All of a Sudden and Forever by Chris Barton, Nicole Xu

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I had never heard of the survivor elm until I read this book. For all I'd read and seen about the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Building in April of 1995 in Oklahoma city, no one ever mentioned this. That bombing seems so long ago now, and has been so overshadowed by so many things since, that it's easy to forget what far too many people cannot: that 168 people died and left behind them loved ones whose pain didn't end that day with the loss of a life, but began instead.

The elm was almost cut down because it was damaged so badly, and embedded in its branches and trunk was forensic evidence: shrapnel from the blast. But it survived and later, people noticed it blooming. When it fruited, the seeds were collected and cultivated and passed out to those who needed them. Those seedlings grew and sprouted their own harvest, and so the progeny of this tree have spread everywhere now.

The tree itself has become a memorial, and this book is a memorial to that tragedy and the tree that survived it and gave hope and solace to others. This book is tastefully and respectfully written, tells a great true story, and is beautifully illustrated by new artist Nicole Xu who is very talented. Her work can be found online and is a treat to see. I commend this book fully.

A Girl Like Me by Angela Johnson, Nina Crews

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a rip-roaring lion of a book in which young women of color stand up for their right to be whomever they want, and we've never needed that more than we do now with a groping, misogynist of a racist president in office backed by a bunch of weak, white old sheep of 'men' in his party and yes-men of that same aged hue in his cabinet.

Defying the nay-sayers, who tell her she can't fly so high, or swim so far, or climb so strongly, the girl at the heart of these stories carries on not out of rebellion or defiance (that comes later when she goes to by a new cape!), but because she knows without a doubt that she can do do the very things others would have her believe she can't and deny her the right to even try. This is affirmative action at its best! I loved this book, the photo-collage illustrations, the powerful text and the strong females who inhabit this world. Angela Johnson and Nina Crews? You rock!

Mexico Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

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

So another in the Tiny Traveler's series, and if it seems like I'm choosing ones just to annoy the racist president of a certain country I assure you that's not the case....

This one follows the same pattern as the other two I've reviewed today (China and puerto Rico). It features about a dozen colorful illustrations with local language words for various items, places, and customs depicted, and each page contains a search item. The books are bright, engaging, interesting and very educational. Like the other two, I commend this whole-heartedly.

What if Soldiers Fought With Pillows? by Heather Camlot, Serge Bloch

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This book may be a little pie-in-the-sky, but it offers some true stories and some basic truths. Every other pages asks a seemingly silly question, such as what if battle grounds were soccer fields and spectators cheered for every team? Or, What if Navy SEALs balanced balls on their noses? Or what if innocent civilians could be airlifted by music?

When you read the accompanying story, each only a few paragraphs long, you realize that the question is not only not as silly as it initially sounded, but is in fact rooted in a real event. Clowns, rappers, children, and even circus performers have helped to bring peace to troubled areas.

Of course, not every idea is always happy. The question about battle ground and soccer fields talks about the success of the Ivory Coast soccer team in Africa, and how friendly soccer games led to a ceasefire. It carefully ignores the reverse situation where a soccer game ended in two nations going to war (between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969). Of course, the underlying causes went deeper than one soccer game, but it's still a fact of life.

But that's not the focus of this book - and rightly so. Instead it chooses positive as did the people whose stories are told here, and that's the right way to go and a useful and inspiring lesson for children everywhere to learn from and emulate. Our president should read this book! I commend this as a worthy read.

Puerto Rico Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Another fun book in the 'Tiny Travelers' series. This one covers your president's most favorite place to hate (after Africa) - Puerto Rico! That's one reason I chose to review this! Anything he hates, I tend to love - apart from Amazon that is! Once again it's a series of about a dozen beautifully-drawn and gorgeously-colored illustrations, each of which imparts a little knowledge of the location, and a hidden treasure to find.

There's a website and a club to join for anyone who chooses, or you can just stick with the fun books, the poetic descriptions, and the joyful attitude. Either way I commend this as a worthy read!

China Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This book is both an educational trip through China, whose new year - the Year of the Rat started the day this review was posted, so 新年快乐 (shin yin kwai luh - that's happy new year in Chinese)!

The book consists of about a dozen pages of brightly-drawn and nicely-illustrated images of various places and landmarks in China along with happy kids visiting them. Each has interesting facts, along with Chinese words, their English translations and pronunciation, and a hidden treasure to be found.

This book was a fun treasure hunt and an educational trip. I commend it.

Hidden Picture Puzzles at the Zoo by Liz Ball

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is definitely a book for curious kids with sharp eyes and lots of patience for detail! There are some ninety pages of line drawings packed with hidden items and the guide to those items is included right there in the drawing so you don't have to leave the page to check. If you have the print book (my review copy was of course electronic!) you can also color in the picture after you've discovered the items.

Some pictures are single page, others are doubles, and each depicts a different scene in the zoo and contains fun facts about the animals. Those are, as usual, mostly mammals, but some of them are not so common - such as capybaras and tapirs. There are some birds, reptiles, fish, and amphibians included.

This will be a fun book for any kid who likes to play detective.

A Kid's Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals by Vicki Whiting, Jeff Schinkel

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is an easy and straight-forward way to entertain your child - let 'em loose in the zoo...but not just any old zoo: the zoo of the imagination where they get to draw animals all day long. The drawings included in here, by Jeff Schinkel, along with step-by-step instructions and the space right there in the print book to emulate the examples - run the gamut from...well not A, but Bee to T for tiger (or tarantula!), and include an insect or two, a mollusk, a gastropod, and the aforementioned arachnid. Predictably, most of the animals are mammals. I'm not going to say it's a crock, because that would be a misspelling, but there is one dangerous reptile, and one cute fish to horse around with, but no birds.

That said, the animals that are included are quite diverse, and easy to draw even for the inexperienced and lacking-confidence because of the guides to follow. There are hints and tips, and outlines to add faces to existing drawings in one section. Some of the animals are the entire thing, others just faces, and on that score, there's a section with head outlines, and a selection of practice faces full of weird expressions that your kid gets to copy in the blank spaces. There are cats and crocodiles, gorillas and koalas, rats and reindeer. In short, plenty to provide practice skill and the confidence that comes with it.

I think this is a fun and useful book for any budding artist.

Mission ot the Bottom of the Sea by Jan Leyssens, Joachim Sneyers

Rating: WARTY!

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

I have to express disappointment in this book. While on the one hand it does have colorful illustrations by Sneyers and it does tell a true story of underwater exploration in the newly-invented 'bathysphere ('bathy' meaning deep - something the book fails to educate on), the sins of omission are too great to let them go.

The exploration depicted here makes it look like it was all men all the time. There is brief mention of Else Bostelmann as an artist, but it makes no mention that she actually went underwater herself at one point - not in the bathysphere - but with a helmet on to make an oil painting, sitting on a chair on the bottom! I think that's at least worth a mention, but worse than this was the complete omission of any mention of Gloria Hollister, which was part of the expedition and who also took some trips down in the bathysphere herself, setting records for deepest dive by a woman.

While I can get with the idea of a book which educates about exploration like this, I can neither commend nor even condone one that seems dedicated to relegating the female contributors to mere support roles. Young girls need to be allowed to understand that they can do anything the men can do and this books fails disastrously in that regard. It also fails in the publisher's seeming lack of understanding that making it clear that women were involved is a selling-point for female audiences. This books seems like it's a boys-only-club edition, marginalizing the female contributions.

Let's Explore Bread by Jill Colella

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a fun and useful book of less than thirty pages, full of good advice, exploration, and a recipe for bread bears! Who wouldn't want bread bears?! I fell in love with the title to begin with, but the content is equally of value.

Using bright photos for illustration, the short texts describe bread in many varieties and how it's used; there's an experiment you can do, and then comes the bread recipe and that's followed by the bread bear recipe!

It would have been nice to have a word about nutrition content, and whole wheat versus white, things you can add to bread - such as nuts and raises, for example, and also about gluten and gluten-free. Not everyone can enjoy bread as it's so routinely offered in stores, so that felt like it was an opportunity missed in educating as to why baking your own is important, but that aside, this is a fun way to gat kids interested in baking and in eating healthily, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Spending and Saving by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

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

In this third book from the Mary Lindeen collection, the author discusses what to do with all the lovely lucre you've earned from providing the goods and/or services form various careers which were discussed in the previous two books I reviewed today! The others talk about the kinds of opportunities for earning, and what goods and services actually are. The book employs short texts and big colorful photos illustrating the text and tuns to around 30 pages.

It discusses how money is earned and what uses it's put to. There are some things which have to be bought, and others which we choose to buy for fun or entertainment. Some money is spent, and some is saved. The book admirably makes it clear that once the money is spent, it's gone. Children might not grasp that the first time they think about spending, especially if they're some of the kids I see in the grocery store from time to time! Race, circumstances and income are things which kids don't worry overmuch about, so it was nice to see a diversity of people in this book, as it was in all three books I read in this series.

Because the author is a former elementary school teacher, she has wisely set up in the back of the book, a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. I commend this as a worthy read!

Goods and Services by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is another in a series about how people earn and spend or save money. This one goes into some detail (it's about 30 pages long) concerning how people make things to sell (which are the goods), or how they offer a service, and this is what makes the world go round. And here I thought it was simply inertia from the formation of the planet! Just kidding!

The book is colorfully illustrated with photographs and features a diverse 'cast' of people who are growing or making things to sell. It talks about how goods are supplied (from near and far) and transported (trains, and boats, and planes!) and how some services are free, but others cost money.

At the end of the book there's a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. The author is a former elementary school teacher so she knows how this works. I commend this as a worthy read!

Earning Money by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a sweet book about how people earn money: through providing goods and services. Another volume in this series, which I shall also review, explains just what goods and services are, and a third book, which I shall review as well, explains just what to do with that money once it's earned!

Using short text and large colorful photos illustrating that text, the book, with commendable diversity as its watchword, shows a variety of people, such as a farmer, a nurse, a teacher, who pursue different careers to earn their money. The book describes how people can earn in different ways: by providing a service or offering goods, and describes how varied jobs can be: quiet or loud, clean or messy.

We learn that children can also earn money from doing chores (providing a service) or making things (those brownies looked awesome!). The book is short - some 30 pages or so - and very colorful, filled with different people from all walks of life. In the back there's a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. It could be fun to get a bunch of kids to set up a shop together, and offer work and services for cash (Monopoly cash, of course!). They can learn about real life and about managing money. On which score, stay tuned - there are more reviews to come!

The author is a former elementary school teacher so she has this covered! I commend this as a worthy read!

Sing Freedom! by Vanita Oelschlager, Mike DeSantis

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Here's another from the Oelschlager oeuvre, this time illustrated by DeSantis. The story is a true one: of the singing victory of the Estonians over the overbearing Soviet Union as it was known back then (but it was really all Russia). Estonia (called Eesti in Estonian) is one of the Baltic states, and it sits between the other two (Lithuania and Latvia) and the sliver of Baltic sea that separates Estonia from Finland. After World War 2 (like one wasn't more than enough), Russia began subsuming the smaller European nations along its border, and trying to grind them under its heels into subservience.

Estonia was one of the 14 such nations that resented this and always sought to recover its own identity and freedom. They did this in many ways, but in part, it was achieved through a five-yearly festival of song, where they rebelled by singing a nationalist Estonian song, which the Russians did not like. The Estonians would not give up and in the end, they found their freedom during Mikhail Gorbachev's reign.

This book tells a colorful and enjoyable story about this great and peaceful success, and is well worth reading.

Bonyo Bonyo by Vanita Oelschlager, Kristin Blackwood, Mike Blanc

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This begins a stretch of some seventeen children's non-fiction books I shall be reviewing! Deep breath and off we go!

I've had a lot of success with Oelschlager's books, and this was no exception: it was a lot of fun, as well as informative, and interesting book, beautifully illustrated by Blackwood and Blanc. It's a mini-biography of a young boy who was living in Kenya in Eastern Africa, a country lying just below what's known as the horn of Africa. The boy's name is Bonyo Bonyo, and he loved to go to school That's not a given in Africa. Even if you can find a school, you may have to pay to go there.

These school fees may be cheap compared with what a paid education in the US costs, but people are impoverished there, and even what we consider to be a trivial amount in the US can be an insurmountable obstacle in the so-called third world. This is why we can do a lot by contributing even a little to charities which help with people in such situations. Bonyo had a hard time, and had to travel a long way to get his education, but he was determined.

He did so well in school that he got a chance to go to a college in the USA. All he needed was the airfare! Yikes. That was hard to come by, but through work and donations from friends and well-wishers, he eventually achieved his dream and became a doctor, and now he runs a clinic on his home town and also a practice in the USA. Spoiled as we are for good food, clean water, and a free education in the west, it's easy to forget that others are not so fortunate. It's sad that our millionaire president is too selfish and simple to grasp this. This book is an important reminder to those of us who are open to an education.

The book mentions a college in Texas, not a college in Ohio. While I can find no confirmation of the Texas college attendance, I did find an article online that lists the college he attended in Ohio as an osteopathic college. Such is not exactly a complete medical education. Osteopathy can provide some knowledge of human physiology, but it has only a limited application: to bone and muscle health. It's really not a lot of use for the great diversity inherent in practicing general medicine. In a way, it's a bit like chiropractic (and I could tell you a sorry tale about that!), but at least it wasn't homeopathy! However, that's not so important in a children's story because the take-home message here is one of enduring and triumphing, of courage and persistence, which Bonyo exhibited in spectacular fashion. On that basis I commend this as a worthy read.

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

Rating: WORTHY!

This book sounded quite interesting and although it wanders from the octopus often to delve into other topics, it always comes back to the main one and overall, despite an issue or two, I enjoyed this audiobook, read by the author, and commend it as a worthy read. It's for the most part well written, although a bit sentimental and anthropomorphizing at times, and the author has a pleasant and enjoyable reading voice.

The story covers her falling in love with the octopuses (octopods if you must, never octopi), at the Boston Aquarium, and since they're so short-lived - the Pacific giant octopus, which is the mainstay of this book, lives only for four years or so at most, and is biologically programmed to die after caring for the thousands of eggs that she lays. In the main, there were three of these animals discussed throughout the book: Athena, Kali, and Karma, but others were also touched upon - sometimes literally!

At one point I had to question the purpose of bringing these animals from the wild into a zoo to be put on display. There was this one relatively young octopus they named Kali, who featured in a large part of the book. Overnight, she managed to get out of this new tank she'd just been put into that same day, and she died of dehydration and suffocation on the floor at night.

There was a small gap in back of the tank where the water pipe went in, to keep the water refreshed, and she somehow squeezed through that. You have to wonder how intelligent these critters really are when they deliberately leave a safe environment to go into the open air through a two- or three-inch gap. The thing that really bothered me though, was the sheer number of accounts in this book, of this kind of thing happening repeatedly, affecting one species after another. Frankly it was irresponsible of the captors of these animals not to have seen to their welfare better than they did and I'm sorry the author didn't seem angry about it. She was more like, 'Oh well, there goes another octopus. Bring a fresh one in.' It's a little cruel to phrase it like that, but honestly, that was sometimes how it felt to me.

Obviously caring for animals is not an exact science, and things can go wrong. I can imagine if these animals were kept by private owners there would be all kinds of stupid and thoughtless mistakes made and animals dying, but this is the Boston Aquarium staffed by seasoned professionals and the number of incidents was disturbing, like for example, when this electric eel got from its tank into a neighboring one where it electrocuted two prized fish in that tank.

Seriously, did these people never consider keeping the tanks completely isolated from one another? Keeping secure lids on them? At least giving a nod and a wink to Murphy's Law? The saddest thing is that it felt like none of them learned anything from past experience and were therefore condemned to repeat their mistakes. This is incompetence, plain and simple. I sincerely hope other zoos and aquaria take more care.

I can also imagine that Kali's death was an emotional moment for the author after she'd bonded quite strongly with this particular octopus, but the rapidity with which she moved on to Kali's replacement, named Karma, of all things, rather cheapened her mourning period. It was at that point that she put some stuff in the book aimed at justifying going through this parade of wild-captured octopuses.<./p>

She talked about the value of the education that the aquarium does, but she never said a word about pollution or climate change and whether or not the educational experience, for whatever it's worth, that random members of the public get in seeing these animals in captivity, ever really translates into any concrete results in terms of public awareness and support for combatting climate change, or pollution, or in increasing environmentalism.

The absence of something like that undercut the value of her words, because without knowing if that works and produces results it seems fatuous indeed to me to be so devil-may-care about capturing these animals from the wild and then seeing them die in foolish and thoughtless ways. Neither does it do any good to educate people that the giant pacific octopus is really cute, interesting, and harmless if they don't connect its habitat with a polluted and warming ocean. I found that annoying and inappropriate.

I had to ask myself why they aren't breeding these octopuses and repatriating their offspring back to the ocean, or using the bred-in-captivity offspring to populate zoos instead of capturing more from the oceans. That would help to make up for those that are dying in captivity, but she didn't say a word about that either! Overall I got the impression that she was so enamored of the animals that her thoughts really were not free enough to stray very much into the bigger picture, which was truly sad.

That said, the book was educational, although it could have gone a lot further, and it was entertaining. It gave me more of a picture of what's involved in maintaining an exhibit in an aquarium and in how octopuses interact with novelty - including humans sticking their arms into the tanks. It said a lot less about what I was interested in: how intelligent (or dumb!) these animals truly are or what efforts are being made to measure and test that intelligence. I'd hoped for more. This was very much a puff piece - a PR exercise for octopods - but I was reasonably satisfied with what I got, so on that basis I rate it a worthy read.

How to Outline My Novel by Sussi Leclerc

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata:
"Lie to his teeth" - should be lie through his teeth!
"Some characters live double lives like Peter Parker doubling as Spiderman, Bruce Waine and Batman, Buffy Summers the vampire slayer, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde..." Couple of spelling errors in there (Wayne, Jekyll)

That's a great name to have: Sussi Leclerc, who I assume is a French author who did her own translation or maybe wrote it directly in English. It's good English for the most part, a hell of a lot better than (pardon) my French, but I have to say I found this book wanting in several areas. The thing is that while I was intrigued by the premise of the book (which curiously the disclaimer depicts as a work of fiction!), I've never heard of her. I'm far from an encyclopedia of author names, but I've reviewed well over three thousand books on my website and I'd never encountered this name even tangentially. When I looked her up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, I could find literally nothing she had written except a couple of books on how to write novels!

I have to wonder about a person who has no literary track record (unless all her work is in French and not available through two of the major outlets in the English speaking world), yet who promises to tell how to write a novel or, in this case, how to outline one. This seems to be par for the course for this kind of book though: they're always written by people you never heard of. It's very rare to have someone who is well-known - like Stephen King, for example - write a book about writing novels. Not that I'd read his, not being a fan!

If you go online and search for similar topics, such as 'how to write chapter one' for example, you will find the web is also populated with authors you may never have heard of offering advice (replete with cussing and foul language in one case, I'm sorry to report!). Maybe I just have it backwards and maybe those who write novels that become beloved are the worst teachers, and those who have apparently sold none are the best at explaining how to write something. That seems off to me, but what do I know?! I do know I shall never write a 'How To' book, rest assured!

But this is why I was intrigued and decided to review this particular one. Who knows? Maybe I can learn something. I'm always ready, but I should say up front that I'm not a fan of such books, because while you're reading endless books or attending lectures, seminars, and taking courses about writing, you're not actually writing anything yourself!

I'm a fan of reading, in great variety, what others have written and hoping, by a process of osmosis or something, that I can absorb into myself something of what made their book work, and maybe bring it out of me when writing something of my own. This has the same problem I mentioned above though: while you're reading, you're not writing! The thggn is that reading, these days, can be done anywhere, even on a ten-minute visit to the bathroom, or while waiting for a doctor's appointment, or on your lunch-break at work, if you have ebooks on your phone.

You can listen to books while driving, while cooking, while gardening, while exercising, and so on. You don't even need audiobooks to accomplish this these days since your phone will read an ebook to you; not ideally, but it works! At least on an iPhone. It's called VoiceOver and it's a pain, but once you learn to work with it, it does a decent job. The thing is though, you really need to spend at least as much time writing as you do reading.

The other problem with my technique is that one's own work risks becoming nothing more than a sorry clone of what others have written, and that's the most boring writing of all. I mean how many competition-based dystopian trilogies did Suzanne Collins inadvertently spawn when The Hunger Games became a thing? How many tedious vampire vs werewolf novels were tragically spewed-out in the wake of the twilight abomination, which for me signaled the imminent twilight of original novel writing? Such novels are tedious, and the thing is that neither Collins nor the woman who wrote that other novel and who shall remain nameless for her crimes, were copying anyone else (although you can argue that Collins was channeling Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, and the other story was in many ways a rip-off of Stoker's Dracula, but I'm not going to take that detour here.

So the real problem in reading lots of books is that you may fail distill something original from what you've been reading, and end up copying rather than learning the ropes. There is nothing worse than the tired parade of cloned YA novels we've seen over the last decade or two, and I feel that this is a weakness with this particular book, because it seems almost entirely focused on YA material, and in trying to set out rules for writing your own work, it's still playing into that same trope - rather like writing by numbers. That said, you can't simply write any old thing and expect people to embrace it as a literary masterpiece no matter how well it may be structured, because the sad truth is that far too many readers are like sheep in mindlessly buying into the clone publishing industry which rests entirely on woolly thinking.

I was right about this book teaching me something though! I quickly learned this startling revelation: "The main point is the antagonist wants the same thing as the hero, the exact same thing, only he means to get it the wrong way." I'm sorry. I don't have a degree in literature, but didn't Voldemort want to crush non-magicals whereas Harry Potter wanted to support them? Didn't the shark in Jaws want to eat people and the sheriff wanted to save them? Same for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park...and Hannibal Lecter for that matter. And is it so obvious that McMurphy wanted exactly the same thing as Nurse Ratched? Not! I'm sorry, but this struck me as completely off.

The book quickly launches into a series of chapters explaining what needs to happen in the matching chapters of your novel: chapter one should do this, chapter two that, and so on. The author does warn earlier in the book that your mileage may differ, and that in consequence, you may want to change things up a bit to match whatever it is that you're writing, but this 'by rote' (or in this case 'by wrote', maybe?!) approach seems to me to be problematical if people follow it too closely. I felt it was the wrong approach, and risked the reader writing far too rigid a novel in trying to follow this plan, at the potential cost of spoiling what otherwise might have been a free-flowing work of art.

For me this was a weakness. What if your chapters are shorter or longer? If your book has fifty short chapters then surely you can't accomplish the same thing in chapter one that the author advocates here. In such a case, you'd need to calculate the ratio of chapters and try to figure out what proportion of the book you need to get to before you can apply the specific chapter rules listed here. Percentages of the distance through your book would have been a wiser choice. The author did employ these a couple of times, but why not more often, I could not figure out; it would have been less rigid and made a lot more sense.

For me personally, the book advice was made worse by the steady diet of quotes from YA novels. I'm not a huge fan of YA although I've found many books in that category that I've enjoyed. The problem is that I've found far too many more that are precisely what this author appears to be advocating: pedantic cloning of what everyone else has done, and that makes for the most tedious reading material because your novel will sound exactly like every other YA novel in the genre, and what's to differentiate it then? This is not good writing and it sure as hell isn't going to lead to great literature (in the loosest sense of that word).

The author seemed to rotate around The Hunger Games (which I liked), Divergent (which I personally detest), Hex Hall, which I rather liked, but which isn't well known, The Coldest Girl in Cold Town which I've never heard of, a novel by a male author who I shall not identify by novel title or by name because I detest pretension in writing, and Daughter of Smoke and Bone which I liked.

There were others which I'm not listing here because they were mentioned less, but they suffered precisely the same problem: nearly all of them were YA! You will note that the bulk of these I listed are trilogies or series. Even though I liked the beginning volumes of Hex Hall and Daughter of Smoke and Bone, I never actually finished the series in each case because I grew bored; so despite liking some of them, it was annoying to have them constantly brought up.

Worse than this though was that these were all used in a positive sense. There were no negatives in this book! There were no examples of how not to outline your story or how to outline it in a non-standard way and still achieve the same effect. It was like this arbitrarily-structured pattern was the only way to go and I disagree. So do many other authors as judged from the huge variety of stories that are out there.

In this 'How To' book, there was no adjustment for example for short stories, novelettes, or novellas, nor was there any overarching view that could be taken if your novel is written as part of an arc - a trilogy (god forbid), for example. Naturally, you should write each volume with the same basic rules in mind, some of which are espoused here, but if your story is to stretch over three or (god forbid) more novels, then doesn't your overall outlining need to encompass those volumes too? That's a major reason why I found this so strange, to talk of only one volume and then use volume one of a trilogy as an example! It made no sense to me because volume one of any series is nothing more than a prologue. None of that was addressed here.

On a technical note I have to say that the copious quotations from the works listed (and others) and which I quickly took to skipping, were all done in an odd way. Instead of having the text inset to signify it was a block quote, the quotes appeared to be set in shaded squares. Maybe this would look fine in a print book, but in an ebook they didn't work so well. It was exacerbated on my phone because I always set my ebook readers to be a black page with light text rather than the other way around - a white screen with black print.

I do this because it conserves the battery, but it can produce very odd effects in books which try to go any way other than plain vanilla in their layout. What my mode of viewing did to the quotes from these various books was to set the background to little squares of pale gray, and the text to white, making the quotes pretty much illegible. As it happened in this case, this suited me: it made it easier to skip them! Note that these quotes gave major spoilers, so you might want to skip them too if you haven't read the book in question and plan on doing so.

In general the book felt like it had far too many persnickety rules and regulations, and it was far too 'busy' in appearance, making for an unpleasant read. I didn't like the approach it took, and I found it to be too set in its ways. So, while I wish the author all the best in her career, for these and other reasons listed, I have to say I was disappointed in the book, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Chi Running by Danny Dreyer, Katherine Dreyer

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not a runner although I do really need to get back to exercising more this year, but I was intrigued by what this author had to say and in the end I have to report disappointment. My version (more on this anon) is 320 pages of largely fluff, with occasional interesting bits sown throughout, but you have to read very closely and pay attention to catch those bits as they fly by in what seems like nothing but an endless prologue. I've never read a book that seemed so intent upon disguising the very topic it claims to promote.

Let me say up front that all this business about 'chi' and 'prana' and so on is patent bullshit. There is no such thing. If there were, scientists would have found it by now. The author claims early in the book that "Chi...generates movement in the physical world and is that which animates life." If by 'chi' the author means adenosine triphosphate then they're correct. If not, then this is pure nonsense! What's really confusing though is that the B&N website has two print versions of this book, each with a different cover, one having 320 pages, the other having only 288 pages. The one with fewer pages costs two dollars more. Why? It's chi! Don't question it!

None of this necessarily that the author has nothing valuable to say about improving your running technique. For e, the problem was that even when the book confined itself purely to that, it often made no sense. The author at one point was talking about two forces that are claimed to be at play when you run: gravity, and the road! I'm sorry, but these are the same thing. To be more specific, there is only gravity (and yes, there's your kinetic energy as you move forward, but that's not what's being talked about). Gravity is what pulls you to the road, your legs are what propel you up from it. The force of the road is no more than the resistance of it to gravity trying to pull you down to the center of the globe!

Worse, the examples serve only to obfuscate, not clarify. One of the important points that is made is that you should move your feet to support your body, so you land with your foot flat underneath your center of mass, rather than stretch it out to land on your heel or your toe. This is the main secret to preventing leg injuries such as shin splints and knee problems we're told, but the example used here to illustrate it is the Warner Brothers cartoon Road Runner about which the author says "He had a great lean, while his feet are spinning behind him." Now I personally claim no great insight into the Road Runner's gender. The author seems quite certain, but I'll let that go.

The thing is that this idea of the feet behind the body is precisely the opposite of the technique we're supposedly being taught, which insists that your feet land directly under you. That's the chi running technique in a nutshell, FYI: let your body lead, pulling you forward, and as gravity pulls it down to the ground, place your feet directly under your center of mass to keep your body from falling. In this way you can, we're assured, improve your running and avoid injury.

The problem is that you're still moving your legs forward and pushing off the ground and you can only do this with your toes. You do have a certain amount of momentum once you get going, but without that propelling leverage off the ground with your toes on each stride, you will stop! Or fall flat on your face if you quit putting your feet under you. One or the other. The explanation we're given claims that you really don't need to call upon your leg muscles to run, which is nonsensical throughout, and you cannot run without injury if you're trying to propel yourself forward while your foot is flat on the ground. That for sure will injure tendons.

The author doesn't quite get the first law of motion as expressed by Isaac Newton. It's really the definition of inertia, which people too often mistake for a couch potato, but inertia doesn't mean unmoving, it means unchanging in terms of motion: not only things which are sitting still remaining at rest, but also things which are in motion remaining in motion until and unless they're acted on by an unbalanced force. So the author's right in that your body will not move unless you employ your legs to move it (in this scenario), but this is in direct contradiction to claims at other points in the book that you don't need to hit the ground with your feet to propel yourself forward!

There are pictures in the book aimed at illustrating the techniques discussed, but those often are unclear. One of them which was clear refutes this claim about landing on the flat of your foot rather than your heel, because the third picture in the sequence (figure 57) shows the heel of the foot hitting the ground first! Figure 59 of this same sequence of six photos, shows the leg pushing-off with the toes, so the images that supposedly show the correct technique show the very thing we're purportedly being warned against! Either that or the explanation we're being given is, again, obfuscatory rather than explanatory.

Some of the illustrations themselves are problematical in another way because, as for example in figure 42, the illustration has light text on a light background which is impossible to read. Another (figure 41) which supposedly shows correct technique, has a circular diagram at the lower legs, showing (we're expected to believe) the circular motion of the feet, but feet do not move in a circular motion when running. The foot that's in the air in this image isn't going any higher. It will not complete a circle before hitting the ground again! It's going to swing back and hit the ground in the shortest way possible. The feet therefore move much more like a pendulum below the clock, not like the hands on the clock face! If the author had something else in mind, it was not clear from the writing.

So I have to say I cannot recommend this book at all. Maybe if you're really interested and can get it for free or at a close-out, it may offer useful tips for you, but for my money, I pass. The book does not.

The Story of My Life by Farah Ahmedi, Tamim Ansary

Rating: WORTHY!

For my last review of 2019 I have found a real cracker! Books like this are essential reading because such a book almost comes with a guarantee that no matter how bad you think your life is, no matter how badly you think you've been treated, there's always someone worse-off than you who has struggled through their difficulties and found a life worth celebrating on the other side.

This book was also highly educational in that it reveals the shortcomings of groups that while admirably seeking to help refugees, also inadvertently fail them in really taking care of newcomers, leaving them feeling lost and abandoned just when they were starting to hope their troubles were over. No one in their right mind wants to stand around handing out peeled grapes to someone reclining indolently on a couch, but once you have taken charge of someone's welfare, it is incumbent upon you to see it through to the point where the people you are supposedly helping can stand unaided and take care of themselves. Rescue followed by abandonment halfway through the job does no-one any good, least of all the nation that's adopting the refugees.

Farah Ahmedi was born in Afghanistan - where the people are called Afghans, and they don't speak "Afghani," which is not a language, but their currency! A dozen or more languages are spoken there, the most common of which is Dari, also known as Afghan Persian and Farsi, which is what this author calls it. Farah was born into the Hazara ethnic group, the third largest, concentrated toward the center of the country. She had her earliest years in quite a large family in the time right before the Taliban destroyed Afghan culture, and so had the chance to experience a life without being hidden under a blanket, and which included school, but she had very little of that, because at the age of around 7, running late for school and taking a shortcut across a field, she stepped on a landmine.

She spent the next two years or so alone in Germany being fixed, which in her case meant having pins put into her good leg, because her knee was infected, and having a good portion of her other leg amputated because it was too badly damaged to fix. So she had a 'good' leg she was unable to bend, and a leg she was able to bend, but which was artificial. The Germans took good care of her and fitted her with a prosthetic leg and foot. Returning to Afghanistan, she felt a certain amount of alienation because her own culture now seemed so small and primitive compared with her mind-expanding experiences in Germany, where she had begun learning their language and forgetting her own.

Any relief she may have had at returning was soon stomped on by the Taliban which moved into Kabul like a disease. While out shopping for Afghan clothes now that Farah had decided to give up the western outfits she had worn in Germany, a rocket landed on her home, killing most of her family and leaving only herself, her mother, and two brothers, who quickly had to flee the country because the Taliban was enforcing military recruitment: every family had to give up a son to the Tali-whackers. The problem was that the Taliban would rather shoot than recruit the Hazara ethnic people, so the two young boys fled to Pakistan at their mother's insistence. Farah never saw her brothers again nor learned what happened to them.

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This began a nightmare for Farah and her mother because they too, were forced to flee, and were lost to a system of deprivation, endurance, bribery and hopelessness. They made it to Pakistan, and learned of a faith program aimed at helping war-torn Afghan families move to the USA. The problem was that they were approved right before 9/11 and so lost their chance to go, but later they managed to make the trip, dreaming of a better life only to find they were largely abandoned once they had been settled in the USA.

Farah seems to have placed far too much faith in her religion which did practically nothing for her, and little to none in people who were really the ones who helped her. Despite barely speaking any English and having no money and no jobs, and no facilities, they were essentially told, after the settling-in period, that they must fend for themselves now. Finally, due to the kindness of one family in particular, they were able to properly make the transition, and Farah wasn't done overcoming obstacles even then. Fortunately, she had a facility for languages and a dedication to achieving her goals which was beyond admirable, and she almost single-handedly kept herself and her mother afloat until life, finally, eased for them.

This is a story of triumph and heroism that the likes of Marvel and DC comics can never hope to match and that alt-right assholes can never begin to understand or appreciate. People like Farah Ahmedi are not a burden on a nation, but the backbone of it, and one can only hope and dream that a disturbingly large forty percent of the US population will one day come to understand that.

William Harvey by Thomas Wright

Rating: WORTHY!

Subtitled 'A Life in Circulation" (humor maybe?!) this biography of Harvey, the man who, in Elizabethan times, went against prevailing teaching and realized that blood doesn't ebb and flow in your vessels like an ocean lapping on the beach, but actually circulates. Galen was wrong! Who knew? Galen was a complete clown from what this book reveals of his teachings, but in Elizabethan times, he was a god of medicine and there were professional penalties for straying from what he taught, no matter how absurd it was.

Harvey came from a relatively modest background and rose to great heights. He lived at the same time as Elizabeth the First, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, John Dee, Francis Drake, and Donald Trump (one of those may be fake news). He studied at what was then the center of diversity and education: Padua University.

Language was no barrier because all academics spoke Latin back then no matter which country they hailed from. He kept his head down and studied hard and did well, returning to England to be - eventually - accepted into the world of professional Physicians - such as it was back then. Blood-letting as a cure-all was still in vogue, as it would be for another three hundred years notwithstanding Harvey's discoveries, and his discoveries took time to gain traction since they flew in the face of accepted philosophy.

Those discoveries were made at a high cost to animals which were dissected alive and in great numbers as he demonstrated what he found to be the reality of blood circulation and the heart's purpose being a powerful pump. It turns out that blood was not created in the liver and delivered slowly to the various bodily organs, but was in continuous circulation and revitalized as it went. Parts of this book were hard for me to read as a vegetarian who went into a depression when a pet rat died, but I muddled through it and learned a lot. I commend this as a worthy read.