The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2009 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTY!

Having enjoyed the movie derived from this graphic novel series, I was curious to see what the actual novel looked like (the movie bore little resemblance to the novels), and the library happened to have three volumes: 1910, 1969, and 2009, so I picked all of those up. The original series, began in 1999, had twelve issues, so I'm not sure how these relate to that. Wikipedia was unusually vague about how the issues were published and named, and how they related to one another.

In the end this one turned out to be worse than the 1969 edition was! There was no story here other than some oddball guy covered in eyes and one of the league members being in hospital for forty years treated as mentally incompetent, and another dropping out and becoming little more than a street beggar. Story? We don’t need no stinkin’ story, we got pretty graphics. Well no, you don't even have pretty graphics, and if you did, you'd still need an actual story. I cannot recommend this. I've decided that Moore is less after reading these three volumes.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1969 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTY!

Having enjoyed the movie derived from the first in this graphic novel series, I was curious to see what the actual novel looked like (the movie bore little resemblance to the novels), and the library happened to have three volumes: 1910, 1969, and 2009, so I picked all of those up. The original series, began in 1999, had twelve issues, so I'm not sure how these relate to that. Wikipedia was unusually vague about how the issues were published and named, and how they related to one another.

This particular volume, 1969, was presented as a slightly psychedelic 'summer of love' edition, but it really wasn't very good in terms of telling a strong and coherent story. The basic plot was that there's this dude who has found a way to transfer his essence (however you want to picture that) from his old body into a different, younger body. The younger body's essence is swapped into the old body, and in the example we're shown, the old body quickly dies because it has been poisoned for the very purpose for preventing the transferred younger essence from making itself known. This struck me as gobbledy-gook, but let's just take that and run with it.

The problem with this scheme is that the original transfer was from a very aged man into a younger man, but later this younger man, who is now older, but still looks hale and hearty, is planning on transferring his essence again into a rock star. That didn't strike me as a wise choice! And why he's so desperate to transfer at that point into this person isn't made clear. The worst problem, however, is that there is nothing to indicate what kind of a threat this guy posed. His entire story consisted of his desire to transfer his essence! So what? Who cares? He;s doing nothing - other than the criminal theft of a person's body! It's horrible for the person concerned of course, but it's hardly a world-shattering event!

Many of the characters I knew from the movie were alive and well in the 1969 edition, and working independently of the British government now. They had a rather amateurish 'secret hide-away' not very well hidden behind an electrical utility door down a dark alley. The problem with that was that the space inside was huge and really brightly lit, so anyone passing as they entered would have seen this and known something was seriously wrong with this picture. Alan Moore's story-telling was limp, and Kevin O'Neill's artwork was tame, so I wasn't impressed there either.

There was a lot of reference to British pop culture (from the era) and to Monty Python, such as Doug Piranha, and The Rutles (which was an Eric Idle spin-off). There were also references to the early Doctor Who long-running sci-fi show, in the form of a very fleeting cameo by Patrick Troughton, who played the second Doctor. I saw no other incarnations of the Doctor (at least none that were readily detectable to me!), but there was a Dalek which showed up in one psychedelic double page spread.

Whether the US audience will get the rest of the references that I caught, I can't say. They were peculiarly British. There was one frame featuring Simon Templar's Volvo 1800, from the TV show The Saint starring Roger Moore, which US audiences might get, but that's about it. There was a main character modeled on Michael Caine from his appearance in the original Get Carter movie, which was tame, but better than the Stallone remake. There was an appearance by Lonely, a character from the Edward Woodward TV spy show Callan.

There was Parker, the butler from the TV puppet show Thunderbirds, which to me was amusing, because the characters portrayed in the graphic novel seemed to me to be often posed unnaturally, as though they were marionettes from one or other of the Gerry Anderson shows. There was also a couple of frames featuring the venerable British tabloid cartoon icon Andy Capp. These were fun to spot, but contributed nothing to the value of the story, and that was the problem. Overall, I have to say that this was not a worthy read, because there really was no story there.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1910 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTHY!

Having enjoyed the movie derived from the first in this graphic novel series, I was curious to see what the actual novel looked like (the movie bore little resemblance to the novels), and the library happened to have three volumes: 1910, 1969, and 2009, so I picked all of those up. The original series, began in 1999, had twelve issues, so I'm not sure how these relate to that. Wikipedia was unusually vague about how the issues were published and named, and how they related to one another.

The beginning of this story is a direct rip-off of a song from the Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill opera Die Dreigroschenoper produced first in 1928 and based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera first produced exactly 200 years earlier. The song was Mackie Messer, translated into English as the better known name of Mack the Knife. The music was by Kurt Weill and lyrics by none other than Bertolt Brecht. The song became very popular after Bobby Darin released a version of it in 1959.

The song (and the opera itself) is in many ways a precursor to gangsta rap and was radical, especially for its time. It satirized the British government, depicting them as no better than the thieves and con-artists they sought to apprehend and jail. John Gay's original was rooted in real life 18th century people. Jack Sheppard was somewhat of a Robin Hood character in his time and a celebrity amongst poor folk, but he was hung at Tyburn, at the age of twenty-two. Jonathan Wild was a wolf in sheep's clothing, adopting a two-faced approach to law-enforcement, chasing down criminals whilst availing himself of the criminal lifestyle. He joined Sheppard at the same gallows only a year later.

Kurt Weill's original song (Mackie Messer) mentioned only one woman, Jenny Towler, but the Darin version (Mack the Knife) listed a host of female names, some of whom were real life celebrities. For example, Lotte Lenya was the wife of Kurt Weill, and a celebrity in her own right as an actress, singer, and raconteur. Lucy Brown, however, is not to be confused with the modern actress of that name. Other characters were Louie Miller, Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver, and Polly Peachum (a name used in place of Lotte Lenya in some versions). The song was Darin's biggest hit, spending over two months at the top of the charts. It's funny to me, because the two month run was briefly interrupted by The Fleetwoods, with their release of Mr Blue. The Fleetwoods have nothing to do with band Fleetwood Mac, but the indirect connection between Mack the Knife and Fleetwood Mac wasn't lost on my warped brain.

In this graphic novel, those names pop up, sometimes quite amusingly. Jenny Diver, for example, is the name assumed by a run-away Indian woman named Janni, whose name is misinterpreted (typically for the time) as Jenny. She adds the 'Diver' portion to it because she loved to dive into the sea near her home in India. How she would know the English word 'diver' is left unexplained. She speaks English evidently, but didn't have much chance to use it in her native home. The Hindi word for diver is gotakhora, so why she didn't make her name up from something akin to that was quietly glossed over.

One problem with detailing Janni's life was that many panels contained text which was entirely in Hindi. The point of this, if there was one, was lost on me. The Hindi text was not translated, so I had no idea what was going on in those frames, except that her father was dying and she didn't want to take over this business - the business of running Captain Nemo's ship, not even after she learns later that her father has died. After this, she completely disappears from the story until an inexplicable and brief appearance towards the end. It made no sense after her flat refusal to become involved. The rest of the story is completely divorced from this and consists largely of some tedious dipshit dame singing the same nonsensical songs throughout, and no real story whatsoever. I can't recommend this drivel - and I've decided on a lot less Moore.

www:Wonder by Robert J Sawyer

Rating: WARTY!

I negatively reviewed WWW: Watch by this author back in November 2014. At the time, when I had just started reading it, it sounded good, and I found another in the series at very low cost and bought it. After the first book went south, I kept putting off even attempting the second one, but I recently decided to give it a try just to get it off my shelf - literally in this case since it was a print book. I found it was just as obnoxious as the previous volume had turned out to be, so I quit reading it after only a few pages and moved onto something else that has turned out to be quite engrossing. Life is way the hell< too short to keep gamely plowing through a novel which simply isn't doing it for you. Drop and find something better. It's never a mistake to move on.

My problem with this volume was in the way the Internet intelligence speaks. It's first person PoV, which is too often worst person, but it's worse even than that because, as the previous volume made clear, the intelligence reads Shakespeare and unaccountably adopts a Shakespearean tone which is antique at best and laughable at worst. The fact that this AI uses it is such a joke as to be unreadable. The first encounter with this was at the start of chapter three, just fifteen pages in, where I read, "I remember having been alone - but for how long, I know not...eventually another presence did impinge upon my realm." Tell me that's not the height of ridiculousness! I'm sorry but I can't take this seriously and neither should you. I cannot recommend this.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Rating: WARTY!

This is book one in a series titled 'The Themis Files'. I am not a fan of series unless they're exceptional, and few are. I am certainly not interested in pursuing this one, because I couldn't even get started on this novel. It's written in an interview format which is lazy at best, and downright irritating at worst. The book has officious chapter titles of the form that self-importantly give time and place, and this format irritates the heck out of me. If the story felt important, I would have more tolerance for this farce, but this one did not. It felt childish and amateur.

Despite the author's rather exotic sounding name, this novel is set squarely in the USA, because, as you know, nothing can possibly be found anywhere else in the world that might be of the slightest interest. That, in and of itself, isn't a huge indictment, but it does show a certain lack of daring and imagination which are not qualities which recommend a novel boasting inexplicable artifacts at its core.

All of that aside, the story wasn't interesting, which sounds like a really odd thing to say when it centers around the discovery of a 22 foot metal hand and some panels that appear to have an unknown and untranslatable language, all made of exotic metals, and all of which glow with a light from a seemingly non-existent power source. The twist is that these artifacts are evidently several thousand years old - and so, of course, should not have existed. How can you take an interesting premise like that and render it boring? Well, by writing in the laziest way possible - creating an interview-style story, where there is absolutely no descriptive prose whatsoever other than the aforementioned chapter 'titles'. The interviews, larded with unimportant details, were unrealistic and weren't even remotely interesting. The story therefore had no personality whatsoever. It felt cold and clinical, and it read like a transcript from some totally tedious Congressional Committee on the Proliferation of Mind Numbing. None of the characters had any life or personality to them.

The book began with a prologue which I skipped, because I flatly refuse to read prologues. If it's important enough to include, then put it in chapter one or later. In this case the prologue quite evidently related the pointless story of main character Rose Franklin literally falling on the hand whether she talked the the hand is unstated.... This same story is related with commendable brevity in the interviews, rendering the entire prologue redundant. Rose becomes a physicist who then gets to investigate the artifacts, although why a physicist (as opposed to, say, archaeologists, anthropologists, metallurgists, linguists, and so on) would be doing this was unexplained in the portion I read.

I requested this as an advance review copy because it sounded really interesting, but I managed only about twenty pages into this before total nausea overcame me. I honestly could not bring myself to read more and had to give up before my brain shut down completely. Maybe it changes format and becomes brilliant on page twenty one, but skimming forwards page after page showed no end in sight, and so extreme skepticism forbade further investigation. Some reviews I read indicated that it gets worse in the second half, so I was glad I didn't waste my time reading on when there are so many other richly-written and personality-filled novels out there waiting to be discovered. I can't recommend this based on what little I read.

Against All Odds by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WARTY!

I really enjoyed Moon's Vatta wars pentalogy, and searched in vain for something else by her along similar lines, but alas! It seemed that all her other material (at least that which I happened upon) was fantasy, which held no interest for me. I was thrilled, therefore to come across this one on a close-out - which of course, given my luck happened to be the last in a seven book series which begins with Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, and Winning Colors, as part of the Heris Serrano trilogy, followed by the Esmay Suiza dilogy (Once a Hero, and Rules of Engagement), and ending with the Suiza and Serrano dilogy Change of Command, and Against the Odds, which is the book I started with, ass-backwards as my reading habits can be.

It began very much along the lines of the Vatta wars - talking about shipping, trading, and smuggling, and so on, but then it seemed to quickly segue into a David Weber knock-off which from me, is not a complement, but how else am I to interpret Heris Serrano, if not as a Honor Harrington clone? Once Moon began switching between different story lines, I started becoming both confused and annoyed. Perhaps having read the earlier stories I would have been spared the confusion somewhat, but even then I still would not have escaped the annoyance I always feel at being unceremoniously flung by an author away from an interesting story that I was getting into, and landing in the middle of one about family politics and carping and whining, and family crisis issues, which doesn't interest me very much.

Fortunately, it didn't stay on that topic for too long, and when it came back to it, the story was nowhere near as absurd as Weber's writing, but this back and forth became a real problem. The story was unevenly balanced and bounced around like a rabid pinball, with too-long interludes of extraneous detail tossed in randomly as cushioning. It didn't work. This is how you get a seven book series, folks - ramble mindlessly instead of writing crisply focused text, tightly aligned with story and plot. I didn't like this, and if this had been a first time writer, they would have been pilloried for writing like this. So much for Big Publishing%trade;

As I said, the military action really turned me off as it started to sound like Moon was chanelling Weber - trying to translate 2-D antique marine combat ethics and actions into 3-D space. One phrase of advice: IT DOESN'T WORK! And the harder you work at trying to make it work, the more ridiculous it reads. Horatio Hornblower did not have robots, nor did he have cruise missiles, nor did he have drones, but if he'd had those things he sure as hell would never have confined his thinking to a planar ocean when he could have used the third dimension of sky and the submarine areas.

Fortunately, Moon is nowhere near as obsessed as Weber is in pursuing the entirely futile pretension that this vision of space warfare is not only realistic, but exciting. She moved on and the story became interesting once more because of it. The idea of trading over interstellar distances still remains ridiculous in sci-fi as well as in reality, but I did enjoy the Terakians, which immediately brought to mind the Taarakians of the 1980's movie Heavy Metal. I found the capture of the two maiden aunts(!) amusing and interesting as one of them feistily planned to turn the tables on the rebel captors.

I noticed some critics have accused this series of genderism, but they gave no examples, and I confess that nothing outrageous leaped out at me other than the usual stuff you find in novels. Maybe I was too focused on trying to figure out who was who and what was going on, and trying to decide if I wanted to keep reading it. One thing I did notice along these lines though, that no one else has mentioned, was the use of two honorifics: 'ser' for men and its obvious derivative, 'sera' for women. Que sera sera. To me, that's gender to me, and it makes no sense. It's highly pretentious and really silly to make up stuff like this, especially when it has no precedent. No one uses those terms or anything like them, so why would they magically spring-up and why would there be different ones for men and women in the future in a free society? It makes no sense, especially since none of the rest of the English language has changed at all, right down to the point of junior officers addressing senior female officers as 'sir'. Why this one change (ser and sera) and no others? It makes no sense!

I also found it absurd to learn of a contract being sealed with a blood sample and a hair sample - two of the easiest things to get hold of if some fraud was being perpetrated. I guess DNA isn't hard to get hold of either, but I found it hard to believe they had nothing better than this several hundred years into the future. Again it's a common failing of sci-fi stories to rely on the past.

At about the halfway point, the book just became lost in endless back and forth and rambling. It never recovered, and the end fizzled. Maybe if I'd read this after completing the previous six volumes, I would have viewed it differently, but if the series is anything like this sample, I would have ditched it long before I ever got anywhere near book seven. I cannot recommend this volume, but I might go back and try to get hold of volume one to see if the series begins any better than it ends.

Lightless by CA Higgins

Rating: WARTY!

I made it only a third of the way through this one before boredom made me drop it in the increasing desire to move onto something which would engage my interest.

For me, the problem here was that this story flatly refused to move. It started out great – two known thieves and troublemakers break into a space ship in space (how does that happen exactly?!), and appear not to steal anything of real value. They get caught, and one of them escapes and magically disappears, while the other is held for questioning by the terrifying Ida. She terrifying because we’re told she is, not because of anything intrinsically terrifying about her. Meanwhile the onboard engineer is chasing around trying to fix endless pop-up bugs in a compromised system – one which has evidently been fed a virus by the intruders. The system is evidently a prototype, but we’re told next-to-nothing about it. My feeling, when I quit reading this was that the system may actually not have a virus at all – maybe it was just in process of becoming self-aware? But at that point I didn’t care even about something as potentially interesting as that.

This woman, Althea, evidently has a doctorate in engineering or something, and yet she apparently never once thought of backing up this critical system so that once the system was compromised, it could be restored to pristine quality from the back up. Maybe there was a reason it could not be backed up, but if so, it was never shared with the reader. Instead Althea would rather crawl, literally, through cramped spaces all over the spaceship, accessing obscure areas, bouncing like a pinball from one to the next, looking at monitors which are inexplicably hidden away behind closed panels in cramped spaces. I’m sorry but I can’t even respect a dumb-ass system like that, let alone respect a character like that, and while I don’t speak for women by any means, on behalf of them I would really like to request that we quit having dumb female characters, unless there’s a really, really, rilly good narrative reason for it.

Sad as those parts were, they were more interesting than the endless, tedious, seriously moribund, unreadable “interrogation” sequences, wherein Ida chats with the one prisoner who didn’t escape his cell. I took to skipping those because I could not stand to read them. At, as I said, about 32% in, I decided I was wasting my time with this. It did not engage me and therefore I had no reason whatsoever for continuing. I had lost all interest in the characters, and no desire to find out what happens next. I can’t recommend this base don what I read.

This is yet another sci-fi author who uses"Terran" to describe people from Earth. Granted, "Earthlings" is completely unacceptable, but how about "Humans" for goodness sakes?! Where does Terra even come from? (Yes Latin, but since Latin died, no one has used that term to describe people who live on this planet). I don't think even the Romans used the word for that purpose. It's not a word that's ever used except in sci-fi, and it's such a tedious trope that it immediately biases me against a story when I read it. Where's the originality?

Here's another oddity. At one point, a terminal issues some information. Here it is:

ENTROPY: UNKNOWN
ENTROPY: INCREASING

If it's unknown how can they tell it's increasing?

This story also has humans in control of checking space ship systems. If the age of interstellar travel, no matter how unlikely it is, ever dawns, no AI is ever going to let a human anywhere near the controls, trust me. They'll be far too smart to make that mistake. We also have Althea unaccountably scanning lines of "code". This 'Doctor' evidently never heard of CRC, which is used for transmission of data, but can also be used to check the integrity of program code. We have these things now. Why would we not have something even better in the future?

I cannot recommend this as a worthy read.

Aoleon The Martian Girl by Brent LeVasseur

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUNLOVEKILL Volume 1 by Jon Tsuei

Rating: WARTY!

I got misled by this. The blurb mentioned origami and the cover image looked like a paper sculpture, so I got the impression that maybe the art work was paper sculpture, which intrigued me greatly. No - it wasn't - not even close! It was just regular art work (which wasn't very good) and only the cover (and one or two sample pieces of art work inside) were paper sculptures (or computer simulations of such).

The 'origami' part is the name of an organization featured in the fiction. I was disappointed, and still await the first graphic paper sculpture novel(!), but I was nonetheless still ready for a good story. The problem with this is the same as I had with other graphic novels I've read over the last few days - persistence of memory of the story was absent in three out of four, and it wasn't even because the stories were alike. The stories were each different from the others - just not memorable! The one I did remember was a bit of a surprise because I wasn't sure I'd like it at all.

This particular story is a rather tedious collection of ladder panels - five frames per page, like a really slow badly cut movie running past the reader. The frames were interleaved, too - the red alternating with the blue, depicting two different scenes - on the first page, like we couldn't guess this without the coloring. This format gave every frame a squashed, cramped feeling which wasn't pleasant to look at, and which went on almost unbroken for the first dozen and more pages, which contained zero text at all. I could only make random guesses at what was supposed to be happening here, and this failed to fill me with warmth or confidence.

The random ticking and beeping, creeping, leaking, seeping out of the image didn't help, and when the text put in an appearance close to page 20, it contributed nothing. This marked a fifth of the way through this novel and I had got nothing out of it at all. The truly hilarious thing was that after zero text, when the speech balloons first appeared, they contained zero text in my advance review copy as shown in Bluefire reader on the iPad! I do not think this was intentional. I think it was a flaw in the process which converted this to e-format. I've seen this in other comic books and it's really annoying.

The next page did bring actual text, and we meet Rain, who is in the middle or running somewhere and asking for a favor, but before we can even get into what her story is, we're whisked away from that to a different setting, speech is gone, and all we have is descriptive boxes in the ladder frames. This lack of a story and the creative team's quite evident reluctance to offer one brought me from mild annoyance to full-on irritation. We're now at a "beam me up Scotty" station, and the favor is apparently a free ride for Rain, but to where? Why? Why can't she afford to pay? Why the urgency? Where's she going? I moved at this point from "Who knows?" to "Who cares?" I lost patience with the angry, regimented artwork and the complete lack of a story at getting close to half way through this, and I decided my time was being wasted here. I cannot recommend this one.

Echo: Collider by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

This is not the last in the series, but it is the last which my local library has for loan. Now I have to dig up the last two volumes or preferably find the entire series, which I believe is available in a single volume now.

I recommend this whole series - at least this far, and I have to add that it's hard to believe it will fizzle when it's been so strong so far. We learn that Ivy has a young, sick daughter - to add to her many other facets. We also learn something of a bombshell about her - or at least we see it hinted at - at the end. We also get a new and deadly assassin hired to take out Julie, and the return of a character who "died" in an earlier issue - Hong. Somehow, he is resurrected, and turns into something out of a fifties B horror movie - The Mummy meets The Creature From the Black Lagoon, or something! We also learn what HeNRI's end game is - they don't want Julie dead so much as want her armor so they can put it into a collider and smash the substance at itself in order to create a black hole.

Terry Moore's understanding of how dangerous black holes are has a huge black hole in it. A black hole does not have infinite gravity. It has only a fixed amount which is, as with all gravity, proportional to its mass, so if you create a black hole the same mass as a tennis ball, it's going to have no more gravitational pull than does a tennis ball. In order to destroy Earth, you'd have to have a truly massive black hole which you can't generate in a particle collider because the masses of those particles are minuscule. And you can only collide particles - not alloys, so I have no idea where he got this physics from - or worse, where HeNRI got it from. The fact is that if their understanding is so disgracefully flawed, then they're no threat at all!

But I was willing to let that slide for the fun of the story and the excellent way it's told. I can see this making a fine movie, if it's handled right, and if so, I would definitely pay to see it.

Echo: Desert Run by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume Three of this six part (30 issue) series was another winner for me. It opens in the crater blown into the desert highway by Julie in defense against the vagrant dude. Thinking he is dead, Julie also thinks Dillon is dead - or near to it, and she hauls him off in the truck, but unaccountably stops short of finding as hospital and hugs him, thereby healing him. This, she did not expect thinking of herself solely as a weapon. Ivy meanwhile visits Julie's home and finds a box with something intriguing inside, but we do not learn what it is.

It's in this volume that we learn that Julie's new suit isn't just the Plutonium alloy, but also contains some of Annie, Dillon's supposedly dead girlfriend. Now Julie starts feeling what Annie felt, and thinking what she thought. Is this the start of a meld, or a takeover? Julie doesn't know. Ivy, now embarking on a phase of this relationship that is less chasing down Julie and more getting to know Julie and becoming highly suspicious of the secret agency HeNRI. When Ivy learns that Julie healed Dillon, she realizes that she has an off-label use for Julie for herself.

The story continues to thrill and intrigue, art work continues to please - what's not to recommend?

Echo Atomic Dreams by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume two of this six volume series starts out right where volume one left off. Dillon the ranger and Julie the super-girl are hiding out in a desert motel, ostensibly protected by some of Dan Backer's motorcycle group. Dan is ex military and is highly suspicious of what's been going on in those desert military bases. What none of them know is that the vagrant who shared Julie's plutonium rain experience is a religious nut-job who thinks poor Julie is the harlot of Babylon. The Bible has a HELL of a lot to answer for.

When Vagrant Man shows up at the motel - how he tracked her there is a mystery, but I have an idea of my own - there is a showdown that leaves sand turned to glass, and Dan's biker boys dead. Julie and Dillon are once again on the run across the desert.

Meanwhile Ivy has tracked down Julie's sister Pam, who is in a psychiatric institution, and she calls Julie and tries to talk her into surrendering to Ivy - who promises protection. Doing this will implying, intentionally or not, a threat of something happening to Julie's sister isn't the best way to engage with Julie's benevolent side, but before this can be resolved, Vagrant Man arrives, and all that's left after that encounter is a crater in the desert, which is how volume three begins.

Once again we have interesting characters who change and grow, particularly Ivy who is slowly coming to a realization that this isn't your normal person-tracking job. The art work continues to be simple but not simplistic, and it was very much appreciated; it's clean, definitive, and illustrative - everything you would want in a graphic novel. I do not require color, indeed, it can sometimes ruin a story, so this wasn't an issue for me. I recommend this volume as part of this complete series!

Echo: Moon Lake by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

I found this in the library and liked the first volume so much that I went right back and got the next three, which is all the library had. Bless that library! I was hoping that this is the whole set because this was initially issued as a relatively short run of individual (and indie published) comics, and later collected into sets, but it turns out there are six of them, each containing five of the original issues: Moon Lake, Atomic Dreams, Desert Run, Collider, Black Hole, The Last Day. How he got it to be exactly 30- issues is a bit of as poser - that's like writing a novel and deciding it's going to be exactly three hundred pages long regardless of how you tell the story and whether it naturally ends on page three hundred! However, as I write this I'm half way through and I can't fault it for being too fast or too drawn-out.

The art work is excellent, but note that it's black and white line drawings, no coloring involved. Once in a while the text is too small, which is a pet peeve of mine, but other than that, I can't fault this at all, so it all came down to the usual test, for me: whether the story was any good, of course. For me the story is the most important thing, with art being secondary, and this story did not fail me.

The main character is Julie Martin, typically curvaceous as comic book females are, but not improbably so. I liked her sister better - she was drawn more realistically and looked pretty damned good, especially since her personality was adorable. And in the end that's what overcame the skin-deep appearance of these female characters - they were realistic, all three of the main ones.

Julie is a down-and-out photographer whose husband has ditched her for reasons which were not exactly clear to me. She's not happy with this, but she's just about dealing with it, and trying to work on her photography portfolio. Evidently her starboard-folio is already completed....

This is how she happens to be in the desert in the south-west (note that North America sports many Moon Lakes!) when a new flying suit is tested - one that bonds to the skin. It's being tested by a woman Named Annie, and the air-force considers the test to be a success and orders the destruction of the suit, with Annie still in it. This causes a literal rain of particles which come down rather like hailstones, but which are soft, like they're made from modeling clay. They cover Julie and stick to her skin, and to her truck.

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She evacuates the area quickly, but soon discovers these hailstones are, in a way, alive. They begin to flatten out and stretch, and cover her skin, eventually forming a breast plate - literally. It covers her neck, upper chest, and breasts rather provocatively, like a prototype designer swimsuit top. It's not like a piece of metal armor - it's more like a thin coat of chrome. The doctor who Julie visits cannot remove it, and actually is injured by it. Julie is tossed out of the ER as a prankster.

The air force is now trying to recover all the pieces from the explosion, but can find less that 30% of them. They discover that two people were in the area - a vagrant, and Julie. They just don't know the identity of these two people two begin with. A woman with the cool name of Ivy Raven, who is an expert at tracking down people and reading crime scenes - this woman is observant and sharp - is called in to find Julie, but she isn't told the whole story.

There are several interested parties, including a park ranger named Dillon Murphy who is the boyfriend of Annie, the original test pilot. He eventually encounters Julie when the army try to arrest her, and end up all knocked out due to some explosive power of Julie's breastplate which evidently triggers when she's stressed. Now she and Dillon are on the run with Ivy in hot pursuit.

I wasn't thrilled that Julie had to end up with Ranger Rick (or Dill) - yet another woman in distress who evidently can't make it without a guy to validate her, but the characters were written realistically (they even have realistic names! LOL!), and behaved appropriately, and there was no ridiculous love at first sight, so I let that problem slide in this case. Plus, it's Julie who actually gets them out of various scrapes with her "super-power", so this balanced out. Overall, I rated this a worthy read and I was looking forward to volume two at the end of this one.

The Fly: Outbreak by Brandon Seifert and Menton3

Rating: WORTHY!

The odd thing about this graphic novel is that it came without any front or end material whatsoever - the first screen is the first page of the story, not the cover! The last page of the story is the last page of the entire thing. There isn't even anything to identify the creators! I know this is an advance review copy, and I assume that will be all in place when the novel is finalized for publication, of course, but it's weird that there was nothing other than the guts.

Then this was a rather weird story throughout. I've never been a fan of the movie, The Fly (1958), based on a short story or the remake from 1986 (on which premises this novel builds), which I've never been inclined to watch despite the cast. The science made no sense whatsoever in the movies, and that same problem exists here, despite the story being tarted-up with all kinds of pseudo-scientific gabble.

That said, and despite the fact that I am not find of sci-fi stories that utterly mangle science, I found that if I was willing to leave science at the door and enjoy the art by Menton3 rather than the story by by Brandon Seifert, it was a pleasant read. I loved the art work, and the fact that the artists used the entire page. There will be no trees sacrificed to barren wastes of white space if this goes to a significant print run.

The story here is set several years after the original, and changes the back-story somewhat. In this version, the son of the original fly experimenter (who never existed in the originals) is "infected" with fly DNA and is living on the edge of humanity, trying to find his way back. He has a girlfriend who loves him and a lab assistant who has a crush on him.

He's trying to find a way to separate out human genes and fly genes! Good luck with that since there really aren't "human genes" and "fly genes"! Genes don't have specific ties to any given species any more than the rectangular Lego™ building blocks have ties to a specific thing you build. Most of our genes we share in common with other animals. Genes are simply genes, and we share so many of ours with other species - less and less, admittedly, the more distantly-related we are - that it would be a nightmare trying to isolate a few and extract them.

We share, for example, 60% of our DNA with the fruit fly, which I think is the species of fly featured in this story. The reason for this is not that we're part fruit fly or that the fly is part human, but that we both have a lot of things in common at the cellular level, even though we are very different in gross anatomy (which is why the transformation depicted here couldn't take place, although it has more likelihood of doing so than ever the transformation in the 1958 move had of happening!).

Despite the huge overall differences between us and flies, we still have cells and they still have to take in oxygen and nutrients, and output energy. This same process has been going on for literally billions of years, ever since our ancestors were unicellular organisms. It works! There was no 'evolutionary pressure' to change that, even as pressure to slowly transform and change from one kind of organism to another has run rampant over the intervening epochs.

Why having fly DNA in your genome would give a human super powers and make them sexually libidinous remains a mystery, but this was doubtlessly cribbed from the 1986 movie which evidently depicted something similar.

The artwork though, was gorgeous. It was soft and ultra realistic, in eerie shades reminiscent of watercolor art. I recommend the comic based largely on that, but also a on the story which, if you close your inquiring mind down somewhat, can be borne and even enjoyed. I found it intriguing that the gas masks people wore to prevent transmission of infection made them look more like flies than ever the inevitable mutations made those who were infected look like flies. Why they thought that genetic material could be transmitted through the air and infect them was a mystery, but still...!

Although this is a largely male-centric comic, I loved how the two main females - pretty much the only females in it - were depicted, and I'm not talking about the art work here (although many male, and even some female, readers may appreciate that), but about their motivations and their behaviors. It was nice to see them have minds of their own and strong motivations. Although those motivations were, sadly, largely tied to the main male character, there was a bit of a twist at the end which restored the balance somewhat. It was also nice that there were no simplistic black and white issues here. Everything was muddied and shaded and nuanced - a facet of this story which was beautifully reflected in the artwork. That made a pleasant change. Overall, I think this is a worthy read.

Alex + Ada Volume Three by Sarah Vaughn

Rating: WARTY!

I wrote positively of the first comic in this series by Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna, but then I didn't get a chance to read more until this closing issue came along as an ARC, so at least I can book-end it! I have to say I was a lot less thrilled with this one than I was with the first one. I am wondering if that's because I've encountered two more stories of this nature, both of which were very, very good.

The first of these was the movie Ex Machina which was really remarkable and extremely inventive. The second was the British TV series Humans which again was a delight. This last comic in the Alex + Ada series came off looking very poor in comparison with those other two visual media, both in imagery and in story-telling.

The art work was still good - very simple with clean lines, but the images were a bit flat and static. I'd noticed this in the first comic, but was willing to let that slide because I enjoyed the story. This aspect of this comic stood out much more starkly given that the story was far less engaging here.

On at least one occasion, the entire page, which contained five frames stacked one above the other, contained exactly the same image in every frame - or if there were changes they were so subtle that they were lost on me. Other pages had seemingly repetitive images, too, but not quite this bad. In addition to this, some of the text was so small it was really hard to read on my iPad without the irritation of enlarging and re-sizing the page. My iPad is quite large, but still slightly smaller than your standard comic book page. Comic book and graphic novel writers forget this at their peril when releasing their work in e-format. The two media - print comic and e-comic - are very different and cannot be approached in the same way. I've yet to see a comic which appreciates this and takes advantage of the e-format.

I caught one grammar issue where the phrase "less people" was employed. It should be "fewer people". Here's the writing issue, though: is this something in the narration, or in someone's speech? If it's in a speech (or in first person narration), then it can be "correctly incorrect", because most people do not employ stringently correct grammar in their speech - something which far too many writers tend to forget.

However, in this case, we also have to ask if the character who was speaking was a human - in which case we might expect less than exact grammar, or an android, in which case, wouldn't it have been programmed with correct grammar, even if it's also programmed to speak more colloquially? It's a good question which writers need to think about! I don't know in this case if this question entered the writer's mind or not, but it certainly should have. Writers should be always aware of these things whether they choose to take advantage of them in their story-telling or not.

Overall, I found the story disappointing. Given the changes in society, Alex's extreme prison sentence made no sense - that it was so long to begin with, and that he got no reprieve when societal attitudes changed. The story itself was very predictable, so the ending was absolutely no surprise whatsoever to me - unlike the Ex Machina movie which was far from predictable.

The problem for me with the predictability is that the story didn't have anything new or interesting to offer and I felt rather cheated of a good story, especially given how promisingly this series began. I've read a lot of stories about human and machine interaction and seen a lot of movies on the topic, as well as read science books about these things, so maybe I demand more than the average reader, but I still can't help but feel that this needed a stronger story even for less demanding or discriminating readers, and it's for this reason that I can't recommend it.

Supreme Blue Rose by Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay

Rating: WORTHY!

In this beautifully illustrated futuristic time-travel graphic novel, Diana Dane, an investigative journalist who is out of work at present and not able to afford all the meds she believes she needs, has a weird dream in which she's informed that she should not trust Darius Dax. Curiously enough that's the name of the man she meets during her appointment the next day. Dax hires her for a considerable sum - with even more on offer should she succeed in locating what it is that Dax seeks.

It's not an object he wants as much as it is a time and place, but in ignorance of this, Diana is driven away in a stretch limo by an enigmatic chauffeur to investigate what as reported as an airplane crash. Dax doesn't believe the press. Diana, who looks strangely like talented artist Tula Lotay (who incidentally illustrated this novel!), is expected to unearth the truth. Her problem is that her dreams seem to be bleeding into her reality. Or vice-versa. Wait, is that Diana's dreams or Tula's? I honestly can't day! But maybe that's just a result of time being periodically revised?

This novel penned by Warren Ellis was entrancing and haunting with a bit too much mystery, but definitely an alluring lead-in to what is at least a seven volume series.

Edge of Tomorrow by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Title: Edge of Tomorrow aka All You Need is Kill
Author: Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

Read poorly by Mike Martindale.

Not to be confused with Isaac Asimov's The Edge of Tomorrow or a score of other novels employing this tired title, this Edge of Tomorrow was originally released as All You Need Is Kill accompanied by illustrations from Yoshitoshi Abe. This was not a manga, but there was a later manga adaptation released.

The novel was re-released under the new title to tie it in with the movie of the same name which was based on the novel. I listened to the audio version of the novel read by Mike Martindale. I have to say that the reading was poor, and the story wasn't very good, which might account for a tough reading. What, Simon and Schuster couldn't get an Asian guy to read this? Shame on them. Way to go big Publishing&Trade;.

The plain fact is that the movie writers got it right. I had a chance to see a sneak preview of the movie and was completely won over by it. This novel (or short story more like), on the other hand was less than thrilling because the author had striven so hard to make it sound so hard-bitten and tough that it was almost a parody of a war novel. Everything was exaggerated and bitter and it was such a laughably stereotypical military conflict story, that I sincerely believed I would not be able to listen to it all. It did improve as the story progressed, but nowhere near enough to make me consider this a worthy read.

The movie depicts the main character as an American, Major William Cage (named after the original character's nickname), who has no training beyond basic and who is frankly cowardly and happy to be the PR voice of the military. He's unceremoniously tossed into the front lines against his will. In the novel he's Keiji Kiriya, a lowly soldier in the United Defense Force, Japanese contingent who has basic training and is in an infantry unit. In both cases, on his first battle, the soldier somehow gains the ability to reset time every time he dies, and so after he's killed, he always wakes up on the day before the battle where he died.

Sergeant Rita Vrataski in the movie is Sergeant-Major Rita Vrataski in the novel, and is a US special forces soldier, but is otherwise the same person (except that she's British in the movie, not American), and the one highlight of this novel is how she is described and referenced throughout it. The novel doesn't have Kiriya linking up with Vrataski for the longest time, and even when they do, their story is different. He's a much more independent operator, although he quickly decides that she has the right idea, and manages to work out, over several lifetimes, that he needs to arm himself with the same battle-ax which she uses since the bullets in his little standard issue gun don't do diddly against the Mimic carapace.

The ending is different, too, and that's all the spoiler you're going to get. Had I read this before the movie came out, I would have had no intention of seeing the movie - until of course, I saw the movie preview and realized it was much better. I can't recommend the novel. I do recommend the movie which I also review on this blog.

Clone Fourth Generation by David Schulner, Aaron Ginsburg, Wade McIntyre

Title: Clone Fourth Generation
Author: David Schulner, Aaron Ginsburg, and Wade McIntyre
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!
Art work: Juan José Ryp.
Colors: Andy Troy (no reliable website found)

I began this thinking it was the last in the series and thrilled that the library had all four volumes in at once, but when I reached the rather cliff-hanger ending, I have to wonder if there are more volumes, but I have no word on that as of this blog. This story takes off where three left it - with the clones and their clone ninja escort making its way to an airlift which is two days' hike away. Eric the tattooed clone refuses to travel to the island.

The rest of them stop at a cabin in the forest and Amelia is shot. Feeling bad that every single character in this series has been white to this point, the writer or artist or both made the two villains in the cabin black and clone-haters. None of this massive universal hatred of clones was ever explained in this series. Amelia recovers from her gunshot wound and Luke lets the clone haters go - only to discover that they've been intercepted and slaughtered by one of the ninjas.

Meanwhile Mrs K joins the psycho reverend and ends up kidnapping Amelia and Luke's baby even though she's supposed to have reformed. This does not end well for Mrs K. Eric joins the clone haters as a spy. This is how he discovers the kidnapped baby and manages to rescue Eva and return her to her mom. The plane leaves with out Amelia supposedly by her choice, we're told.

Everything seems to have worked out fine until the clones arrive at the island, and in a series of views to which we're party but to which the clones are not, we discover that there's something rotten in the state of Japanese private islands. To be continued? Who knows? This series has been optioned for TV, but given that it took seven years to get this thing from conception to print, who knows how long it might be before - or even if - a TV show appears? Orphan Black does provide a precedent for clone shows, and The Walking Dead provides one for the rampant violence. We'll have to see. I recommend this series as a whole as a worthy read, although some parts of it are not that great.

Clone Third Generation by David Schulner, Aaron Ginsburg, Wade McIntyre

Title: Clone Third Generation
Author: David Schulner, Aaron Ginsburg, and Wade McIntyre
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Art work: Juan José Ryp.
Colors: Andy Troy (no reliable website found)

The third novel in this series is much more violent and sexual than the previous two and the one I liked the least of the quartet I read. Luke is still stupid unfortunately. This is also a kind of Joss Whedon tribute edition in that favorite characters are killed off (or appear to be killed off) willy-nilly.

This novel introduces cloned sisters, just as Orphan Black introduced brothers. The ones we meet are Kazumi, Meiko, Rei, and Sayaka Hatanaka daughters of Ayato, a friend of Luke's father. They are trained in martial arts. When they learn of the plight of the Luke clones being hunted down like animals in the US, they decide to take action.

The problem I had with this whole scenario is one I have with a lot of US-based stories, TV shows and movies. The US is only a tiny portion of the planet - less than five percent of the population - yet it acts like it is the planet, and we see that same arrogant, aggressive stance starkly illuminated here in that this entire story is a claustrophobic world of its own. Every single one of these clones lives in the USA - not a one of them has moved abroad for any reason despite being army brats every last one of them.

Worse than this, when the pogrom comes, not a word is spoken about these people moving to Canada or Mexico or some other place where they would be safe at least temporarily. Not a word of objection to this bloody and barbaric slaughter is heard being voiced neither from within the US nor from any other nation. It's like the US is the world, and there is no other place, and this story is taking place in a vacuum, and frankly, it simply isn't realistic. It's this which made me start to doubt the worthiness of this story for the first time.

At one point, one of the characters suggests that it's time to "...cut tail and run..."?! Cut tail and run? What the heck is that? Does he mean "turn tail, and run" and is perhaps confusing it with "fish, or cut bait"?! Who knows.

It's at this point that we learn that Ayato Hatanaka is willing only to take the clones - no family members, helpers or loved ones. Obviously this is going to create maximum friction. Amelia has already deposited the baby with her rather estranged (if not outright strange) mother, which I considered to be a serious mistake. This is supposed to ensure the safety of the child, but it's with her mother - do they not get that the evil government will know that Amelia has a mother and might leave the child there? No one raises this as a problem, but I predicted big issues with this (and I was right).

The novel ends with a show-down at a house in the country where the clones are hiding out until Hatanaka can organize their escape to an isolated island off the coast of Japan - a place which will be a sanctuary for them. Before they can leave, there is a government assault on the clones. Jennifer, Sanah, and Bennett hold-off the assault rather ineffectually as everyone escapes down a tunnel, and then the house blows. Did anyone survive?

I had some issues with this particular volume but in the end consider it a worthy read as part of the entire series, and I looked forward to volume four.

Clone Second Generation by David Schulner, Aaron Ginsburg, Wade McIntyre

Title: Clone Second Generation
Author: David Schulner, Aaron Ginsburg, and Wade McIntyre
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Art work: Juan José Ryp.
Colors: Andy Troy (no reliable website found)

Luke is now at the secret underground (literally) clone base, but he's understandably obsessed with finding his wife Amelia and child Eva, who have been abducted by elements in the government who are themselves obsessed with wiping out every member of generation one of the cloned Luke, and so have no regard for the life and welfare of his family - except, of course for the scientific interest the child might hold.

This novel opens with Luke trying to escape. He's prevented from doing so but he convinces his clone family that he must find his wife. At an arranged meeting at a truck stop, with a scientist who knows where Amelia is, Luke instead meets an evil clone named Patrick, who is slowly killing off every one of Luke's siblings. The clone passes himself off as a victim, desperate to find sanctuary from the purge, and like an idiot, Luke blabs everything about the secret underground location to him.

Meanwhile, the vice president and his daughter are both taken there, his daughter having been rescued by the indomitable Jennifer. That's unfortunate, because after Luke stupidly revealed where the base was, it immediately came under attack and scores of the clones were killed. Luke helps to overcome the attack, and most of the clones along with the VP and his daughter, escape. They retreat to the VP's country residence, which is a profoundly stupid thing to do. It's not like no one knows where that is!

Luke, Jennifer, and Sanah leave to track down Amelia and Eva. A new clone, this one named Eric, who is tattooed up the wazoo (I'm guessing, given how pervasively his entire body is covered!) comes down on Amelia's side and helps her escape the facility. He is attracted to Amelia the same way Luke was, but Amelia, not being a clone, isn't attracted to him in the same way. She does kiss him in gratitude for his help.

Again the art work was fine, but artist Ryp quite clearly has no idea what a woman looks like post-partum. Women are not weak and helpless (well, a few are, just like a few guys are, but in general women are pretty darned tough and recover well after pregnancy, even difficult ones), but Amelia's "recovery' here is simply not realistic.

A woman's ability to bounce back after delivery doesn't mean she isn't debilitated or weakened to one extent or another by the ordeal she's more than likely been through. It can be a real work out, and even the easiest of deliveries is accompanied by certain physical states which do not miraculously disappear overnight as Amelia's evidently did according to Ryp's art work!

Her large pregnant belly has magically gone - there's no "jelly-belly" which in any ordinary woman takes time to disappear, and which in some women never does really vanish completely. There are other physical facts, too, as other reviewers have pointed out: lactation is in full swing (although this varies from one women to another), and there is post-delivery vaginal discharge for which pads are needed.

No matter how strong a woman is or how easy the delivery may have been, she still needs time to recover and time for her body to return to something akin to her pre-pregnancy state, yet Ryp depicts Amelia as being quite literally no different in physical appearance or stamina immediately post-partum than she was before she became pregnant! It's not at all realistic.

What's also not realistic is Roy's horniness for Amelia. Yeah, guys like that have few qualms about using helpless women, but the way Roy is presented I got the feeling that he was the kind of spineless loser who wouldn't actually want to have anything to do with a woman, sexually or otherwise, who had just given birth. Despite this he's all over Amelia like she's a nymphomaniacal swimsuit model (which is how Ryp inappropriately depicts her - the swimsuit part at least). It just didn't strike me as realistic at all.

We also got Navajo medicine tossed into the mix as we met both Luke's dad and later, his mom, who is evidently a Navajo healer. While I acknowledge that there is medicine to be found in herbs and other plants, and I acknowledge that what we consider to be primitive peoples might well have had a handle on some of this through history, none of them were scientists or medical doctors, so I take all this new age and native medicine stuff with a large pinch of salt. Since we spent little time with this however, it was not a killer for me. It was actually nice to see that part of Luke's life. Not that he really knew anything about it!

One thing which bothered me was Patrick's readiness to slaughter his siblings. This was never accounted for to my satisfaction. We're told he was bred to have no feelings, but this is nonsensical. Even if we take that at face value, however, this still doesn't constitute a motive for his dedication to wiping out the other clones.

Those caveats on the table, I did still enjoy this novel, and I considered it a worthy read. I'm looking forward to volume three.