Wrapped in the Past by Chess Desalls

Rating: WARTY!

This was a weird story about a time traveler who takes his family on a trip back, purportedly, to the deserts of the Middle East where they meet the "three magi" following the star to Bethlehem. This is such a literal interpretation of the Biblical story and it's not even accurate, even if we pretend for a minute that the story was true. This legend appears only in the gospel of Matthew, which Matthew didn't write, and nowhere does it say there were three dudes.

There are three prized treasures mentioned, but that doesn't mean there were three magi each with one treasure. Nor is there any solid indication that they were literally following a bright star in the sky. It merely says that they saw his star in the east (not in the west, note!) and have come to bow before him. They could have been astrologers who looked at a chart saw some sort of a sign and headed out with no star visible in the sky whatsoever. The best guess is that (assuming there were real) they were Zoroastrian priests. Zoroastrianism, coming out of what's now Iran, has had a significant influence on the development of Christianity.

The thing about this story is: how did this family happen to light down in the very place where these dudes were traveling? The desert is not a small place and although there were trade routes, they were vague. There was no highway to follow. This family had no idea where they would be along the route, even assuming that they were following one. They didn't even know which year this took place nor at what time of year, so the improbabilities were rife. Add to that the morphing yacht turning into a camel and the convenient fact that the father has taken very little time to master the common languages of that place and period, it was too much. It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to consider this to be realistic fiction.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Rating: WARTY!

In Italian, Divina Commedia or originally just Comedia, this is a poetic work describing a descent into hell by Dante, and everything he sees there, but the real hell was actually having to listen to this audiobook. It is sooo boring and so pretentious that I gave up on it after about a quarter of it.

It was not holding my attention. It was saying nothing of interest. The story was stupid and primitive, and tedious. How this can be described as the greatest work in Italian is a complete mystery to me. Note that in Dante's time, the word 'comedy' meant something with a happy ending - it did not necessarily mean it was funny, and there's nothing funny - not even unintentionally, in this work.

The real oddity here though is that all the while that Dante is vaunting the Catholic church, he's also extolling the Greeks who were multi-theists and certainly did not subscribe to Catholicism! The guy is very confused, and his name-dropping is both tedious and laughable. Almost as laughable as his nine circles of hell:

1. Limbo
2. Lust
3. Gluttony
4. Greed
5. Wrath
6. Heresy
7. Violence
8. Fraud
9. Treachery

Heresy isn't the worst thing? Neither is violence? This is the system Dante invented out of whole cloth. He made it all up and people at the time believed it. Many still do. If you're a flatterer, you end up in the eighth circle of hell, but if you're a murderer, you only get sent down to the seventh circle? There's actually no story here, just a litany of offences and vile punishments that no god calling itself merciful would actually countenance - an eternity of suffering and a loving god are irreconcilable. And Dante was a moron.

Dream of Me by Quinn Loftis

Rating: WARTY!

There were serious problems with this book. Naturally it's YA, and so naturally it has problems - like this is a: hot young special snowflake of a girl whose parents are not in the picture, but a much older less than savory guy is in the picture kind of a YA story.

Most YA books have problems - though thankfully not all. The biggest problem with this one was the antique Sandman, called Brudair in this novel, or Dair for short, and the eighteen-year-old he stalks, who is named Serenity. And yes, the author can joke about it and call it what she likes, but he is a stalker who spies on her in her bedroom, lusts after her, goes into shallow raptures over her beauty, talks to himself about 'making her his', and he is literally centuries old. It makes zero sense that he would be attracted to a teenager for anything other than pure carnal lust, because he really doesn't know her at all. It makes as much sense as a forty-year-old guy falling for a toddler.

His job is supposed to be bringing life-changing and guiding dreams to people on behalf of 'the creator' so yes, this is religious fiction, but it makes little sense the way it's told. It's like Serenity has no choice in how she lives her life. She wants to get out of this Podunk town and live a real life somewhere else, "But destiny has other plans, and it's the Sandman's job to make sure those plans are fulfilled."

In other words, she's screwed. She has no free will. She's being controlled by a much older guy - the "tall muscular Sandman." - like he isn't already threatening enough, dressed in black as he is and "wrapped in shadows." The unanswered question is, if the Sandman was "never meant to have a mate" how come he has such lusts? And for someone so young? How come he didn't plant these ambitions in Serenity when she was much younger? Because then it would be an even sicker story than it already is

The writing is a bit limp, not awfully bad, but hardly great. I read at one point, "Serenity had not come to the decision to leave easily," which really ought to be "Serenity had not come easily to the decision to leave," but things like this are quibbles that are easily ignored if the story is worth reading. This one isn't and I ditched it at maybe 10% in, and moved on to something much more worthy of my time. I can't commend this kind of writing as a worthy read.

Legion by William Peter Blatty

Rating: WARTY!

This was Blatty's attempt to get back some of his former glory after The Exorcist supernova had faded. I thought that original offering was a great novel and I really enjoyed it, but this one, which I read some time ago yet did not realize until today that I hadn't reviewed it, was a poor, poor sequel.

Often when a writer has a huge hit it's hard for them to get anywhere near that point again. We've seen it with runaway best-seller writers like JK Rowling after the Harry Potter marathon, and Suzanne Collins after The Hunger Games and its sequels. Inevitably they're drawn back to retread old tires because efforts to go in other directions are met with indifference. Typically retracing steps is a mistake and it fails.

The plot for this is very confused, resurrecting people who clearly died in the original novel and turning the demon into a limp and unoriginal serial killer, jumping from living body to body to leave trademark serial killer crimes scenes but with different fingerprints. The book was clearly very badly-written, very confused, and not worth the reading. A better take on this idea is the Denzel Washington movie Fallen which did not perform well at the box office but which I think far outstrips both this novel and the movie that was made from it. I can't commend this particular novel as a worthy read.

Archangel by Sharon Shinn

Rating: WARTY!

After a hundred pages or so of this huge tome of a fine-print novel, I really didn't feel like I'd be very happy trying to read several hundred pages more if the first hundred are not doing much for me. The story had potential I think, but I feel it's been wasted and I'm not a fan of this meandering and waffling style of writing.

The premise is a world set in Biblical times, and in which angels interact with humans in ways the Bible never talked about. The position of 'Archangel' is due for a change of tenure, and Gabriel is up for it. For reasons which go unexplained, he's required to get him a human bride, but one designated by "the god."

Having failed to find his bride at the location he was told she would be, he begins a search for her, but can't find her anywhere. The village has been destroyed - and was razed several years ago, which begs the question as to why he was directed there when there was no 'there' there! That question, again, goes unanswered, at least in the portion I read.

It made zero sense because everyone in Gabriel's angelic circle is chiding him for not getting off the mark and finding his bride earlier, but if he'd done that when the village was still extant, then she would have been a child bride! Seriously? If he'd waited, as he did, until she was old enough to marry then her village was gone. What the heck? It made no sense at all. I don't think the author thought it through.

In another pov, we discover that she, Rachel, is a servant for a family which is organizing a wedding to which Gabriel has been invited. This is where he meets Rachel, purely by accident, but instead of following Gabriel's search and showing him meeting up with her, the author chose to skip to her life as a servant and ramble on about that, before bringing that to a jarring halt while we're forced to back-track to a documentation of Gabriel's fruitless search.

This held zero interest for me and as gar as I'm concerned, was a complete waste of trees. They'd already met at the end of the previous chapter! Why force a flashback on us? It contributed nothing to moving the story forward - quite the opposite in fact. It held it up and I react negatively to dumb writing choices like that. I'm not a fan of pointless flashbacks.

On top of this, what's wrong with this match up? A young woman to an antique angel? I mean let's face it Gabriel's been around since the dawn of time, so why would he have any interest at all in a juvenile human female? That said, Gabriel hardly has angelic thoughts. He doesn't come off as an angel at all, but as exactly how he's portrayed - a regular human male in his thirties or thereabouts. It was bullshit.

It's like that asinine 16-year-old Isabella falling in love with the hundred year old Edward. if she;d been legally an adult and he'd been half his age that would be one thing, but how is it remotely going to work given their massively different life experiences? I'm not one who denigrates May-December relationships; far from it, but in this case it was way extreme, and even more-so in the case of Gabriel and Rachel.

Why would someone of his antiquity and background have any interest at all in a woman who must have seemed like an infant to him? I'm not taking about physical appearance, but about mental compatibility. They would have had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common! Just yuk, and ugh, and blecch!

I never did get why it was so hard for him to find her if it's been divinely ordained that he and she are to wed and sing praises to a god at a ceremony. It made no sense to me, and I quickly decided I wasn't about to expend any more time reading another several hundred pages of this kind of writing. I ditched it and moved on to something better. Trust me, there's always something better! I see no point in wasting my valuable time on something that simply isn't doing it for me, and so, based on the portion of this that I did read, I cannot commend it as a worthy read, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

The Gifting By KE Ganshert

Rating: WARTY!

This is a supernatural story about a world where science rules and supernatural belief is frowned upon, but where, of course, this one girl has inherited from her grandmother the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Naturally no one told her she has this power, and she thinks she's going crazy. Because this is YA, she is of course completely and unrealistically ostracized because of this one freak-out she has when she and some fellow teens are playing with a Ouija board.

I don't normally read stuff like this, but it's been a while and this one seemed quite interesting; unfortunately, it immediately seemed to be going down the same road to Tropeville that YA writers all-too-often follow like a bunch of blind sheep. This author appears no different, sporting the usual YA fear of being different, and thereby ironically becoming in a real way, the very character she writes about!

The book was a free loss-leader for a series, but I can't generate interest in a series that's written this poorly and with so many clichés in it. It's YA, and in my extensive experience is already a mark against it. Worse, it's in first person, a voice which often irritates me far more than it entertains me in stories.

It seems to be a rule of YA writing that everything is black and white: there can be no room for gray areas or nuance in these stories. Consequently, Tess is so ostracized that her family leaves the area and moves to Northern California where, her parents say, there's an institute that can help her. Her parents must be rolling in money because this whole transition takes only three weeks from Tess's incident to abandoning their old house and moving into a new one! Wow! Privilege much?

The author describes the move: "we jettisoned across the country." That makes zero sense. 'Jetted across the country' would have made sense or even, "we jettisoned ourselves across the country." Earlier she'd written something about 'Judo chopping' her brother for some remark he'd made, but Judo is not a 'chopping' sport. If she'd said 'karate chopping' that would have meant something, but not with Judo, which is a throwing sport a little bit like wrestling. It's not hard to get these things right, and you have to wonder about a writer's dedication when simple mistakes like this are so readily made.

The author makes no secret of the fact that she's something of a born-again believer and her bizarre detestation of science comes through in her writing and spoils the story which felt a bit like she was preaching a sermon rather than relating an entertaining tale of the supernatural. It's so strident at times that it's off-putting and it ruins her writing.

It wouldn't have been so bad if she wasn't so very wrong! Those who believe in these things, talk about having faith because it's not something science can measure, but this is bullshit. If the supernatural world (which I do not believe in, by the way) purportedly has any impact on the real world, then in order to do so it must cause change in the real world in order for it to act or to be detected, and that's something science can measure, quantify and study. There never has been any such evidence.

The believers themselves admit this by repeatedly - and throughout history - making excuses for their god's total absenteeism and inaction! They talk all the time about how we must act. "God helps those who help themselves," they cry, which sounds truly selfish to me, to say nothing of utterly lacking the very faith believers profess they have, but this small part is true: because we help ourselves, no god ever has to do anything! LOL!

That conveniently explains away why no god ever shows! And how we browbeat ourselves: if we succeed, then it's a god's success! If we fail, then it's our failure! How pathetic is that? The Old Testament is full of stories of the ancient Hebrews fighting foes. No god ever helped them to win. This for a supposedly peace-loving religion, but whenever the Hebrews won a victory, it was because they were the chosen people blessed by a god. Whenever they got their ass kicked it was because they were unworthy sinners and direly needed to repent. I call horse-shit on such self-serving and deluded lies.

The fact is that Bible and other religious literature throughout the world is rife with stories describing how people did the work that the god really ought to have done! They did this precisely because there was no god to do it, and this same 'epiphany' runs rampant today! If there were such a thing as gods, we would never find ourselves in the position of always having to do the work! This and the complete lack of any positive evidence for a god or an afterlife is why I do not believe. I'm sorry that writers like this one do not have a sounder scientific education; if they did, they would not make the mistakes this author has made.

But this isn't a review of the author, it's a review of the book and that is sadly lacking. As I mentioned, it's far too full of trope and follows far too many other writers telling pretty much the same story with a tweak-tweak here and a twerk-twerk there. What I long for is the story that steps off that worn-out path and dares to tread where no author has gone before. This novel wasn't anywhere close, and I could not continue reading it. I can't commend it based on the portion I did read which was a recipe for disaster: one more half-baked than well-done.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen

Rating: WARTY!

I have no idea who this is written for. Not me, that's for sure because it rubbed me up the wrong way from the off. It was first person to begin with which is typically a poor choice of voice, and it's especially a poor choice when the voice comes off as fingernails on a chalk board.

If I'd known that the author was a professor of creative writing at some college I would have avoided it like the plague because sorry experience has taught me well that books from authors like that paradoxically tend to be dreary and uncreative at best. Kate Christensen's review in the NYT says it wonderfully - and in an otherwise positive review! She wrote: "Nothing much happens here, plot-wise." I couldn't have put it better myself. The blurb had made this sound interesting though. It was about a 43-year-old woman who almost simultaneously separated from her newly-revealed gay husband, and was involved in a serious accident that left her with several broken bones. In true fictional tradition, she went running...well hobbling anyway, back to her hometown.

That's about as far as I got. I'm not normally into that genre - the running back home like a little kid story that is so unfortunately common these days, but this one sounded like it might be different. It was different in that it was not fictional, but it wasn't in any other way, and the screeching, laughing too loud story-telling style grated on my every nerve. I honestly could not stand to read it beyond the first few pages, and I ditched it in short order. I'm done with this so-called creative writing professor.

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

Rating: WARTY!

Time to look at some more audiobooks!

Emezi was born in Nigeria which is wealthy in oil, yet despite this, over 50 per cent of young people cannot find work and many cannot find food. Out of this came this author, and this is her debut novel which fortunately for me was read in English, not in Igbo, and it's read by the author, something of which I approve for an author who can do it. No one can give better voice to their words than the one who wrote them. Unfortunately, while getting off to a strong start, the novel went into a downward spiral in the second half and I ended up not able to commend it as a worthy read despite it being a really pleasant experience listening to the author's voice.

This novel is about Ada (the author pronounces it almost like the word 'adder' but with very little of the R on the end, and she's referred to most often as The Ada, because the story is narrated by the spirits which occupy this girl and have done so since before she was born in pretty much the same region of Nigeria as the author herself was. The blurb claims that Ada "becomes a troubled child, prone to violent fits of anger and grief", but there really is very little of this. She seems perfectly ordinary for the most part, although far from normal.

The blurb does get it right when it says that "a traumatic event crystallizes the selves into something more powerful." Ada has long known that whatever is in her is satiated by a blood sacrifice, which is why she occasionally cuts herself, but after she experiences something which is all too common and which sees little justice in the coed world of American higher education - a topic I touched on in my own novel, Bass Metal - one of the spirits takes over Ada's body and the original Ada fades into the background much more, although she isn't lost altogether.

What I found poor about this story was how human the gods were. In some parts of it the author goes out of her way to point out how unimportant human life is to them and how trivial it seems, yet the parts narrated by the god reveal them to be very human and petty and to focus on human needs and wants. There is nothing godly about them, and in Ada's case their interest revolves almost entirely around sexual gratification which I found rather pathetic. So while this started out interestingly, it quickly became repetitive and boring for me.

A conflict arises when Ada - the real Ada - falls for this guy that the female god Asughara does not approve of. She's not the only one onboard, although the others are really non-entities as far as the story is concerned. The only other one to really appear is Saint Vincent, but he's a bit player and not worht the writing in the end. So there's a conflict, but the god is really uninterested in doing anything about it and when things go badly simply says "I told you so" and that's pretty much that. The story rather fizzles out after that and I gave up on it. I can't commend it, although I'd be willing to listen to another story by this same author as long as she reads it!

Give Please a Chance by Bill O'Reilly, James Patterson

Rating: WARTY!

Not a fan of O'Reilly or Patterson, especially not now I see the two have colluded on writing a children's book! After all the news we've had about O'Reilly and harassment allegations and multi-million dollar hush money, I don't see where he gets the chutzpah to write a book advising kids to say please. Seriously?

Several artists illustrated this, but I don't know which one of them got a juvenile into her underwear for this book. Talk about bad taste. I'm not for banning books as a general rule, but this one ought to be, based on hypocrisy alone. I don't care if they're both donating proceeds to charity. It's still not right. The guy's last contract with Fox was for what - $25 mill per year? Let him give some of that to charity and stay away from writing children's books. And let's boycott Fox for continuing to employ people like this, and Henry Holt publishers for publishing books by people like this. Some people just have no shame.

The book doesn't even do a decent job of sending the message it claims to send. The message it does send seems to be that you can bribe people to do what you want - in this case by saying please. I guess it works with simpletons on the extreme right.

Sadia by Colleen Nelson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

The story is about displaced and immigrant Middle-East young Muslim girls in Canada. Sadia Ahmadi is fifteen years old. She and her family left Syria when her father got a teaching post at a University in Winnipeg, which is the capital city of Manitoba, a Canadian province. Winnipeg sits some seventy miles north of the North Dakota-Minnesota state line. It's cold up there at this time of year! it's 5° Fahrenheit, or minus fifteen Celsius as I write this! The average low in January is minus twenty one! Even in August it doesn't breach eighty (25°C), and it's down to the fifties (12°C) at night. Call me a wuss, but that's way too cold for me! You have to be tough to live in Canada!

By moving when they did, Sadia's family missed the Syrian civil war. Sadia has some mixed feelings about the move and her new homeland, but she gets a real education as to how lucky she is when Amira Nasser, a refugee, ends up at Sadia's school having left everything behind in Syria to escape the not-so-civil war. Now she's in a strange land with different customs and language and she's expected to integrate and learn. Sadia is assigned by her school (Laura Secord High School) to help her get up to speed. Laura Secord is (or was) a real person - a Canadian hero of the 1812 war.

But the story isn't about Amira; neither is it about Sadia's best friend Nazreen Hussani who originally hailed from Egypt. Instead, these two are rather employed to represent the trope angel and the devil sitting on Sadia's shoulders. Amira is very much a traditional Muslim girl. Nazreen is a rebel who removes her hijab and conservative clothing as soon as she gets to school, replacing them only before she leaves to head home. Sadia has issues with this and while she tries to maintain their friendship, she also feels increasing tension, dissent, and distance between herself and Nazreen. She feels pulled between these two extremes, yet tries to find her own path.

The thing which seems to erode the rough edges, and bring all these girls together is basketball. It is Sadia's passion. She has the chance to be on a co-ed team which enters a small tournament. Everything seems to be going great until the finals, when one of the teams objects to Sadia wearing what is a suitable outfit for a strict Muslim girl to play a sport in public, but which the opposing team finds objectionable, and which we're told is contrary to the official rules of the game.

On a point of order, it really isn't. The problem is that there is a slow turn-around time for professional publishing houses - a lag between the author finishing a novel and it being published. I don't know when the author wrote this or how long it was between her signing-off on the finished copy and the publishing date (which is this month) but as it happens, the rules in basketball got changed early last year in Canada to allow religious headwear (with certain restrictions), so I chose to assume that events in this novel took place before that date! Full disclosure here: the publisher, Dundurn, is the largest Canadian-owned publisher, and I am on their auto approved list on Net Galley, for which I am grateful since I tend to like what they publish.

Just as importantly, a young girl named Amina Mohamed of the Dakota Collegiate in Winnipeg came up with a design for headwear that meets both Muslim restrictions and basketball regulations. In the novel, it's Nazreen who comes up with this idea. There's no acknowledgement to Amina, so I'm wondering if this book was locked-down before that item got into the news. Perhaps in future editions, the author can acknowledge Amina Mohamed's accomplishment.

The story itself, though, was well-told and moving. It did bring to the fore the issues Muslims have when trying to live in Western society and stay true to their faith: the restrictions, the difficulties, the prejudices and the outright racism in some cases. I'm not religious at all, so some of these issues struck me as trivial, but that's certainly not how they feel to people who are invested in faith, so I let that go, but what did bother me is that there are deeper issues which the author did not explore. The most outrageous of these is the appalling gender bias that seems to go hand-in-hand with far too many organized religions (and not a few disorganized ones as well, for that matter).

If the purpose of covering a woman's body is to prevent inciting passions, then it seems to me to be doomed from the off, because when a woman is completely covered, doesn't that in a way inflame an embarrassing number of the male half of the population with curiosity and desire to know what's under there? Of course you could argue that no matter how a woman dresses, but this is actually the other half of this problem: while all the pressure is placed upon women to tone down their dress (whether it's Muslim dress or even western dress as it happens), none is placed upon men to tone down their behavior and it was this which the Quran addressed first!

The whole idea of covering a woman up isn't only an insult to the woman, it's also an insult to the men in its implicit assertion that they're so lacking in self-control that women need to be hidden under blankets lest their very appearance cause the men to become serial rapists. That whole idea is absurdist and wrong-headed to me and says far more about the men who promote these ideas than ever it does about the women who have suffered and continue to suffer under this oppressive and cruel patriarchal hegemony.

The Quran is quite explicit in terms of modesty, but this requirement did not so much address clothing as partition between the genders, and it does not apply solely to women! It applies to men, too, yet in this story, we find no issues raised over the boys, only over the girls. I thought this ought to have been delved into a little. What;s good for the goose is worth taking a gander!

Why must girls wear a head covering (which technically is a khimar, 'hijab' having a more general meaning) and not the boys? I think there is some mileage to be had there, especially when telling a story of this nature. On a related, but slightly different topic, one of the things Nazreen did in her little rebellion against conformity was to wear (when she did wear them!) very colorful Khumur (the plural of khimar).

Personally, I have no problem with what women wear (or don't wear!), it's their choice, but I can't help wonder how making a Khimar more attractive meets the stated purpose of the garment in the first place, which as I understand it, is to promote a modest appearance. Isn't it less modest to make yourself stand out? Indeed, in western society, wearing a Khimar in the first place is rare enough that it makes a woman stand out more than if she went bare-headed, so this seems to me to be in conflict with the whole purpose of a head covering if it's to detract from attention! That's all I'm going to say on that topic, although I certainly reserve the right to go into it in some future novel of mine!

On a minor technical issue, and prefacing this by saying that I'm not a basketball fan and I certainly don't pretend to be an expert on rules: as far as I know in regular play, once a basket is sunk, the ball goes to the other team! There's no rebound to be had and you certainly can't try to score again. So when we read that Jillian scored a trhee-pointer and then "Allan grabbed the rebound to shoot again" I had to ask: what rebound? There's no rebound from a sunk basket! And even if there were, you can't just grab the ball and shoot again! The possession devolves to the defending team. I'm thinking that the author was conflating regular play here with taking a free throw during which - if the ball rebounds - a player can grab it and take a shot. But like I said, it's a minor issue and we all manage to let a few of those get by if we're honest!

So in conclusion, the novel felt maybe a little young for high school, but then the students were only on the cusp of the high school experience, so perhaps I'm being too judgmental there. Or maybe just mental! I felt there were some issues with this as I've mentioned, more in the omission than the commission, but overall, the novel was a worthy read and I recommend it, especially for the intended age range.

Solomon's Ring by Mary Jennifer Payne

Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
"Smith flexes a well-toned bicep" Once again YA authors, it's biceps! Unless you do happen to be speaking about only one of the two upper attachments of this muscle: the long head or the short head. I favor the long head myself....

The twin motif in novels, especially young adult novels, has been way overdone, so if you want to venture into it as a writer, you need to offer something truly different or inventive and unfortunately, this novel offered neither. To be perfectly fair, this was volume two in a series, and I have not read volume one, but this seemed like it stood alone fairly well if you were willing to accept that there was baggage from the past that you were not directly party to. But every new relationship is like that, right?!

My problem with it was the writing which felt very amateur. There was nothing technically wrong with it in terms of spelling errors or poor grammar and so on, but it just did not tell the tale well at all, and some of the story seemed so poorly thought-out that it felt like reading indifferent fan fiction.

If you're going to call-up children to do a job that would normally be done by adults, you'd better have a more solid reason for it than simply "Oh she's a special snowflake" and then get all coy about why it's so, and in book two no less. It's just an insult to your reader's intellect, or did you plan on writing only for dumb readers? It's a good question to ask yourself as and author: who are you talking to? And do you really want to talk down to them?

The stakes are higher when the story is a fantasy, especially a religious one, because if you're calling on humans to do a job that a god cannot do and angels cannot handle, then you'd better have a good reason for that too! I know the Bible has countless instances of humans being called on to do a job which God can't handle, but that's a sign of really poor fiction, not of a well-written classic. Just to put it out there - that these kids are needed to fight demons - and offer nothing to support that contention is either empty plotting or the cowardice of hiding behind scores of other poor writers who've employed precisely the same blinkered plot.

The twins had been separated (in volume one) one of them being thought dead, but she was just in Hades evidently, although it's not called that here. Here it has a cutesy hipster term that I prefer to forget. Anyway, her sister discovered where she was and rescued her and now they're back together, but demons are walking the Earth! Or at least the town where they live.

There is a curfew and there are power outages, and these two sixteen-year-olds are so dumb that they let themselves get talked into staying out until dark, which is apparently (and for reasons unexplained at least in the part I read) when demons are loose. Why the demons can't walk during the day is unexplained of course because this novel cowers behind trope. You're expected to swallow all these dumb 'rules', like not crossing running water and being allergic to iron, and so on because it's always done that way! Why would an author strive for originality and to up their game when they can take the road most traveled like everyone else does?

The demons are hunting one of the twins because she's your predictable YA special snowflake although no-one, predictably, will tell her why, not even her angelic best friend, predictably named Raphael. This is one of those tedious stories with all kinds of unnecessary secrecy and poor plotting. If a city was in that bad of a shape, the national guard would have been called out, but no! Everything is going along 'normally' despite the dire crisis, the curfew, and the murders in the streets. This made no sense whatsoever.

It made no sense that one of the twins would be armed with a bamboo pole to fight demons. We're told that bullets cannot kill these demons, but this made no sense either given that the demons were occupying frail human bodies. Why would decapitation work? How do you decapitate with a blunt bamboo pole anyway?

Even were I willing to grant all of that, especially given that I'd not read book one, I can't overlook that it made no sense that the police would not find something highly suspicious in a young, rather frail-looking girl magically decapitating an attacker with a bamboo pole! It made less sense that they would simply nod their heads and say "Oh, okay!" when told the bamboo pole had disappeared. Police are not dumb. They know a lot more than you do, yet far too many authors treat them like they're clueless clowns. For all the faults that police do have, I can't respect an author who depicts all of them as idiots.

It was at the point where Raphael was being all mysterious and for absolutely no reason whatsoever that I could not stand to read another world of this book. There are people no doubt who will whine that you cannot gauge a book after reading only ten percent of it, but that is an outright lie. A book either does it for you from the off, or it doesn't; it's either smartly-written or it isn't. A novel is with worth reading or it's not, and this one simply was not. Life is far too short to waste it on a book that does not launch for you right from the beginning.

This one seemed dedicated to employing great leaps of faith as a substitute for thoughtful writing and solid plotting, and it relied on so much hand-waving to cover plot holes that I could feel a chill from it. To me, that's a sign that you should whack it with a bamboo pole. Intelligent readers deserves a lot better than this. Other readers deserve what they get.

Cloudia & Rex by Ulises Farinas, Erick Freitas, Daniel Irizarri

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a great story which I really enjoyed, although I have to say it was a bit confusing at times. The art was lovely and the story was different from the usual fare. I always appreciate that! For one thing, it presented African American females as protagonists. It was nice to see strong female characters of color, who are far too few in comic books, and strong, independent females who are equally rare. I would not recommend a graphic novel if that was all it had to offer, but I would sure be tempted! Fortunately this offered much more.

In the story, two young girls, the eponymous Cloudia and Rex, and their mother run into ancient gods who are seeking safety which can only be found in the mortal world. An antagonist named Tohil wishes to destroy those same gods and is hot on their heels.

Somehow the gods end-up being downloaded into Cloudia's phone, and some of their power transfers over to the girls. Rex is somewhat bratty, but she finds she can change into an assortment of animals. It's amusing and interesting to see what she does with that. Cloudia is a bit strident, but maybe she has reason when her life is screwed-up so badly and unexpectedly.

Daniel Irizarri's coloring is bold and pervasive, and it really stands out from the comic. It's almost overwhelming, actually, but overall the story was entertaining and the characters were fun, I recommend this one.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Rating: WARTY!

This was a bloated audiobook which I came to by way of the excellent TV show. I find it disheartening that authors like Gaiman (who is evidently channeling Stephen King here), so routinely get away with padding novels with extraneous material that's not even relevant to the plot, let alone moves it along. If this had been submitted, as is, by an unknown author it would have been slashed and burned by the editor or publisher, assuming they even deemed it publishable.

Gaiman needs to take a few editing hints from the writers of the TV show, because for me, this bloating is what ruined what could have been a fine novel. I made it about a third of the way through, and hit one section after another that was padded with material that seemed to come out of deep left field - which is saying something for a story that is entirely out of left field! - and I gave up on it. I'll stick with the TV version. It's better done.

For example, an entire half-hour drive to work listening to this audiobook (nineteen disks!) was ironically occupied in the novel by a drive which Shadow, the main character in the book, undertook simply to get from point A to point B. It did nothing to advance the story. Gaiman could have simply said "and he arrived somewhat worse for wear from the long drive, but he got there" or words to that effect and that would have been it, but instead, we got thirty minutes of prose and dialog occupied with his buying a crappy old car to make the trip, driving the car, sleeping in the car, taking a leak in the morning (yes, Gaiman described this!), having this random woman show up to beg a ride from him, driving the car, stopping for a meal, driving the car, and then dropping her off at her destination. What exactly, was the point? Just so's he could hook up with her at the end of the story?

The next disk after that became bogged down with the minutiae of running a funeral home. I pretty much skimmed every track on that disk, and quickly decided that this novel, which had started out so well, was not for me. None of this padding was necessary, giving how fat the book was. Frankly, I was annoyed and resentful that a writer felt he could so casually waste my time like this. This is why I don't typically like to take on long novels because they're almost inevitably larded with this kind of thing, and it's boring and irritating to me.

The story in outline is that the old gods - those which are familiar to anyone who knows anything about mythology or comparative religion (although some reviewers seemed sadly ignorant of the mythology which begs the question as to why they even started reading this book in the first place!) are at war with the new ones.

Gods such as such as Odin, Kali, and so on, are being forced out in a take-over by the new gods of television, videogames, technology and so forth. Odin resents this and decides to embark upon a fruitless war against them. He endeavors to recruit the other old gods to help him. This means we meet a lot of characters (if there is one thing humanity truly excels at, it's inventing gods). I notice that in his recruitment of gods obscure and common, Gaiman carefully avoids names like Yahweh, Allah, and Brahma so as not to piss off any fanatics. Other than that, he has no rules and no boundaries.

Some of the story was good, well-written, sacrilegious, and fascinating, but it was nowhere near good enough, well-written enough, or fascinating enough to make up for the dreck. I cannot recommend this. Go watch the TV show instead. be warned that both novel and TV show are explicit and violent.

Same Love by Tony Correia

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Set in Canada, this was a short but sweet story that I fell in love with just from the blurb. The idea is that a young Christian guy, Adam Lethbridge, with religiously strict parents, is suspected of being homosexual - it's true, but the condemnation is based on the flimsiest of evidence - he was seen shopping in the mall with a "known gay"! Clearly this 'raving pooftah' needs to be saved from Hell, so he's promptly dispatched to a Christian summer camp to be 'deprogrammed', aka saved by Baby Jesu, but there he meets another guy, a Korean-Canadian named Paul, who is questioning his own sexuality, and the two fall for each other!

I thought that was hilarious, but the story isn't a romantic comedy by any means. There is humor in it, but it's a story which is told seriously and thoughtfully. I really enjoyed it.

There's nothing explicit in it - nothing more than a kiss and holding hands - so it's a safe read for anyone who is bothered by a lot of overt physical affection. The funniest thing about it was highlighted by controversial comedian Lenny Bruce many years ago: how do you punish homosexuals for breaking the law? Lock 'em up with a bunch of guys! The same thing happens here, and the lack of straight-thinking behind that kind of philosophy boggles the mind.

Of course this seems like it was always worse for men because the white male authorities behind this asinine approach to relationships were not only horrified by, but scared of homosexual men, while they never took homosexual women seriously. As queen Victoria was supposed to have said, "women simply don't do that sport of thing!" That doesn't mean women had it so much easier, by any means. In some ways they had it worse.

I confess I had a bit of a time getting into this at first because the story seemed so full of conversational prose and very little descriptive prose, but after Adam arrived at camp, the reading became very easy and comfortable. He's bunking with three other guys including Paul: a depressed guy named Martin, and a weirdo named Randall. The dynamic between these four was fascinating. Adam also meets Rhonda on the bus up to the mountain retreat. She's being sent to the camp to be have the 'slu't removed from her - and she and Adam bond quickly.

I loved that the author pointed out the hypocrisy and cluelessness in these approaches, although I would have loved it more had there been a complete deconstruction of Biblical teachings, but the thrust of this novel was not in that direction, so that was fine. The point was clearly made that there's a difference - and sometimes a huge one - between what's in the Bible and what people claim is in the Bible. I loved that bit!

Speaking of which, as is often the case in novel for me, one of the more minor characters was the most interesting. Rhonda intrigued me and was the outstanding character. I loved how feisty, confident, and outspoken she was, and would have liked to have read more about her, especially taking the camp religious teachers to task over their poor understanding of the bible, but of course the focus was on Adam and Paul, and his other roommates.

If there was a weak spot, for me it was Randall, who didn't quite ring true at times, but other than that, the story was great, well-written, instructive, and it had a beautiful ending. I recommend this one.

Amish Country Treasure by Ruth Price

Rating: WARTY!

You can't put a price on good Amish stories - not when the price is this author. Chapter one begins with these words: "If you are reading this without having read the others in the series, please be aware that this series is complete and there is a boxed collection HERE. This will help keep a few more Sheckles in your pocket..."

Stop right there!

The author starts chapter one by advertising her 'boxed' collection? And she doesn't know how to spell Shekels? This is hilarious given that the author's name is Price! Well I got this for free just out of curiosity, and I'm not about to go shelling out for a series where the story begins with an author's pitch for me to buy a whole series when I haven't even been allowed the chance to read this first one before she gets in my face with her 'series'?

I dislike the term 'boxed set' which is meaningless drivel in the first place when it comes to ebooks. The only boxing required is that to the ears of the idiot who decided this was a good term to use in the electronic book world! This is one more reason to detest series and authors who are so addicted to them, so congratulations, you just talked me right out of even reading your 61 page episode. I'm not interested.

Could you not even let me read sixty pages before you start your pitch? I'm sorry, and I know it's a competitive world out there, but this is unacceptable. If your only interest is money and you're so obsessed with it that you're right up there in my face with it on page one, then you are definitely not the author for me. I will not recommend this book - and yes it's based solely on this, and I am done with this author, and that's entirely based on this attitude she flaunts. Amish? Pish.

The Relic of Perilous Falls by Raymond Arroyo

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook I experimented with. It's read by the author, who sounds a bit like Phil Hartman, the American comedy actor who was shot by his mentally-ill girlfriend in 1998 while he was sleeping, and I can't say that the author does an absolutely disastrous job, but after listening to about an hour of this I soon found myself being irritated by his voice, particularly when he was doing this young female character, and making her sound like she was mentally deficient rather than just young. In principle, it's nice to have an author read their own work. That's the only way you can really tell how they meant it to sound, but in this case it was eventually annoying and not pleasant.

Will Wilder is a 12-year-old boy who deserves his last name. He's irresponsible and has way too much energy. In his defense, he's gifted, or plagued, with the ability to see otherworldly 'shade' creatures, and his stupidity ends up unleashing them. No wonder the town is called Perilous Falls. Now it's Will's job to fix things. So far so good, but this novel carried a quite heavy religious agenda - so it seemed to me, and I disliked the preachy tone. It's tied to the remains of the Saint Thomas, who supposedly had so little faith that he didn't believe Jesus had risen.

If you ask me he was the smartest of the twelve! The burial place is supposedly one of only three of the apostles: the Basilica in Rome, of Peter, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, of James, and the National Shrine of Thomas in Chennai, India, yet not a one of these can offer evidence that what they contain really is what they claim to contain. Will Wilder's village, though, supposedly has the very finger (among other body parts) that was plunged into the wound! This is what keeps the evil away. The skeleton came from Italy in World War Two. How it got there as opposed to being in India remains a mystery.

Not only does Will screw up and break his kid brother's arm, he also screws up further and steals the relic from the church, thereby removing the town's protection, and unleashing evil. Why all the evil is there, waiting to be loosed is yet another unanswered question. I never did get this demon thingy. And what's the deal with demons? There are none in the Bible - just angels, of which Lucifer is one.

Given that Thomas is supposedly buried in India, how this GI brought the relic home from Italy is a mystery which goes unexplained, but then I DNF'd this so maybe I missed something. Obviously the book isn't aimed at me, but I've enjoyed many such books which were not. I have no interest in pursuing a series like this, though, and I can't recommend it based on what I heard of it.

Dante's Divine Comedy by Seymour Chwast

Rating: WARTY!

In which I play the back nine with Dante Alighieri!

I almost picked up a copy of the Divine comedy in audio book form, but I declined it in favor of this graphic novel, Wise decision! The book seemed like too much to take for me, and the graphic novel confirmed it. Much simplified - indeed to a degree greater than I would have liked - the book depicts pretty much the Cliff's Notes version of the story, with lots of low grade illustration (in the form of monochrome line drawings and very little text. There's a mild sense of humor running through it, but overall I was neither impressed by the graphic novel version, nor by the primitive and idiotic original story, steeped as it was in the most asinine superstition and bullshit imaginable. I was so glad I didn't plump for the audio book which would have been a nightmare to listen to if it was as tedious as this version.

This is where the nine circles of hell originated, at least in popular consciousness, and which in turn evidently owes a lot to the seven deadly sins. It's also very confusing. The first seven circles are each dismissed with barely a page of illustration and text, and having been through that, I have to question the mental health of Dante, although having said that, I do fully realize that this was how people in general and the church in particular really viewed life and death back then. Or at least tried to sell it, in the case of the church.

The first circle of hell is Limbo, which is apparently simply hanging out solely with, it would appear, celebrities. It left me not knowing quite what to do, because for me that would be hell. I imagine it wouldn't seem remotely like hell for all-too-many people, and especially for those who live in a celebrity culture like the population of the USA seems to do!

The second circle of hell is the naked truth. We're told that it's inhabited by "Lustful creatures who committed sins of the flesh who are tossed about carelessly in the dark by the most furious winds." Now they spend eternity locked in carnal embrace. I can't imagine all that many people actually going beyond this level. They would be happy here - probably most guys, and more women than you might initially imagine. It would be like going back to the sixties. For eternity. How is this hell? LOL!

The third circle (or the turd circle as it happens) is to punish the gluttons, and this one is the first level which actually does punish. Evidently the fate of gluttons is to float around in the very excrement which has resulted from their own gluttony. Ick! You gluttons better get your shit together or you're actually going to get your shit - together!

I really wanted to get my hands on the fourth circle, which is devoted to avarice. It's also where apparently Rolling Rock beer got its name, because rolling rocks is what these people do - around a circle until they crash into the other team coming the other way, then they turn and roll the rocks back in the opposite direction. This sounds like a rip-off of the Sisyphus myth, but not really much of a hell as compared with the previous level, at least!

The fifth Circle is a joke, apparently. It's naked mud wrestling! It's not exactly my cup of mud - although I guess that would depend upon who it is I was scheduled to wrestle! LOL! There's a kind of a break here, where we see out traveler and his guide traveling the River Acheron (take that, Percy Jackson and your river Styx lowest common denominator!) Evidently these three rivers, The Acheron, the Phlegethon, and the Styx, flow from the mouth of a statue. I never knew that! Nor can I figure out how Greek mythology took over this story about Christian punishment! Rip-Off!

As the two travel (Virgil and Dante) with Phlegyas across the Styx now, they pass sinner Filippo, who is killed by other sinners. Wait, what? Wasn't he dead already?! We are in the afterlife (written as two words in this version!) are we not? It's no wonder that three furies appear and call upon Medusa. I felt like doing the same at this point. The sixth circle consists of heretics and Epicureans, sitting in coffins surrounded by fire. They look bored, but I would imagine they would have some great debates and discussions going if this weren't fiction.

The seventh circle is devoted to violence to begin with, but this is where the neat nine circles goes to hell - as it were, because there are now sub-divisions, and anyone who has lived in a badly-designed subdivision will know exactly what kind of hell it is. On level two, a minotaur guards a ravine of broken rocks across which Dante rides on a centaur, because those broken rocks are hellish, don't you know? Dante seems to have a particular obsession with naked bodies and broken rocks. You have to wonder what state his own rocks were in when he was naked. Possibly New Jersey, but more likely Arizona. Oh, and centaurs prevent the violent folk from escaping the boiling blood river! I imagine they would become trapped when the blood congealed from being boiled. Have I ever boiled blood, you ask? Well this ridiculous theology makes my blood boil. Does that count?

On level three of the seventh circle, you can catch the direct line to Buckingham palace. Oh, wait, wrong hell! No, here, harpies feed on the suicide trees, which are like the ones in the Wizard of Oz movie - living beings. They have it better than those who were violent against god, though! Those villains have to lie on hot sand and have ashes rain upon them. Seriously? Dante's god is so petty that he punishes people for eternity with abusive and nasty pettiness because they were violent against him? I know some parents are harsh on their children, but for the most part, a truly loving parent forgives their kids and loves them unconditionally, continually striving to help them all they can. God evidently gives up after four score and ten. For all our faults, when it comes to looking after our loved ones, for the most part, we humans put all gods to shame.

In the second zone the sodomites are punished under fiery rain! The thing is that flames evidently burn-off the features of the sodomites, so not a one of them is ugly! Yeay! Next up, eighth circle, which is yet another sub-divided mess: the fraudulent, the pimps and seducers, oh, and astrologers, magicians and diviners! Hypocrites. Serpents attack thieves and the two merge. Sowers of discord have to walk in a circle where they're repeatedly stabbed, heal, and are stabbed again. Falsifiers of metals get scabs. Now scabs merely cross picket lines. The ninth circle is pretty much more of the same. It's all about betrayal and usury - which is a sin! Bankers of the Earth beware! You have nothing to lose but your bottom line....

Curiously, Dante has an out. Giants lower him to the bottom of hell where he can use the devil's own tunnel to climb out and escape! He makes his way to purgatory where he's required to wash his hands of hell, because he's not a spirit. He notices that he casts a shadow, but Virgil, his companion does not. Spirits, we're told, cannot cast a shadow but can feel pain. How does that work?

The dead are begging Dante to tell their loved ones to pray for them. Why is this? Are we to understand from this that two spirits, both equally stained with sin, will have different outcomes if one has people begging for him whereas the other does not? This is the same thing as saying that it's not your own sin which condemns you, but the level of groveling you can command from your followers! Honestly? Why would the prayers of the living matter? Why not the prayers of those already dead, who have gone on to heaven? Wouldn't their evaluation be more accurate? And why would a perfect god need to be told anything? Or asked for anything? Doesn't he already know? So the purpose of this is for people to debase themselves with no guarantee of an outcome, evidently. It has nothing to do with actually affecting, much less effecting, an outcome. Indeed, how can a perfect god's mind be changed by prayer? To suggest it can be changed indicates the divine mind is in an imperfect state!

Of course, the value of Dante's insights is rather lessened when we learn of his cosmology, which has Earth at the center and the sun out in a "sphere" between Venus and Mars.... Comedy is definitely the word for this. It's a joke. Not only is the original story complete trash, as well as being both juvenile and vindictive, this graphic rendition of it felt to me like it was tossed together on the cheap. It was lackluster and minimalist to an extreme degree, and I can't recommend it.

The Superyogi Scenario by James Conner

Title: The Superyogi Scenario
Author: James Conner
Publisher: Sky Grove
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"...Captain Davis' wiry main mechanic..." should be "...Captain Davis's wiry main mechanic..." (similarly used on pps 52, 53, & 94). Davis is singular, so adding the letter 's' after the apostrophe is appropriate.
"That pulled more g forces of the most aggressive roller coaster" (p118) makes no sense as it's written. Try 'than' instead of 'of', and 'g force' (singular)?
"...entitled Dangerous Yogis..." should be "...titled Dangerous Yogis..." (p13) but so many authors conflate these two words that this point it's pretty much a waste of time objecting with a language as dynamical as English.
"I'm not saying there is any eminent danger of this mountain collapsing..." (p239) should be "I'm not saying there is any imminent danger of this mountain collapsing..." The author uses it correctly on p275.
"...I put the dresses in your closest personally" (p245) should be "...I put the dresses in your closet personally"

So, this was yet another Adobe Digital Editions book that started on page minus five. Way to give a negative impression! I don't know what does this. It isn't the author's fault. Something evidently got lost in translation between the typescript and the ADE. It's not an insurmountable problem - just annoying, but I never saw this problem until recently, and now I've seen it three times in three different books. Authors and publishers beware!

There were too many flaws in this story. On the one hand, this made it very little worse than your average super hero story, all of which are flawed in some way - notably how the hero got their powers and how those powers work. The biggest flaw was that there were pictures - in a book that's supposed to be about denying self - demonstrating how good-looking and hot these cool super-heroes were. In the ADE edition, the very first picture, of Physique, the villain, was cut off. Only the top portion of the image was visible (in the iPad edition it was all visible), so we didn't even see her face (see image on my blog). I was sorry it wasn't showing only the bottom, with the top cut off. At least then I could have maybe garnered some hits for my blog by telling everyone she appeared topless! LOL!

This story at least had the advantage of taking the road less traveled and for the most part, it's well-written apart from some rather glaring gaffs listed on my blog. I liked the way we're told that it's "A novel" on the cover - like we might mistake it for fact! In the end though, for me, it collapsed under its own weight. At times it read far more like a yoga training manual than an exciting novel, which was tedious at best, but this wasn't even the worst problem. I go into detail on my blog.

The grotesque sexual objectification of the female characters was what killed it for me. There are no everyday real females here and it was - even for a super hero story - completely unrealistic. I had initially thought that going with the yoga scenario would either be a joke or refreshingly different. The latter possibility was what made me look forward to reading it, but in the end it was just another trope super-hero story with nothing essentially different at all except for the yoga lectures.

I didn't like the genderism one bit, and adding brainy after beautiful, and mentioning (as opposed to showing) it just the once, does nothing to redress what is clearly and blatantly objectification. When we meet Agent Rollins, a guy, all we get is that he's tall, wiry, skin as black as midnight (which actually isn't very black when you're in times Square). No mention of handsome - or ugly for that matter, but this author cannot introduce a single female character (and they're all single) without larding her up with buxom, beautiful, voluptuous, or otherwise waxing gratuitously as to how thoroughly all-around hawt she is.

First we meet Physique, aka Tina Hinsdale - the villain. She seems to be the only one who doesn't come swaddled in a super-costume of sexist superlatives, although even she is described as "athletic". After that, though, all restraint fails:

• "...Surat Banal, the beautiful and brainy assistant..." (pc)
• "...instantly found her attractive..." (pc)
• "...no woman so attractive had ever..." (pc)
• "To Detective Brennan - an attractive but hardened woman..." (pc)
• "...blonde and buxom..." (p78)
• "...an attractive woman in an olive green flight suit..." (p83)
• "Samantha simply enjoyed being the beautiful translator..." (p137)
• "...accenting her voluptuous chest..." (p137)
• "...if she's going to become a beautiful slugger..." (p186)
• "Samantha looked at her beautiful, glowing body..." (p189)
• "...on the dramatic cover, a buxom brunette..." (p198)
• "...she was glowing and attractive..." - attractive to moths maybe? (201)
• "...her voluptuous figure..." (p204)
• "...a beautiful blonde woman..." (p235)
• "...their sponsor's attractive niece seemed..." (p239)
• "...spirits looked like beautiful angels..." (p261)
And my personal favorite:
• Arial Davis, "...a beautiful woman who smelled like roses..." (p112)
Seriously, roses? Roses don't actually smell of much any more - not like they did in Shakespeare's time. These days, they're all about looks, just like these descriptions.

So for example, when we meet female Surat Banal, the very first thing after her name is "the beautiful" with a side order of "and brainy" as a sop to try and weaken the fact that the most important thing about her is her looks. We get no indication of what Rollins is wearing, but a complete description of Banal's attire down to her pearl necklace, lustrous hair, and Bollywood smile. I am so tired of this, and was pretty much ready to ditch this novel at that point, only five pages in. I had hoped for better, but reading on and on, I quickly learned it wasn't coming. This novel doesn't take the less traveled path after all.

I know this is traditional in super-hero stories, but does that mean it's required? Does that mean we can never try a different kind of super-hero story and break this mold? The truly, truly hypocritical thing here is that Diamond Mind, aka Eric the super yogi, is constantly banging on about how important it is to shed the 'me' and broaden our 'self' to become selfless, and yet every single page, near enough, is larded with how firmly attached to the me and to the material these people truly are.

The 'enlightened one' himself tosses his hair out of his eyes with metronomic regularity. Can he not get it cut so it isn't a constant distraction to him? Do his super yogic powers not extend to holding his hair in place? This endless parade of references to physical appearance completely betrayed and obliterated everything the author was saying about higher consciousness, detachment, and all that drivel!

But on to the story. The idea here is that there are super-powered yogis. They have such control over their bodies that they can overcome the laws of physics (yeah, good luck with that!) and as we learn in the very first chapter, change their body density and crash an airplane, this we need good super yogis to beat them at their own game.

One major problem for me is that the novel had almost no humor except that which was supplied unintentionally, such as when Physique observes at one point, "One side of a mountain moved six feet, sixty years ago...this isn't earth-shattering stuff". Actually, it is! Here's another: the author describes Physique and Agnite clinging to the rail of a boat out on the ocean, fearful that if they fell into the water, no one would ever find them out there, but Physique can float and in the air, too! Why would she be scared? It makes no sense. The only intentionally amusing highlight I noticed was the use of the term "un-dynamic duo" to describe agents Rollins and Kirby investigating this truck that physique damaged. That was it for humor.

While I think it's great that an author has come up with something new to bring to the super hero story genre, taking this particular tack also brings problems along with it. The most obvious one is of course, why set it in the USA? There are shamefully obvious reasons for that of course, but it would have made a lot more sense if this had been set in a place where yoga has been practiced for centuries. The USA is hardly known for its spiritual enlightenment! But if it's super-hero, it has to be USA, right?! And USDA - certified pure beef, too!

Whole chapters of the novel are devoted to teaching yoga, which I routinely skipped because they were boring new age woo. Other readers may find this appealing, but I have no interest at all in reading a bunch of unsubstantiated religious claptrap, especially in a work of fiction. If I did, I'd get a book about the topic and read that. And no, I'm not interested in hearing arguments to the effect that the brain waves of meditating people have been measured and the brain structure of these people has been studied, and I'll tell you why.

Such claims are meaningless without controls. We don't know if those brain changes were there long before the path to meditation began. Neither have there been control studies testing other people doing other things for comparison, such as measuring the brain waves of an athlete when they're in the zone, or of a concert pianist or violinist performing, for example, or of a video-gamer, or of a fighter-jet pilot doing maneuvers.

Without a real honest-to-goodness scientific study, claims are meaningless and out of place in a work of fiction which certainly doesn't require minutiae to be highlighted, and detailed explanations provided for every little thing! Besides, even if all of this were proven, it still provides no evidence for other claims, such as yogis having super powers, or that there is any such thing as reincarnation. These things are fine for fiction. They're fun to play with, and can make for a really good story if handled well, but I can do without the lectures and training manuals in a novel.

A belief in past lives and migrating souls is nonsensical. Consider this: at a point in the not-so-distant past, there were only maybe 2,000 humans living on Earth. We almost became extinct. Now there are billions. Where did all those extra souls come from? If they already existed, what were they doing in the literal billions upon billions of years before Earth formed and life began, and finally, within the last few million years, humans appeared on the stage? Reincarnation ignores the facts of life and this is why it's nonsensical.

The author seems to know that it's the Medal of Honor and not the Congressional Medal of honor (perhaps people confuse it with the Congressional Gold Medal) on one page, but later he refers to it as Congressional Medal of Honor. He's wrong in claiming it was issued to one civilian. It's not issued to civilians per se, but it has been issued to at least seven civilians who were in the employ of the US military at the time it was earned.

"He's gonna have to learn how to lighten up. Having a sense of humor is a big part in making any spiritual progress" - this from Eric the yogi who has been telling these two women that they need to let go of the "me" and focus on others, and now they're being kitted out for super hero costumes by comic book artists - who evidently don't use pencil, ink, or paint any more but all use $2,000 Wacom graphics tablets! Neither Arial (now "Airspeed") nor Samantha (now "Samsa") raise a single objection to their being objectified. This is the point I quit feeling positive about this novel. After that I just completed it for the sake of it since I was so close to the end and hadn't yet finished counting the incidence of "beautiful," but I knew i could not rate it positively.

In a humorous book, calling in comic book artists to design the superheroes' wardrobes would have been a hilarious touch, but this was not that kind of story and it sounded completely ridiculous here. Why not get he movie costume designers? They're the real exerts, and they have been there and done that!

The genderism worked negatively in two ways with the costuming, too. The guys get full-body covering. In fact, the one who actually is impervious to bullets gets a full body suit of Kevlar. The two "girls" (as they're now referred to), are not only forced into the ignominy of wearing what is, let's face it, skimpy swim suits and thoroughly ridiculous mini-skirts, they're also the ones who have no protection against bullets, being forced to expose acres of vulnerable skin. Where is their protection?

The worst part is that neither of these women has sufficient integrity, professionalism or self-respect to raise any objections. Instead they're portrayed as lapping it up, and this wasn't the only dumb in play here. I was especially disappointed in Arial Davis, as a military officer, going along with this. It seemed completely out of character for her, but then the military isn't portrayed in a very positive light here.

At one point, after discussing a new threat from Physique, the commander of the Marine Corps supposedly says, "Then madam, it's time to deploy the Marines with some heavy weapons to defend the Capital," but the Posse Comitatus Act prevents just this kind of deployment, as a Marine commander ought to know. That's what the police forces and the National Guard are for.

So no, I cannot in good faith recommend this novel. All of this leaves only one unanswered question: If there was a naked Yogi living in Yosemite National Park - would that be a Yogi Bare? I'll let you know when I visit.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

Title: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Author: Philip Pullman
Publisher: Canongate
Rating: WARTY!

Having read of the religiously-motivated controversy surrounding Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, when I came across this audio book, I was curious to find out what he had to say. Pullman reads it himself, and it makes for entertaining listening, although I confess I'm not sure what his motivation was in writing it or what he hoped to achieve in doing so.

I'm not religious and I do not believe there ever was a Messianic son of god roaming around what is now Israel some 2,000 years ago. Certainly there never was a "Jesus Christ" - which is all Greek to me! Yes, there were people named Yeshu, or Yeshua or Yehoshua - it was a common name as was Miri (Mary) and Yusef (Joseph). There may even have been one or more rabbis going by the name of Yeshu, one or more of whom may have been crucified. That doesn’t make the contradictory stories in the New Testament true. There's no evidence that any of those poor victims of Roman barbarity ever rose from the dead.

Pullman tells it like it's true, but he puts a spin on it which is unique to my knowledge: that Jesus Christ wasn't one man, but two: Jesus, and Christ, brothers, both of whom could perform miracles, but only one of whom, Jesus, took on the mantle of Messiah. Directed by a creepy anonymous benefactor, Christ remained in the shadows recording and documenting Jesus's words and activities.

Pullman tells the story very much like it’s told in the NT, including some little known tales from New Testament era apocrypha, but on some occasions he puts a slightly different spin on the stories, heightening the interest and drama, while all the time, Jesus is becoming more well-known and popular, and the authorities increasingly taking an interest in his activities.

And so it goes, but in the end I can't recommend this as a worthy read because it really didn't offer anything new or startling - apart from the aforementioned and rather schizophrenic aspect of it. Kudos to Pullman for reading his own stories in the audio versions, but this isn't something I really enjoyed or would want to read again, unlike the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, which I adore.

The Adventures of Basil and Moebius by Ryan Schifrin and Larry Hama

Title: The Adventures of Basil and Moebius
Author: Ryan Schifrin
Author: Larry Hama
Publisher: Magnetic Press
Rating: WARTY!

Illustrated by Rey Villegas, Lizzy John, Novo Malgapo, and Adam Archer.
Lettered Dave Sharpe and Ed Dukeshire

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!

Alaric Moebius and Basil Fox (a take on Basil Brush maybe?!) are two adventurers. Moebius is, by his own admission, a cat burglar (no, he doesn't steal cats, he climbs around buildings like a cat and steals valuables). Fox is supposedly a British soldier from the Special Air Services (SAS), although in the second of the three stories combined in this volume he's shown as a Grenadier Guard, guarding Buckingham palace. This seems highly unlikely. He's either one or the other, not both. Either one of which isn't going to give him laissez faire to sneak out at night and gallivant around London. This was one of a number of errors in authenticity in this fiction.

No one in Britain calls cops 'Peelers'. And they don't routinely carry guns (now if this had been set in Northern Ireland that might have been a different matter, but Scotland? No!). 'Peelers' is really an Irish name coined after Sir Robert Peel formed the Metropolitan Police Force in London in 1829. The more common name in use (again from Peel's name) was 'Bobbies', but they're more likely called simply 'cops' these days.

The cops are drawn authentically, but the cars they use are not. Metro cars are highly colorful, not plain white. This kind of thing tends to be a problem when Americans try to write a Brit story. We get odd conjugations of slang, way-the-hell too much supposedly 'Cockney rhyming slang', and oddball mash-up phrases joining Americanisms with Brit-isms. In this particular case, we got interesting statements like: "So what's the heist, Guv?" and "...beat the ever-lovin' shite...". Maybe non-Brit readers will love this, but Brits will likely be irritated by it at best.

There was a notable number of these things, including some really weird ones. For example, at one point, one of the characters, in process of shutting-up Alaric before he can expose this guy, says, "...I know just the place to keep him until the gendarmerie arrives." I have no idea whatsoever where that out-of-left-field comment came from! The guy is supposedly Israeli, not French, so why an Israeli would talk about French police in Scotland is a complete mystery - unless, of course he actually was French and this is a ham-fisted way to out him to the reader, but he'd have to be pretty stupid to make a gaff like that - and this wasn't the case anyway.

There's also some gun-play going on here, which is not unknown even in Britain, but which is also relatively rare there. The point here isn't that it was depicted, but that no one was at all shocked by it when one character shot another - and in the back, too. No one batted an eyelid. I found that beyond belief. Even in the US, something like this would have been remarked upon, or there would have been expressions of shock or dismay, yet in Scotland - nothing! It didn't feel authentic to me. On the positive side, the writers/artists did know what a portcullis and an oubliette were, so it's not all negative (just to be fair!).

I have to say at one point that I enlarged the image in Adobe Digital Editions to verify the spelling of a mis-used word (the writers apparently used "blimmin' " when it actually should have been 'blooming' or that rendered as "blummin' ". That wasn't the real problem. When I returned the page to normal 1:1 size, it lost all page integrity, so that when I clicked the down bar or pressed 'page down', instead of moving down one entire page, it moved only partial pages, making for a really annoying reading experience. Closing the ebook and re-opening didn't fix it; neither did opening the app to full-screen and then returning it to regular size, and neither did closing the entire application before re-opening it and then re-opening the book. The only way to work it from that point on was to sequentially type in the novel's page numbers to move to the next whole page, which was annoying! I think this is an issue with ADE though, not with this particular graphic novel.

The most off-putting thing about the novel, and the real reason why I'm not rating it as a worthy read, is that neither Alaric nor Basil were at all appealing. I didn't even like, much less admire or envy either of them. I didn't appreciate their attitude or their behavior, and they did nothing to endear me to them. They were essentially a pair of louts who had no interests in life other than thievery and blowing their ill-gotten gains on drink and partying. To some people that might represent entertainment, but it doesn't to me. Why would I want to read about a pair of thugs like these guys? I gave up after the second of the three stories in this volume. I have no interest in following these low-lifes any more. Your mileage may differ.