This totally Bites by Ruth Ames

Rating: WARTY!

This short novel (~180 widely-spaced, large font pages), aimed at middle-graders, amused me greatly from reading the blurb. Reading the actual novel was a slightly different experience. Emma-Rose Paley is a middle-grader who weirdly dreams of red eyes watching her at night. I know authors don't have a darned thing to do with their book covers unless they self-publish (or maybe if it's a young children's story or a graphic novel where they illustrate it themselves), but I have to ask what this girl is dressing for on the cover of this book - not her age, that's for sure, and not to look Goth. Did the illustrator even know how old she was supposed to be? Who knows.

One thing which annoyed me was ER's description of her friend "Gabby" which is a tragic diminutive of the gorgeous full name of Gabrielle Marquez which she sports. Why it's Gabrielle and not Gabriela, I don't know. Gabby is, commendably, a vegetarian (we rarely see those in novels). The problem was that immediately my pleasant surprise arose, it was harshly slapped away. ER tells us that, just as Gabby puts up with ER's burger cravings, she puts up with Gabby's salads. What? The only thing a vegetarian can eat is a salad? I'm sorry but that's an insult and totally inappropriate. It's condescending and abusive, and I see this repeatedly in books which have a vegetarian character. If it's not salad, it's nut cutlets or something equally ridiculous. If the author were making this kind of 'fun' and hurling snide comments at a person because of their skin color or their sexual preference, would it be considered appropriate? Damn straight it wouldn't. So why do we get a bye when it comes to something like food preference?

It doesn't end there. "My BFF can be a bit annoying when she starts gushing about the wonders of bean sprouts" we read. Can we heap the clichés any higher? Yes, we can! "I can get you some tofu to practice on" Gabby says shortly afterwards. There's a difference between an author portraying a character as behaving in a certain way - even in being a bigot and a moron - and the author themselves shamelessly embracing attitudes which are at best ignorant, and at worst, downright insulting. I was not much of a fan of Ruth Ames after this, but I still had to try and read this novel, which wasn't turned out in the dark ages. It was published just five years ago. You would think people would be a little more accepting and enlightened.

When ER's great Aunt Margo visits, ER quickly determines, which unimpeachable evidence, that she's a vampire, and deduces from this that ER herself is also a vampire - or well on her way to becoming one. At least ER isn't dumb and clueless. That helped. Whether she was on the right track, or completely misinterpreting what was going on, remained to be discovered.

Whether she is or not, I'll leave for you to decide if you choose to read this, the first in a series. For me, the story improved after that early problem, and would have been rated a worthy read were it not for those insults. Kids are likely to enjoy it, but for me, I can't recommend it precisely because of the gratuitous condescension towards vegetarians. Yes, it does totally bite.

Aoleon The Martian Girl by Brent LeVasseur

Rating: WARTY!

I had a few problems with this. I know it's not aimed at my age, and that those for whom it was written might well not care about the things I grew concerned over, but this is my review so I get to say what's on my mind!

This is book one of a series, and though I'm not really a fan of series, except in exceptional cases(!), I did liked the premise of this one - a feisty Martian girl. Yes, we know there's no life on Mars right now, and that there never was any life like ours to the best of our ability to determine. There may have been bacterial life at some point before the planet became too dry, but I wasn't going to let that get in the way of a good story! The only question is: Is this a good story? I have to argue that it isn't for a variety of reasons.

The first problem for me was with the eponymous Martian girl! There was an accent on her name: Aoléon, but when the boy spoke the name phonetically it didn't match the accent. In Spanish, the accent aigu indicates the vowel should be stressed. In French, it indicates a missing letter 's' as in étudiant which means, student. Here it evidently meant nothing, so why include it? There's neither an 's' missing nor does Gibert stress the 'e', nor does Aoleon correct him. That's a minor problem, so I'm going to spell it without the é. Other problems were worse. For example, she's given certain traits without any reason as to why she might have them. We're told at one point that she breathes out of the two tubes on top of and located at either side of her head, yet she quite clearly has a very noticeable nose. What's the purpose of that? Clearly it's to make her look more human, which is something I found myself resenting and thinking was foolish, and it's never accounted for in the novel.

Another issue is her blue skin. That, by itself, isn't a problem if it's accounted for, but it never was - not in this volume. A major problem with sci-fi is that writers lard it up with oddball aliens without giving a shred of thought to how they could have possibly evolved that way. There are always reasons for the way living things are: their color, their shape, their size, their lack of, or possession of, certain organs. Because our blood is red, and it shows through the skin, which is translucent bordering on transparent when it's thin enough, we humans have pink skin, unless it's heavily disguised by a really good tan. We know of organisms, such as the Prasinohaema virens - green blooded skink, which have green blood because their blood is saturated with bile - something which would be fatal to other such organisms. There is also a blood condition which can make your blood look green: Sulfhemoglobinemia.

Some organisms, such as the venerable horseshoe crab, have hemocyanin rather than the hemoglobin which we have, but this doesn't make them appear blue. It makes their blood appear grey-white to pale yellow, which is odd enough. The blood turns blue, however, when exposed to air, because it becomes oxygenated. So what's Aoleon's excuse? We don't get told. We're just expected to accept that she's blue because she is.

These are picky problems, but there is a worse one: her behavior! This is the worst one because it's something young readers might pick up on, and consider cool. Aoleon is totally irresponsible. She's first discovered by the male protagonist creating crop circles. We're told she doesn't damage the corn - it still grows when it's bent over, but of course when it's bent over, it can't be harvested properly. In short, it's ruined, but this vandalism doesn't bother her at all.

Even that's minor compared with her idiotic behavior when chased by air-force jets. Instead of shooting out into space and escaping harmlessly, she deliberately leads them on a not-so-merry chase, and when she outpaces them, the air-force starts up the Aurora - a prototype super jet which can keep up with her. Again, instead of leading the chase into space where the airplane cannot follow her, she deliberately entices the pilot into a low-level chase across one country after another, causing all kinds of damage, and not giving a hoot about anyone's safety but her own. This, to me, was unacceptable behavior, especially given that she never faces any consequences for it. I thought it was a really bad example to set for kids.

This bad example came hand-in-glove with another one - this time of American arrogance and imperialism as represented by this Aurora jet pursuing Aoleon not only out of US territory, but across the world into London and Paris, and firing missiles as it went. This would, in any rational world, be considered an outrage at best, and an act of war at worst. Never was there any talk of getting permission or of working on cooperation with foreign air-forces. Correct protocol would have been a wonderful example to set, and would help kids to understand boundaries, but instead we get an example of a form of bullying - that the US can go anywhere it wants and do whatever it chooses without needing to ask or to share, and again without any consequences. To me this was unacceptable. That the US can do this was proved in Abbotabad not that long ago, but do we want to teach our children that might makes right - that sneak makes neat? I don't.

In addition to these issues, we're borrowing flying cows from the movie Twister and we're teaching bad physics (that zero point energy is a viable energy source). There's a glossary in the back of the novel which will explain these terms, which is a commendable thing to do in general, but in this case, I really didn't see a point in explaining nonsense. There's a significant difference in employing untested scientific hypotheses in science fiction to gloss over violations of the laws of physics - for example, to permit travel at superluminal speeds, but this is mindless and I can't recommend such a story for kids.

Sound Bender by Lin Oliver and Theo Baker

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a middle grade novel, the start of a series which, having read this first volume, I felt would work for the intended age range, although I had a few issues with it personally. Overall though, I rate it a worthy read for the intended age group. Note that it has nothing to do with the Avatar Airbender kind of stories, and indeed, nothing to do with bending sound at all, so the title is completely off. More on this anon.

The story features Leo Lomax and his younger brother Hollis; both attend an arts and science school in New York city, but now their parents are dead - so we're led to believe. I say that not because the novel suggests otherwise, but that the circumstances of their death are by no means nailed down. The truth is they disappeared in the Arctic (or Antarctic - I forget which ), and now Leo and Hollis have to move in with their rather oddball Uncle Crane.

Crane is a very wealthy man, having made a fortune in trading priceless (evidently not quite priceless LOL!) artifacts - cultural symbols, archaeological finds, rare fossils and so on. In short, these are great source material for a series of children's adventures. Crane may even be an outright criminal, but this is never confirmed or denied. Curiously, though, he lives in a nasty run-down dockyard warehouse where he houses literally thousands, maybe even millions of dollars' worth of his stock-in-trade, evidently with minimal security. I did warn you that he was oddball!

Leo is obsessed with capturing noises and sounds on a portable recorder. He evidently does nothing with these other than capture them, and this sound-recording habit plays no part in the story, so that felt a bit weird to me. It seemed like a clunky way to depict that he had a deep interest in sound. His brother is into playing music and has organized, or is organizing, more than one band in which he plays drums.

On his thirteenth birthday - a significant age in some cultures and religions - Leo gets a letter from his dear departed dad - a guy who studied sounds in nature and made recordings as an ethnomusicologist - informing Leo that he was not born in NYC as he had been hitherto led to believe, but on an island in the pacific during a ceremony. There is an odd disk - an old style analogue home-made disk, which Leo eventually manages to play at the used record store owned by a family friend. From this point on, Leo is suddenly sensitized to objects - not all objects but certain one which 'speak' to him - and can experience at least some of their history just by touching. So yes, there is no sound-bending. There is psychometry, but "Psychometric Bender" is a lot less catchy as a novel title, isn't it?

In exploring his new-found skill with his BFF Trevor, who is conveniently an electronics wizard, Leo discovers, amongst his uncle's artifact collection, a certain crate in storage which calls out very loudly to Leo in a very sad series of impressions and images. Tracking these down to an old recording his father once made, Leo realizes that the impressions he has been getting are form dolphins which have been used in experiments, and which may be used again if he doesn't destroy the object the has found - but it belongs to his uncle and is worth a quarter million dollars. What's a thirteen year old to do?

I found it odd that at one point in the story, Leo and a purported dolphin expert are talking about leading dolphins from an island where experiments were conducted in the past, to join the dolphin sanctuary just fifty miles away - like the dolphins couldn't function without human help, and like they couldn't have found this island themselves - especially since we've already been told that dolphins are very vocal (they use dolphones, maybe? LOL!), and that sound carries a long way under water.

I found it equally improbable that once the artifact was broken, Crane wouldn't have retrieved it and sold it anyway - it could have been, if not fixed, the copied. Crane's acceptance of this loss of a quarter mill wasn't really believable - although it was ameliorated somewhat by the fact the Crane is now more interested in pursuing another artifact with which he inexplicably believes Leo can help him.

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One thing which bothered me about this novel was the total absence of females. There was one, who was commendably a doctor (non-medical), but she hardly figured in it at all. There were no girls of the same age as Leo and Hollis, which, given that there were two authors, one male, one female, was a shameful omission.

I did not like the anthropomorphization of the dolphins. It's always a huge mistake to convince yourself that that wild animals, even very intelligent ones, necessarily think and feel just like humans do, especially if they've evolved for tens of millions of years in a completely different environment from us. There's no doubt that they think and feel, but to assume they're just like us and have our values and predilections is to do them a serious disservice. That said, dolphins (rather a lot of them) have actually been used for military purposes (military porpoises, no doubt! LOL!). Exactly what they are used for remains somewhat suspect although of course the US military denies any wrong-doing. The sad fact is that animals have been used for military purposes of one kind or another ever since Genghis Khan, Hannibal, and others.

Although I don't plan on reading any more in this series, and despite a few issues from an adult perspective, this looks to me to be plenty entertaining, informative, and scientific - for the most part - for younger children and I consider it a worthy read for that intended age group.

The Pistachio Prescription by Paula Danziger

Rating: WARTY!

This book went on for half its length offering nothing more than an extended pity party for main character: thirteen-year-old disaffected misfit Cassie Stephens. Then it changed and went on for the other half with an even bigger pity party for Cassie Stephens. This reads like a first draft of a Judy Blume novel before she tore it up and burned it with a large quantity of gasoline, before crushing the ashes to powder and then burying them too deeply even for utility companies to unearth them accidentally.

This might have been bearable had it not been first person PoV, which is worst person PoV, especially when the character is so completely self-absorbed in wallowing in hypochondria-inspired whining. Cassie was not likeable at all. Indeed, check that name. She has a seventeen year old sister. A seventeen year old sister who still goes by Stephie. Yes, Stephie Stephens. The author has infantilized them irreparably, so it's hardly surprising we get a lousy novel.

There was some humor and some engrossing moments, but just when it looked like the author might be getting over herself and starting to tell us an interesting story - Cassie's run for class president - along comes new boy in school, who's a hottie, and inexplicably zeroes in on Cassie as his main squeeze. This is one in a long line of school clichés in which the author indulges herself. There's the perky, devoted best friend, the mean clique, the wonderful teacher, the mean teacher, the embarrassing incident, the rough home life, and finally the guy who takes your sorry-assed weak girl’s life and turns it around because you’re too much of a weak and sorry-assed girl to do it yourself. Pul-eaze!

Curiously we get a brief explanation for why the one teacher is mean, but we get no explanation at all for why Cassie's family is as dysfunctional as you can get and still maintain a place in the family category. Her mom and dad are at each other's throats all the time, her older sister is downright mean to her, her younger brother, despite all this, is perky and positive, and charming, and not remotely affected by his disintegrating family. And he's only seven. Yeah, right.

Cassie's mom seems not to be mean at all. On the contrary, she's very supportive of Cassie, but Cassie is mean to her, rejecting her every overture, demeaning her every action, rejecting her support and friendship, and internally bad-mouthing her quite literally all the time. There is no reason for this behavior and none is offered. She has a better opinion of her dad, despite his absenteeism and self-absorption, and his routinely wandering off to play golf instead of spending time with his family.

In true trope fashion, the new boy in school this year zeroes in on Cassie for no apparent reason, and becomes her instant soul-mate, actively seeking her company, and asking her out to a movie. By the half-way point I was tired of listening to Cassie, and I certainly did not like her. I found the novel to be making no sense at all. Fortunately it was short enough that I decided to try and read it all the way through, to see if the suggestion of an improvement (as Cassie starts to run for class president) actually would turn out to be a real improvement, or if the new boy's clichéd attraction to and salvation of our main character would drag the whole story right back down into trope trash. That admittedly faint hope was dashed cruelly on the relentless rocks of Cassie non-stop whining.

Cassandra (for that simply has to be this moaning Minnie’s name) wins the school election as she loses her family through the inevitable divorce and the story suddenly stops. I can’t recommend this, not even a little bit. It's horrible. Had it been submitted to a publisher now, it would have been run out of town on a vuvuzela.

Molly of Mars and the Alien Syndicate by Wyatt Davenport

Rating: WARTY!

This book is described as being for "ages 10+, written to a Harry Potter level of reading". Harry Potter is a standard measure now?! This book has nothing to do with Harry Potter, so why they would mention that, I don't know. To me it felt like a middle grade novel masquerading as YA. The children are described as teenagers but behave like middle-graders. There are four books in the series so far. I believe that this one is the first, but I'm not sure. The others are: Molly of Mars and the Alien Nebula, Molly of Mars and her Alien Sister, and Molly of Mars and the Alien Creatures.

Molly Lennox lives on Mars. She's been adopted by Naomi, who is on the Mars governing council. As I said, I don't know why anyone would draw parallels with Harry Potter, but if you want to, Molly struck me as being like Tonks when she was a kid - but a lot less endearing. Despite quite an extensive history together, Molly treats Naomi like dirt and vice versa. I didn't like any of the characters this novel offered, which is bad, because it's a also worst person PoV story, which is obnoxious unless done right.

Molly has an adopted sister, Pirra, an alien who looks ridiculously, impossibly human, and who is a year older, we're told, but we're not told how that year is measured - by Earth years? By Mars years which are twice as long? Or by the years as measured on Pirra's home planet? The author sets this on Mars but makes absolutely no allowances for the setting whatsoever, other than to mention that it's cold once in a wile.

Pirra used to be a "warrior" for her own people, fighting in a war against humans, but that's all in the past. Despite their best efforts, peace broke out and now, without explanation, Pirra has somehow lost her powers, whatever they were. Why? No explanation. Maybe they only arise under conditions of war. Pirra is now pretty much humanized in all respects, even to the point where she is obsessed with fashion. She also appears to be Naomi's favorite adoptee. This favoritism doesn't seem to cause any friction with Molly, however.

Molly has two other friends she hangs with. Vicky Valentine and Luke, and her only interest in life, evidently, is in "hover-boarding" at the local outdoor skate park. I guess you could draw another parallel here with Harry Potter and the bizarre obsession with broomsticks, since Molly is always wanting a newer hover board. Yes the park is outdoors. Mars has an atmosphere, but it's thin and evidently losing oxygen. It's also cold, so outdoors, people tend to wear thermal suits and carry spare oxygen. More on this atmosphere anon.

Why Naomi would invite her least-favorite, most trouble-making daughter to a function is a mystery, but Molly is there and during the event she sees - or thinks she sees - two men being kidnapped in stasis boxes and removed from the house. Later she discovers two scientists are missing and goes looking for them at the space port where she gets into trouble with the police.

I think the author missed a gorgeous educational opportunity, and in doing so screwed-up the story. Whether the bulk of ten-year-olds will notice this is a good question, but I have no doubt that a lot of them will. The biggest problem is that Martian gravity is only one third that of Earth, and this would make a noticeable difference in how people moved. To the people living there, it would be normal if they had lived there for a long time, and it would not be remarkable, but the author conveys none of this gravity difference to us. It's never mentioned or demonstrated! The story may as well take place on Earth.

He screws up badly on two occasions because of this inattention to how Mars truly is. Molly falls off some rocks early in the story and breaks her arm, but given the low gravity and the short distance she fell, there was no way in hell she would break her arm. On another occasion, Molly drops a power converter off a cliff to keep it out of a bully's hands. The power converter evidently weighed very little since Molly was able to run easily while carrying it, but when she dropped it off the cliff she got into trouble with the police because someone below could have been hurt or killed, so we're told!

The thing is though, given the information available to us here, that it more than likely would not have caused any serious injury given how light it was and how low gravity on Mars actually is, yet this issue is never even raised. This could have been a teaching opportunity - to subtly compare life on Mars with life on Earth, but it was wasted.

Another issue I had with this was that the air on Mars (and the author uses 'air' and 'oxygen' interchangeably, which I think is a mistake) is thin and oxygen low, yet they appear to allow all manner of internal combustion engines from hover boards to motorbikes to rocket ships, all of which will pollute the air and burn up oxygen. This is never addressed - this laxity never explained! That's another serious mistake and a wasted chance to educate children about pollution and wise use of resources!

There are other issues that make little sense, too. The author talks of a spaceship's afterburners when he really means rocket motors. He talks of "silver racing strip" when he really means racing stripes. He says "The Sephians had stunners when they invaded to round up the girls" which is downright weird. Why would the aliens want to round up all the Mars girls?! Are they alien pedophiles? Molly's claim to fame as a 'war hero' was that she led the girls to freedom, but she gets zero credit for that.

Molly isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. She doesn't seem to grasp that Neptune is more like four billion kilometers from Mars even when they're at their closest. She claims when she goes to the academy there, she will be a billion kilometers from Naomi. I guess she still has a lot to learn in school!

This wouldn't have been too bad of a story if there had no been so many glaring errors or mismatched assertions in the text, and if Molly hadn't been such a "super hero" type blundering into things without thinking and without calling for aid from the authorities, or from her mother who was an important figure on Mars, even though she was a jerk. This endless acting without thinking makes Molly look really stupid.

Within a few paragraphs of demonstrating to Pirra that Molly is stronger, and therefore Pirra shouldn't try to maintain her warrior ways, Molly insists that Pirra boost her up on this machine they're trying to tinker with because Pirra is strong! She's either strong or she's not. In this same section, the author has Pirra sprinting shortly after her leg has been injured, and then later has her limping because her leg is weak from the very injury which didn't prevent her sprinting! You can't have it all ways! These were two examples in in a long line of things in this story which made no sense and which turned me off it.

On a museum trip, Pirra shows Molly skins of animals from Sephia, her home planet, but there is no rational explanation as to how these skins came to be present on Mars. Yes, the Martian ships evidently brought some animals with them, but how they would have ended up as museum specimens when those ships were destroyed is left unanswered. More problematic is this one creature which Pirra evidently killed on Sephia when she was undergoing her warrior training. How did that end up on Mars? It makes zero sense. On top of this, there are really poorly written lines, such as: “Who’re you?” I asked, rather terrified. Rather terrified? You're either terrified or you're not. If you're rather terrified, you're really just frightened.

After we hear (and witness more than once) how ineffectual ex-warrior Pirra is these days, Molly is dumb enough to think "Pirra would've fought harder than anyone I knew if someone had grabbed her. This place should be a mess if an attack happened." Again, it makes no sense except to once more highlight how dumb she is and how little thought she processes. Because of her name, Pirra kept reminding me of Perry the Platypus from the Phineas and Ferb cartoon series, although that Perry was more effectual than this Pirra.

The story itself was engaging enough if you closed down most of your brain, but the basic plot about the Martian atmosphere owed a lot to the Arnold Schwarzeneggar movie Total Recall. Molly's stepmom's blind tyranny made zero sense. At first I thought it was to get Molly off Mars and to the academy orbiting Neptune, where I suspected the real action was, but this wasn't the case, which made the tyranny even less explicable. Even that wasn't as inexplicable as why they built an academy out at Neptune. Why it had to be an orbiting academy, when it could have been built on the ground on Mars is a complete mystery. The extreme cost of space transportation seems to have gone completely over this author's head as it does over most every sci-fi-writer's head.

One thing which really turned me off this story is that Molly quite literally always gets the blame - no matter what happens and how unlikely it is that she had anything to do with it, she's automatically blamed for anything which goes wrong when she's in the vicinity - by the police, by her mom, and by her school teachers. It's entirely unrealistic. That was the rotten root of this story: everything was black and white. There were no shades of gray and it made the story tedious in the extreme. On top of this, Molly is an obnoxious and self-centered little tyke, so there is no impulse to sympathize with her; she's not a likeable person, and makes one stupid decision after another, never learning from her mistakes. I do not like stupid protagonists, and she's quite literally the red-headed child here. This also turned me off the story. I cannot recommend this at all.

A Horse Called September by Anne Digby

Rating: WARTY!

This debut novel is now forty years old, so it has to be read in that context with an eye on whether modern readers of the middle-grade age group would appreciate it. That said, it's actually quite timeless in general terms, so you can read it and imagine it's happening today, if you ignore that the girls communicate via hand-written letters rather than through email, and have no ubiquitous cell phones/p>

It's set in Britain and features Mary, who is friends with Anna, a relatively well-off farmer's daughter who is attending boarding school in the hope of pursuing her show-jumping dreams. While Anna is off with her hoity-toity friends, becoming, in Mary's eyes, a different person, Mary is left behind to take care of Anna's horse, named September.

The author writes in very simplistic, overly dramatic, black and white terms, and anthropomorphizes the titular horse shamelessly. I know horses are smart, and any intelligent animal can sense moods and emotions in others - not through any telepathy or human-like quality, but through simple observation of how we hold and carry ourselves, and probably through facial expressions, too. The problem is that the author almost turns this horse into a four-legged human in its purported prescience, and it gets worse as the story progresses.

At boarding school, Anna encounters another horse, named King of Prussia, and she starts riding it exclusively, and winning several competitions with it - and evidently drawing away from Mary into a world of new and rich friends. After Anna returns home for the summer holidays and her over-bearing and domineering father demands that she jump September over a particularly hard jump, the horse becomes injured on the dreaded Demon's Dyke fence. Suddenly it's a question of whether he's worth saving or whether the knacker's yard can make better use of him - a question that seems to be answered when Anna's parents decide to sell their luxury car to buy King of Prussia for their daughter.

This deadeningly predictable story continued downhill from there with an ridiculously absurd everyone wins ending which just about made me puke, it was so very perfect. A very young, very un-discriminating child may enjoy this, but in 2015, I think it's below most middle grade readers' credibility level.

Here's to You Rachel Robinson by Judy Blume

Rating: WARTY!

Move along now there's no story here! That's how this book which lacks not only an ending but also a middle and a beginning (the beginning is in a different volume), felt to me.

This is another classic example of how thoroughly stupid and inept Big Publishing&Trade; truly is. Once again we have proof that the cover designer is utterly clueless as to the content of the book they're supposedly designing for. The model on the cover of the copy I read was supposed to be twelve and have curly auburn air. Shah, right! She looks like she's in her early twenties. Her hair is very dark, not auburn, and completely straight.

I know that when you sell out to Big Publishing&Trade; you give up your rights to the cover, but you'd think a quarter century into her career, an author like Judy Blume would have some clout, or at least be competent enough to point out to the publisher that they got it so wrong that it's more of an abuse than a joke.

The story here is part of an unfinished trilogy, and it sounded interesting from the blurb, which means nothing more than that the blurb did its job in tricking a reader into picking up the book. I haven't read the other book in the series. By all accounts it's far better than this one, but after this, I have no desire to read any more of this stuffy nonsense.

Rachel Robinson is a wreck. She's supposedly very smart and something of a prodigy, but she's also highly strung and tends to fret and worry over everything. She's a neatness freak who feels compelled to volunteer for anything and everything at school because her mother - a lawyer, of course - pressures her to excel. She's also the babysitter of choice (not that she has any choice) for babysitting Tarren's infant son Roddy. Yes, he's named Roddy. I don't think any of that excuses her pronounced superiority complex and thoroughly self-centered view of life.

Rachel's dad got his life right: he gave up his lawyer job and changed his profession to teaching history - at Rachel's school. Rachel's older sister Jess has a really bad acne problem which extends beyond the mere condition of her skin, of course, but the real problem with this family is Charles - the oldest brother who was just kicked out of boarding school, and who is in such a constant state of acting-out that you want to seriously kick him in the balls pretty much every time he opens his mouth. The saddest thing is that his parents let him get away with it, and so his sisters suffer. This book is about him. It's not about his sister at all. She's merely the narrator.

Rachel's entire extended family and friends are all having issues. Her cousin Tarren, a single mom who is trying to finish college, is having an affair with one of her professors, who happens to be married. Her friend Steph's single mom is starting to date a guy who Steph dislikes on sight. Rachel's mom is the only one who seems to have it all, since she's just been recommended for a judgeship (which will mean a cut in pay), and she's on the verge of losing it.

The writing overall isn't bad. It's a very fast and simple read. One issue I noticed is that on page 102, there's a conversation between Rachel and cousin Tarren which makes no sense. Rachel comes up with the word 'obstacle' which wasn't in anything Tarren had said, so what this felt like to me was that some lines of the exchange between them went missing during the editing stage and no one noticed! It's not unimportant, either, since the word 'obstacle' is employed as a euphemism a lot in conversations pertaining to Tarren's love life afterwards.

That said, the book is utter nonsense and the ending (so-called) is quite honestly nothing more than a deus ex rectum wherein all these snapping vicious, angry, spitting family members are magically hunky dory. It's complete crap!

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

Rating: WARTY!

This was such a pathetically dull story, and read by such an awful reader that I made it through only two disks on the audio book and could stand to listen not a phoneme further. There was one part where it got really interesting, which kept me going briefly, but that was soon blown to shreds by the deadening text which followed quickly afterwards. And where in hell the author dragged that title from has to be one of the great mysteries of the 21st century. A novel about ice and snow, and cold and an Ice Queen is titled Breadcrumbs? Definitely a Whisky Tango Foxtrot call-sign on this one.

The basic story is about Hazel - an adoptee from India who prefers to hang out with her best friend Jack (yuk - yet another unimaginatively mundane male character named Jack. Barf, etc.) than to do "girly stuff". Hazel is evidently overweight, and the subject of bullying - from the very boys with whom Jack hangs out at school. There's an entire story there which was lost because this author evidently couldn't see it. As for Jack(-ass), he couldn't see anything wrong with his friends hazing Hazel, and basically tells her to get over it. What a jerk. The true tragedy here is that Hazel evidently has no life without Jack in it. As for the story, it had no life at all. It was pedantic and tedious, and the narrator Kirby Heythorne's reading voice was god-awfully dull.

The problem with Hazel is that she is one of the most boring characters ever, with no motivation and an obsession with Jack which is pathetic if not scary. She's not likable and she doesn't change - not in the part to which I listened anyway. She has nothing to offer to win our hearts or minds.

The interesting part for me was where Hazel met an old childhood friend whom she had not seen in four years - a lifetime for an eleven-year-old child. When Hazel arrived at her home, her friend was in the kitchen doing homework whilst her slacker uncle (supposedly a screenwriter LOL) was baking cookies. The girl's uncle told Hazel that he was encouraging his niece to invent a story which he could steal and turn into a screenplay which would make him rich.

They began to elaborate on the original idea, and the story became quite engrossing, brief and sketchy as it was. Unfortunately it was over all-too-quickly, and we went right back to the brain-deadening tedium of our regular programming, which is where I said, "Check please, I'm outta here!". I wanted to switch to the other story and pursue that instead, but of course that option wasn't available so I couldn't avail myself of it!

This is based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and things turn towards the fantastical as this novel progresses (according to the blurb), but that was nowhere near enough of an attraction to lure me any further notwithstanding that I had liked the "screenplay" they'd discussed on earlier. I cannot recommend this story based on what I suffered through, and especially not in the mind-numbing audio version.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

Title: Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
Author: Judy Blume
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

In a continued and disappointing effort to read the classics, I happened upon this, which isn't an old classic but is nonetheless a modern classic, supposedly well-loved and well received, although it's rather dated now (it was published almost half a century ago). It felt like reading a peanuts cartoon to me, which I actually don't do, not being a Peanuts fan, but this is very short (~150 pages) so I figured it was do-able even if I didn't like it. As it happens, I did like it and I recommend it.

Margaret is a middle-grader who is moving to a new home and a new school, of course, but at least it's not your typical middle grade/YA novel where there is a orphan child and an evil clique. Margaret makes friends easily and immediately finds herself part of a secret girls club, where they (Janie, Gretchen, Margaret, and Nancy) meet once a week under fake names at the house of one of the members, and have to wear bras and write lists of boys they like and keep the list in order as these various guys' favor falls or rises. It's all very innocent stuff, part from when Judy Blume writes "Good-by" instead of "Goodbye", but maybe departure wishes were different in the seventies....

Margaret is conflicted about all sorts of things, one of which is her religion or lack of one. Sadly she feels she ought to have one, but one her parents hails from a Judaic background and the other from Christian, so they don't attend organized worship services, which is the smartest thing they can do. There's nothing in either religion which demands its adherents attend any kind of church.

If there were a god (and I don't buy it because there's never been any useful evidence for any gods), then what would he care (it's nearly always a he, isn't it?) if you worship in church or out? Wouldn't he prefer it if you spoke directly to him rather than let some guy do the job for you? In fact, the New Testament has its Messiah (who was a Judaist, not a Christian!) specifically ordering people to worship in private, not in public. So much for that advice! LOL! I don't get this intermediary nonsense where a rabbi or a priest or a mullah takes charge of your worship for you.

But Margaret goes to a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish new year just to comparison shop. The author gets the new year greeting wrong, although she gets Rosh Hashanah in the right part of the year (the fall in the northern hemisphere). The Judaists don't wish each other a happy new year, but a good year. The author has the Rabbi saying "Good Yom Tov" to Margaret, which means "Good day good" which is nonsensical! The actual greeting is far more likely to be "Shanah Tovah" - a good year, or something along those lines. It's not like our western greeting at all and has a different meaning.

Margaret takes to praying from whence the novel's title, but her prayers are never answered. Like most believers, this neither disillusions nor deters her. I promise you that there are far more excuses made up by theists for why prayers are not answered than ever there are prayers answered. For the Christians this is awkward because their Messiah did not equivocate. He promised every prayer wish made in his name would be granted. So much for his credibility! LOL! Instead of answers, we get excuses. If your prayer isn't going to be answered - at least in the way you expect - there ought to be an official communiqué from your god explaining why, so you at least you would know that it had at least been considered!

Margaret also has to face a new teacher - not that she knew the old one, but the new one is male, and he seems wise to the mischievous ways of his students. He assigns them a year-long project, and no one has any idea how to handle this or what to choose, but Margaret, perhaps propelled by a brief chat with her wily new teacher, takes it upon herself to evaluate her parents' religions in an effort to try and decide which one she should adopt. Her father is Jewish, but Margaret is not, since her mother is not. Her mother was raised Presbyterian, but due to the hostility from her and her husband's respective parents, they neither of them pursue any active religious worship.

One thing which bothered me about Margaret was how self-centered she was. All but one of those unanswered prayers was about herself and her needs. The exception was when her dad was clueless in dealing with a lawn mower and cut his finger. She prayed for him then. Other than that, she never did ask for anything for anyone else.

I was intrigued to read about the times when the girls began getting their periods and it became such a awful competitive thing. Being a boy in school (and still am, as it happens!) I was never part of that, so it's a curious thing to me and I wondered how much of this was Judy Blume's own life story, and how much she was making up or filling in from other women's shared recollections. She definitely made a huge fuss about it.

Boys go through their own thing, of course, but it's nothing like girls go through. It's hard to imagine what it's like to endure these things, especially if it's anything like Margaret's adventures in this novel. It's hard to imagine what it does to the psyche to enter such a dangerous, er, period of your life when one false step can spell pregnancy and all it entails. Scary times, bleeding every month! To quote Isidor Isaac Rabi on his hearing of the properties of the newly discovered muon: Who ordered that?!

Margaret's parents were pretty bland parents throughout this novel until there came a point - inevitably it would seem - where her mom's estranged parents came back into her life. This, I felt, was pure evil on her mom's part. She had randomly sent her parents, to whom she had not spoken in fourteen years, a Christmas card, and suddenly they wrote back announcing that they were coming to visit - they wanted to reconnect with their only daughter and granddaughter. They said not a word about their daughter's evidently despised husband.

Of course, they happened to choose to come at the same time as Margaret was scheduled to fly out to visit her paternal grandmother in Florida - the grandmother who had stuck by the family and whom Margaret adored. The ticket was already bought, but Instead of telling her parents that they would have to either miss their granddaughter or reschedule, she chose instead to screw over her husband's mother, and she told Margaret that she could not go. That was unforgivable. If it had been some emergency, or something complete unavoidable, I could have understood it, but it was not. Her mother was just plain selfish and mean over this and that's not appreciated at all. It makes her mom look so awfully bad and there was no reason to write it this way.

This would have actually made a far more interesting story had Margaret run away at that precise time her grandparents show up, or if her dad had taken her to Florida, but instead both Margaret and her dad completely knuckle under and mom's evil plan holds sway even as it goes awry.

Overall, I liked this book. I liked Margaret despite her short-comings because she was actually the only real grown-up amongst the adults in her family. She was interesting and fun, and although some of this book was oddly contrived and no doubt far-fetched, in general it was a fun fictional read even for me, and I think those for whom it was primarily written will like it.

Nikki Powergloves: A Hero is Born by David Estes

Title: Nikki Powergloves a Hero is Born
Author: David Estes
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Nikki Nickerson is a nine-year old who is at a loss this summer holiday because her best friend Spencer is out of town, she doesn't like doing "girl stuff", and the boys won't let her do "boy stuff" with them. I found this author's going out of his way to establish the young girl's tomboy cred a bit overdone. Plus I really didn't like how dependent this girl was made to be on her best friend, especially since her best friend sounded like a jerk. He inveigles himself into becoming her side-kick and when he acknowledges her supremacy it's with the words "Big-Boss-Man", not "Big Boss Woman" which was annoying. He likes to use pet names which he ad-libs for Nikki, and I'm sorry but these were tedious in the extreme, and just plain stupid. They became really irritating, really fast, and were not remotely funny.

Spencer is actually a complete disaster and I think it was an awful plotting decision to make Nikki so dependent upon him. It was unnecessary and abusive of women when you get right down to it. even a nine-year-old needs a guy to validate her? Shame on the author. Can this young girl not stand on her own feet and have her own adventure without having to have this kid act pretty much like a father figure to her? It was weird and uncalled for, especially when we were repeatedly told how smart he was, yet were shown that he really didn't behave like he was. Masculinity does not equal smarts and femininity does not equal dumb, yet it seems like this is the lesson that's being foisted onto middle-graders here.

That gripe aside, the story wasn't too bad in parts, although I all-too-often had mixed feelings about Nikki. There were times when she could be endearing and other times when she was a little jerk herself. For example, when they were testing out the powers of her gloves, she more than once did bad things to Spencer, like turning herself into a lion and scaring him, and like tying his shoelaces together so he falls over. You can have a girl being a tomboy without actually turning her into a boy - especially one who is a troublemaker.

The story begins with Nikki walking out in the woods, and her little dog, too. She discovers a weird creature which she later learns is a Weeble. It looks like a cross between a porcupine and a beaver, but other than this introduction, this creature plays very little part in the story. It made me wonder why it was ever included, especially since Weeble is a proprietary name (they wobble but they don't fall down, you know!).

But anyway, the "Weeble" runs off down this weird path in the woods which Nikki has never seen before. It leads her to a chest containing several pairs of differently colored and designed gloves. She learns that these are magical gloves and if she wears them, they give her super powers indicated by the particular design on the gloves. One pair might allow her to fly, another to become invisible, another to impersonate someone, another to turn herself into an animal, another to manufacture ice, another for fire, or lightning, and so on.

Nikki evidently can't cope with this by herself and has to put her life into the wise hands of Spencer, who luckily is coming back early from his trip out of town. He immediately takes charge of this lost girl and tells her what to do. They test and catalog all the gloves and then hurry home to design a super hero costume for her. Meanwhile, her nemesis shows up in the shape of Jimmy, who has magical boots which do for him the same kind of things which the gloves do for Nikki. We quickly learn he can fly and teleport, and he can make himself very strong.

To her credit, Nikki sets herself to putting right the things she screwed-up when she accidentally called up a really damaging thunderstorm, and then sets about developing a costume, and is once again completely overrun by Spencer Quick, who pretty much designs it for her. Finally she gets the chance to show her super hero skills, in her new costume.

A lot of the references in this book seemed more aimed at people the author's own age rather than at nine-year-olds. And Spider-Man isn't "Spiderman" - if you're going to write book about a super hero, at least get the comic book references right!

“…he saw a flying shape appear on the horizon. It was moving so fast it was only a blur. Good girl, he thought, Nikki was giving the cameras plenty of time to capture her on film…”

How does this make any sense at all?! I'm sorry but the domination of a nine-year old girl by a jerk of a nine-year old boy for me destroyed anything this writer might have been trying to do. I cannot recommend it.

Alexandra Fry, Private Eye by Angella Graff

Title: Alexandra Fry, Private Eye
Author: Angella Graff
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"...had similar Coat of Arms" should be "Coats of Arms"
"...buku bucks"?! She means "beaucoup bucks", beaucoup being French for very many.

This is a middle-grade leading into young-adult story about a girl who can see ghosts and has suffered for it by being labeled Loopy Lexi as her old school. Now she's moving up to middle school and has the chance to hide her past and start over. She can do this because the move coincides with her mom moving to a new home across town which happens to be in a different school district. Her dad is not living with her mom, and her older sister is in college already, so it's just Alexandra and her mom. And her new friend Penelope, who quickly spots that something is going on with Alexandra, and finally gets her to spill the beans as to her behavior.

Alexandra's ghosts are not your regular everyday characters. They seem, for reasons unexplained, to be the cream of ghostly society. For example, her last visitor in her old school was Ferdinand Magellan - yes, he of the straits. In her new school, she is once again accosted in the middle of a class by a new ghost - this time it's Elizabeth the first - of England, not of Britain as this author has her state. While there were Britons, there was no Britain during Elizabeth's reign, so she never would have introduced herself with "My name is Elizabeth, Queen of Britain." I know this is a kids book but that doesn't mean they deserve less respect than do adults in their reading material.

This is a problem with having old ghosts (or with time-travel novels). Do you have them speak in Elizabethan English and risk sounding pretentious or worse, being misunderstood, or do you say the hell with it and have them speak modern English and hope your middle-grade audience isn't as sophisticated as an adult audience? It's the author's choice of course, but it needs to be made very carefully, and Elizabeth was a bit too modern and sounded fake. What bothered me here though is that Alexandra simply took it at face value that this was Elizabeth without any questioning or any attempt to verify it. I don't like dumb lead characters, and it sets a poor example for kids.

Here's something which bothered me more. In the middle of chapter six, Alexandra goes to visit her father. Elizabeth 1.0 had told her that a locket had been stolen and if it wasn't recovered, then disaster would befall the town. How Liz knew it was gone, but didn't know who took it goes unexplained. Alexandra decides to visit her dad after school, in the museum where he works. She declares:

Even when it was his weekend, he mostly just ordered me pizza and handed over the TV remote while he was shut up in his study doing stuff for the museum. I mean he was a great dad...

I'm sorry but the last sentence definitely doesn't follow what's gone immediately before it. In what way, exactly, was he a great dad? I really do not like this kind of writing. He sounds like a deadbeat to me. Here's more evidence:

The good news was my dad was good friends with the guy who owned the coffee shop, so knowing him, he’d get into some half-hour conversation and totally forget I was still out here.

Here's another such quote:

I'd always liked staying my dad's place, even though he was usually too busy to spend time with me.

The hilarious thing is that after all these statements of clear neglect on the part of her dad, we then get the absurdity of him going on about her wanting to go over to a friend's house on a Saturday afternoon, with a girlfriend. The other friend is male, but seriously? If you don't know your daughter well enough to trust her, or worse, you failed your daughter by not putting in the time it takes to raise her properly (which is clearly the case here given how frequently Alexandra tells us he leaves her to her own devices while he goes off to do something he evidently prefers over spending time with his daughter), he has no business raising issues here.

Elizabeth claims that one of the Ainsworth family stole her sister's jewels (presumably she's talking about Queen Mary) "and burned for it," but they never actually burned people for theft. They had lots of other horrible things they could do back then, trust me. Again with the historical inaccuracy. Fiction is entitled to be fiction, but there's no reason at all why real historical people cannot be made as authentic as is reasonably possible. This writer struck me as simply lazy or uncaring and it showed in her writing. Kids deserve better.

Alexandra continually sets bad examples by running around late at night and breaking into places. This is a really poor role model for children of this age.

This last one was what decided it for me: I was rating this negatively:

"I promise," I said, but that was probably a lie.

'This isn't a good thing to have young kids even thinking, let alone asserting. There wasn't even a moment's hesitation or any attempt at hedging here. She knowingly and with no good reason, outright lied to her parent. I know all kids fib here and there, especially if they think the truth will get them into trouble, and sometimes there are good reasons given for lies in stories like this, but this was not one of those cases. Alexandra's behavior does not set any kid of good example, shows her lack of integrity and honestly, and certainly doesn't make me respect this kid or want to read about her. I can't rate a book positively when it fails on as many levels as this one did.

Sharkboy And Lavagirl by Robert Rodriguez And Chris Roberson

Title: Sharkboy And Lavagirl
Author: Robert Rodriguez And Chris Roberson
Publisher: Troublemaker Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Alex Toader.

This illustrated novel began as a movie and later was transformed into a short novel by Rodriguez, who concocted the movie from stories his kids invented, and Chris Roberson - yes, he of iZombie and Cinderella graphic novel fame. The basis of the story is very much a rip-off of the novel The Neverending Story (which was then made into several movies). In that, a savior has to rescue the world of stories before darkness overtakes it. In the novel I review here, three saviors have to rescue a dream world before darkness overtakes it.

The rip-off doesn’t end there. Max, the main human character, long ago dreamed up a robot which he named Tobor ('robot' backwards). Tobor is ripped off from a 1954 movie titled Tobor the Great.

That aside, the novel is very entertaining and inventive with its amusing naming conventions. It’s well written for the most part with no great spelling or grammatical gaffs, except for page 62, where the paragraph which appears in the middle of the page is repeatedly word for word immediately afterwards, at the bottom of the page.

The novel is written for a juvenile audience without any effort made to appeal to more mature readers, but aside from that it’s written quite well. Shark Boy (rendered as one word: Sharkboy in the novel's title, but consistently rendered in the book itself as two words) wakes up on a cold beach not knowing who he is or where he came from. He quickly meets Lava Girl (again rendered as one word: Lavagirl in the novel's title, but as two words in the story) who is suffering the same amnesia. They discover their super powers quickly - she can literally produce lava and he can breathe underwater.

The novel differs from the movie in some ways. For example the movie begins with Max, the boy who dreams, describing how Shark Boy (S) came to be. We get no similar information on Lava Girl (L). This story is, Max assures his classmates, a true story, but Linus, the class bad boy makes fun of him.

In the novel this is omitted completely, and we first meet L & S on the beach where L saves his life by returning him to the sea. Immediately afterwards, a professor shows up who tells them very little but warns them they must save dream land, aka Planet Drool, by finding the dreamer, who is on Earth. He disappears from the story immediately after that, but in response to his advice, they take a rocket to a point where they can interact with the real world, and they contact young Max, a daydreamer in middle school, who can fix the world known as Planet Drool. Meanwhile, Mr Electric, with his cable beasts and electrical powers, is trying to thwart their every effort.

In an afterschool playground incident Linus steals Max's dream book, via which he has inadvertently created Planet Drool and L & S, but this back story isn't so clear in the novel. However, the end result is the same in that Max joins them on Planet Drool, transported there via S's shark rocket, and slowly starts putting things right.

They encounter the same cable beasts, and Mr Electricity, and eventually figure out who has distorted Max's dreams - it's Linus, using Max's own dream book. After almost losing L & S - she once again saves him after Mr Electricity has tossed electric eels into the water where he's swimming. Unfortunately, the water has a very negative effect on L and she's pretty much dead until S runs at super-speed to deliver her to the volcano which can restore her. After this, she realizes that she's a girl of light, and she can restore the light and banish the dark which has beset Planet Drool.

Linus and Max become friends when Linus realizes he should not be killing dreams, and Max realizes he needs to dream with his eyes open. Now he has no evil overlord, Mr Electricity rebels completely and becomes the villain, but he's subdued by Max.

The book carries no mention of the ice princess (in the move she's a classmate of Max's who also appears on Planet Drool) and is rather short, but the illustrations - comic book style line drawings - are very good. I recommend this novel for an age appropriate audience.

Cassidy's Guide to Everyday Etiquette (and Obfuscation) by Sue Stauffacher

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Title: Cassidy's Guide to Everyday Etiquette (and Obfuscation)
Author: Sue Stauffacher
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WORTHY!

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 often enough reward aplenty!

This book was hilarious and I recommend it whole-heartedly. Yes, there was a more-than-minor character named Jack Taylor, which would normally cause me to jack this in, but he wasn't the main character so I was willing, in this one instance, to tolerate him in the small doses where he was present. I loved Cassidy's attitude to life, and her relationship with her sister.

The story here is that Cassidy's great grandmother has died and in her will she condemned (that's what it feels like to Cassidy) the poor girl to attend etiquette school two days a week during one month of her summer holiday. Cassidy bristles and rebels at this.

This story went from joy to joy. I completely adored the author's tone and voice - even though it was first person. Normally that's a voice I don't appreciate, but once in a while an author makes it work, and this is a sterling example of how to do it. The text is full of sly assessments, and astute and amusing remarks such as this observation from Cassidy: "I knew better than to say anything about the value of my time. Adults and kids have never seen eye to eye on that subject."

I don't know what it was, but Cassidy won me over from the off, and she kept on winning me over, although I have to admit, Livvy ran her a close thing. Cassidy was perhaps a bit more mature than you'd expect for her age, but I was willing to forgive her that in the same way I forgave Bill Watterson for the same thing in his totally awesome Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.

Cassidy is a smart, adventurous, curious, and self-possessed girl of eleven who is fearless and confident. She's not a bad person by any means, but her aggressive approach to life tends to land her in water that's decidedly, shall I say, too temperature-challenged for her taste? You can imagine then, the difficulties inherent in any attempt to teach her etiquette. It's precisely this ocean of endeavor upon which the author has chosen to launch Cassidy Corcoran.

Here's another joyous quotation: "Miss Melton-Mowry decided to ignore me. It's a normal developmental stage for every one of my teachers." And another from a conversation Cassidy has with another attendee of the etiquette class when they discover they have an acquaintance in common:

"What's the polite-conversation word for smart aleck?"
"High energy...original mind...future politician?" I replied, quoting my report cards from memory.

And one more for good measure:

"Nice to meet you, Dr. Bean."
"And you, Cassidy. Your reputation precedes you."
"That's usually how it works."

I'm not going to tell you how this goes, because it's a journey that you have to take for yourself - with Cassidy as your guide. Be prepared for a strenuous outing, though: it goes from height to height, but it's awesome terrain. I am totally on board with this and looking out for other books by this author now.

A Girl Called Al by Constance C Greene

Title: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/girl-called-al-constance-green/1006032668">A Girl Called Al
Author: Constance C Greene
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WORTHY!

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 often enough reward aplenty!

This is a very short book from Open Road Integrated Media with whom I've a great reading relationship, so it's nice to be able to review this one positively! It starts on page five and ends on page 72. I wish it were longer because it really is quite enthralling. However, there's no need to despair. It's the first of six: A Girl Called Al, I Know You, Al, Your Old Pal, Al, Al(exandra) the Great, Just Plain Al, and Al’s Blind Date. Normally I can't stand first person PoV, but some authors can use it appropriately and nail it completely and this author is one of them. It would not have worked as well had it been told in third person.

I think the reason it does work so well is that it's not about the narrator per se. Obviously she's involved, but the story is really more about things going on around her, about other people, rather than about herself and I think this is why it's so palatable. This self-effacement is further enhanced by the author's stubborn refusal to give a name to the narrator.

It's both set and was written in a bygone era - although not too bygone (it was published originally in 1969), and it gives a very different - and I have to say thoroughly refreshing - take on school. There is no love triangle here, no excessive emphasis on sports or jocks, no school bully, no bitchy girls, and no guys at all, if you discount the apartment building caretaker. It's all girls, girls who have no need of guys, but who are not immune to them, and it works perfectly.

Al is a year older than the narrator, but she dropped back a year when she moved to town, so they're both in seventh grade. Al lives just down the hall in their apartment block and soon the two are fast friends and all but inseparable. I love the matter-of-fact way in which the narrator relates the story, and I admired her trenchant observations and commentary on life around her.

There's nothing going on here - no fantasy, no paranormal events, no great adventure, no melodrama, which would seem to make the story boring to modern youth, but that's the very point of it - not the boredom, but that life can be an adventure even when it isn't obvious that one is happening, and that adventure doesn't necessarily mean drawing a sword and leaping into a kraken's maw. The delight of this story is that we become friends with these girls as we see their own friendship blossom and mature. We enjoy their company and look forward to meeting them again.

Alexandra hates her name and advises the narrator upon their first acquaintance that, "You can call me Al" which was very nearly a laugh-out-loud moment for me. Al is a self-declared non-conformist. She wears pigtails and is pretty much the only girl who does. She's somewhat overweight which the narrator, with refreshing honesty, declares might be an impediment to their friendship, but which isn't.

Al is rather worldly compared with the narrator, having traveled quite a bit. The narrator doesn't know where Ellay is until Al explains that it's the initials for Los Angeles. Al is also an ERA advocate in her own way. She wants to learn what she determines to be 'useful things' at school, so she wants to do "shop" instead of sewing and cooking. She wants to learn how to make bookshelves just like the boys are doing, but she's denied this opportunity. It's frankly a disgrace how primitive and backward the USA was in race and gender relations even as recently as the sixties and seventies. We should all of us be as ashamed as we are ever mindful of how badly things can deteriorate when people are not treated as equally as the constitution plainly requires.

The girls are friendly with Mr Richards, the aging ex-bartender who is the apartment caretaker, and when he learns of their problem with shop, he offers to teach them how to make bookshelves, which they do. Al is (unwillingly) alienated from her father, and Mr Richards is alienated from his daughter and grandchildren, so they become his default grandchildren and the relationship is wonderful. The stories of his spotlessly gleaming kitchen floor are hilarious.

With this novel being a generation old, it has had several covers, and the one I illustrate on my blog (of the girl's face), is perfect. There's another cover which I've seen floating around and which shows a blonde girl shellacking a bookshelf. This girl bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the character Al. My advice, for what it's worth, is to boycott that version and buy this one!

Rocco's Wings by Rebecca Merry Murdoch

Title: Rocco's Wings
Author: Rebecca Merry Murdoch (no website found)
Publisher: Bark and Howl Press Ltd
Rating: WARTY!

Illustrations by Kalen Chock.

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 often enough reward aplenty!

I almost selected this from Net Galley, but I changed my mind thinking I wouldn't like it; then I read something else by this author and I really liked that, so I went back and picked this one. I wasn't impressed with it, which surprised me because I really liked the other thing I read: Wild cats Volume One. I lost interest in this one about a third the way in and skimmed the rest just to see if it turned around. It didn't.

Of course, this isn't aimed at me - it's aimed at middle-grade (at least as judged by the writing level), and maybe they will like it, but I have to warn you if you're a parent or guardian, that the story is seriously brutal and gory in places with prolonged pages of bullying. This didn't appeal to me, although the story was one of rebellion by the subjugated against the evil overlords, so there was a kind of justification for it.

The story is about a race of people (who, from the sparse illustrations are evidently humanoid despite their traits, who live in the valleys, overseen by the urvogel people - a race of humanoid flying creatures - kinda like angels, I guess. One of the lowland women mated with one of the urvogels and the offspring was Rocco - an angel with blue wings, who comes in as an outsider and wins the affections of the urvogel youth, who then rebel with him.

This business of interspecies mating made no sense to me, but this is fantasy, so I didn't have any real argument with that. What bothered me more is that the urvogel guy, Rocco's father, must have known, as indeed did his mother, what a horrible life Rocco would have as a "half-breed", yet they still spawned him. This struck me as irresponsible in the context of the story because it put both his and his mother's life at risk. It's not discussed in the portion I paid close attention to, and it's not likely to be at this point, either, due to certain events which would be too big of a spoiler to reveal.

The worst thing of all for me though, was the exclusion of females - and this in a novel by a female author! The main character (and hero) Rocco, is male, and this story is very much aimed at a male audience. There are female characters in it, and the "bad guy" is female, but there really is only one token girl (again, I skimmed a lot of this so I may have missed something) who plays any sort of significant rôle in the story) other than the aforementioned bad guy).

I know this is (evidently) aimed at young males, but even so there's a real need for serious female representation. The author says, in the acknowledgements, that she spent four years on this novel, and I find it unacceptable that this isn't written better and doesn't have more female representation. I don't care if it is aimed at young boys. That's still no excuse for excluding half the population from any kind of reasonable representation. The glass ceiling doesn't just exist in industry, it exists from birth and it needs to be smashed as early as possibly. That's the main reason why I'm rating this negatively.

Keeping Secrets by Maggie Dana

Title: Keeping Secrets
Author: Maggie Dana
Publisher: Pageworks Press (website not found)
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a big fan of series, so this one looked like a potentially problematic novel to begin with since it’s book one of the 'Timber Ridge Riders' series which was once a series called 'Best Friends', but I am a fan of an engaging and well-written story, and the author took away my fear right from page one. Knock-out Punch! That's the way to do it!

If I could patent and sell what it is which draws me immediately to one story, or if I could invent a spray to remove what it is which leaves me cold about another, I’d probably be a quintillionaire by now. As it is, I'm only an Ian-aire! Whatever it is, this story has it, because I felt quite at home.

This just goes to show that you can get me to read anything you like if you can find a way to draw me in. I don't care what age range it’s aimed at, or what gender. I don't care what the story is about, just give me a reason to read it! Make me want to turn the next page and I'm yours, shamelessly yours! One thing I can say helped in this case is that this isn't a first person PoV novel. 1PoV is something which I normally detest, so mega-kudos (or is that Maggie-Kudos?!) to the author for that.

Maggie Dana seems to be making a career out of writing middle grade equestrian epics, and what young girl doesn't want to read a story about horses? I have no idea, but that's what this story revolves around even though it’s actually about people. Kate McGregor applies for a job as companion and helper to Holly Chapman. The latter is wheel-chair bound (or is she?!), and Kate's only just turned fourteen. She has no experience, but Liz (Holly's mom) is getting desperate, and Holly and Kate take to each other immediately. Liz's mom decides it would be good for her to have someone her own age around, and so Kate is hired, she and Holly become room-mates so Kate doesn't have to commute, and the adventure begins!

You know there's a fly in the ointment - in this case, a horse-fly(!). Or more accurately, several of them. The Chapmans are only guests in their home, which is owned by the association which hired Liz to train riders. It used to be about fun, but now it’s about winning a competition at all costs, and if Liz doesn’t deliver a victory, she's out of a job and she and Holly are out of their home.

As for Kate, she fakes a fear of horses not because she's hippophobic (scared of horses, not hippos!), but because she carries a huge weight of guilt. She believes she's responsible for the death of her own horse, Black Magic. Worse than this (if that's possible) she makes an enemy of Angela Dean, the daughter of the main pain in Liz's life. Angela is a spoiled trouble-maker and, I have to say, rather a caricature. One almost expects her to twiddle her waxed mustaches as she cackles.

So we know up front that Kate is going to overcome her phake phobia, and that the real reason for her refusal to get back on the horse is going to be resolved and she'll be vindicated. We suspect that Holly will regain the use of her legs since it’s psychological. We know that Angela will be bested, and Kate triumphant in some competition or other. There's no mystery here. The only mystery is how the author is going to extricate her main character from the roadblocks with which she's hemmed Kate in. The answer is: it’s nicely done!

There is, unfortunately, a boy blip on the horizon. When I first encountered this I felt a faint twinge of nausea. Is this going to be yet another novel for young women where the reader is made to feel like she's only of worth when she has a guy to validate her existence? I was hoping he'd turn out to be gay and they become fast friends, but given the milieu, it was highly doubtful the author would take us there; plus the gay best friend motif is rather a cliché now. OTOH, if you take the tack(!) that he's the only guy in a field of girls, then to make him straight would pay against cliché, so what you lose on the swing, you gain the horse-ridden carousel!

The writing, in general, was par for the course. Not brilliant but eminently readable, and the writer evidently knows her stuff when it comes to horse-riding, care, and competition (not that I'm any kind of an expert!). There were some instances of "Say, what?" however, such as towards the end of chapter eleven where in one paragraph we're told that Denise racked up thirty faults (on a "cross country") for, in part, being too slow and then immediately in the very next paragraph, we’re told that it’s "not a race"! Either speed counts or it doesn’t. It may not be a race per se, but it is a race against the clock, and it seemed really odd to talk about being faulted for slowness and then having an instant avowal that coming in fast won't garner you any points. Yes, technically, in a deductive scoring system you're not earning points, but if you're too slow, you are going to lose them, so speed is of the essence. That just seemed like poorly-worded writing to me.

Another issue was with Kate's mantra that it’s about horse-girl-ship (not horsemanship, surely?!) and fun. We hear an oft-asserted claim that competition isn't important, but then we seem to find that everything is focused on Kate winning competition and triumphing over Angela. There's way too much competition in society, particularly in the US, so while I did like this story and wouldn't mind reading another installment of Kate's adventures, I also hoped that further episodes wouldn't be all about competing and winning. I hoped there would be far more to this world and these characters than that.

It wasn't all smooth sailing (or riding). One really big annoyance is that this novel was very aptly named. Allow me to explain that! Angela Dean turned out to be Angela Demon and was depicted increasingly in such extreme measures that she really did become a caricature fit better for the Cartoon Network than for an intelligent novel. Maybe the intended audience likes this kind of thing (which would be rather sad), but that doesn't mean a writer can’t elevate her readership and bring them up to something better, more nuanced, and actually realistic. Life is very rarely this harsh a contrast between midnight black and angelic white.

That was bad enough of itself, but what was actually worse was keeping secrets - that is, of Kate's passive enabling of Angela's atrociously abusive behavior, by not telling on her. Bullying is not acceptable, and as long as we teach young people via stories like this that bullies should never be brought to book, should never be called out on their behavior, should never be reported, then we're no better than the bullies because we’re saying it’s OK, and we're happy to facilitate acting-out and deliberate sabotage. IT'S NOT OK! It's never OK, not even in a novel, unless you have some higher purpose in allowing a character to temporarily get away with it - and it had better be a much higher purpose!

Another issues was with the horses, which were supposedly loved but which were not treated very well. Horses don't naturally choose to make crazy jumps over high obstacles unless they're frightened or panicked, yet these purported horse-lovers were making them jump and race, and risking injury not only to the horses, but also to the riders. If you're willing to put that aside, then there's entertainment to be had here.