Hooky by Míriam Bonastre Tur

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was a comic book for younger readers written and illustrated by talented Spanish artist Tur. It's rooted in a 'webcomic' from 'webtoon' with which I am not familiar, but which seems to have been a success.

This version evidently has new material, but without knowing the original I can't speak to that. While I thought the artwork was bright, colorful, and well done, for me the story failed to live up to the illustrations. It was choppy and made no sense, and while I realize that I am not the intended audience, and that a less critical audience might well go for this, I can only review it from my own perspective and for me it failed for a variety of reasons. I will say that one wonderful thing about it is that this story did not have JK Rowling's sexist distinction that boys were glorious wizards, but girls were 'only' witches with all the negative baggage that appellation entails. No, these guys were both witches!

I have a problem with magic stories where the actual magic takes a back seat and the story ends up being just a regular story with a patina of magic dusted over it for flair, and that's what seems to have happened here. There were so many places where magic would have been useful, but obviously if you're in a world where you can 'magic' anything, you really need to work on the story to make it entertaining. It's a fine line the author walks between going full throttle magical, which risks making everything too easy for the protagonists, and being a magical miser, which to me makes the magical elements worthless by failing to use them when they make logical sense.

The author seems to attempt to get around this by having these kids be so poorly-educated (magically speaking) that they swing right into that 'magical miser' territory and for me this spoils the story. It seems to me that the kids ought to have had at least a basic grounding in magic from their parents or from their elementary magic school, but none of this is even discussed, much less explored, so there's this huge plot hole whereby the kids are rank amateurs, but we're offered no reason why.

The story here is that witch twins Dani and Dorian miss the school bus that would deliver them to their magical academy. Instead of telling their parents of this, or taking out their brooms and flying, they give up completely and end up wandering aimlessly around, quite lost as to what to do. Through a series of accidental events they end up with an advanced professor of magic, and somehow irresponsibly fail to tell their parents of their change of plans.

The story deteriorates after this as they fall in with a random group of misfits - a princess and a trouble-maker - and just have a chaotic series of adventures seemingly unconnected to anything. Meanwhile we're getting hints of a magical conspiracy, but that seems like a separate and entirely unconnected story. I was pretty much lost by this time because I had no clear idea of what the author was trying to do, or where this story was going, if anywhere. It just seemed to meander at the author's fleeting whim without having a purpose or a plan, and I DNF'd it because it was not entertaining me at all. I was looking for a coherent story, and there wasn't one to be had here. It felt more like a disconnected series of Sunday newspaper cartoons, which is what, I'm guessing, the web series was. So while I loved the art, I can't commend it based on the story - or lack thereof.

Hope Defined by Shannon Humphrey, SY Humphrey

Rating: WARTY!

The book blurb makes this novel sound interesting but book blurbs lie. This one started out on the wrong foot with me by having everything taken to extremes and too much slang in the speech to find it remotely interesting to read. The story is that Hope is your trope weird outside kid, up against the class queen bee, and it’s a tired trope that this novel didn't promise anything different to ameliorate.

There's a sci-fi element to this which you don't usually find in such stories, but I never got to that part because I was so turned off by the writing in the very earliest pages that I DNF'd it. One example of the poor writing is right up front and it's the double reference to a boy who was talking to the class about a project he'd done. Twice he's described like this with the space of a couple of screens: "He stood behind a podium and talked as confidently as if he had discovered a cure for cancer."

The book also features drop caps which do not work, not in a ebook. Keep your text as simple as possible because if you don't it will get screwed up, especially if you make the mistake of getting the Kindle version, which I don't, but the drop caps still cause problems, so all around, this was a no for me.

Annalynn the Canadian Spy by Shawn PB Robinson

Rating: WARTY!

"After she’s visited by a curious band of thieves, 10-year-old Annalynn is recruited as a spy for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service." Way to insult the Candian intelligence services! This is a non-starter.

Living With Viola by Rosena Fung

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I loved this graphic novel. Having dealt very recently with an anxiety situation which did not end well, it really spoke to me with all its messy art and confused panels, but it told a real story of problems and issues that can overwhelm a person so easily and without warning.

Based on the author's personal experience, we meet Livy, who is dealing with a new school, parental expectations, making friends, and growing into a young woman of color all at the same time. She does not expect Viola to show up - Livy's highly critical and judgmental alter-ego who only she can see, and who is a constant presence, delighting in her every failure. Making friends seems to provide some escape, but even that starts going sideways and Viola never lets up.

Fortunately in Livy's case, there is help; she's smart enough and strong enough to avail herself of it, and the outcome is good. I wish it could be that way for everyone. This book scorched some raw nerve-endings for me, but it told an honest and revealing story in graphic in enlightening terms, with inventive and provocative graphics and a sincere heart, and I commend it as a worthy read.

The Explorer's Code by Alison K Hymas

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was read decently enough by Laci Morgan, but that couldn't help a story which dragged and which felt all over the place to me. Nor could it help one of the characters, who I found obnoxious. Obviously this story isn't written for me, since I'm far from a middle-grader, but I've listened to and read many such stories before, and enjoyed a lot of them, so it wasn't the age range; it was the story itself.

Let me put in a minor qualification in here. This was an audiobook, and I listen to my audiobooks while out in the car commuting and doing other stuff. A book which deals in alphabetic cyphers and math problems really doesn't lend itself to that sort of listening, because you cannot see the printed word and study it, so the advisability of having this as an audiobook in the first place became questionable to me once I'd listened to a significant portion of it.

The story is of three youngsters, "math whiz" Charlie, his sister Anna, and another girl who they meet, named Emily. All three are with their families, spending time at an old house which has been turned into a hotel. I do believe it was explained how they came to be there, but I either missed the details or I've forgotten it, so I can't tell you. It's not really important.

In the course of their exploring the place, all three find clues to a mystery, but by the time I quit the story, they had solved nothing despite getting into everything, and the story really was dragging for me by then. The description indicates that they work together, and I'm sure they do, but the fact that by almost two-thirds the way through, they were barely on speaking terms was a problem and evinced very little in the way of cooperation or faith in them as a team.

On top of that one of them finds some old letters which were read out in full in the story and were tedious to listen to. They felt like a ball and chain on the story. Maybe they were supposed to be clues, but they sounded more clueless to me. Consequently, around sixty percent in, I decided I'd had enough of this and DNF'd it without any regrets. Younger readers might have more patience with it than I, but I wouldn't bet on that.

I was put off the story quite early by Anna, who was frankly a nightmare. She had no boundaries, no sense of personal space or privacy, and was an unrepentant pain-in-the-ass troublemaker of a child who would wander around routinely into places she didn't belong - and knew she wasn't supposed to be there - yet she never felt bad about it or had any problem with being a busy-body, an unregenerate rule breaker, and a meddling little demon. I disliked her pretty much from the start.

How you can pretend there's an explorer's "code" and then feature a hobgoblin like Anna was the only real mystery here for me. Charlie and Emily, by contrast were such bland characters that they never really registered with me as anyone to pay that much attention to. Emily was mildly obnoxious, but was a milksop compared with Anna. Charlie was a one-note character as were most of the people in this story for that matter. Charlie was bland to the point of fading into the woodwork he studied so intently.

So, overall, not a good experience, and I certainly cannot commend this as a worthy read.

The Adventurers and the Cursed Castle by Jemma Hatt

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook that has 'series' written all over it, although there's nothing on the cover to indicate that. It's aimed at a young middle grade readership, and while I didn't think it was particularly good, it wasn't awful either, so I'm rating it a worthy read because it's not bad for the audience it's aimed at. I just think it could have been better, but the readers who go for this sort of thing are probably not as discerning or critical (or whatever!) as I am.

The story was read pretty decently by Ciaran Saward, and involved a couple of cousins, Lara and Rufus, going to stay with their great uncle at his 'castle' which is a crumbling old mansion on the coast in Cornwall, an English county that's right at the tip of south-western Great Britain. Naturally there's a 'pirate treasure' angle to it, involving an antique relative of the family, but it's not really pirate treasure, it's more like artifacts from ancient Egypt which were purloined or otherwise appropriated and were, for reasons which go unexplored, hidden away in secret location. None of this made any sense to me, much the less the byzantine cryptic clues which the kids, of course, solved.

On the down side, I felt a great educational opportunity was missed here because we learn little to nothing of Cornwall, or of the era in in which the adventurer who originally hid the treasure lived, or of Egyptian antiquities. Naturally no kid wants to read a novel that sounds like a boring and lecturing textbook, but there are plenty of ways for a skilled writer to incorporate some educational content, especially in a treasure hunt where some knowledge of history and customs can readily be made a part of the hunt, and I was sorry those opportunities were missed.

The story is a bit like a Dan Brown for middle-graders, and my problem with that is that I've never bought into this kind of 'cryptic clue hunt' because they're so far-fetched, and it makes even less sense that a small group of kids would be the subject of one incredible adventure after another, as a series of these would demand. Of course, young readers don't care about that! But cryptic clues are silly and cheapen a novel for me, and the improbability of the whole thing is like those cozy mysteries that take place in a little hamlet where the murder rate would make even a seasoned Chicago cop tremble!

No one who is dying of stab wounds is going to work out cryptic clues for Dan Brown's protagonist to solve. He's going to at best write a short note asking the protagonist to contact his granddaughter! That was truly laughable. That same sort of short-sightedness inhabits this story in that the elaborate hiding of the treasure and then the distribution of multiple cascading cryptic clues makes zero sense. Who are the clues aimed at? Why did the guy who initially had the treasure not sell it and enjoy the proceeds for himself, otherwise why did he even steal it in the first place? Did he really believe his clues would be readily soluble two hundred years hence - or even ten years hence? That takes a lot of faith!

That said, it's a reasonably fun adventure for the target audience. The younger boy, Rufus, was just annoying to me, and the girl seemed a bit lacking in oomph. The older boy Tom was also quite flat, but the story itself was innocent enough and fun enough that young middle graders will likely lap it up, so this is why I commend it as a worthy read. It's not for me though, so this series, if there is one, ends with this volume for my purposes.

Tentacles and Teeth by Ariele Seeling

Rating: WARTY!

The problem with this story is that it was too improbable for me to get into at all, so I never made it beyond the first few pages. I don't mind fantasy, but for me, it has to be reasonably realistic - at least within its own framework, and this was not. The idea of a tentacled organism on dry land doesn't work for a variety of reasons - which is why we only see animals with tentacles in the ocean. The idea of what is, essentially, a giant 'kraken' taken right out of Pirates of the Caribbean, which is as big as a small house, and which has teeth and can move with frightening speed on dry land is nonsensical, so it turned me right off, but it got worse.

There was no explanation given for where these creatures came from, why they came, or how they arose. It was like the author was simply cribbing directly from the Pacific Rim movies and her hero Askari seems like a female adventurer from some video game - like Zelda, for example - so there's really nothing original here. I can see how an author wants to create scary beasts to make obstacles for her hero's quest, but the problem I see quite consistently in these stories is that these creatures are either of this nature: 'fish out of water' animals that make no sense (which was almost literally the case here), or improbably giant or mutant versions of existing animals. It's rather tedious and it too-often doesn't work. The thing is that there are plenty of real and scary organisms from Earth's past that with just a minor tweak or two will work admirably. You don't need to delve deeply into the ridiculous to get the effect you're after.

I didn't read far enough to see this myself, but after I decided this novel wasn't for me, I read some reviews by others and they were saying that the story is essentially one of each chapter being a new monster this girl has to escape or fight, and despite supposedly being the best warrior, she always seems out of her depth and needs help. This unimaginative and tedious metronomic rinse and repeat approach to story-telling made me glad I wasted no more time in reading further. I can't commend it based on the admittedly little I read. And Aerial Ceiling (near enough!)? Is that a real name? Maybe it is but it seems highly suspect, to me!

The Girl Who Stole an Elephant by Nizrana Farook

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This novel for middle-graders was light and entertaining and a decently enjoyable read. It took off at a great pace and was highly entertaining, but toward the end I have to say that it seems to lose track a bit and began to flounder, and the ending itself wasn't exactly thrilling, but overall I found it a decent read for the intended audience.

The story is of Chaya, a young girl who is an accomplished and shameless thief, but she uses her spoils to help out people in her local community. She finds she's bitten-off more than she can chew though, when she actually steals jewels from the queen herself, and ends up accidentally getting her best friend jailed as the thief. She rescues him and makes her escape on the king's prize elephant, and the adventure gets wild!

There were a few minor issues I had with the writing. Amazon's Kindle process is well-known for turning books into kindling. Why people continue to support Amazon and its practices, I do not know. I guess capitalism has a lot to do with it. As an example of what I mean, at one point I read this:

"You can see him, and then we’ll leave." He kept
53
looking at her from time to time."

As you can see, the page number (53 in this case) is incorporated right into the text. Kindle will not convert text properly unless it's the plainest vanilla. You cannot have headers and footers in your book when you let them convert it. Trust me, if Amazon's Kindle can screw up your text, it will gleefully do so. And you sure as hell don't ever want to let them kindle your images. This is one of many reasons why I refuse to publish with Amazon or have any truck with them or their Goodreads website.

There were other problems, such as misplaced backgrounds for the chapter header numbers. There was another example of kindling here, where a whole line was mashed together:

you.” Aroundthemthementalkedandlaughedandmunched their food,

I also read some seemingly anachronistic text, such as, "He’s been fired, Chaya." which not only sounds way too modern for the story setting, but you don't 'fire' a military guard! At another point I read,

"Orders?" said Chaya. "From whom?"

Some writers cannot get out of their own way, it seems! I know that 'whom' is technically correct here, but no one actually says 'whom' anymore in real life, unless they're really pretentious. That just jumped out at me as being inauthentic, especially since Chaya isn't exactly a language scholar!

But these are relatively minor quibbles and while you cannot cure a kindling of a novel, many of the issues hopefully will have been fixed in the final published version. The important thing is, like I said, that I enjoyed the story, the earlier parts and the beginning of their jungle adventure more than the last, I dunno, third or so? It seems like the king's men had a much easier time of tracking Chaya and co. in the jungle than reality would support, and I could have actually read a whole novel about Chaya's thieving exploits, but overall this was fun. I really liked Chaya. She did become a bit of a boor at times in the jungle, but despite her failings she was a strong female character and I'm all for those. I enjoyed this story. It was fresh, different, and entertaining for the most part, and I commend it as a worthy read. I'll be keeping an eye open for future Nizrana Farook novels.

That Thing about Bollywood by Supriya Kelkar

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This middle-grade work of fiction is about Sonali, a young girl whose parents are on the verge of breaking-up, and her reaction to this isn't what the majority of kids her age might experience. Sonali's reaction is for her to perceive her world turning into a Bollywood musical movie, along with songs, dance, and scenery changes. But she's the only one who seems to be aware that the entire world is changing!

I should say right up front that I'm not really a fan of Bollywood movies, but I do like Indian music and I love stories about the Indian people, even writing a couple myself. There was a short story titled Upanishad in Poem y Granite, and a full length new adult novel titled Balletwood which I published recently. But enough about me!

Sonali has learned, over her short eleven years, to bottle her feelings up and screw the top down tight, so when stress from her parents' antagonistic behavior, her younger brother's tearful reaction to it, and the possibility that she might be losing her best friend, all conspire to come down on her at once, it seems like something weird happens and her life becomes, slowly and by stages, a musical! Why not?!

I loved the changing emotional landscape and Sonali's valiant attempts to figure out what was going on, all the while trying to control her feelings, and her frequent references to 'filmi magic' which amused the heck out of me. She's a strong female character, and I appreciate those. The only writing issue I noticed in this novel was when I read, "...my bicep aching...." It's actually biceps! The bicep is a part of the biceps, but it's not the bulge one sees when someone flexes their upper arm. I guess it's technically possible to have a bicep ache, but usually people are not that specific! That's a minor pet peeve of mine because I read it (along with other language atrocities) so often, usually in idiotic YA novels.

Apart from that though, I loved the way this was written and I commend it as a worthy read. I shall be watching author Supriya Kelkar with anticipation from now on!

Witch Ways by Kristy Tate

Rating: WARTY!

This is a wannabe young adult novel, but the main character is only fifteen, which technically is young adult territory for better or for worse, but it felt more like middle grade reading this stuff. Inevitably, it's written in first person, and it's about Evelynn Marston who is quite obviously a witch, but who is in serious denial.

Her denial makes as little sense as her name - who calls their child Evelynn these days? It's not even in the top 70 names for children born in 2005. Despite being hit over the head with her power repeatedly, 'Evie' still doesn't believe. This tells me that she's both stupid and tediously incurious and I have no interest in reading even one novel, let alone a series, about a shallow girl who has no interest in exploring her own potentially magical abilities.

I would have DNF'd this were it not so short. It's more like a novella than a novel despite it proudly declaring itself to be a novel on the cover (did the cover designer really believe that we'd think it was non-fiction without the bright red lettering telling us it was a novel?! ). In reality it's nothing more than a prologue, and I don't do prologues. Worse, it was all prologue and nothing of substance; quite literally nothing of interest or value happens in these 160 or so pages. It's barely even a witch novel because Evie doesn't do any actual witchcraft to speak of.

There's a handful of accidental displays of possible magic, every one of which is disputed by Evie and is quite easily dismissible. There are a couple of minor dumb spells she tries on purpose which are of the stupid rhyming English variety, like if you say a poem over a candle, magic happens! I'm sorry but that's juvenile and pathetic. Never is there any point at which Evie has the smarts to question any of this or to ask herself why, if she can cause magic without saying a word (like in burning something down) does she need to go through these ridiculous and childish rituals to do a spell?

The story moves ponderously slowly and like an idiot, I kept reading on waiting for Evie to unleash herself, but she never did! It's like one of those joke cards that on one side says, "How do morons pass their time? (see other side) and on the other side, it says exactly the same thing. In that same way, the story went nowhere and in the end, I resented wasting my time reading it. To employ a sexual vernacular, it will leave you blue-balled! That's not inappropriate because (quite symbolically I think, if perhaps unintentionally!), Evie actually wears a blue gown to a ball! The only good thing I can say about it (the story, not the gown!) is that it was short and the first person actually wasn't as irritating as it usually is for me, but this character is so lacking in agency and smarts that she's certainly not worth following a series about.

It's your predictable YA fish-out-of-water story, with Evie having to attend a new school after having been accused of burning down the science lab in her previous school, but from this point onward, the impression is that Evie is literally strait-jacketed into doing things without anyone caring what she herself wants. You'd think at some point she'd rebel and her witch powers would manifest, but no. I kept waiting for it to happen, but it never did. I also found it very weird that such a small town sported not one, but three high schools, two of which were private ones.

This dick of a guy named Dylan, who Evie vaguely knows because he's friends with her best friend's brother, is two or three years older than Evie and he treats her like dirt when she first arrives at the new school: not even saying a word to her and then suddenly, he's all over her and she's perfectly fine with his manhandling of her, touching her, and kissing her without even asking and without any history whatsoever of their being together, or dating.

For example, I read, "Dylan stood behind me, resting his elbows on my shoulders and his chin on the top of my head," and later, "He chuckled and took hold of my hand," and "He lowered his lips to mine in a gentle kiss." This is when the two of them are barely involved in any way. In short, Evie is a doll, and not in the old fashioned 'complimentary' sense. She's not really an autonomous person, and he's a possessive closet rapist who improbably soon begins talking about marriage. Meanwhile she also has Josh, her best friend's brother, on a string, making the depressingly predictable, tediously unoriginal, and utterly boring YA triangle.

I know that authors don't get to choose their own covers or blurbs when they publish with a professional publisher, but when I read something like this in the book description I have problems with it: "When Evie's friend, Lauren Silver, turns up dead, Evie must rely on all her newfound powers and friends to find the truth. But bringing a killer to justice may require stronger magic and true love, the kind that can't be found in a potion."

There are so many issues with this it's hard to know where to start. First, Lauren isn't her friend, she's an acquaintance who Evie barely knows and has met only once. Second, when Lauren is killed, instead of going to the police Evie starts sneaking around to hide some sneakers (LOL!) which she accidentally left at Lauren's house during their one encounter. Later she breaks into Lauren's home to steal something. Secondly, what newfound powers? Evie is in denial and doesn't believe she has any powers, so how can she "rely on all her newfound powers"? The book description is sheer bullshit.

Thirdly, "bringing a killer to justice may require...true love"? What's that all about? There is no true love here. And why must Evie have true love? Because she's too weak on her own and needs some guy to manhandle and validate her? Why do female authors persistently infantilize and demean their female characters like this? If Evie wanted to bring a killer to justice she would have immediately gone to the police and reported being attacked on her way home one night instead of waiting and waiting, oh, and waiting before she actually did report it, and then only when urged to by others.

And about that cat? After Evie visits Lauren's house under cover of darkness to retrieve her sneakers, a black cat that used to belong to Lauren, follows her home and will not leave. I kept waiting for the cat to do something, or to be acknowledged as her familiar. or something! But. It. Never. Happens. So what is the freaking point of bringing this cat into the story? Finally, the villain was a weak one, and I found it hard to believe that this person would not have been found out long before they revealed themselves.

There were some writing errors/problems in the story (and from what I've read, there were apparently more, but some at least appear to have been corrected. The only really bad one I noticed was: "What do you think they what?" where clearly that last word should have been 'want'. Where Lauren's possessions were referred to, they were improperly apostrophe'd: "Lauren Silvers' scrapbooks" as opposed to "Lauren Silvers's scrapbooks." 'Silvers' is a name, not a plural.

And here is a fifteen-year-old speaking in first person: "I knew that Bree shouldn't mandate whom I did and didn't like...." Who the hell speaks like that, especially at fifteen? It may be technically correct, but it's tiresome, and no one says 'whom' except the most pretentious of people, and writers who are so obsessed with correctness that they even put it into the mouths of their characters when it couldn't stand out more than the sore thumb it sucks like. It's time for 'whom' to retire. Really.

At one point in the story, a person is injured and a nurse came out to see if there were any family to share a status update with. 'Uncle Mitch' who is not remotely related to the hospitalized person steps forward and says, "I want to be a family member, does that count?" and then we read, "The nurse grinned" and she said, "Sure. Follow me." No. Just no! I've known many nurses and they are fiercely protective of their patients and not a one of them would ever have invited a stranger in or given out personal information about a patient to 'Uncle Mitch'.

Another issue was the obsession with beauty evident in this novel. Again this is a female writer and she's obsessed with looks, as though a woman or a girl can have no other value. Repeatedly I read things like: "...but I did pick out a very young and very beautiful Mrs. Fox." "No, you're beautiful." "...a Brazilian beauty." "You look beautiful." "Looking both beautiful and terrifying..." "Lauren was so beautiful." "Lauren was a beauty queen." "Lauren had a fragile, almost eerie beauty." "She was beautiful too."

It's far too much. Given the many shortcomings of this novel, I have to say it's a warty, not a worthy.

Charlie Thorne and the Lost City by Stuart Gibbs

Rating: WARTY!

Not being a big fan of series, I don't normally ever get to volume two even if I started volume one. In this case, I skipped the first in the series because I was unaware of it until I saw this one and was attracted by the fact that it involved Charles Darwin. You don't usually see his name in this kind of a story. It would have been nice to have seen a little bit of education slipped in here and there regarding his scientific Theory of Evolution, which is the bedrock of modern biology, but there really was none of that, and worse, there was some seriously misleading science. So while I initially began reading this favorably, I can't commend it after finishing it and realizing there were far too many problems with it to overlook them.

I wasn't expecting much from this middle grade novel, but it proved to be an engaging read to begin with, if annoying at times. The story is very much of the Dan Brown category: someone who is speedily following a series of clues to solve a mystery, while being chased by evil-doers. I don't use that comparison as a compliment since I'm not a Dan Brown fan, but it will give you a broad idea of what's going on here.

After her adventures in Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation, Charlie has evidently been hiding out in the Galápagos islands seeking anonymity. She's surfing and otherwise generally doing nothing save read a book here and there. She has money, presumably somehow obtained during the first novel, so working isn't a necessity, and it's just as well since she's only twelve - but apparently looks older. That was the first slippery slope proposition in my view, since it's often used as a lousy non-excuse when a guy is charged with statutory rape ("Well she looked eighteen"), so while I let that slide for the sake of reading on, it's nevertheless a problem for me.

The main problem with Charlie though, is that she was much more of a Mary Sue than a Charlie. She never got into any real difficulties, and effortlessly effected escapes worthy of an animated series. On top of that, she was constantly reminding us, that is, when the author wasn't, that she was a genius - probably the smartest person on Earth. That was irritating as hell. For example at one point I read,

"Of course I’m right," Charlie told him. "I’m me."

Seriously? Even if it were true about her being so smart, it's a stupid mistake for an author to keep slapping his readers in the face with it, but the fact is that it's not true.

The confusion is a common one. The author conflates knowing a lot of trivia with being smart. The two aren't equivalent and the sad thing is that though we're reminded of how smart she supposedly is with metronomic tedium, the truth is that Charlie's actions prove her to be other than a genius. She wouldn't do dumb things that make little sense if she were indeed as smart as she's so often claimed to be.

Maybe she's hiding her light under a bushel, you think? Bushel is an archaic term for a bowl, hence its more modern use as a measure as opposed to the use back there as a shade. But knowing that trivial item doesn't make me super-smart. The thing is that we really don't get a lot of Charlie as an actual person. She's more like a place-holder for a real character, or more like an android (or given her gender, I guess a 'gynoid'!). We never see her around kids her own age in this story, so she's constantly dealing with adults who never seem to like her at best and at worst, want to kill or to capture her, so maybe this influences how she presents. Or maybe they just knew her better than we readers ever will?!

The thing is that if Charlie truly wanted to stay off the radar as we're told she did, she would have kept a much lower profile than she had been doing where she was hiding. Instead of being a star of the surfing circuit, she might have found a quiet cove to read or to snorkel? And making her brilliance known by volunteering at the tortoise rehab centers was a poor choice. This is what I mean about her not being as smart as she claims, because she ought to have known better, and she doesn't. Better yet, why not move her idle carcass to a large city where it would be a lot easier to hide? And where she could actually do some good helping other people instead of indulging her every whim? She doesn't seem like a nice or a thoughtful person to me.

But her dwelling on that island and volunteering is how she comes to the attention of Esmerelda, who seeks her out for help deciphering a code that was, we're told, etched onto the shell of a tortoise by Darwin himself, the better part of two centuries prior to Charlie finding out about it. In an era where we've discovered a certain ex-president's name scratched onto the back of a manatee, this sounds a bit inappropriate to say the least, but I'll let that slide. Tortoises in the Galápagos islands are very long-lived unless the animal has been hunted for meat or died from some other cause and rotted away prematurely. So Darwin etching the underside of the tortoise is problematic with a message for the ages. It seems like he would have been smarter than that.

Darwin was studying change both in the planet's crust, and in the lives of plants and animals and it seems very doubtful to me that knowing how impermanent things are, and how living things can also change so readily, he would have recorded the various clues he left in a form where such inevitable changes could easily erase or destroy them, and in only that one way given that he lived a long life after his voyage and had ample opportunities to record it elsewhere or share it with people he trusted. For the undiscerning middle-grader, these things might seem convincing, but if subject to any thought at all, they're so far-fetched.

That same rule applies across multiple clues, others of which I'm not about to reveal in any great detail here, but I have to say that in one case, a stone used to build something tends to be a rectangular block, and if something were etched on it and later that same stone was carved into a different shape to be used for another purpose, any original etching would be long gone! And if you're trying to hide a clue in a natural setting by using fire to mask it, you'd think a genius would make it look like a natural forest fire rather than a deliberate attempt burn off a clue! This is what I meant about Charlie's actions not really mirroring her billing as a genius.

There were some writing issues which I shall mention because there were so many of them. One or two here and there are not an issue, but so many do tend to distract from enjoyment of the story. At one point, for example, I read how a stick of dynamite behaved when kicked off a boat: "It sailed off the boat and exploded a second later, close enough to knock her and Dante off their feet. A piece of red-hot shrapnel nicked her arm, while others whistled past her head." Shrapnel is named after a British army general and initially referred to what in modern times might be a pipe bomb or something similar. Dynamite itself contains no shrapnel - typically metal fragments, or ball bearings or something like that. The way dynamite would hurt would be from a compression wave, especially if experienced underwater, and would result in a concussion and ear-bleeding, so this rang hollow, but again, maybe middle graders won't think twice about it.

After a certain person (name redacted) had literally tried to kill Charlie, and she makes this observation about that person's mood: "XXXXXXX sounded as though they really wanted to kill her." That's a bit much given that the person really was trying to kill her! At another point I read, "...it would swallow up any evidence of the cities within decades, if not sooner." Well, the 'within decades' covers 'if not sooner' so it seemed a bit superfluous. At another point in the story Charlie and another person were searching for some food in the jungle, and I read this: "They had tracked down a moriche palm full of aguaje fruit within only a few minutes-and then spent another two hours trying to retrace their steps." This suggests again that Charlie isn't so smart. Had she not thought of calling out to the person they'd left back at the boat, in order to follow their voice back? If they were only a couple of minutes' walk away they could surely have heard each other. It felt like it betrayed the girl's smarts.

At one point I read, “The most famous spot was Yellowstone National Park, which was located in the largest volcano caldera on earth,” which simply isn't true. The largest (as of this writing!) is the Apolaki Caldera in the Philippine Sea. If you're talking 'on dry land' and 'square area', then Yellowstone caldera gets it, but it's actually four overlapping calderas, and the park isn't in the caldera, it's the other way around. By the same token, the Amazon basin isn't quite the same size as the entire United States, but once you start seeing errors of fact, it's hard to stop! I don't agree with those people who claim it's just as easy to get it right as get it wrong. It's much easer to get it wrong, but I think we owe children a better education than this, so when they call out a 'fact' from your novel in an argument or worse, in school, they get it right, not wrong, and they trust you as a writer.

One of the annoying and anti-scientific facets of this novel, and which does Darwin a grave disservice is talk of 'proof' of evolution and of 'missing links'. First of all, science doesn't talk about proof, it talks about the preponderance of evidence and that's a bit stodgy for young children, but not asking too much for them to understand if a bit of foundation had been sown through the writing. But to talk of a definitive 'missing link' in hominid evolution is pure bullshit.

Human evolution is complex and it's replete with links, so there's nothing critical that's still missing. In Darwin's time there was, but he barely mentioned humans (in terms of evolution) in "On the Origin..." brushing it safely under the carpet with a "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." It wasn't until over a decade later in The Descent of Man that Darwin tied humans into the mix. If he'd found anything concrete he would have mentioned it there, and he would not have spent the time he did studying an orangutan named Jenny at the London zoo. The fact that he had the chance to mention this fictional 'discovery' without giving anything concrete away about it in 'Descent' yet did not undermines this whole story's premise. The fact is that finding a fossil, or for example, something like chimpanzees in South America wouldn't 'prove' anything. And there is no way he could find any such thing there because it South America never has had apes and no evidence of there ever being any such thing has turned up there.

One last problem was this animal that Charlie befriended. It had earlier been terrified of this helicopter, yet later it's depicted sleeping soundly onboard while the chopper is flying, and while you can argue it was sedated, when it awoke it showed no sign of fear or panic whatsoever. It wasn't realistic. Again most kids who read this might not think about these things, but that doesn't mean an author ought not to be aware of them and get them right - or re-write! We all screw up; there's no escaping it, but a little more attention can reduce these incidents to a negligible level.

The only other issues I ran into were the usual Kindle formatting ones. I detest Kindle because it slices, dices, and juliennes everything that's not plain vanilla and pure text, so I wasn't surprised to see a numbered list appear like this:

There were three reasons that might be true:
1) Darwin had traveled faster than she had calculated, so they had not reached the right spot yet.
2) She had misinterpreted what Darwin meant. 3) The river no longer turned to blood.

Note the third item is on the same line as the second instead of on a line of its own. This is one of many reasons why I will do not business with Amazon. But that's just me, and it doesn't reflect on the content of the novel itself - just on the editing and checking. Clearly this is another novel written as a print novel with little to no thought given to the ebook version.

Another such issue was where the page headers got tied right into the text because of the incompetence of the Kindle process, predictably turning everything into kindling, so I read:

“...archaeolog CHARLIE THORNE AND THE LOST CITY • 263 ical sites”

That happened in more than one place.

But I'm judging on content, not on kindling, and by that measure alone I can't commend this as a worthy read. The main character was at times obnoxious and her situation was just too Mary Sue and simultaneously too improbable. As a Saturday morning TV cartoon, this might have sufficed, but as a middle-grade novel it needed more. I can't see any promise in a series that pretends on the surface to honor great scientists, but in practice does them such a disservice by making up improbable stuff and treating real science so cavalierly.

Ava and Taco Cat by Carol Weston

Rating: WORTHY!

Okay, I read these out of order, so sue me! This is the second. I liked the first and did not like the third, but I can report that I liked this one which did not feel like your typical cloned-volume in a series, unlike volume 3 which was essentially a retread of volume 1 with a few details changed.

Since this is an audiobook, I actually listened (as opposed to read) to all three in this series, getting all of them on a discount deal from Chirp which was nice since I liked two of the three. The reading, by Kae Marie Denino, is consistent and enjoyable in all three. The books are also all very short! So, in this one Ava gets an apparently stray cat, which I knew from volume 3 she was both going to get and keep, so no mystery or suspense there. There's also a side story about friendship and fear of losing friends as they make other friends.

The palindrome and other types of word usage are not overdone here, I'm happy to report. The first volume bordered on annoying the reader by putting too much of that in the story, but this one has a lot of story and a lot of heart, so it was appreciated much more, and overall I rate this a worthy read.

Ava XOX by Carol Weston

Rating: WARTY!

This was a tired formulaic story that exemplified everything that's bad about series. I listened to the Ava and Pip original audiobook by this same author recently, and liked it, but this one, also an audiobook, was too much of a 'more of the same' story, which really had no story, and it was pretty much a cookie-cutter clone of the first volume in the series (this is volume 3 which I read out of order, but the order doesn't really matter). The reading by Kae Marie Denino was fine, but the story really wasn't.

In the first volume we had Ava making endless palindromes which was frankly a bit tedious because there were so many of them, but it wasn't awfully bad. There's more of that here, and it's really too much more in a second volume, and it becomes wearing rather than entertaining. Was there not another aspect of the English language the author could have explored here? Additionally, we have Ava once again doing something thoughtless, getting chewed out by other people, fixing it, and then becoming friends with the people who were extremely hostile to her just a short time before. This is exactly what happened in the first story. So what it transmits here is that Ava can't learn and is stupid, which is never a good thing to do to your main character, and it says, I'm making you, the reader/listener, pay a second time for what's essentially the same story with a few details changed, which suggests that the author thinks you're also stupid to fall for the same trick twice.

On top of that, there's the 'hey, I didn't know I loved my best friend' trope, which is tediously common in YA novels, and here it reared its ugly head in a middle-grade book. Again it says the main character is stupid to have failed to realize she has a special bond with her best friend. Even an eleven year old can tell that. It also says her friend Chuck is stupid for failing to realize this in return, and also that he's an insensitive jerk to hang around with Kelli, who is a jerk herself. When he quits seeing her (after too long) the book also says it's fine to lie to people since he doesn't tell her he's done hanging with her because she's a jerk, but because his mom said she didn't want him hanging with people in that way at his age. In short, he outright lied.

The text for the day here is also the same as the first volume, in that it relates to considering others' feelings, but the story actually undermines its own morality tale because, after having had people chew out Ava about her total cluelessness regarding body positivity, it still has her go ahead and put out a poster essentially saying, 'hey fatty, here's how to shed a few'. It's not that bad, obviously, but it might as well be.

So for me this book was a fail because it sent all the wrong messages and often contradictory ones at that. Ava's mother at times seems cruel and cold as well, which is frankly disturbing. Now I have the second book to get through, and I'm thinking it's probably also going to be a redux of volume one. We'll see. At least these books have the advantage of being short!

Ava and Pip by Carol Weston

Rating: WORTHY!

I am not much of a fan of series, so I have to warn up front that this is the first in a series of (so far) three. All three apparently can be read as standalones, so there's that, but I've read only this one, so I can't comment on the series. This first one was actually well-written, funny, entertaining, and has some good life messages for young readers, perhaps the most important of which, in this Internet age, is that once you put something out there in writing, it's very hard to take it back.

Note that I listened to the audio book version of this which was read brilliantly by Kae Marie Denino. Just as the author evidently did with the writing, this woman really put her heart and soul into the novel in reading it, and it showed; so my favorable review isn't solely over the writing, it's also of this reader's contribution which I loved completely and highly recommend.

There's a lot of wordplay in this book, which may delight some and annoy others. I love wordplay, but even I found it a bit much at times, yet it was quite inventive and entertaining in general, so I had mixed feelings about it. Most of the palindromes I had heard before, but some I had not. There's also other types of wordplay and a smattering of English 101 peppered unobtrusively into the text which makes the book quite educational on that score alone.

Ava is the younger sister, Pip the older. Their parents, who have palindromic names (Bob and Anna) gave their children the same thing: Ava Elle, and Pip Hannah, since mom and dad (also palindromes!) are very much into language. Dad is a playwright, for example. Ava, who is ten and looking forward to her palindromic birthday (when she'll turn 11), thinks she wants to be a writer, but she has several unfinished diaries she's given up on.

She makes a fresh start in a new one and actually finishes it over the course of an eventful story in which she becomes her sister's champion over the queen bee (named Bea) at school, who schedules a party on the same day Pip was going to have one. Ava writes a short story for a competition and makes the Queen Bee the center of the story. She has some success with it, but when the real Bea calls her to complain about the story, things start souring for Ava. The thing is that Bea isn't as bad as Ava has painted her and over the course of the book, the two become friends.

I read some negative reviews of this novel which have labeled Ava with the over-used buzzword 'ableist' and torn her off a strip over her trying to get Pip out of her shell, as though Pip is autistic or a chronic shut-in or something, which is nonsensical because it's untrue. Pip is shy and that's all she is, and there's nothing at all wrong in Ava desiring to help her. What's wrong at times is Ava's approach to helping! None of these knee-jerk alarmists seemed to grasp that. Nor did they seem to have any compassion for poor Ava, who feels neglected because her parents focus a lot of attention on Pip.

So this book is a growth experience and a learning curve for Ava, who while admittedly being somewhat spastic and too full of energy at times, is only ten, yet she's learning and caring, and she deserves a better rep than the "nattering nabobs of negativism" are giving her. Yes, that was awful wasn't it? And William Safire ought to be ashamed of it. But the thing is that Ava is a feisty spirit and young kids can learn a lot from her even as she learns of her own shortcomings and works to fix them.

This is a book about bravery and determination, about friendship and sisterhood, about navigating relationships, and about learning and improving oneself, and it deserves to be read.

Danger in Monrovia by Paul Moxham

Rating: WARTY!

This book is misleading in a sense because it promises to be a 'choose your own adventure' story and that is of course, nonsensical. All you get to do in this case is to choose is one of two options presented by the author, so it's really a choose his own adventure story. It's middle-grade and the plot is about some stolen crown jewels.

I should say right up front that I haven't had any success with novels by this author. In the middle of June 2015, I reviewed The Mystery of Adventure Island and The Mystery of Smugglers Cove and I hadn't liked either of them. I therefore knew going in that I probably wouldn't like this one either, but I was still curious to see how this story worked. The short answer to that is that it didn't! And I mean that literally.

I read the first section and tapped on the link that was supposed to take me to my chosen option, and nothing happened! I tapped on the other link, again without result. None of the links worked which makes this book a waste of money! I actively dis-commend it.

The Mystery of the Missing Heiress by Carrie Cross

Rating: WARTY!

This is the third in a series of which I've read no others - and have no intention of doing so since I didn't like this one. I made it through only two chapters before I gave up because of first person voice and poor writing. This is a Nancy Drew wannabe novel and while admittedly that bar is low, this novel failed to clear it.

The story is supposed to be about an evidently spoiled-rotten Skylar whose parents have moved her into a mansion, which of course automatically has a mystery. Skylar finds a clue written in code in a jewelry box, which inexplicably "opens the door to a world of danger."

Skylar is supposed to discover a "shocking image" that "glows in the beam from Skylar's black light" Why the author is so afraid to use the term 'UV light' I don't know. 'Black light', which is a contradiction in terms, seems to be her go-to phrase, but the thing is that if Skyler were so smart, she'd know that blood doesn't glow in UV light, so the image is not done in blood, but something else - so not really shocking! Forensic scientists can only make blood glow in UV light by spraying the area with a substance like Luminol.

The book blurb tells us that there are poems in Xandra's diary - which naturally Skylar uncovers - and which contain clues to the location of a key, but why would Xandra - the murdered heiress - write clues in her own poems? Was her memory so bad that she couldn't remember where she left the key? If so how would she remember that she'd left clues in her poems? LOL! And how would she ever solve them?! None of this makes a lick of sense at all. Neither does the idiot book blurb when it asks: "Can the team determine how the heiress went missing...before Skylar suffers the same fate?" because we know this author isn't going to kill off her cash cow. Duh! There's no danger to see here. Move along.

Fortunately, I never made it that far because the first person annoying voice irked me, and the stupid description of Skylar's first day back at school - a school she had already been attending - was written like this was a brand new school where she knew no one! Barf. Also the ridiculously caricatured school bully nonsense was a major turn off. I know this isn't aimed at my age range, but come on! I've read a sufficient number of decent middle-grade novels to know that it's perfectly possible to write an intelligent 'grown-up' book for kids instead of playing to every lowest and most childish denominator an author can find. I can't commend this garbage at all.

Underground by Chris Ward

Rating: WARTY!

The premise for this book sounded interesting, but I could not get into it at all, so I didn't get far before I DNF'd. This is based on what I did read. To be fair it's not aimed at me but at a much younger readership; even so I've read many books in that age range before, and enjoyed a lot of them. This one just didn't get there for me because it came across as stupid - with stupid characters in a future dystopian London doing stupid things for no apparent, let alone logical reason. And when I say logical, I mean from their perspective, not from mine.

That's when I felt I could no longer buy into this premise. It was too much of a leap from these characters, none of whom I liked, to what the author evidently expects them to do. Plus it's yet another trilogy where a single volume could tell the story, so no thanks. Some publishers and authors seem to think it's fine to take three times the money from a child to a story that could have been fitted into one volume if it had been told right. I don't like that kind of mercenary approach to children's books. Or any books. That's why so many of mine are available for free, especially during covid times.

For those who're interested, the premise is that this young girl Marta Banks is the leader of a group of young kids who take reckless rides hanging onto the speeding tube trains on the London Underground (London's subway system). How this worked I never could figure out from the sketchy description given in the opening pages of the book, which describes it as a wooden "clawboard." I have no idea what that is or even if it's a real thing that I'm supposed to know about for the purposes of reading this. Well, newsflash, I don't!

So I was at a loss as to what they were actually doing. At first I thought maybe they were using some sort of a sled which they somehow hooked on to the train as it went by, but it made zero sense to me. After I re-read it, it seemed more like they were just hooking onto the side of the train, and then jumping off, but the whole thing was vague and too stupid for me to waste my time on trying to figure out.

One of the guys fails to 'make the jump' and when they go back to see how he's doing, the text reads, "Paul was huffing like an old man trying to start a car...." Ignoring the age-ism here, I don't know how old this author is, but what is it he thinks is involved in starting a car? These days (and this novel is set in the future recall) it invovles involves pressing a button, but there was a time, way, way back, that it involved rotating a crank handle plugged into the front of the engine. I can imagine if someone, old or not, had been doing that fruitlessly for some time, they might be huffing and puffing, but in the future why would anyone be doing that? This is where I quit reading this.

The book blurb claims that Marta is "a girl who risks death every day in the abandoned underground stations of London," but if the stations are abandoned, why are the trains still running? Is it just a few stations that are abandoned? Why? I dunno. The authors doesn't tell. How did the kids get in there? If they break in and are not supposed to be there, why are they not reported by the train drivers? Or are the trains automated and have no drivers? In which case why aren't the kids reported by the passengers? The train has windows. If it's purely freight, why the windows? I got this impression this wasn't too well thought through, and that impression seriously dissuades me from continuing on in a novel - any novel.

Some people might argue that I haven't read enough of this to review it, but they're wrong. If you start reading a book and immediately it starts turning you off reading it any further, then that's a review in and of itself. I'm not telling anyone not to read this; I'm telling you that I didn't like this book, and I told you why. Deal with it!

Ninja Girl Adventures by Melissa G Wilson, Phil Elmore

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was an ebook that rubbed me the wrong way from the off. I had some real problems with it. The first chapter launches right into an action scene and cuts off at the end of the chapter with a sword swishing through the air, but we know that Moira, the middle sister of the three the story is purportedly about, is not - as a main character - going to be killed in the first chapter. So, for me: no cliffhanger really - certainly no dramatic tension. I don't like that in books, nor in movies, nor in TV shows. It's just annoying, if not infuriating.

That wasn't what bothered me though, nor was it the fact that this is yet another series launcher, meaning that this is really a prologue, nothing more. There was nothing on Net Galley, nor on the book cover to indicate this though. If there had been, there is a good liklihood that I would not have asked to review this. I know authors like to write them and publishers love to publish them because they can be cash cows, but that will never be my motivation, and even that aside, I'm not much of a fan of series. To me they're lazy and derivative, being essentially the same story told over and over with precious little added to try and leaven or freshen the volumes.

What bothered me to begin with is the fact that I detest flashbacks unless they're done well, and to me there's nothing worse than launching into a story and then slamming on the breaks and bringing it to a screeching halt, before grinding it into reverse and backtracking. I thought that maybe it was just the next chapter so I began skimming and I realized: no, it's the entire novel that's backstory! The action part doesn't start again until chapter 25 (out of a total of some 27 chapters!). The first part of that late chapter acknowledges how appallingly long it's been since then, by essentially repeating word-for-word the last few paragraphs of chapter one!

To me this is bad writing. It's a huge no, and it turned me right off reading any more of this novel. That's not the only problem (and I'm not even going to talk about the common misuse of apostrophes in the book description!). For me I thought the ninja portions of the story might have imparted some life-lessons for young children based on that lifestyle, but this didn't seem much to be the case.

Originally ninjas were nothing more than spies - the James Bonds of their era which was around the fifteenth century (with possible roots running earlier and influence later). They learned stealth techniques and covert behavior, but were considered dishonorable precisely because of all this sneaking around! From what I could see of this story (and here again, I did not read it all) it seemed that it was much more focused on the mystical - which was never a part of the 'ninja code'. They had no magical powers (no one does!) and did not shapeshift into animal forms. A much better parallel for the Ninja life would have been to have drawn one with the resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War Two.

But even there you would have issues because, being of medieval times, Ninjas had no firearms. They were all about swords, knives, and other inventive metal weapons such as shuriken which were employed. Note that shuriken referred not just to the 'star disks' that are so fondly used in movies featuring these characters, but also to a variety of small weapons known collectively as shuriken. The thing is, in modern times, ninjas would have to be exceedingly skilful otherwise they would simply end-up being shot to death, so to present these behaviors and try to update them makes little sense - unless of course you had planned on using their methods to teach life lessons which doesn't really seem to have been employed much here.

On top of this the sisters, other than, of course, the super-heroic Moira, are kidnapped and yet nowhere does there seem to be any real effort at a police investigation. They're bypassed in favor of ninjas! I get that this somehow has to happen if the planned story is to be told, but to remove it so far from reality with so little justification doesn't get it done for me.

While it's never a good idea to teach kids to go outside the law, for the sake of a good story you can get away with it if it's done well and you can also somehow justify it, but as far as I could tell, that doesn't even seem to have been attempted here. It's just, 'oh, the hell with the police, let's take the law into our own hands', and I've seen that cliché too many times tossed in like bacon sprinkles on a salad in the forlorn hope that it will somehow improve limp lettuce and soggy tomatoes, and it doesn't. When you add this to the overdone trope of the black sheep of the family, of the poor ability to recognize who's behind the evil, of the bypassing of the law, of the improbable heroic rescue, it's too much. You have to ask what's really new here and how have these behaviors been justified, and the answers seem to be: nothing much and not at all. For me that's a serious negative.

One final problem is that the story is presented as one about sisters ("sister power at its best"), which I was ready to enjoy, but the truth is it's really all Moira. The other two sisters combined garner for themselves nowhere near as many mentions as Moira does, and Moira did not strike me as a very appealing character, to be honest. In view of all of this, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Samantha Gets Brave by Melanie McClay

Rating: WARTY!

This felt like it was written a bit young for middle grade readers, but it's been a long time since I was twelve or thirteen (the age of the protagonist), so who knows! It's a short novel about a girl named Samantha Taylor who is shy and timid and who slowly learns to take her place in the world. It has been expanded into an ongoing series, so I understand, and if you or your middle-grader likes it, there's more to read after this volume. For me, though it began well, it felt a bit plodding and the characters didn't seem too smart, so although I began by liking it, the more I read, the more problems I had with it and I DNF'd it about a third the way through.

The tale was interesting enough and moved at a decent pace to start with, but once the treasure hunt began, it slowed painfully and the characters seemed utterly unable to grasp the simplest of clues, or to resolve the easiest of problems. The book description has it that there's a "forbidden forest, an injured wolf, and a forgotten tale of lost gold" so that sounded pretty intriguing, but the forest wasn't really forbidden, the wolf behaved far too much like a pet dog rather than a wild animal and never at any point was any concern raised that it might be rabid, and the lost treasure wasn't actually forgotten!

Neither was its location: the treasure never was actually discovered. Fortunately the wolf wasn't rabid, and though it was quite young it was hardly a puppy. It was injured and I think that the author thought the kids taking care of it would somehow magically domesticate it, but it doenslt work like that. Given that wolves usually hang out in a pack, where were all the others? There was no mention of any other wolves, nor any concern over them showing up - not in the portion I read.

Samantha's bravery starts in that forest when she decides to walk the two miles home form school along a hiking trail in the forest rather than take the school bus after a particularly trying day. She'd rather be alone, but you're never alone in nature, and things start happening right then and there. Fortunately she has my namesake to help her out in a pinch, and the strange friendship begins. I found her growth from her initial nervous state to be a bit pedantic, but otherwise not too bad, if belabored somewhat.

I had a few issues with the story though, such as when I read, "They started showing up to school in skirts and fitted tops that showed off their legs and sometimes their midriffs." I was amusedly thinking, "how does a fitted top show off their legs? But it's just the poorly-considered juxtaposition of words that's confusing. Another instance was where I read, "up ahead a black crow cawed" but all crows are black in the USA (unless you happen upon an albino). There's a gray crow, but that's out in Indonesia, so describing it as a black crow seemed redundant. The author didn't seem to know much about the natural world she was trying to represent, and this cropped-up several times.

There were a couple of other issues, like where I read, "Her whole body was shivering and shaking as she tread water." The past tense of 'to tread' is 'trod', not 'tread' and certainly not 'treaded' which the author uses later.

At about that same point in the text the two children, and a man who was helping them, were looking to cross a ravine. It was only 40 feet deep and fifteen feet wide and it would not have been hard to find a way to descend one side and climb the other. The children proved this by finding just such a place quite quickly. The problem was that the outdoorsman's first 'solution' to this problem was to fell a tree and let it drop across the gap. I felt that this was setting a bad example, and not just because a twenty foot tree is heavy as hell, and the guy would need some serious help to manipulate it into a stable position, even if he succeeded in felling it perfectly across the gap at first try (he didn't).

It sets a bad example because we desperately need all the trees we can get, since they're the only entity which is serious about combatting climate change. Trees alone cannot do it, admittedly; we need to get the CO₂ out of the air to fix it, but cutting down trees never helps. If it had been done for something critical, then I could have let that slide, but it sure wasn't, and to have this go right ahead without a word about what killing this tree meant, was not excusable for me.

Even if we set all of that aside though, there remains still the fact is that this tree was in a forest that was on land none of these people owned. They had no permission to take an axe to anything, yet they assumed they could do whatever they wanted. This and the climate change angle are very bad precedents to set for children, especially in an era of selfishness and 'me first' self-entitlement that's been coagulating around us over the last four years. Some of these issues are minor quibbles that don't make or break a novel. Others are much more serious and writers need to be aware, especially in a children's novel, of what kind of an impression they're putting into young people's minds.

At one point, due to the stupidity of one of the characters, the main characters are attacked by wasps and have to run and jump into a small lake, like this is a cartoon. The whole thing was unrealistic. This boy was spying on the others and when he thought he'd been seen, he ran off. He had no idea the others would track his footprints, so there was no reason why he would climb a tree. It seems more likely that he'd keep running, or he'd double back to spy on them some more, from a different location.

This was written like he knew he was being followed, even though he couldn't have. Even if he did, it's more likely he'd try to hide in undergrowth than climb a tree where he'd be pretty obvious - and especially not climb a tree by a wasp nest unless he's painfully stupid. It felt like this little part was lifted directly from The Hunger Games!

That wasn't the real problem though. It was the wasps! After the attack, I read, "He started picking the stingers out of his skin." The author doesn't seem to get that it's not wasps that leave their stingers. It's bees. A wasp stinger can occasionally break off or get left, but it's rare. The author should have learned this if she wants to write about it.

Also wasps do not have a deadly vendetta against people who disturb the nest. They will fly around randomly, and home in on perceived offenders, but usually they won't stray more than fifty or a hundred feet from the nest in doing this. Young children, dogs, and even an older man would not have a problem running away, and certainly wouldn't need to jump into a lake or pond to escape them. This whole section was misleading when it could have been educational.

Another problem is that these kids knew this other boy, Billy, was lurking around in the woods. They also knew he was trouble, but it was like they had this constant blind spot where he was concerned, so they never took precautions thinking he might be around or spying on them, and whenever they felt someone was watching them, or they saw this kid spying on them in the distance, they never immediately thought it was Billy, despite wracking their brains about who it could be.

For that matter, nor did the author account for him being in the woods in the first place to even start following them. The woods didn't seem like the kind of place a kid like Billy would hang out. He was more likely to be at the mall shoplifting, or playing videogames at home. This lent a certain degree of implausibility to the story in and of itself where he was concerned.

There was also a mistake in the book description where the section addressed to teachers says, "This realistic fiction book is chalk full of subtle lessons about bravery." I think the author meant 'chock full' but maybe it was a play on words: you know - teachers and chalk? LOL! Again, a minor thing. Often authors don't get to write their own book descriptions, but I think that wasn't the case here since this author publishes through Smashwords, which is a self-publishing platform that I abandoned several years ago because I experienced far too many issues with them. Life has been a lot easier for me since I started dealing directly with the platforms I publish on, although there are always issues of one kind or another!

On a slightly different topic, but also tied to Smashwords supposedly being picky about formatting, there was an inexplicable and problematic formatting issue in my ebook. It resulted in the lines of text breaking oddly. The new line would start indented right below the roevious one, even though it wasn't a new paragraph. The impression I got was that the break represented an actual hard break in the line as it would appear on a full sized-page, but because I was reading this on my phone's narrower screen, these hard 'carriage returns' resulted in the odd formatting. I tested this on my iPad and sure enough, it appeared to be the case that it's hard-formatted for a specific text size, and using hanging paragraphs with a ragged right edge, so it doesn't flow properly when you change typeface or typeface size.

Any one, or maybe even two or three of these issues wouldn't be an insurmountable problem, but to have so many of them in a book with largely uninspiring characters and a rather limp story was a bit too much for me to declare this book a worthy read. There may well be middle-graders who will like this. I can't really speak for them. All I can do is to judge this based on its entertainment and educational value and I personally found it lacking in both. It came off poorly in a comparison with some other middle-grade novels I've read and enjoyed. I found this particular book, on balance, to be disappointingly less than a worthy read, and for the reasons given, I cannot commend it.

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a charming and unsophisticated novel published almost a century ago in 1924, and it eventually turned into a series. I'm not a series fan and with few exceptions, I usually don't even finish the first novel if I ever start a series, but I was curious about this one because it's so old, and so well-known, and I have never read any of this. There was a revised and somewhat altered version published in the reverse year (42 as opposed to 24), but the one I read was the original '24 version and I think it's better.

The story is of four orphaned children named Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny who take up with a semi-kindly baking family. The kids overhear the family's plans to return them to their grandfather who for reasons unexplained, the kids think is the next thing to evil. They slip out in the night and start hiking down the road, heading into the field to sleep inside a haystack when daylight threatens to expose them. Later they overhear the baker couple passing on the road and learn that they're going as far as a certain village to try and track down the kids, but not as far as this other village, so the kids decide to go to the other village.

Now this story is old and it sure wasn't written for people my age, so I have loosened my criteria somewhat in reviewing this, but I have to say right here that it's a bit simplistic, and a bit of a Mary Sue kind of a story. There aren't any real threats or crises, and everyone behaves perfectly and does the right thing all the time. Henry, the oldest, lucks into a job and finds regular and generous employment with a very kindly family. The man of the house is conveniently a doctor for when one of them gets sick. They luck into finding the boxcar very quickly, and it's conveniently near the village they were walking to, as well as near a stream where they can get water and bathe, and as well as near a dump where they find all kinds of discarded items they can use to furnish their home. A dog quickly shows up injured (a thorn in its foot) and proves to be a very smart and loyal watchdog, and eventually they are all united with a family member who is rich and kindly, and so on!

For me that was a bit much and I have no desire to read more of the same, but I have to add that it was also a charming feel-good story, which anyone can use right now, and I think young kids in particular will probably enjoy the adventure and the kids fending for themselves and making a home in a boxcar. It's also educational in a way with regard to how the children behave and think positively, and find ways to make things work for them, so on that basis I commend it as a worthy read.