The Wolf Keepers by Elise Broach

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"He had a teasing look on her face" She had a pleasing look?!
"She tried a different tact" tack?!

I have to vote a 'no' for this one, I'm sorry to report. While the novel itself wasn't written badly and contained some interesting story-telling, the overall message of irresponsibility and misbehavior by these kids, and of withholding important information from parents, for which there were no consequences, really turned me off this. I don't think it's the kind of thing a middle-grader should be reading. Worse than this, I felt it portrayed people of color in an unflattering light and the young girl as easily led. I won't go so far as to say it's racist and genderist, but to me it sure felt that way from time to time.

The basic story features Lizzie Durango, who is the daughter of a senior zoo keeper if not the head of the zoo itself. I didn't quite get exactly what her father's role was. If the book mentioned it, I missed it, but he lives with Lizzie in a house on the zoo grounds. Lizzie never knew her mother, who died shortly after Lizzie was born. Her father never remarried.

Lizzie has the run of the zoo during the summer, and free food at the concession stands. This was one of the problems for me. There seemed to be no supervision, and Lizzie was essentially eating junk food all day, every day. This tells me her father was more concerned about the animals than he was his own daughter! He was an irresponsible parent. As far as it went, this is fine because in real life there are irresponsible parents. What bothered me here is that this issue was never addressed, and he was never brought to book for his behavior.

Lizzie is keeping a notebook on activities at the zoo as a summer project for school, but this was another issue. I never did get why the notebook was so important, because while it occupied a lot of the story-telling, it featured so little in events and had nothing to do with the plot. I had thought it might contain useful information that became important later in the story, but this never happened, so why there was such a focus on it escapes me. It was tied to a side-story about John Muir, but this story never really went anywhere and I didn't see the point of it. Worse than this, Lizzie's personal behavior seemed completely at odds with her adoration of John Muir. He was a very responsible and far-sighted naturalist, whereas Lizzie was about as short-sighted and inconsiderate as you can get.

One day Lizzie encounters Tyler Briggs, a kid her own age, who is a runaway from a foster home, and who is living behind the elephant enclosure at the zoo. The two kids begin to bond although no good reason is offered for why they should. One of Lizzie's favorite exhibits is the new wolf enclosure where rescued wolves live. There's also a minor side-story about her bonding with the wolf-pack leader, but this doesn't really go anywhere either and is betrayed on one occasion. It made no sense to me, but anyway, the wolves are apparently becoming sick and dying one by one, but it turns out that it's not quite that simple. There are, Tyler tells Lizzie, odd activities in the zoo at night, especially around the wolf enclosure. One night the two of them spy on these activities, and they discover that someone is tampering with the wolves.

So far, so good, but it was right around this point that the story went completely downhill for me. None of it made sense from here on out, but I can't go into very much detail without giving away huge spoilers which makes it really difficult to explain why I disliked this story so much. Let me just say that the plan for the wolves is that they will be rehabilitated and released into the wild at some point which makes the behavior of a certain zoo employee meaningless, and undermines the whole reason why Lizzie and Tyler end up alone in the Yosemite National Park. I've visited Yosemite, all too briefly, and I loved it. I became pleasantly lost among the redwoods for an afternoon and it was great. Lizzie and Tyler do not have such a pleasant experience.

My problem with Tyler was how selfish and inconsiderate he was. Again, this was never resolved and he was never held accountable for his entirely irrational behavior. As soon as he showed up, the independent and confident Lizzie became his pawn. Every time there was a conflict she was depicted as bowing to his wishes. It made her look like a stereotypical "weak and compliant woman." It also made Tyler look like a complete jerk, and a little tyrant. Curiously, no parallel was drawn between Tyler's behavior and the wolf-pack leader's behavior, and there was definitely one to be drawn!

Tyler never made any sense to me because we were never offered any kind of decent reason for why he absconded from his foster home, where (contrary to what he consistently leads Lizzie to believe) he is loved and missed. This made me believe Tyler was unreliable and an outright liar at times. This is hardly the kind of person I'd want my young child to hang out with. The fact that Lizzie clings to him from day one, almost obsessing over him, made me nervous and made me feel she really wasn't very smart after all. It also felt wrong because Tyler could have been portrayed in a much better light, yet he was not. I don't know why.

Tyler was African American and at first I was glad to see a story including main characters who were not white, but as I read more about him, I began to wonder why he was painted so negatively, and so stereotypically: broken home, drug-addicted mom, crowded foster home, and so on. It felt wrong. To me the story would have been better had the roles been reversed, and Tyler had been the one living with his dad in the zoo whereas Lizzie was the street kid. To me that would have felt less like it was profiling, you know?

But Lizzie had her own host of problems, the biggest one of which was how completely irresponsible she is. She's initially presented as smart and well-behaved, and as someone who really cares about the animals in the zoo, but her behavior reflects none of this. Instead of advising her father that there is a runaway kid in the zoo, she aids and abets Tyler, never pursuing any concern over how worried his foster family might be about him, or how at risk he is living on the street. She exhibits this same behavior with regard to the zoo animals.

When she learns exactly what's going on, she should have reported it to her father. That's the kind of person she's initially presented to us as being: responsible and caring, and protective of the animals, but instead she acts out of character and takes things into her own hands, which is how she ends up stranded at the National Park, lured into making the trip there by Tyler. When she wants to go to the village and call her father, Tyler once again selfishly browbeats her into going with him, and she buckles to his will. I really didn't like Tyler's lordly attitude and despicable behavior to begin with, and at this point I started really disliking Lizzie's, too.

The ending, where Tyler is accepted despite having been the lure which put Lizzie at severe risk in the park, felt false. Yes, Lizzie had bonded with him for some reason, but her father's complete and ready capitulation seemed entirely unlike a parent, especially after her painful misbehavior. She paid no penalty whatsoever and neither did Tyler. There was no moral to this story! There are ways this novel could have been written which would have avoided all of these pitfalls and still told an adventurous and exciting story. I was really sorry these were not explored. I can't recommend a novel which fails to avoid so many traps and which fails to give any rational and reasonable resolution to so much poor behavior. Perhaps the children at whom this is aimed will not be so critical, but I can be, and this kind of a story is where I draw the line.

The Map to Everywhere by Carrie Ryan, John Parke Davis

Rating: WARTY!

Like the other library print book I looked at recently, I can't really review this one because I made it through only the first four chapters before giving up. They story switched back and forth (or even froth as I originally typed it! LOL!) between the two main characters and it wasn't making a whole lot of sense, much less as it drawing me in. One character, the guy, was named Fin, which turned me right off. 'Fin' is almost as bad as 'Jack' for an adventuring character name and the lack of originality in choosing either of those names frankly nauseates me. I flatly refuse to read any novel where the main character is called Jack on principle, no matter how tempting it sounds. The girl is named Marrill, which is almost equally obnoxious.

This is supposedly a middle-grade book, but the page count is well over four hundred - much too long for a middle-grade book unless the book is exceptional and really has something to offer, and this one didn't feel that way to me. It's also odd that it's so long, because it's not a one book story! It's part of a series, and I sure don't do series unless they're exceptional, so this one loses on that score, too. This authors need to seriously redact their work! OTOH, maybe this is what happens when you try to co-author a novel: it bloats!

As if that's not bad enough, Fin is an orphan who is in search of his mom, and there's a bumbling wizard. Yuk! It sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Terry Gilliam Movie Time Bandits, but it's not Gilliam and it shows. So, based on what little I looked at, I can't recommend it. But also based on what little I looked at, this review may be useless to you and if so I apologize, but I could not get into this book at all, and life is too short to spend pursing things that don't instantly delight you as a reader!

The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop by Kate Saunders

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audio book red amazingly by Jayne Entwistle, a professional narrator and (almost literally) one-time actor, who does great British voice because she's...British! She lives in the US now.

The story is a magical one in more ways than one. Lily and Oscar Spoffard move into a property their family inherits. It used to be the location of a very successful chocolate manufacturer and retailer which purveyed chocolates to royalty, until two of the talented Spoffard triplets were murdered by the other in 1938.

But there's more going on here than that. The third triplet is evidently in search of the magical chocolate molds used by his brothers, and now Lily and Oscar are tied up in the adventure, especially after they're recruited by a little known division of MI6 (the Brit equivalent of the CIA), they begin to learn their family history and of the magic that can be passed own in families - maybe to them?

The story wasn't perfect (but then which is?!). The terrorists didn't seem to end up caught, and the magical abilities the children were supposed to have never materialized in any overt form, but apart from that, the story was chock(olate) full of LOL moments, and the talking immortal cat (Demerara - great name for a cat) and the similarly endowed rat (Spike!) were hilarious. Spike was actually my favorite character, but then I have a soft spot for rats. Lily was a close second. I'd have been proud to have had a daughter like her. I thought Ms Entwistle overdid the cat's voice a touch, but overall I loved her characterizations. Her voice was to die for dahlings! I thought the story was great, and very entertaining. I shall be looking for more from this author.

Rosco the Rascal Visits the Pumpkin Patch by Shana Gorian

Rating: WORTHY!

Just in time for Halloween and in plenty of time for Thanksgiving, this is a middle-grade chapter book with some illustrations set around this time of year (assuming you're reading this in late October and you're in the northern hemisphere!). It has its roots in a real dog owned by the author, but the story is fictional. It's part of a series, and you can get another one in the series free by signing up for the author's mailing list.

Rosco (which I keep wanting to add an 'e' to so it looks less like a corporate name!) is in the McKendrick family, which consists of mom, dad, and two children, ten year old James, and seven-year-old Mandy. In this adventure, they visit the pumpkin patch where dad wants to procure a giant pumpkin to carve for Halloween. Rosco is a bit naughty at times, but it all comes from his desire to have fun and run-off excess energy. To be fair, he also has some very positive traits, though. He's very protective of children, and both his naughtiness and his protectiveness play a role in this story, as they enjoy the outdoors, take part in activities on the pumpkin farm, and get lost in the corn maze - which turns out to be fortunate for an even younger child who's in there, also lost. And very afraid. And hurt.

I'm not a big fan of "intelligent" dog and cat stories because in my sad experience the authors make them so human that they're no longer dogs or cats, so really, what's the point? In this case, though, I loved the way the author seems to get inside the dog's head, making it appear very human in a very doglike way, without turning it into a completely unbelievable human substitute. The story wasn't written for my age range, but even so it was fun, interesting, realistic, believable, and very entertaining. It carried positive messages and had a warm and happy ending. I recommend this for kids of all ages.

Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck

Rating: WORTHY!

Here's how to write a decent first person voice story! There were some issues with this, notably gratuitous animal cruelty and lack of justice, but overall the story was a worthy one and an enjoyable read and shows that once in a while, first person can be told without it being nauseatingly unrealistic. A lot of authors, not only in the YA field, could learn from this.

It's told (and rather like a reminiscence), by Eleanor McGrath of Indiana, who lives with her brother Jake in a podunk village which is just beginning to wake up to the disastrous rise of the internal combustion engine. But this isn't about ill-considered decisions, or big oil, or pollution and climate change. It's a love poem to the early automobile, some of which were awful, others of which were works of art. It's also a coming of age story - not of the young girl, but of the countryside, which was about to lose its isolation and idyllic innocence to the rape of petroleum and brute force or the carbon age, amply represented by the villains of the piece, the Kirby family, who are the only rivals in town to Jake and Peewee's garage, where you can get gas, flats fixed, and free air! Try getting that these days!

When I tell you that the story begins with a tornado, and it's not the most tumultuous event, you'll get an idea of the upheaval that's to come, when Eleanor's comfortable and happy life starts to be completely remodeled in the same way a modern vehicle's flimsy front-end is readily remodeled by an accident which wouldn't hardly even faze one of the older, solid-steel vehicles like the Stutz Bearcat which is a centerpiece of this story (you can hear that bear chasing that cat all around!).

It's not the only vehicle to get an admiring nod. All the early ones are here: the Cadillac, with it's electric self starter(!), as well as a host of vehicle you may never have heard of much less surmised existed, such as the Brush Motor Car Company's vehicle with a wooden chassis! Actually it did feature metal cross-bracing, which you will not learn from this novel, but nonetheless there it was. It helps if you keep in mind that back then, these vehicles were quite literally thought of as horseless carriages, and no one saw any reason to design them as anything other than carriages. If you look up pictures of the oldest of these vehicles, you can plainly see it.

The names are unfamiliar, too. They have gone out of business or been subsumed under modern mega-corporation names, and all the charm and individuality has been lost to convenience, cost-cutting, and shared resources. Thus we no longer have the Stoddard-Dayton, the Peerless, the Packard, the Pierce-Arrow, the Stevens-Duryea, the Apperson Jackrabbit, or the Marmon Wasp, although others, such as Chevrolet, will be very familiar, and it may be a surprise to learn that some names have a very long history.

Eleanor, better known as Peewee, for want of a more original name, is also a work of art. She's one of the most unladylike ladies you ever saw, but please don't misunderstand that to mean she's crude, entirely uncultured, or plain ignorant. She isn't, far from it. But you wouldn't want to call her a girl or talk about her wearing a dress if you didn't want a tongue-lashing. She'a feisty, capable, fearless, non-nonsense girl who has everyday smarts, and who is every bit the measure of a boy. She has no problem getting under a car and checking your brakes (which, like your steering, were not hydraulic), or popping the hood and fixing your carburetor or blowing out your blocked fuel line.

Eleanor and Jake's life really turns around when some city girls breeze into town. Why they show-up there isn't satisfactorily explained. Yes, it has to do with their idea of resurrecting the local library, but why this library in this little town? Because they heard of the tornado? We don't know. Either that or I missed it! But the point is that they encounter Jake and Eleanor when they have the inevitable car trouble. As much as we might love those old cars for their personalities and looks, those vehicles could be very unreliable, even more so than modern ones. But they were a hell of a lot easier to fix, and willing owners could do it themselves, and took pride in it. There were no complex electronics and computerized engines. The engines themselves were bare bones, and only just starting to become powerful and migrate form as little as one cylinder(!) to twelve!

As the new library takes shape, so do events, with the Kirby family trying underhand tricks to run Jake and Peewee out of business and Jake having eyes only for the ten-lap county automobile race. But things never do turn out how you plan in these stories and events take some interesting, amusing, annoying, and even surprising turns.

It bothered me that there was gratuitous animal cruelty, as I mentioned. What do I mean by gratuitous? Isn't all animal cruelty gratuitous? Yes it is, but in a novel, there can be instances of it which contribute something to the story you're telling, and other instances where the author evidently thinks it's funny to have someone cut off a cat's fore-paw, or deliberately stomp on a toad. I don't think that's remotely entertaining, and I saw no reason for it to be in a children's book.

The other issue I had was with the Kirby family. They were evil and lacked all morality, yet nowhere do they get any sort of comeuppance. Yes in real life bad people do get away with bad things. The oil corporations immediately come to mind, along with the junk food purveyors and the financial industries, and certain mega-computer software corporations, and yes, a corporation is a person so we're told, so they're bad people. But in a children's story, we expect evil to be punished, and it simply isn't here. Nothing befalls the Kirby family. Their evil pays off in the end.

It bothered me that the feisty girl was a trope redhead, and she went by the trope name of 'Peewee' but those were not major issues for me. I'd like to have seen the other issues addressed, but if I stack those against the overall story, I have to conclude that the quality of the story outweighed them by a large margin, and I have to say that I liked it, and thought it was, for the most part, a well told and entertaining read. Note that this is the second successive Richard Peck novel that I've rated positively. That one is also set in the same era and features a strong female character.

A Fish Called Blackbeard by Gillian Rogerson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was another charming young children's/middle-grade book from an author who is growing on me! Note that this is a text book - no pictures here - so while you can read it to young children, there's nothing for them to look at. Lilly desperately wants a pet, and her only hope is to win a goldfish at the fairground even if it uses up all her allowance. She finally wins with her last shot, she picks the more active of the two remaining fish. She notes a black ring around the fish's eye, she decides to name it Blackbeard after the pirate.

So far so good. But the thing is, she discovers the fish can talk, and when she talks to it, she discovers he's depressed. The other fish at the fairground was Blackbeard's girlfriend and now he's heartbroken to be separated from her! Can Lilly help her new friend? This story reveals all! I liked it. Written lightly and amusingly, it was different, fun, and inventive. It's exactly what you need to stimulate a young person's mind, and I recommend it.

Watch Out For The Bears! by Gillian Rogerson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an amazingly entertaining story about the son of the man who looks after the weather. One day the weather keeper has to go out and he leaves his son, Tom, in charge of the weather huts where the weather is of course kept locked away from the bears. Everyone knows about bears and weather. Most of the time we grin and bear it, right? There is a very brief section at the end of this book where the author talks about how she came up with the idea for this story, and I found that as entertaining as the story itself. It sounds very much like the way I come up with oddball ideas for stories! And the way you need to as well, if you want to be an original and inventive writer! She sounds like a fun and interesting person.

But I digress. Tom is happy to take charge of the weather for the day and doesn't care about the bears. He's never even seen one. Unfortunately, when he went to check on the weather this, one of them was unlocked and the clouds were gone! There were bear prints! Tom has to track down those clouds or he'll get in trouble with his dad, and he does track them down, but unfortunately this marks the first of several adventures he has with those kleptomaniacal bears. Tom is industrious and very responsible though, so he pursues his task diligently and bears up well in the end. You knew he would, right?

The story was completely charming, and I enjoyed it immensely. I look forward to reading other stories by this author - several of which are free on Barnes & Noble and possibly other online outlets, even as you sit here wasting time looking at this review while those books go unattended! Get over there! Now!

Teenage Mermaid by Ellen Schreiber

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those novels where an older writer writes for a younger age group without changing any of her personal preferences or prejudices! Thus she sounds dumb at best and stupid at worst. This is written in worst person voice, which is first person voice, a voice I detest, but it's actually twice as bad here, because we have two alternating stories and the first one, where the guy is rescued by the mermaid, is straight out of the Tom Hanks/Darryl Hannah movie Splash which preceded this novel by some two decades. It was juvenile even for the intended age range, and frankly I expect better from an author whose very name in German, means writer! I managed two chapters of this before I DNF'd this DNR.

Diary of a Wickedly Cool Witch by Kate Cullen

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb tells us that this story involves the titular character, Lily, taking on school bullies. Lily is some three hundred years old. The reason she appears to be twelve is that she is periodically reincarnated, yet she retains all her memories so while she was technically born only twelve years ago, she has the mind of a triple centenarian. Herein lay the first problem with this. Lily not only looks like a twelve-year-old, she thinks, feels, and acts like one. I don't know how middle-grade girls (at which this is aimed) would feel about this, but from my perspective the story was completely nonsensical and wildly inauthentic.

The blurb also says that this novel "touches on the notion of bullying, self-image, standing up for yourself, caring for your friends and being an individual" yet despite that, we have fat-shaming and age-shaming. How is that building anyone's self image or does the author want only willowy girls to read her books? It was disgusting and inexcusable. On top of that we get the 'girls hate math' stereotype.

Anachronism was rife. How come Lily knows the words to a thirty-year-old song by the police? Not because the middle-grade girl does (which is possible but unlikely), but because the author does. So now we have a three-hundred-year-old witch in a twelve-year-old body speaking in a thirty plus year-old/I don't know the author's age voice of Kate Cullen (not to be confused with Scots cyclist Katie Cullen, or with the other Australian Kate Cullen, writer of poetry and fantasy!).

There are many inconsistencies. Lily has psychic skills but she isn't a mind reader?! I know the two are not interchangeable, but if you have psychic skills you are definitely some sort of a mind reader! At another point she says, "I'm a witch not a psychologist," but after almost 300 years of experiencing humanity? You're both!

There are also writing inconsistencies. I read at one point "I think she snobbed me." I don't know if that was intended as a joking play on words or if the author simply put an 'o' instead of a 'u'. Maybe it's something Australians actually say (the author is Australian, so US readers should beware that there might be some minor language difficulties) That is the kind of thing an under-educated middle-grader might write, but it's not what a 300 year old would write. Finally there's the unintentional humor: "I try not to put the words cute and Dan in the same sentence." Um...she just did! Guess she's not trying very hard.

I can't recommend this. Maybe the girls at whom it's aimed will be less discriminating and view it differently from me, but I hope they actually aspire to read better-written novels than this.

The Seventh Element by Wendy Mass

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook I tried as an experiment and it failed. These things happen more frequently with audio than other media because I take more risks on audio. The story was poor even for the juveniles at which it was aimed. I assumed from the behavior and language level of the characters that it was aimed at middle-graders, but it was juvenile even for them. My kids are just edging out of that zone and they would have had no interest whatsoever in this.

It didn't help that this was book sixth in a series, I admit. Things were definitely missing, so you cannot read any one of these, I'd guess, as a stand-alone, but that wasn't why I failed this one. I didn't realize it was a series when I grabbed it in haste (obviously!) off the library shelf. This because I don't judge a book by its cover, given that authors have very little to nothing whatsoever to do with designing their cover unless they self-publish, so I do not linger on it and missed the tiny '6' up there under the massive series title. I really must start paying more attention before I flip the book for the back cover blurb! I don't normally read series for the very reasons exemplified here. Judged by the amount of fluff in this book, all six volumes could have been contained within one volume and it would have remained rather slim!

The novel had poor science, and it was silly and ill-conceived, and it was simply not worth my time. The title says it all. It was volume six, but it was the seventh element? Not well-planned!

Charlie Bingham Gets Clocked by Maggie M Larche

Rating: WORTHY!

I love books which have a title that makes it sounds like the author has done something perhaps she oughtn't! I mean did Maggie Larche really clock Charlie Bingham? That's what it says: Charlie Bingham gets clocked by Maggie M Larche! Seriously, this was a fun middle-grade book aimed at slightly mischievous, or perhaps slightly unlucky boys. Or perhaps both more likely. It's part of a Charlie Bingham series.

Charlie's friend Brad has a rather unruly pet lizard which secretes itself in his clothes when he heads out to school. Then it gets loose and hides in the teacher's old-fashioned alarm clock - the one with big bells on the top. Rather than reveal his reptilian pet is running around, Brad takes the clock and hides it in his backpack, intending to retrieve the lounging lizard later.

From this point on it's a bit like a game of pass the parcel, as they try to retrieve the lizard and return the alarm clock without being discovered! It doesn't go according to plan of course, and there are questions of trust and betrayal, but it all works out in the end. I liked it, and I think the intended age range will like it even more than I did, so I recommend this one for a fun romp for the intended age range.

The Rivalry: Mystery at the Army-Navy Game by John Feinstein

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't read series, and worse, this book is a complete lie if judged by the blurb. I know authors don't get to write their own blurbs unless they self publish, but the outright lie is a bit much even by blurb standards. I didn't realize this was number five in the "The Sports Beat" series. It read more like number two. If I'd known it was part of a series, I would never have read it - or in this case listened to the pedantic voice of the narrator (who was the author himself, so it's hardly a surprise that the reading was as bad as the writing).

I know it's not aimed at my age group, but the blurb outright lied about it: "John Feinstein has been praised as 'the best writer of sports books in America today' (The Boston Globe), and he proves it again in this fast-paced novel." If that's the case, if he's the best, there must be some lousy, lousy sports books out there. Either that or the Boston Globe is full of shift, to use a football term. No, this novel is anything but fast-paced. It begins with two flashbacks, so it's actually negatively paced! It's supposed to be about events during the Army Navy football game, but that game does not start until the final twenty percent of the novel! In the first third of it, literally nothing happened except that I got teed off (and not in a golfing capacity) by the incessant use of "Susan Carol" which is the first and middle name of one of the main characters. Seriously? No one ever calls her Susan or Sue? She should sue!

She's a fourteen-year-old female sports reporter for a big Washington newspaper. I'm not even going to get into the improbability of a teen female sports report in a major newspaper reporting on mens' sports - not that a fourteen-year-old female couldn't do it in theory, but that she would never be allowed to do it in practice in an adult men's world, and if she did do it she'd be jeered, insulted and abused incessantly by dickhead males. It happens all the time for a lot less than a female presuming to "trespass on male Astro-Turf."

As I mentioned, this story revolves around the annual Army and Navy game which is attended by the president and so Stevie and "Susan Carol" are following a Secret Service agent around. I get that this story is aimed at sports fans, but it's all sport (including the two flashbacks) and no mystery, no thrill, no cut to the chase, no fast-pace, and no thing to hold interest. You would get more thrills from reading a sports almanac or a stats book. I skimmed this one and missed the mystery - that's how pathetic it was, and I refuse to say anything good about a novel this badly written and this boring.

The Pants Project by Cat Clarke

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this is based on an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I really wanted to like this novel and rate it positively, because this genre is under-served and is nuanced with color and hue. These stories need to be told, but this one was so larded with flimsy black & white caricatures that ti could barely move without falling over itself, and it became impossible for me to continue reading it. I made it about halfway through and I could not bring myself to read on. I think middle graders need better and can handle a much more grown-up story than is presented here, and LGBTQIA deserves to be served better than a blue plate special.

The story is of Olivia, who insists upon being called Liv because for some considerable time she's felt like she's a boy, and not a girl. She's starting middle school and is offended by the fact that girls are not allowed to wear pants, but must wear skirts, and she rebels against it - hence the title. I found this to be unbelievable in a school that was purportedly as good and progressive as this one was supposed to be. It would have been far more rebellious had the main character been mtf transgender and wanted to wear a skirt, as The new Statesman pointed out back in March this year.

Liv had an important story to tell, but it was buried under the weight of caricature, cliché, and trope. The school is not populated with real students and teachers, but with cardboard stand-ins. There's the trope cool guy who befriends Liv; there's the caricature of a female school bully who was so far beyond belief as to be a joke. Not one of the teachers reins her in (once - it happened once in the half I read), which is absurd. The school principal is quite accurately described by the term "sexist pig." I find it incredible that he would be where he is and not one teacher has a problem with it. This is the twenty-teens not the 1950's.

The clichés run outside of school, too. Liv has to have two moms, one named Mom and the other named Mamma. Mamma is an Italian stereotype. The family dog not only has a pretentious name (Garibaldi) but also has three legs. In this brand of story, the moms will run either a bookstore or a delicatessen, and here it was the latter. I kept waiting to hear about the kitchen sink, because I knew that had to be in there somewhere.

This message is important, but here it was cheapened and ridiculed by the story and it deserved to thrive in a much more realistic milieu than ever it had here. I cannot in good faith recommend this.

Under the Ashes by Cindy Rankin

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was an amazing story about Elizabeth. Or is it LittleBeth? No, I think it’s just Beth. Anyway, she’s troublesome and then some, and she gets sent off to her maiden Aunt in San Francisco to become “refined”. She resents this with all her eleven-year old might, but she’s resigned to it. That is, she’s resigned to going. She’s not about to become refined if she can help it. There’s only one problem: this is San Francisco in mid-April 1906 and a couple of days away is a massive earthquake in which some three thousand people will die and eighty percent of this city of nearly half a million people will be destroyed. Severe damage and death also occurred outside of the SF metro area, too. The path of the Salinas River into the Pacific was diverted by six miles!

I had a hard time getting into this for a couple of chapters, but then it was like something clicked and I was completely on board. I don’t know what my problem was with the beginning. Maybe it’s my allergic reaction to first person PoV novels. I normally cannot stand them, and I can understand even less why authors are so OCD over them. I try to avoid them like the plague, but since none of these novels (except my own just published!) actually carry a mental health warning sticker on the cover, it’s hard to know what voice the novel is in until you request it and get to reading it.

This one, as it happens, turned out to be readable and the protagonist didn’t feel to me like she was self-obsessed or arrogantly demanding we look at her all the time. She has a way of deflecting attention from herself to what’s going on around her, and this was why, I think, the novel really opened up as it progressed to the train, and thereby to ‘Frisco.

The author made me feel like I was going through this with Beth: struggling to understand what was happening that morning as the world came literally crashing down around her. I felt what she felt, and I saw the eyesore. I felt the heat from the appalling, raging fires, and I smelled the smells. I felt her fear of losing her aunt even as she had such a prickly relationship with her. The writing is remarkable; it’s smart enough for an adult to appreciate, but juvenile enough for a kid Beth’s age to read, and to enjoy and engage with.

If I had a complaint it would be the usual one I have with children’s historical novels (and not a few adult ones for that matter, particularly time-travel ones) which is that of coopting historical figures and having them take part in the story. In this case it was Enrico Caruso - who was actually in SF when the quake hit. He left quickly and swore he would never return, and he never did. The story would have been perfectly fine had he not been in it, or had he merely been in it for the performance, and not actually hanging out with the girl after the quake, so I never did get the point of including him. He’s not the kind of person an eleven year old is likely to be interested in, or relate to.

But that’s a minor irritation, and it didn’t spoil the story overall, which was excellent. It was charming, funny, and sad. Beth was an awesome character, and I recommend her story highly.

Flood: Race Against Time by Aaron Rosenberg

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is the second 'STEM' novel I've reviewed, but unlike the first one, in this case I have to confess I'm very disappointed in it. It purports to be science-based, but in the end it's really sci-fi and I think this does the STEM objective a grave disservice by removing it from reality. Science is fantastic and engaging enough without seeking to 'amp it up' with unrealistic situations and exaggerated fiction.

This chapter book, augmented with a few images, features five kids who have transferred to a new school named after Einstein - as though he's the only scientist worth remembering. It couldn't have been named after a woman? But why would it be in a novel where genderism runs rampant? At one point I read, "or they’re manmade [sic]" Man-made? Why not simply say "manufactured"? Of course, that still contains 'man', but the root of that word is in reference to the hand, not to the gender.

This wasn't the only instance. At one point, I read, "Her dad commented from the head of the table." Dad gets to sit at the head of the table? Was this set in Victorian times? Even if he does, why stress it? Why not simply have him comment without specifying that he sits in the privileged position? At another point I read, "Anthropology is the study of man" No, it's the story of humans, male and female, boy and girl, and everyone in between.

Genderism wasn't the only problem. An improbably intelligent chimpanzee character which could have been ditched without loss was repeatedly referred to as a monkey, and this in a book purportedly aimed at improving science education? It's inexcusable. Also as inexplicable as it was inexcusable was the military teaching assistant. He was a disciplinary moron, had no place in a classroom and sure as hell didn't represent any military I'm familiar with.

Improbability was running high here, though. The children have their parents sign a blanket release form for field trips, then the teacher takes them on an experimental automated school bus - which has no driver? They almost get into an accident, but it's brushed-off as a science lesson! Even a capitalist corporation (or is it a person?) like Google doesn't let its robot vehicles out on the streets with no driver! And for good reason: we're a very long way from automated driving.

As if this wasn't bad enough, the children are taken to a field camp studying flooding, where there are unstable fissures in the ground, and the teacher leads the kids past police barriers warning that it's unsafe. Parents were given no information about the field trip, or about the use of the automated bus! This was not only a poor lesson in safety, it was ridiculous in the extreme. No wonder the author wasn't credited in the copyright (which was to the publisher, not to the author!). I wouldn't want to be credited for this kind of a book!

The point of the trip to the flood site wasn't made (unless it popped up after I quit reading). There seemed to be no point for the kids to be there other than putting them in danger, and indeed no point for the scientists and engineers to be there since there was literally nothing they could do, and no reason for them to be so close to danger, especially since they had by that time failed to take any action before the flood which might have prevented or ameliorated it, yet this tardiness in action was never raised as part of the problem!

There were other such issues, one of which included at least one poor definition, such as specifying that NASA is "the United States government agency responsible for space travel" - yes, it is, inter alia. It's not all that NASA does, hence the 'aeronautics' portion of the name. The definitions themselves were odd, in that they were (I assume) intended as footnotes, and were visible in the really crappy presentation in the Kindle app, but absent from the excellent presentation and formatting in Bluefire reader on the iPad. In the Kindle they were randomly mixed in with the text, rather than at the foot of the screen. I know this was an ARC, but this is really inexcusable in this day and age.

Be warned that the Kindle app is pretty much guaranteed to scramble anything containing images or special formatting like drop-caps, for example. In this case it scrambled that, the images, and the paragraph formatting so that some lines ended in the middle of the screen before continuing on the next line down. Even the Bluefire version, which is normally first class, suffered in that several sections were missing text. I only knew this because of the abrupt starting of sentences which did not follow from the previous sentence, and because the Kindle app had the missing text. This seemed to begin around page seventy. There was a section missing on p71, starting after "much fun and delicious?" And ending right before "103 and then headed down to the lab." Another instance was on p107 running from "engineer with the city" to "seep through". There were other such cases, but I gave up reading this novel at around eighty percent in because it was too stupid to live. I actively dis-recommend this as a STEM fiction book.

The Wishing World by Todd Fahnestock

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy from Net Galley, for which I thank the publisher.

This is an amazingly good middle-grade fantasy novel about eleven-year-old Lorelei (or is she really Loremaster?), a young girl who lost her brother and parents, all of whom she loved very much - yes, even her brother - and not only did no one believe her story of what happened, no one was able to find her family. She was considered delusional for merely telling the truth about what happened, and was referred to a rather sinister psychiatrist.

This explains why, as we begin the story, she's climbing up onto the roof of her old home to try to get inside to find the 'comet stone' which she believes will deliver answers. Instead, she discovers that she's somehow called a griffon out of the peculiar world of Veloran, and he refers to her as Doolivanti. Before long, she's inside the fantasy land, and searching for a princess who can help her defeat the Ink King and return her family to her!

I loved how fast those story moved. It was perfect in that regard, but it wasn't all plain sailing. Pip, the toucan was annoying because he insisted upon duplicating every sentence he spoke! Other than that I had no problem with, and took every joy in the writing until the princess showed up. The attempt to make her speak in a pseudo medieval language didn't work. Maybe middle-graders won't notice or be bothered by this, but it felt fake to me, especially when she said "Prithee, to whence have I come?"!

Whence is a 'from' word, and it incorporates 'from', so you can't use it with 'to'. It's used in the form: "Whence this bounty?" if you should happen across an unexpected pile of gold for example, or a table laden with food. "Whence do you hail?" might be used to ask where someone came from. It's one of those antique words like 'wherefore', which doesn't mean 'where'. It means 'why?' When Juliet says, "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", she's asking why is he a Montague - the family so at odds with her own Capulet family? If he went by any other name, they would not be enemies. But what's in a name? As I said, the rest of the novel was so good that these things became minor considerations.

Kindle isn't known for being a solid app, and often Amazon's process for converting a novel to Kindle format merely mangles it instead. This one wasn't awful, but the Kindle formatting resulted in random lines being truncated half way across the screen, only to resume on the next line down. Also, and quite frequently, the Kindle version took the last line of a page and encased it in a number one at the beginning and a zero at the end, like this:--1 King in the dark. -0. I think perhaps the Kindle conversion process got confused with what was a page number and what was the last line on the page. Hopefully that will be resolved when the final release is published. On my iPad, in Bluefire Reader, the book looked perfect.

Kindle also loves to mangle images, and it did so with gay abandon in this case. The images are at the start of each chapter, and in the Adobe Digital Editions reader on my desktop, the entire book was formatted perfectly. On my phone though, Amazon sliced and diced, and even Julienned the images. I've seen this in many ebooks, and it was the reason I abandoned all hope of migrating images and special text formatting from my book Poem y Granite. I stripped all of the images out and formatted all of the text with the same font for the Kindle version.

One thing I found my imagination running away with in this novel was how Christmas carols seemed to be woven into the story. I'm reasonably sure the author never planned it that way and this is just my over-active imagination at work, but this is the kind of story, like Neale Osbourne's Lydia's Enchanted Toffee which I praised back in November 2015, that stimulates imagination and is the major reason why I'm rating this one a worthy read.

Humans (and many animals, are predisposed to see patterns in things. It's what keeps us alive if we're paying attention, and is part of what law enforcement and the military call "situational awareness." The downside is that it's the kind of thing which also fuels conspiracy theories and inane beliefs in UFOs, the Loch Ness "monster" and sasquatch. On the other side of that coincidence, if people didn't hold such beliefs, I'd never have been able to get away with Saurus, so I can't complain!

But I digress. I was impressed by the mysterious Silent Knight in this novel, and this got me on the Christmas carol track. Silent Knight? So, were the three characters Lorelei first meets, the three ships that came sailing in, or the three kings of orient (it's always three, isn't it?!). When I started thinking of Lorelei and Ripple, the aqueous-addicted princess of the antique language, as the Holly and the Ivy, I realized my imagination was indeed running away! You can warp anything to fit your "conspiracy" if you're willing to shed rationale and logic and let your imagination run riot!

So, before I let my imagination run away any more, let me say that I loved this novel, despite a minor issue here and there, and I recommend it highly. It's fun, it's fast-paced, it's inventive, it's amusing, and it's well worth reading even if you're not middle-grade! I look forward to Todd Fahnestock's next work with warm anticipation!

Back Online by Laura Dower

Rating: WARTY!

I was offered a chance to read this because I'd apparently liked a previous volume in the series, but I honestly don't remember reading the earlier one and I cannot find a review for it on my blog or on Goodreads. I have nothing by this author on my blog, which may be on Google because their search engine sometimes fails to find things I know are there! But the story sounded interesting, so I decided to take a look even though I'm not a fan of series, except in a few rare cases.

The first third of this novel, featuring middle-grader Madison and her family and friends, was actually quite interesting and very readable, but starting in the middle third and continuing, it really went downhill. I reached ninety percent and gave it up out of sheer boredom and out of an increasingly strong conviction that I knew exactly how this was going to go down. It's the tired old story of the girl (in other stories it's the guy) who doesn't recognize that the best friend is 'the one'. It's been done to death. It speaks sadly of the blindness or stupidity of the main character and quite frankly, like Robert Frost, I yearn for the road not taken. I long for something a bit different, off the beaten track, with new or inventive things to say about people or relationships.

Madison too soon became a rather whiny one-trick pony with an annoying OCD centered around two boys. This then became virtually the only thing she had on her mind, the sole topic of her conversation, and the only thing she could focus on. It was not only annoying, it was boring! I don't have any daughters, I'm sorry to say, but I have sons in this age range and while they do tend to focus on things rather tightly, they also maintain a variety of other interests, and are nowhere near as blinkered as Madison is rendered here.

I can understand that girls and boys get hard and painful crushes on one gender or another, but to pigeon-hole them one as one-track minds, with nothing more there than their obsession is an insult. While I'm sure that there are girls who tightly focus on crushes, I am equally sure that all save the worst of these girls do not focus on them to the exclusion of very nearly everything else as Madison does. I can't speak for the age range this is aimed at, but for me, a girl who has more going on in her mind than this is far more interesting than Madison is. I think girls have enough to deal with without being painted as Madisons in every novel that comes out, and this is why I can't recommend this one as a worthy read.

City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, Dallas Middaugh, Niklas Asker

Rating: WORTHY!

I tried this novel in the form of an audiobook not long ago and was disappointed in it, which itself was a disappointment because the premise is an intriguing one. When I saw the graphic novel version on the shelf at my lovely loquacious local library, I decided this was the way to go, and I was not wrong. I really enjoyed the novel in this version. The story was adapted by Dallas Middaugh, who evidently hails from the Slash & Burn school of adaptation, because this was stripped right down to the bone. This might not appeal to everyone, but it appealed to me because my biggest problem with the audiobook was how much it ramble and meandered. The art work by Niklas Asker was fine.

The story is, I assume, aimed at middle-grade readers, since the main characters featured here were quite young. Whether they match the age as envisioned by the original author I can't say. The City of Ember is in perpetual darkness and relies on an increasingly unreliable electrical system to keep it lit during the "day." The citizens lead deprived and unhappy lives, constantly unhappy and often short of food. Corruption is rampant. They're assigned work at a young age, and have no choice in their occupation. Our two main characters, Lina and Doon (Lorna Doone anyone?!) however, buck the system and exchange jobs, both getting the one they preferred, but their collaboration doesn't end there.

The two of them start feeling like there are secrets being kept and that living this life in this city isn't all they and their fellow citizens were meant for. They pursue their suspicions and discover an amazing secret. Amazing to them, that is! It's pretty obvious to the reader by then what's going on. The 'ending' was beautiful. I put it in quotes because of course it's not an ending: it's the start of a series. Yet despite that awful and debilitating drawback, I recommend this graphic novel as a worthy read.

Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda

Rating: WARTY!

Yes, it's talking book Thursday and here's my third review of an audiobook today.

I really enjoyed Sarwat Chadda's The Devil's Kiss which I guess I read before I started blogging reviews, since I find it nowhere on my blog, but if I'd known this was the start of a series titled 'Ash Mistry Chronicles', I would have left this audiobook on the library shelf. I have sworn-off reading any book (single or series) which has 'chronicles' in the title (or 'saga' or 'cycle', and so on). The very name Ash Mistry is a warning. The novel turned out to be every bit as unappealing as I would have expected for a chronicle

Mistry and his daughter and Indian who have grown up in England, and are visiting the city of Varanasi here they run afoul of the evil Lord Savage (I kid you not with these character names). The main reason for this is that Ash is a petty thief. he damages an archaeological site and finds an arrow head made of gold. Instead of turning it in to the people running the dig, his first thought is that the can sell it and get some money. His selfish thoughtlessness directly leads to the death of an aunt and uncle, and he sheds not one tear nor offers a single expression of regret for them. Not in the part I could stand to listen to.

Worse than this, the novel is genderist. When Ash and his younger sister lucky are in hiding, someone offers to train them in the fight against the supernatural evil that Lord savage controls. One of the two gets to be a warrior - Ash. His sister gets to be a caregiver! Not that there's anything wrong with being a caregiver by any means, but why is the male the warrior and the girl the 'nurse'? Could they not both have been warriors? Or nurses? Could they not have chosen for themselves what they wanted to do rather than be assigned traditional gender roles? it was at this point that I quit reading.

The story was read rather melodramatically and breathlessly by Bruce Mann, which didn't help my stomaching of it. Also, if I'd known that this had been recommended by Kirkus reviews, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it at all. Kirkus pretty much ever met a book they didn't adore, so their reviews are utterly worthless. I cannot recommend it.

Return To Sender By Julia Alvarez

Rating: WARTY!

This one sounded interesting from the blurb, but it quickly turned into a clone of all the other stories of illegal immigrants in the American South - or in this case the Northeast. Eleven-year-old Tyler's family hires migrant Mexicans to work on their Vermont farm. They don't worry too much about whether the workers are legal. Tyler gets to know the migrants' oldest daughter until he learns that she's there illegally.

I got to about one third the way through this and quickly lost interest. This story is nothing more than a duplicate of every other such story, showing Mexicans as struggling, trying to build a better life for themselves, which no one can blame a family for, but just like all the other stories, it depicts the Mexicans as religious, family-centric, and it tosses in cozy Hispanic family words like Tio and Abuelita. But if every story of this nature depicts Mexicans as just like all the other Mexicans, isn't that racist? It sure seems that way to me. Why are these writers not interested in telling a different story: in stretching themselves and pushing the envelope instead of parroting the precise same thing all the other writers have already spewed ad nauseam?

I'm sorry but I'm not going to rate a novel as a worthy read when it's a Xerox of every other story and rather male-centric to boot. I do like it for the idea it gave me, but that's as far as I can compliment it!