Percy Jerkson and the Ovolactovegetarians by Margo Kinney-Petrucha, Stefan Petrucha, Rick Parker

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not sure why I picked this up. The title should have warned me it would be awful, but I did not go with my gut instinct ('get out of here while the going's gut'). It was awful. This is one of a series of parodies by this same team. The titles of other entries are equally bad: Harry Potty, The Hunger Pains, Breaking Down (although I admit that last one - for Breaking Dawn, is amusing to me.

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Rick Parker's artwork was average, but the story-telling was pathetic. It was neither entertaining nor engaging and didn't really tell a story. It felt like a series of set pieces riffing off parts of the original story. The jokes were bad, and worse, they were made about a story which is poor to average to begin with, so I didn't see the point.

I mean what could be more dumb than a story about Greek gods entirely set in the USA? The very premise is asinine and one more example of the Americanization of the entire world, like this is the only country, and we have the only stories, and if other nations have stories to tell, we'll simply move them to the USA instead of having the courage, decency, and smarts to relate them in their original setting. I spit on such cowardly and unimaginative writing. Such stories have no need of a parody.

This wasn't even funny and I won't recommend it. Diagnosis: too dumb to live.

Naked Came the Stranger by "Penelope Ashe"

Rating: WORTHY!

It took me a while to get into this one, but in the end it won me over and I enjoyed its complete ridiculousness. There is no Penelope Ashe. The model on the front cover is a Hungarian girl, whose picture was purloined by the publisher, and for which they were later sued for royalties! Let this be a lesson my fellow would-be self-publishers! Don't steal from Hungary mouths!

This novel was instigated in 1969 by mike McGrady, a columnist for Newsday, and was written by some twenty-four authors, who each wrote or contributed to one or another of the thirteen chapters named after a conquest. Some of their writing was rejected by the editor because it was too good. It had to be poorly written (in literature terms, not in grammatical or spelling terms), and full of sex and violence à la Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susann, the two major models for the literary 'style'.

The novel featured the sexploits of a frustrated and vindictive housewife living in King's Neck, New York (modeled on Great Neck, no doubt). The authors were all news people, and each wrote or contributed to a chapter based on what they knew. Each chapter appeared under the name of the male character the female, Gillian Blake (McGrady's wife came up with the name Gillian since it was the kind of name they always use in 'dirty books"!), was planning on seducing, and she pretty much seduces all of them into ruination in one way or another. Gilly, one half of the Billy and Gilly radio show, discovers that her husband is being unfaithful to her and so decides to get even with him, but he isn't the one who gets punished - it's the poor saps who siren Gilly seduces, most of whom end up dead or ruined in one way or another.

Many people contributed on one way or another. Delores Alexander, a reporter in the "women's department" came up with the dedication "To daddy." Beulah Gleich, editor of Newsday's house organ pretty much came up with the title single-handedly. McGrady's sister-in-law, Billie Young, posed for the 'author's picture' on the back cover.

Though the profits were split evenly among the contributors, information about exactly who wrote what is hard to come by. From the prologue (normally I avoid prologues like the plague, but this one was actually interesting to me), a writer with the peculiarly apropos name of John Cummins, an ex-Marine from a Pennsylvania coal-mining town wrote about Ernie Miklos, an ex-Marine from a coal-mining town in Pa. Bob Waters, the sports writer, wrote about a boxer named Paddy Madigan. Bob Greene, a reporter on organized crime, wrote about a Mafia boss, Mario Vella, and Harvey Aronson was "going to write about a husband incapable of infidelity." The chapters were then edited to provide a consistent style and story. Some of the situations are completely hilarious, others not so much, but overall, a worthy read. If you want a sly, tongue-in-cheek spoof, then this is it. I recommend it for a fun, light read and a sterling parody work.

The Incredible Change Bots Two Point Something Something by Jeremy Brown

Title: The Incredible Change Bots Two Point Something Something
Author/Editor: Jeremy Brown
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!

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

I requested this thinking it was a children's story book and wondering how the writer and publisher had avoided copyright infringement from Mattel over their Transformers. I soon discovered how: this is a Transformers parody, and not at all for children. That settled I launched into it liking the idea and finding it amusing, but I soon grew tired of it.

One reason for this was the disorganized way this book was put together. Some stories were amusing, others would have been amusing had they not dragged out so much. Others were not amusing at all. Too much of it was unintelligible. The book looks like it was almost literally thrown together with no effort put into making it look decent or visually appealing, which is ninety percent of a graphic novel in my book. Perhaps this was deliberate, but it failed to impress me, much less engage me.

One major problem was the quality of the images and text. It was very poor. Even on a 15" monitor it was impossible to read the text in far too many frames, and I was not about to start enlarging it to the point where I'd have to slide the bar up and down for every page in order to read all of it, so I skipped a lot of pages where the writing was unintelligible or blurry.

Though this was an advance review copy, there was nothing in the copy I received to indicate that this was a low-res version, so I was left with the idea that the final copy would be as bad as this copy was. It left me with a real appreciation for those who do comic book lettering, since I've never had this problem before.

This book also had the problem I've complained about before in that there's too much white space. Each pager had way too much white space. If you're going to do your images that small, then make your comic a smaller format! Don't take it out on the trees! Naturally this makes no difference in an ebook, and I can appreciate that for artistic or dramatic effect, some pages are not going to be filled.

Filling every page purely for the sake of it is dumb, but in cases like this, where there is a standard set of panels on almost every page, and acres of white space surrounding them, then the book size is too large! OTOH, larger images would have improved readability. Either way this design was poor.

Overall, I was not at all pleased by this work and I cannot in good faith recommend it.

1066 And All That by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman

Title: 1066 And All That
Author: WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated amusingly by John Reynolds.

This is a parody of British history textbooks written along the lines of Monty Python (but predating that by several decades). It was first published in 1931, and is tied to that era. This doesn't mean it has nothing to day about textbooks of more recent vintage. I went to school in Britain and I can tell you that this definitely spoke to me the first time I read it, but that was a while ago. Who knows - maybe history's changed since then!

It really helps if you have some experience of British life and know some details of British history, otherwise you'll get very little out of this, but how charming and satisfying is it that even getting on for a century ago, there were crazy people in Britain who predated The Goon Show (by twenty years) and Monthy Python's Flying Circus by almost half a century?! It's a fine tradition of insanity of which all Brits are justifiably proud.

This book covers all important history from 55BC through World War One. What a startling thought it is that that when this was written, it was still a handful of years before World War Two was even a cloud on the horizon and Anne Frank was barely two years old.

Walter Sellar was a Scots writer who penned humorous articles for the British journal Punch which specialized in humor and satire. He fought in World War One and was a teacher during WW2. Robert Yeatman had a very similar history.

The book promises to deliver "...all the parts [of history] you can remember including one hundred and three good things, five bad kings, and two genuine dates" and proceeds to take history apart at the seams. It features bizarre quizzes, and "important notes" along the lines of this one on page eight:

The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).

The questions in the "test papers" are completely nuts. Here are some random examples:

12. Would you say that Ethelread the Unready was directly responsible for the French Revolution? If so, what would you say? (p16)
2. How did any one of the following differ from any one of the other?
    1. Henry IV, Part I
    2. Henry IV, Part II (p58)
10. Describe in excessive detail:
    (a) The advantages of the Black Death
    (b) The fate of the Duke of Clarence
    (c) A surfeit (p58)
1. Stigmatize cursorily (a) Queen Mary (b) Judge Jeffrey's Asides. (p77)
5. In what ways was Queen Elizabeth a Bad Man but a Good Queen? (p77)
10. Why on earth was William of Orange? (Seriously, though). (p78)

I highly recommend this if you're into British history or if you think you're up to it, but please don't try to read both sides of the page at once....

Fifty Sheds of Grey by CT Grey

Title: Fifty Sheds of Grey
Author: CT Grey
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: worthy

Fifty Sheds of Grey is quite plainly and simply hilarious. It's a small format hardback designed for all those who wish to shed their inhibitions and out their hibitions, and it comes replete with pictures (grey scale, of course) of assorted garden sheds, gardens, garden tools and gardenias (at least he thinks that's what they were, he confesses with a shrub of his shoulders). But it's the sly text interspersed with the pictures which is more than enough to make you exclaim "Garden Bennet!", and then for your exclaim to come around and get your ticker going ninety to the dozen so you can claim it on your tocks return.

It's a parody of course (which contrary to popular opinion is not a cross between a parrot and a chickadee), but the irony (no, that's not a condition of the patella and it certainly has nothing to do with Pat or Ella, so they claim, but offend in knee is a friend in deed) is that it's doubtlessly better than the original.

I haven't read the original, but I did read Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey which was also hilarious, so it at least qualifies me to have a laugh at their expense account.

I think the best way to recommend this book is to pass on a few quotes (unless the poor things have passed on already), so as Mrs Forficula said to her philandering husband, earwig go:

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked. "When I'm done, you won't be able to sit down for weeks."

She nodded.

"Okay," I said, putting the three-piece suite on eBay.

She told me it turned her on to have her movements restricted when she made love. I looked around - I was going to have to get a smaller shed.

As we stood there naked in Ikea, we came to an important decision. Next time, only one of us would wear a blindfold.

"I'm a very naughty girl," she said, biting her lip. "I need to be punished." So I invited my mother to stay for the weekend.

In short, I highly recommend this for a laugh or to be or not to bean. It makes a great bathroom book, or even a book to keep in the shed.