-named Ronan, who is such a cliché that I did not like his character at all. I am so tired of USA authors writing about Irish characters and Ireland with such a condescending and unimaginative tone. Ronan is a stereotypical Irish boy who fights - physically - with his domineering brother who is unimaginatively named Declan.

Adam is a retiring, impoverished boy who has to work other jobs to finance his time at the school, and whose father is a brutal jerk. Noah is even more retiring than Adam and there's a reason for this, we learn towards the end of the novel. Richard Gansey is obsessed with tracing ley lines, and even more obsessed with finding the body of a Welshman. So why look in Virginia instead of in Cymru?

Owain Glyn Dŵr, often anglicized as Owen Glendower, but pronounced more like Oh-wayne Glin Duhr, was the last Welsh-born Prince of Wales, who came off poorly in his uprising against the English (early 15^th century), and spent his twilight years in obscurity. Because of this, legends have grown up around him, including the one that he's not dead but sleeping, like King Arthur, who was actually more of a tribal leader than a king, and who will sleep until his nation needs him, whereupon he will awaken.

Well, that was categorically disproved when Arthur failed to wake up for either of the two World Wars, so I think we can retire that legend! I mean, honestly, of what use will a medieval tribal leader wearing a leather jerkin and carrying a spear be in modern warfare? Will he toss his spear at a Raptor drone?

The asinine conceit of this story is that Glyn Dŵr went to the Americas, despite those not being discovered (or more accurately, rediscovered) until almost a century after he died. Yes, the Vikings knew of the Americas, but it’s unlikely that this information would have found its way to Glyn Dŵr and even if it had, what incentive did he have to abandon his family and move there? None! Although I did develop a theory that Ronan is really Glyn Dŵr in disguise.

This is a problem with readers in the USA: far too many of them are so lamentably and irrevocably provincial that they seem quite loathe to embrace any story that's not set in their homeland. This is why Hollywood lifts so many foreign movies and recasts them in the USA, even if the recasting makes little sense to the story, so this whole Glyn Dŵr angle is nonsensical. You would think someone of Steifvater's stature would have the guts to step away from trope and safety and and set her own course, but I guess she's as unimaginative and chicken as far too many other YA authors.

Anyway, these five (Gansey & co, and Blue) discover a place on a ley line in the forest where time seems mixed up and where a body lies. Here's where the story went downhill because it became obvious all of a sudden who the murder was and what his relationship with the boys and (I believe) also with Blue was. I don't normally catch things like that so it had to be very obvious if even I saw it!

So they story moved slowly, wasn't exactly a mystery, and Blue was a little too subdued and passive for my taste for a female lead. I confess I did enjoy parts of the story as far as it went, but overall, I cannot commend it as a worthy read, and it was certainly not something I'm interested in pursuing into another volume.

Wizards of Once by Cressida Cowell

Rating: WORTHY!

The initial of this title spell 'woo', and that's exactly what this is! Magical woo where the warrior princess appears to have magic and the magician prince appears to have warrior skills, and ne'er the twain shall meet - so the rule says, but you know that's not going to happen. This is a new series by the author of the How to Train Your Dragon. I am not a series fan and do not plan on pursuing this since it's for a younger age group than mine, but just this one story was a worthy read as far as it went.

Wizard children come into their magic at thirteen, give or take, but the wizard lord's son Xar hasn't got his. He decides to help things along by capturing a witch and stealing hers. In this book witches are horrid hybrids of birds and people and you do not want to mess with them. The story is that all witches are extinct, but Xar doesn't believe it - and he's right not to. He takes some of his friends and magical creatures out into the Badwoods which are, like in Harry Potter, off limits, along with, like in Harry Potter, a magical sword with special powers, to build a trap to catch a witch, and he ends up meeting the princess warrior of course.

The princess warrior is named Wish and she is on a mission to return her pet magic spoon to the Badwoods and set it free. Here's where the book blurb is clueless. The 'Evil Queen' is wish's mom, and she's not actually evil. There is evil in the castle, but no one is aware of it until Wish and Xar find themselves face to face with it and try to defeat it.This was an audiobook experiment that paid off. David Tenant did an able reading of this novel, although his voice characterizations were sometimes a bit much for my taste. That said, some of them were really amusing. Overall, I found it entertaining enough for a single story; just not for an entire series though. I am not a fan of series! They're boring and derivative, with few exceptions. So I shall recommend this here, and leave that there.