Stage Dreams by Melanie Gillman

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was an awesome LGBTQIA graphic novel about a cross-dressing southern boy (or maybe a girl) who goes by the name of Grace, and actually has some, and a lesbian stage-coach robber who goes by Flor. I was not sure of her heritage. She's described as Latinx by some, but to me, she had an American Indian look to her from what I saw, so maybe she was a mix of both? Not that it's that important in the big picture of the story, which consists of Flor kidnapping Grace during her robbery of a stagecoach, and eventually entering into an alliance with the latter, to steal from a function being organized by some southern gentlemen of military mein.

All I will say about that is 'the best laid schemes o' mice an' men...' and you know how it goes (or you ought to! It involves gang, aft, and agley). This was a sweet, fun story, easy on the eye and the ear, and I commend it whole-heartedly. The rather sepia artwork gave an antique glow to the novel, and it was a fun romp all the way through. You can find Melanie Gillman at pigeonbits on tumblr and elsewhere online no doubt. Her artwork has a habit of getting around!

Deputy Dan and the Bank Robbers by Joseph Rosenbloom, Tim Raglan

Rating: WORTHY!

I can feel a bunch of children's book reviews coming on, and there aren't many more amusing ones to start it off with than this one. I rather suspect that the author had more fun writing this one than any kid will reading it, but it amused me at any rate. Some would argue that's easily done....

Deputy Dan is new to the job and unfortunately, he's rather a literal kind of guy. You tell him to answer the door and he'll go say "Hello" to it. You tell him to cover the door, and he'll fetch a blanket and hang it over the door. But when it comes down to finding criminals like the scrambled egg gang, he's willing to go to no lengths to catch them, and he doesn't! You tell him they're dirty crooks and he'll make 'em take a bath!

This was amusingly illustrated by Tim Raglan and even more amusingly written by Joseph Rosenbloom. My kids are too old for this now (or maybe not!), but they would have loved it when they were younger. I commend it as a fun read.

A Dangerous Woman from Nowhere by Kris Radish

Rating: WARTY!

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

I was very disappointed in this book. A 'dangerous woman' Briar Logan was not, unless you count being in danger of putting me to sleep with endless flashbacks and rambling descriptions. She always sounded like she might be going to be dangerous, but she never was. Right at the point where she could prove herself to be dangerous, she gets hit on the head by one of the bad guys, and is invalided for some considerable time after that, so where exactly was the danger she posed? Maybe it popped up at the very end, but I gave up all hope of it and never made it that far.

Plus one of the main characters was named Jack. That's a huge no-no for me. I detest novels in which one of the main characters is named using the most over-used 'go-to-guy' name in the history of literature. If I'd known there was going to be a Jack in this novel I would honestly never have requested to read it on that basis alone, so tired am I of seeing the trope 'Jack' in any sort of action-adventure story.

The rambling parts would not have been bad had the story been a rambling kind of story. Had the woman been on a road trip or was 'finding herself' or something along those lines, the diversionary descriptions would have maybe felt more appropriate, but when the story starts out with a sense of urgency - Briar Logan's desperate need to follow her husband who's been kidnapped by desperadoes - and yet the entire tale lapses into a sedentary, drifting, teetering, slow-paced meander, it fails for me because the main character seemed more like she was out on a nature ramble than ever she was interested in pursuing her husband. I simply could not get into this story no matter how far I read, and the author didn't offer any help.

The wandering sentences were of the nature of: "Even with the seriousness of the mission, it is impossible to watch the dew slip from the tops of the trees and cascade through the canopy of leaves that are on the brink of turning into the bold colors of fall without thinking how beautiful it is this time of day and year."

And you know, even in those circumstances, had the descriptions been related to the pursuer's state of mind, they might have worked, but they felt like they had been lifted from a travelogue rather than from a story where this woman's mind should have been, if we were to believe her attachment to her husband, worried sick about him and providing her only with a tunnel vision getting to him as fast as she could. I did not feel form her any sense of worry or fear, or of losing hope or losing heart, or of desperation, or of anger, or anything associated with what she ought to have been feeling! Consequently, it rang false throughout.

There were also oddly contradictory passages. For instance, at one point, and during a section which I initially thought was a flashback because it seemed so out of place, Briar is talking about gleefully strangling chickens, and then right after that, I read, "...been determined to treat him, and all the animals on the ranch, with a kindness she has come to realize is deserved by every living creature."

This was so completely contradictory of what had gone only just before that it brought me right out of suspension of disbelief. That's not to say that people can't have conflicting views, but this one came totally out of left field and for no reason at all. There was nothing to trigger it, and it was one of many passages I read that that made me think the author was more focused on turning a phrase than ever she was in actually telling a realistic story.

It wasn't only rambling, florid descriptions which tripped up this tale; it seemed like everyone and their uncle had a flashback, and if they had one, then they had a dozen. Every time one popped-up, it robbed the story of momentum and immediacy. I soon began thinking that if this woman really doesn't care about reaching her husband any time soon, why should I care if she reaches him at all? I gave up on it about eighty percent in because it simply held no interest for me at all. I cannot recommend this one.

True Grit by Charles Portis

Rating: WORTHY!

It's so nice to end the month on an up note, especially given that it's an audiobook, which tend not to do so well with me because they're more throw-away reads than other formats. Anything to take one's mind off the tedium of driving, right?! But not too far off!

True Grit was published in 1968 and it's has stood the test of time well, spinning off two movies. The first was in 1969 and featured such luminaries as John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Strother Martin, and Kim Darby, who played the 14-year-old Mattie Ross when she was twenty-one, and a married woman with a child! They started young back in th' ol' west! By various accounts the cast and crew did not get along on this set! The 2010 remake featured Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper, and Hailee Steinfeld who, when she starred in her film debut here, was actually the same age as character Mattie Ross. Paramount pictures also spun-off a twenty-seven page comic book from the movie which is available free from Barnes and Noble and other online outlets.

The earlier script has its own interesting background since it was written by Marguerite Roberts who refused to testify before the dumb-ass House Un-American Activities Committee (aka witch hunt) and was blacklisted for a decade because of it. The story in the novel, but not the film, is told by a mature Mattie, who is looking back on her adolescent adventure in pursuit of Tom Chaney, the man who shot and killed her father. She tells us how she hired US Marshall Reuben J Cogburn to go after him into Indian territory (now Oklahoma - they wuz dun robbed agin). The third man in their party is a Texas Ranger name of LaBoeuf (but consistently mispronounced "LaBeef"), who has long been on the trail of Chaney.

The novel was read surprisingly well by author Donna Tartt, who really digs deep into Mattie's central Arkansas accent. I'm not a fan of Tartt's own novels, and I sure wouldn't want to listen to her speak in person for any length of time, but she did a decent narration job here, emulating young Mattie. Neither am I a fan of 1PoV, but again, some authors can get away with it and Charles Portis evidently is one of them - at least in this novel.

Mattie is feisty, humorless, no-nonsense, and definitely not a retiring sort of a girl. She speaks plainly, holds nothing back, and sticks up for what she believes is right. She and will not back down once her mind is made up. The two lawmen hate her and aren't that fond of each other. They try to lose her, and leave her behind, but eventually she wins their respect and the three pursue their goal and eventually win through, with some heroic deeds backed by a sterling spine.

I loved this novel and found it amusing and entertaining, and though I have no idea how folks really spoke back then, this novel felt authentic as hell to me - and that's all I ask from author!

Drifter Volume 1: Out of the Night by Ivan Brandon

Title: Drifter Volume 1: Out of the Night
Author: Ivan Brandon
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!

This is another space cowboy opera, and my first impression was Firefly rip-off, but it's so easy to see everything as a rip-off of that amazing series, that we need to be careful we don't leap to conclusions. That said, it would be nice to find something new in space stories that doesn't rely for its story-telling on lone mysterious cowboy anti-hero figures or on insanely hostile aliens. The story reminded me very much of the graphic novel Copperhead in this regard, which I reviewed in March 2015, although that one had saving graces which this one lacks.

Set in a space-borne future, we're told that humanity has spread among the stars, "colonizing and strip-mining countless planets". Why? No one ever explains this, and if you really think about it, it makes zero sense.

Our friendly neighborhood anti-hero here has a suitably dramatic name: Abram Pollux, who literally crashes into the story and immediately sets about slaughtering aliens. After scaring off those, he is rendered unconscious by another human, it seems, and soon finds himself waking up in 'hospital'. Although he thinks it's been only a few days, it turns out to have been a year since he crashed his ship, so what's been going on in the meantime? You won't find that out here.

The venue for this story is a largely lawless mining town on the unoriginal planet of Ouro. The locals are threatened by bizarre alien beings who look like anemic versions of the Red Skull. The town is exactly like a frontier town from a western movie. Why? No explanation save for cliché and trope. The law is a tough female black sheriff with a Mohawk, so nothing new there. In order to earn money to pay for repairs to something or other, Abram has to get a job mining the feces of a rock eating flobber worm for its gold excretions. The fact that he saved the town by fixing the town dome shield counts for zip, evidently.

Once again we have an advanced society that can build interstellar rockets, but has no clue how to build robots or mining machines, and so of course has to use human slave labor. I have seen this so many times it's sickening, and never once when I've seen this have I ever seen an explanation accompanying it which explains why it's like this. Robots are ubiquitous in our society today, so if you're going to posit a future where they're 'extinct', there needs to be a reason. A failure to provide one is a failure of your writing and story-telling, especially when you do include things like Star Wars hover bikes!

Why is this town an exact replica of your bog-standard western cowboy town? No explanation. Why is life cheap? No explanation. You would think life would be valuable since there are so few people and no machinery. If life is cheap, why are we colonizing countless planets? No explanation. Why are we strip-mining countless planets? No explanation.

For me, while the art work was good, the itself story was too disjointed and had too many characters too quickly introduced with little actual introduction. Half the time I had no clue what was going on or why things were happening the way they were, and that was simply irritating. At one point we get a trope smart-ass little girl with a pet caterpillar. I had no idea what she was about. She was as annoying as you would expect.

We had aliens with lights shining out of their eyes, which is so pathetic as to be a joke. The more I read of this, the more it felt like I was watching a children's show on the cartoon network. Naturally, I quickly grew tired of it. My how tough these hombres are! My how gritty this is! My how authentically western it is! Give me a break! I quit reading this about ten or twenty pages from the end because it was progressively becoming more and more awful, believe it or not. I cannot recommend this graphic cliché.

For a Few Souls More by Guy Adams

Title: For a Few Souls More
Author: Guy Adams
Publisher: Solaris
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This is the inaptly-named book three in a trilogy, at least the last two volumes of which are named after two movies in the "spaghetti" western trilogy which brought Clint Eastwood to major stardom in the sixties, with the movie title's use of 'dollars' replaced by 'souls' in the book titles. Other than that play on words, the stories here have nothing whatsoever in common with those classic movies.

I wasn't really sure what to expect going into this. The blurb made it sound interesting, but that just means that the blurb did its job in luring me in. It doesn’t mean that the blurb informed at all as to what this story is actually about. One thing I did expect when I began this, was that I'd get a coherent story, which I could follow and which made sense, but this isn't what was delivered. I freely admit that this might well have been because I'd missed the earlier volumes.

In fact, I rather quickly got the strong feeling that I needed to have read both previous volumes before I embarked upon this one, because what were to me random characters began showing up anew in each chapter with no information about who they were or what they were doing or why, or what connection they had to anything or anyone else. There was no back-story - which is a good thing if the only alternative is huge info-dumps, but a really bad thing if the reader hasn't read the previous material, or has read it so long ago that details have been forgotten.

The story began as though it was a traditional western with the supernatural thrown in, but in a chapter soon afterwards, we learned there are motor vehicles. Yes, there were motor vehicles in what we view as the old west, but they were rare and primitive initially. The movie The Wild Bunch acknowledges this, as does Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, both of which I recommend. The problem here though, was that there was no context. Are we in relatively modern times, in 'the cowboy era' but as the wild west is fading? Are we in a time where different eras are somehow bleeding into one another? There was no guidance on this at all - not in the part I managed to complete before giving up from a toxic mix of boredom and frustration.

In some ways, this novel is reminiscent of the movie Cowboys & Aliens, except that the aliens are demons here. The main character in chapter one, Atherton, is an Englishman fresh from some unspecified business in Africa. For some reason he was in New York City when a new town suddenly and literally sprang up from nowhere, out west. He was somehow 'assigned' to it (how or why was not specified), and the town it turns out, is populated with demons. Atherton decides (upon what authority, we’re not told), that he needs to destroy the town and the demons in it.

There's a second story told interspersed with the first. This is the tale of Arno James and Veronica, both living in Heaven. In life they did not know each other, indeed could not since they lived at different times. In death, slain by the lover of his unfaithful wife, Arno is thrilled that Veronica, the first person he meets, turns out to enjoy his company, but this isn’t enough for him.

Told by the mysterious Alonzo, who appears to be in charge up here, that Heaven is so poorly populated these days because most people think they deserve no better than Hell, Arno decides to visit Hell and find out what’s going on there. Of course, this 'explanation' does nothing to explain why Heaven - which must have been steadily populated for thousands of years - has failed retain even its original populace.

Worse than any of this, however, is that the story did nothing whatsoever to pull me in. I've read books (I found two different ones over the last week) where I was grabbed from the first page and couldn't put it down, but this one failed to get my attention, much less my good will. It gave me no compelling reason to be interested in what was going on, and it gave me no character(s) to identify with, to relate to, or to become curious about. Given all of that, and given that there are other, more enticing volumes sitting on shelves and devices, I couldn't sustain sufficient interest in this to continue with it.

Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue Deconnick

Title: Pretty Deadly

Author: Kelly Sue Deconnick
Publisher: Magnetic Press
Rating: Worthy!
Art: Emma Rios
Colors: Jordie Bellaire
Edits: Sigrid Ellis
Letters: Clayton Coles (I did a search for Clayton's website on Google and it brought up this blog three times - at the top of Google's list! I guess this is his website! lol!

(see also Three for other work by Bellaire and Coles)

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.

Here's a novel-ty: I'm rating this graphic novel as a worthy 'read', but not on the basis of what I read. Instead, this rating is based solely on the basis of what I saw! The artwork is remarkable, and it's worth 'reading' for that alone. The story, on the other hand, lost me completely. Maybe you will have a better time with it, but no matter how hard I tried to follow it, I could not figure out what story was being told here or what I was supposed to take away from it.

It's obviously about death, but it seems to be a meld of a western novel and a Greek tragedy, and it seems also to be that supposed no-no of the story telling world: it's all a dream, or at least it's all happening in some sort of a dream world. Or at least part of it is. Or something. See what I mean? It's confusing, and I felt bad about that. maybe I'm missing something, but I felt like it oughtn't to be that hard to enjoy a novel!

But this is a graphic novel, so I don't expect each panel to be filled with expository text, yet when we get multiple pages with little or no text (and then the occasional panel which is jammed with text!) and with small images that, beautiful as they are, don't offer much in the way of exposition, it makes reading a chore rather than a pleasure, and there's no excuse for that.

The idea of the story is what appealed to me: death has a 'daughter'? How cool is that? This vengeful 'daughter' is definitely not one to forgive trespasses, and she rides out wreaking havoc, and evidently needs to be reined in at some point. This whole story is encapsulated in a tale told to a butterfly by a dead rabbit. I have no idea what that's all about. And what's with the sword she carries? These pieces just didn't fit together for me, although now I think back on them, I do so with a warm smirk on my face!

The graphics are, in places, very violent and gory, just FYI. I know this is about death, and the setting is the purported 'wild" west, but that level of blood and guts seemed a bit much for this particular story; however, as I said, the artwork was spectacular overall and it merits support for that alone. It would be a tragedy if Emma Rios illustrated no more stories because one such as this failed. Not that disappointment in the writing will cause it to fail - thankfully!

Other than the artwork, one really interesting aspect of this graphic novel is that it's almost entirely female-centric with regard to the development team, and that's another reason it grabbed my attention. The comic-book world has thankfully never been devoid of women, but traditionally it's been dominated by men and it's liberating to see that antiquated 'norm' being so strongly challenged with this contribution.