Odyssey by Homer

Rating: WARTY!

Another classic bites the dist. This is one of the most stupid, tedious, repetitive, and pointless stories I've ever listened to. I listened to the audiobook version since originally, this was meant to be listened to, not read, but the version I had is not in poetic meter. It's told as a prose story by a narrator who was tedious to listen to, which made things worse. Despite this prose approach, the story still retains the repetitiveness of the poetry, which does not a thing to improve the situation. I grew to honestly and truly detest the phrase 'child of morn, rosy-fingered Dawn' with a passion.

Odysseus is one of the most puffed-up, self-aggrandizing, boorish braggarts I've ever encountered in literature. His son is useless and his wife Penelope is a complete jackass. Odysseus is always the best, the most virile, the strongest, the most upright, the toughest, the most skilled, etc., etc. He never loses, except in his ridiculously haphazard return from Troy after the ten year war.

It takes him another ten years to get home and all this time we're supposed to believe his wife is faithful. Odysseus is nearly always plied with riches by his hosts no matter whose island he fetches up on after another disastrous voyage in which he loses the previous treasure he was given. His various crews are always weeping, or lily-livered, or dishonest, or incompetent, or untrustworthy, while he himself is a paragon.

The thing is that it's really not that far from Troy to Ithaca! This admittedly assumes that the present day Ithaca is remotely close to where the ancient one was, but even if it wasn't, we know it was in Greece, where nowhere is very far from anywhere else. The point is that it's possible to travel the entire distance by land pretty much. He could have almost literally walked the entire distance in a couple of years, so why he repeatedly embarks on voyages given that he knows Poseidon, the fricking god of the ocean, is out to get him, is as much of a mystery as it is a testimony to one thing and one thing only: how profoundly dumb Odysseus truly is. He's a callous jerk, too! Despite his losing crew after crew, Odysseus never mourns a single one of those he traveled with or left behind.

Meanwhile back at home, we have the comedy duo of Telemachus, Odysseus's 20-year-old son, and Odysseus's wife, Penelope. His son is purportedly the head of the household, yet he has not an iota of wherewithal to throw out these suitors to his mom who number about a hundred or so. I know there was a tradition of hospitality in that era, but they're the worst guests imaginable, eating him out of house and home and he can't dispatch even one of them? How Odysseus was even supposed to have anything left of his holdings after ten years of this is a joke. Penelope, were she not such a limp rag and a waste of skin, could simply have told any number of these suitors she wasn't interested, but she keeps them hanging on: all five score of them, while making cheap excuses as to why she can't make up her mind. She's an asshole, period.

The suitors are utter morons. They're dumb-asses for hanging around for ten years when they're clearly getting clearly nowhere with Penelope. They're imbeciles in that they cannot see through her ridiculous ruse of un-weaving Laertes's burial shroud each night so she can re-weave it the next day. Despite all this, Telemachus can't seem to handle them and it takes Odysseus's heroic return of course, before they're summarily dispatched. Here's the last ridiculous thing: he arrives in disguise instead of striding proudly up to his home. Why? No good reason at all. Yet we're supposed to believe he has littered his way home with rejected lovers because he loved his wife so much? Bullshit.

This story is awful and not worth the time to read or listen to it.

The Game by Cosimo Yap

Rating: WARTY!

You know, you may be passionate about playing trading-card games or about video games, but unless you can turn that passion into a story that will appeal to those who have no interest in your cards or your gaming, then you're not going to sell many books. This was the problem here.

First off, the plot made no sense and secondly, there was far too much technical crap going on and too little story-telling. On top of that, and given that the book was subtitled "Opening Moves" it portended the predictable series to milk as much out of readers as could be got, and worse even than this, there was a clear but unengaging attempt at a love interest right from the start which was as predictable as it fell flat.

The plot is supposed to be that Earth was invaded by aliens who brought, among other things, "A fully immersive virtual reality called the Game." The problem is that the game is so 'Earth' that there's nothing alien about it. It doesn't remotely suggest alien. It suggests a young author thinking solely in Earth terms about his own interests and trying to project this onto aliens.

The game is all about garnering inventory and adding points to your stamina and so on, just like any game that's out there. There's nothing new or different in it and it makes no sense. Worse, we're offered no reason whatsoever why anyone should be so interested in playing it (other than those who play these things anyway). I mean why would people voluntarily support an alien construction like this? They're not forced to play, so why wouldn't they simply boycott it as a small rebellion against alien rule?

Alan is supposed to be this college student (read 'the author') who can't wait to join the game. We're told next to nothing about him or his studies or why he is so desperate to be in the game, in the same way we're told nothing about the aliens or how they managed to overpower Earth. The story got so technical in terms of game-play from that point on that I lost all interest in it, because: no story! It offered nothing to pique my curiosity or stir my interest, and it was so boring. The characters were uninteresting and the only good thing I can say about this novel is that it wasn't in first person, so there is that. But I can't commend this based on the introductory portion of it that I read.

Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes

Rating: WARTY!

I was disappointed in this. It's like listening to an old relative drone on about an ancient past in which you as the listener have no interest whatsoever. Fortunately your;e not stuck with this until you can politely leave! This should not be thought of as a novel though. It's really much more a memoir of the author's time at a public school in Rugby in the 1830's, and while I am quite convinced he had fond memories of his time there, he imbues the reader with none of it - not if the reader is anything like me, anyway.

Note that public in Britain means private - it was technically open to the public, but in fact required a hefty fee. Rugby has the distinction, when it was originally founded in 1567, of actually being a free public school, but when the 'great' schools of Britain were set in stone in the late 1860's, they started to become renowned for being upper class and elitist. Rugby school is also where the actual game of rugby football was codified in the 1840's. In Tom Brown's era, running with the ball first became a thing. None of this history is told in Hughes's book because most of it wasn't in place in his time.

The first few chapters have nothing to do with school, but instead detail life before he went to Rugby. This part was tedious and I was ready to give up on the entire book, but the time finally came for him to go to school so I stayed with it, and I made it about halfway through the book before I truly tired of it and really began resenting spending so much time on it.

Tom becomes fast friends with Harry East and has run-ins with the resident school bully named Flashman. He plays "foot-ball" and the author inadvertently reveals to us the origin of the term willy-nilly, which was about the only thing I found interesting in the whole book! There are tales of fagging (not what you think!), and other trivia, and that's really about it. I'm not kidding.

I mean it's useful if you want to get the inside story on the minutiae of a school kid's life from that period, but I found no other value in it, and even the utility of that information is soiled by how much crap you have to read through to find anything you might be able to use in your own writing. For me the conclusion was that it wasn't worth it. It's set in roughly the same period as Oliver Twist, so there is some possible interest in the contrast between the lives of these two fictional boys, but even so it's not really worth reading either of them.

Fortunately, that's not why I read it. I read it out of genuine interest in what all the fuss was about in this book and now I can say it's a waste of time. Another 'classic' I've read that's fallen far short of its reputation. I cannot commend this as a worthy read. You'll have much more fun watching an episode of Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns called Tomkinson's Schooldays which is a loose parody of this book and was the pilot episode for the Ripping Yarns series.

Warrior Wench by Marie Andreas

Rating: WARTY!

I'm sure this sounded like a great idea for a story when it first hit the author, but the idea far outstripped her execution of it. The so-called warrior wench, who does far more wenching than warring, is Vas, who manages to get herself drugged, and when she finally comes out of it, a month has gone by and her spacecraft has been parted out and sold. She sets off on a quest to get it back.

I started reading this, got about a third of the way through it, set it down to read some more pressing books where i had a deadline for reviewing them, and then when I finally got back to it, I couldn't recall a single thing about this novel at all. After a brief refresher, I began reading it again and found that this supposedly tough woman is just another wilting violet with hots for this new guy onboard. Why female authors do this to their characters is a mystery to me. Maybe there are readers who like this sort of thing, but I can't subscribe to it.

I have no objection to a love story if it's done right, but this young-adult horseshit featuring instadore makes no sense and is poor writing. It only gets worse from there because there are, apparently, "unmarked ships blowing apart entire planets and the Commonwealth government can't, or won't, stop them." Blowing up entire planets? This is what happens when an author has no clue about physics and specifically, here, the amount of energy required to actually blow up an entire planet.

To totally disintegrate Earth, for example, you'd need something like sixty quadrillion one megaton nuclear bombs - all strategically placed and exploding simultaneously. It's hard to cost out a single nuclear weapon, but a very rough estimate is two million US dollars. Multiply that by sixty quadrillion, and you see the problem. Who has that kind of money? Even if you had some other means of destruction, it would still cost to build the weapon, and to generate the requisite amount of energy to power it, so what would be the point of doing that? What would be the value of it to the ones doing it?

If the aim is merely to wipe out the population, then why not simply drop a virus?

So the whole foundation of this book was clueless to begin with and the romance really didn't help at all. I can't commend this based on what I managed to read of it.

Find Me at Willoughby Close by Kate Hewitt

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"But even big kids don't need to rude words." - to use rude words
"friends with her just because some in girls think she's different" in-girls? It has a double meaning the other way!

This is the second - and the last! - novel by this author I will ever read. The previous one I read was reviewed in December of 2016, and titled 'A Yorkshire Christmas. I'd forgotten I'd read that because if I'd remembered, I probably wouldn't have read this one. This kind of story isn't my style, but I was curious about this genre - the wussy girl running away from a bad relationship back to her home town (or someplace different anyway) and finding the love of her life. There is a tedious number of 'weak woman' books like this, and it fascinates me as to why - and who reads these.

What this novel had going for it - or what I thought it had, was that it was a bit different. This is an older woman, Harriet, with three kids, whose husband lost his high-flying financial job and failed to tell his wife for six months. Was it purely accidental that his name was Dick?!

Harriet the spy discovers he's talking on the phone at all hours of the night with his secretary - the youthful and sexy Meghan. So a Meghan beats a Harriet, evidently! There is no excuse for his behavior and now he and his wife are in such dire financial straits that Harriet has to give up their luxury home and designer furniture and sell it all off to go live in a rental cottage some ways away. Her husband lives separately in a small apartment in London, still looking for work.

How they get by financially is a mystery because despite not even looking for a job for the longest time, Harriet still seems to be able to keep her head above water and buy whatever she needs whenever she needs it, even as she whines endlessly about her impoverished circumstances. The whining got old real fast.

Her husband is in the same position: both are supposedly looking for work, yet neither of them seems to get that they can - at least for the short term - take any job they can get just to have some income. To me they both came off as privileged and spoiled, and stupid. It was also hard to stomach the incongruity of Harriet prattling on about organic this and that while driving gas guzzling Land Rover Discovery which gets an environmentally tragic 20 mpg.

It didn't help that she said clichéd things like "Does this dress make me look fat?" at times. The message coming through loud and clear is that the only thing she thinks of is herself - eleven years of being spoiled rotten and having every single thing she ever wanted will do that to a woman, I guess. It did not make me like her at all. It helped no more that the writing was a bit lax here and there so I'd read things like: "Harriet blinked hard, but it was too late. Two slipped down and with a muttered curse she grabbed a napkin and started dabbing." The idea was that two tears slipped down, but he author had written it so poorly that the 'two slipped down' had no real connection to tears. It was just weird to read.

An amusing instance of this laxity was when I read, "Harriet sank into the armchair by the gas fire that was still in the atrocious pattern Harriet remembered of large pink cabbage roses." This implies that the gas fire had a cabbage rose pattern! I'm guessing it was actually the armchair though. The author might have re-thought that sentence.

What did genuinely impress me was how fast it's possible to get a pizza in London! While Harriet visits her husband to pick the kids up, their father orders pizza via his phone, immediately goes to get it, and very quickly returns with it, all in the brief time that Harriet is having this quite short conversation with her kids. Well, we've all been there - trying to account realistically for time passing in our writing. I didn't want to mark her down for that. But many of us might want to find out which pizza place can prepare two pizzas that fast!

Where I did draw the line though was the tired, tedious, and way overdone YA trope of "the gold flecks in his hazel eyes." That about made me throw up. I've read it far too many times and it sucks. It needs to be banned from every author's description toolbox. It was shortly after that at around 65% that I gave up because the book just kept rambling on.

The next thing up was this designer dog - actually a pedigree dog, an order for which had been placed some months before. Dogs don't arrive as fast as pizzas, but finally it was ready. Harriet had to come up with five hundred pounds for it and barely blinked at that. Then she seemed utterly clueless that the dog would be peeing and pooping everywhere if it wasn't properly trained from the outset.

I felt bad for the dog having to live with this family as well as for the vet bills they'd have to pay for a purebred (read inbred) dog. Since a single vet (named Tom of all pathetic names for manly characters) had been introduced not long before in the story, it seemed quite obvious at this point where the story would be going: new puppy > requires shots etc > nice vet with gold flecks that Harriet knows > new romance. Boring much?

I can't say if that's where it went because I didn't read on and I honestly didn't care about any of these characters. I decided enough was enough. I'd put up with this kind of rambling delivery for far too long, wasting my time when I could have been reading something truly engrossing, so I quit reading and moved on. I can't commend this book at all. Or this author. If this is even remotely representative of this genre, then it speaks volumes about those sorry volumes.

Hook by Melissa Snark

Rating: WARTY!

This was yet another attempt to wring some value from the antique and ridiculous Peter Pan story. About the only one I've read so far that was worth reading was Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson which I reviewed several years ago. Note that in an experiment, I review the audiobook for this same volume in October 2020.

This one is in first person which is an irritating voice to read and it makes little sense in a novel like this one. And who is she telling this tedious story to anyway? It takes forever to get going and in the end, never really does. The captain is informed that Peter Pan's ship Ariel is spied on the horizon - a ship that's faster than the Revenge, and so they have to sneak up on it over several chapters to liberate the children Pan is abducting with the aid of Tinker Bell. I smelled a trap, but apparently it was just the writing that had gone off.

The plot sounded interesting on the surface, but it never seemed to have any depth in the bits that I read. The captain seems to debate her plans and commands with the crew in town hall meetings rather than actually captain the ship so I couldn't take her seriously from the outset. And she rambles interminably. I managed about fifty pages before I tired of this, and then I skimmed to about a third of the way through and found no reason to read any more of it, so I ditched it, neither knowing nor caring what would happen next. I cannot commend this at all.

Live to See Tomorrow by Iris Johansen

Rating: WARTY!

I made very little progress into this book before I gave it up as a bad job. The main female character is Catherine Ling, ridiculously recruited by the CIA at the age of 14, we're told. And no, this is not a YA novel believe it or not.

The story itself begins years along from that time, and Ling has a son who is, for reasons I never learned, under the protection of a friend of hers, Hu Chang. Threatened with 'it's either you or him who takes this mission' Ling elects to neglect her child and go herself to try to rescue a journalist from Tibet. Why this wasn't dealt with through diplomatic channels isn't mentioned in the part of the novel I managed to stomach. Why the CIA has no other agents who can do this is equally an unaddressed mystery.

I dropped it the minute this supposedly strong woman has her job "complicated" by meeting Richard Cameron. I began skimming, and these two complete strangers have unprotected sex early in the story. She's so dumb, she hadn't known people could do "that" - evidently some magical fingering technique he has that this evidently dumb broad never encountered before. or maybe there's some authorial wish-fulfilment going on here.

Later, I read, "...she had been on the defensive since the moment she had seen him and felt that first explosive bolt of sexual attraction," I knew exactly what kind of unfulfilling trashy and female-demeaning story this would be, and I was glad I was out of there. I can't commend dumb-assery like this. I'm done with this author, too.

Kanzi by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Roger Lewin

Rating: WORTHY!

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is a psychologist and primatologist. This book is about her work with a Bonobo (an ape closely related to the chimpanzee) named Kanzi who learned to communicate in ways humans could understand. The author is so far the only scientist to conduct language research with bonobos. Roger Lewin is a science writer who has worked for both New Scientist and Science publications.

Bonobos are very similar to chimpanzees, but not the same species. Kanzi was the first ape to acquire words in the same way that human children do, but her view that language is learnable by apes is contested by other scientists, such as Steven Pinker, who is a cognitive scientist. Kanzi also learned from human tutors how to create sharp flints which could cut ropes which held fast a box containing food, and he demonstrated the ability to create them (including using his own method of smashing the rock and simply selecting the sharpest fragment!).

The author makes no claim that apes are human, but that - as the book's subtitle shows, they are at the brink of the human mind, which of course they must be as our closest living relatives. Modern bonobos and chimpanzees did not evolve into humans, but we certainly do share a common ancestor with them, and one of those ancestral lines, very much ape at one point, did indeed evolve to give rise to the human lineage that led to us. This books gives fascinating insights into how that process may have begun and also into how minds like ours but not the same as ours, view the world - and us. I commend this as a very worthy read.

Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane

Rating: WARTY!

I've been a big fan of Duane's ever since I read So You Want to be a Wizard? many years ago. This book I am sorry to report is not up to the same standard. The subject matter of this kind of a novel is really a bit of a tired topic at this point: social networks gone bad, MMORPGs, and that sort of thing, and you really need to bring something strong and new to it to get a good story, and while this one isn't lousy, it really isn't a great entertainment either. i read this some time ago and I cannot for the life of me recall what the content was in any detail, which speaks volumes about how little of an impressionism this made on me when I read it.

The author seems so enamored of the idea of MMPORGs that she spends far too much time delving into the game and its technology than in actually telling a truly interesting and engrossing story. it seems to me she should have let this stew for a while before writing it. The impression I had was that she'd just learned about these games, maybe played one or two and become entranced by them, and immediately decided to write a novel about one. She went into endless detail about the game, and all this served to do was to make her 'real life' characters seems flat, one dimension, and uninteresting. It was boring. I can't commend it at all.

Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons

Rating: WORTHY!

This book discusses how girls can be the worst kind of bullies of all, employing microaggression and social freeze-out to punish those who displease them. It can often be so subtle and unspoken that even those being punished do not understand what's happening or sometimes even that it is happening at first.

The book discusses various forms this bullying can take, citing examples for real life victims of it. Later it discusses what parents and teachers play in all of this and what are the right - and wrong - steps to take when you're aware this is happening a child you care about.

I have not read the newer edition, but this book has been updated with content covering cyber-bullying. I can't comment on that other than to say if it's anything like this earlier edition, then I would have to commend it, as I do this one, as a worthy and important read even if you don't think your loved one, or a student in your classroom, is being bullied.

Time Lord by Clark Blaise

Rating: WORTHY!

This book has nothing whatsoever to do with Doctor Who! Instead, it tells the true story of Sir Standford Fleming and the creation of a system of standard time throughout the world. This may seem strange to us today, used to an orderly 24 times zones spanning the globe, but prior to standard time being established in 1884, there were for example, almost 150 official time zones in North America alone! This book explains how those and others, elsewhere, were shrunk to an intelligent and manageable number, largely through the efforts of one man.

I enjoyed this book immensely and consider it entertaining and educational.

Unison Spark by Andy Marino

Rating: WARTY!

This is the debut novel of the author and it was a fail for me for an assortment of reasons. I made it about halfway through and resented wasting even that much time. I had to keep forcing myself back into it - it wasn't like I couldn't wait to read the next bit, and the book felt like it was going nowhere slow. I couldn't get to a point where I liked either of the two main characters, couldn't see where it was going, couldn't get into the story. It was like work and I can't believe I stayed with it as long as I did.

The basic plot is that two characters - a boy and a girl - of course, live in this dystopian society - of course - composed of haves and have-nots with no gray area in between - of course. The boy is of one group, the girl of another - of course. It was so tedious and unimaginative. All they have in common is that they dream the same dreams and are clearly genetically or otherwise modified (brings a whole new meaning to binary relationship doesn't it?!), but the story took so long to even reach that point that I couldn't stand to read any more and ditched it, irritated that I'd foolishly wasted the time I'd already spent on it. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Our Lizzie by Anna Jacobs

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this in short order after I read how yet another female writer refers to her female characters. "...Lizzie was a child still, but when she grew up - ah, then he'd be waiting for her...He'd enjoy taming her, wooing her first and then mastering her, as all women loved to be mastered. Marrying her, perhaps." That was page six of this novel and it was where I and it parted. I don't care if this is supposed to be the male character's thoughts. That picture just turned my stomach and I had no desire to read any further.

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I did skim through the book a little and at one point I read the unintentional humor in "I'm a rotten sewer" - where what the girl meant to convey was that she was poor at sewing. Later a character who wants to be her lover is named Peter. he;s described int eh book description as her new love - like the old one was actually a "love" as opposed to an abuser. It confirmed that I'd made the right decision to quit reading this when I did.

I can't commend this precisely because of that.

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.

Bright Dreams The Brilliant Ideas of Nikola Tesla by Tracy Dockray

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm definitely not one of these people who thinks Nikola Tesla was a god and worships him, nor do I buy into the inane conspiracy theories that have grown up around him, but I do admire his brilliance, and I have to say that this well-illustrated and sweetly-told story about his life is a great way to introduce children to an important inventor.

It begins with his interesting childhood (it starts at birth! Where else would a biography start?!), and covers his youth and his travels, and follows him to the USA where he really became a name to conjure with. It pulls no punches, either, not shying away from the sad parts of his life and the times where he was exploited by unscrupulous men. The thing was that he was so good at inventing things that he nearly always bounced back.

I enjoyed reading this and the only issue I had with it was the question of his digging ditches. Yes, it's true that for $2 a day he was forced to do this, which he accepted stoically until he could get back on his feet again, but whether those ditches were for Edison's cables or some other purpose is the issue I think it's folklore rather than authenticity which poetically has him do this for Edison's cables. Maybe it was, but I'm not convinced it was specifically for that. There were lots of other reasons for digging ditches back then.

But this is a minor thing that people can disagree about, and it takes nothing away from he overall power and charm of a story that I enjoyed and which I commend as a worthy read for young children.

Mister Invincible Local Hero by Pascal Jousselin

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This graphic novel was great! It featured a superhero named Mr Invincible, and it was amusing because the creator of it had 'cheated' on the way such stories are typically told, and I loved it. Written and illustrated by a Belgian creator, and published natively as Imbattable: Justice et Legumes Frais ("Unbeatable: Justice and Fresh Vegetables<"), this book will be available in English come September.

In small ways it reminded me of the time in one of my rat books that Louise and Thelma saw themselves performing on stage in a presentation they were doing. There is also a running story that I have yet to finish where these letters escape from a speech balloon and were running around in a couple of books. I think in the next one I do in alphabetical order, I'll bring that story to a conclusion. It's always fun though, to see others exploiting this kind of out of the box - or out of the panel - thinking.

Normally a graphic novel proceeds sequentially in a series of small panels filling each page, but Mr Invincible's power was that he could move from one panel to another out of sequence, and use things in later panels to help himself in an earlier one. In one story, for example, there was a cat stuck in a tree, so he reaches down from one row of panels into the row below and easily plucks the cat from the top of the tree; then he it hands back to its owner. Of course, the owner now has two cats and must surely ponder whether a cat in the hand is worth a second in the bush, but there's a solution to that!

I don't want to spoil the joy of reading this, so let me confine myself to revealing that there are stories where speech balloons are in play, where comic book colors are exploited, and where even the page itself cannot stop the action! And not all of his stories end well. Of course you can only play these tricks in so many different ways before you run out of truly original ideas, so I have to say it was a credit to the writer that he was able to think up engaging ways to exploit this. I'm not sure how you could sustain a series like this indefinitely, but maybe that's not his plan. I definitely became hooked though, so maybe there is a great future for such storytelling.

It's also a credit to the writer that he could figure out what were rather complex and inventive story executions in some of these stories. I had access only to the e-version of the book which took away from the power of some of the stories. I imagine it would work better in a print comic than it did in the ebook, but still it made for a fun read, and it was definitely different! I commend this fully as a very worthy read.

Just a Stage by Corey Majeau

Rating: WARTY!

This book was entirely inappropriate for young children - or anyone. it had an attitude that the environment is there for the pillaging and wasn't even remotely ashamed of it or apologetic about it.

The story in short is that there's no place like home. A house on stilts is the main character, living on a rock in Newfoundland. The house is described as a fisherman (note the gender-bias), but it's one which fishes indiscriminately, apparently having no use for the fish, but just pulling as many out of the water as possible. Never mind the fact that fisheries are collapsing worldwide because of over-fishing. Just pull them thar fish out as fast as you can.

As if this isn't bad enough, the house gets bored and, leaving its trash on the island, it moves to the pristine Canadian forest which is described not for its beauty but in terms of its natural resources to be exploited: trees, a stream, and plenty of animals. The house immediately starts clear-cutting the forest.

Next it moves to a desert, but presumably there's nothing to exploit there, no even oil, so it leaves. The next location is displeasing because, and without a hint of irony, the house finds it 'dirty'. Eventually, it harnesses a whale (no kidding) to swim back to its original location riding on its back, where it settles on the back of a poor turtle and starts fishing again. WTF? I'm sorry but this book is probably the worst children's book i ever read. It's completely anti-environmental and it sucks. Trump, in active process of rolling back no fewer than 100 environmental regulations, will probably buy this by the truckload for his grandchildren. Me? I actively dis-commend this toxic trash.

Her Perfect Life by Rebecca Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I made it about a third of the way through this book before I gave up on it. The story is about a wealthy author who apparently commits suicide on a beach right as her latest novel is hitting the public eye. It's also about her sister who lives a rather more impoverished life, apparently receiving no assistance from her rich sister, and who gets an unexpected call from her distraught brother-in-law. I immediately suspected that guy rather than suicide, but since I didn't finish this novel, I have no idea if I'm right.

Eileen flies to her sister's home, and that's where I gave up on it. The story did nothing to move me at all. In fact it felt like a depressing and dreary read, but two things really turned me off it. The first was the screeching halt to which the story was brought to by flashbacks. I cannot stand flashbacks. I can't think of a better way to annoy your reader than interrupt what had begun as an interesting story to explore tedious family history. When I read a story I want to get on with the story. I do not want to be constantly and irritatingly interrupted by the author forcing me to go back in time, giving me whiplash by suddenly - in Chapter three, for example, forcing me back two years ago. Tell the story now for goodness sake!

Neither did it help by the tennis-play chapters - now we're with Eileen, Now we're with Simon. No, it's back to Eileen. Wait a sec! Now Simon has it. Slap! Look left. Slap! Look right! Sorry, but no. No. NO! I was initially attracted and intrigued by the idea of Eileen reading Clare's latest novel and finding clues in the writing as to what happened, but he author seemed defiantly intent upon putting me off that story altogether by screwing around instead of getting on with it. The more I read, the less I felt that the payoff would be worth the work of reading this, and work it was.

One of the most obnoxious parts of the book was that I once again had to read a female author describing a woman and putting beauty first in the list, like no woman has any higher calling or more important trait than being beautiful. I have seen this time and time again in reading books by female authors and I find it sickening that they cannot value their fellow women - not even fictional ones - for anything apart from beauty first.

I read, at only 6% in, "Clare Collins was beautiful...." Yes, it went on to describe other qualities, but beauty was always foremost. 28% in: "...beautiful, talented, and simply awe-inspiring sister...." Yep. Beauty first. Again. How beastly. 37% in "...her beautiful face...." 40% in: "...her beautiful surface...." 41% in: "Clare was beautiful...." Oh wait! at 51% in we get a change! Clare is "...vivacious and..." on no! "Vivacious and beautiful...." There it goes again. 61%: "...beautiful and talented...." It was tediously repetitive.

This is tiresome, obnoxious, and awful writing. People who write about women like this are a part of the problem and I cannot commend a book that persistently devalues women to a skin depth and little more. The book description has it that this is "a page-turning debut" but for me it was a stomach-turning one, and a cover-closing one so I could move on to the next read on my list which hopefully will feature characters who are not valued only for skin which is 'bright and clear' which is what the name Clare means. I can't commend this based on the layout of the book, the demeaning of a female character, and the content of the third of it that I managed to stomach.

The End of White Politics by Zerlina Maxwell

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
"Kamala's 2020 presidential campagin." - campaign

This book ought to be required reading for anyone involved in getting the Democrat party up to speed for the November election. Zerlina Maxwell is MSNBC's political analyst and also a SiriusXM radio host and she tackles the big issues head-on in this sweeping book that efficiently and competently covers a lot of ground.

The Trump racist presidency has never been exposed more starkly than it has in the last couple of weeks since George Floyd's appalling death at the hands of clearly uncaring white police officer who already had multiple complaints against him, but there is more to that disgrace to the White House than this. Trump's election was, as the author argues, a backlash (or a white-lash if you prefer - and let's face it - when in US history has the black population not felt the white lash?) to eight years of having a black guy in the White House. Well that backlash to eight years brought us eight minutes of cruelty which in turn has spawned weeks of demonstrations which have spread like wildfire around the world.

Far too many insecure white men and women didn't like having a black man in the nation's highest office, and the Democrats mistakenly thought politics à la mode would suffice. They neglected the black vote, specifically the voting power of black women, and the whole country has paid the price for four years now, by electing the least competent president ever elected by majority - or in his case, a minority - vote: a man who is openly abusive of everyone who doesn't kowtow to him, who is misogynistic, racist, homophobic, blinkered, anti-science, bigoted, hypocritical, and unremittingly devoted to the narrowest of self-interest.

Rather than drain the swamp, he expanded it and once again put the Trump name on it. He has shamed the office and the nation causing rifts across the world between the US and every nation that isn't a dictatorship. He's caused untold misery and hobbled the USA in its place on the world stage.

As we saw the most diverse field ever of potential Democrat candidates quickly winnowed down to the business-as-usual old white guy, Maxwell's hammer rings loudly on the anvil of necessary change. This book handily tackles the self-destructive 'Bernie Bros', the problems with Biden, discriminatory public policies - and lack of anti-discriminatory ones - the marginalization of important and downtrodden communities, and the inescapable but ignored fact that, just seven elections from now, the majority of the US voting population will be non-white.

Biden recently embarrassed himself yet again with another thoughtless gaff (words to the effect of: "If you ain't voting for me, you ain't black") that was so mind-numbingly godawful on so many levels. He can't win by being stupid. Stupid is already in the White House and the nation is sick of it. Smart is what's needed. What he ought to have been thinking was that "If I don't steal a few carefully-selected pages from Donald Trump's playbook, I ain't elected." He needs to tackle the man head on and not in the divisive way that Trump does it.

Although very recently, he's stepped-up a bit more, Biden's been largely invisible while Trump has lumbered imposingly around the world stage laying down his law, and despite the overpowering presence of Coronavirus hampering campaigning, it did not have to be that way. Biden already knows (supposedly) Obama's playbook and he isn't even using that one. When will he wake up? Not until after he reads this book. This book is his new playbook and if he doesn't learn from it, and he doesn't change tack, he's going to lose come November because as this author makes clear, he cannot win without winning the black female vote - the one voting block that has been marginalized and undervalued for far too long, and in my opinion he should pick Keisha Bottoms as his running mate - assuming she's even willing. I commend this as not just a worthy read, but as an essential one.

Utopia by Thomas More

Rating: WARTY!

Originally published (in Latin in 1516!) as A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic's best state and of the new island Utopia this book proved to be as boring as the title. It began well enough, but though it's fiction, it is by no means a story as we would imagine one in modern times. It's much more like a lecture that will put you to sleep, so don't listen, as I did, while driving! Although I survived it, the lethargic and droning delivery could prove fatal in some circumstances!

I made it about 60% of the way through, and I was planning on finishing out the week with it, but after listening to it while driving home on the Thursday I grew so deadened by it that I couldn't stand to listen to it on the Friday, so I ditched it for something else. The reader, James Adams has a voice that doesn't help. My Latin is barely existent, and although this is fortunately in modern English, it's possible to imagine that More himself is reading it. It started out well enough, but over time, it became repetitive, plodding, and tedious to listen to.

Utopia is supposedly an island, although it actually was a peninsular though which a canal was cut to separate it from the mainland. The problem is that there's nothing Utopian about it. Life is highly regimented and there is slavery and a death penalty, so how this remotely resembles any idea of a utopia we may hold today was a mystery to me.

The "islanders" have rejected money as any sort of local currency, although they do use it in foreign trade if necessary (trade, after all, literally meant a trade - one item of goods offered for a different item in return), but the society itself is pretty much a communist one along the lines of everything being held in common, with each giving according to ability and receiving according to need, although there is more to it than that in this case. The thing is that while all this may have been original five hundred years ago and may even have impressed some people, clearly it impressed precious few since it never took hold. Today, it's nothing more than quaintly antique, and it offers nothing special, or new or interesting.

In some parts it was unintentionally amusing, being rather reminiscent of the board game The Settlers of Catan where sheep and bricks are traded, and little else. I've never played that game but I am familiar with it, and it was amusing how limited this 'vision' was - about as limited in scope as the game. Though I can't commend this at all as a worthy read, my recent migration through reading/listening to antique works continues to at least to one more volume - but by a different author. I'll post that review anon.

The Machine Stops by EM Forster

Rating: WORTHY!

Edward Morgan Forster published this very short story (only some 25 pages) in 1909, and I came to it by way of an article online that claimed (as does Wikipedia) that the novel is eerily prescient of life today under Coronavirus, but that's bullshit!

There's one thing and one thing only that's similar which is that the story depicts a society where everyone typically lives in isolation from others, communicating using a video system. But that's it. In this story people are not forcibly confined to their homes under threat of a virus! They choose to live that way from habituation, and they're not struggling with it any more than they are struggling to provide food for themselves! Every single thing is laid on for them; they're spoiled rotten. There is no comparison whatsoever to the world today and it's insulting to claim there is.

A much better comparison is to the short story is Pixar's movie Wall-E, where humans are carried around on chairs and everything is done for them. True, there's no isolation, but in every other regard it's pretty much the same story. They're confined to a spacecraft whereas in Forster's story they're confined underground, they live in fear of the surface of planet Earth, and are totally under the thrall of technology. Forster's story is a tale of caution against too much reliance on machines and therein lies the comparison to modern day living.

Predictably the story doesn't end well with the machine breaking down. It's right there in the title. What I find mysterious is how, in 1909, the author managed to tell the story at precisely the time that this event came to pass. Was he psychic? Was he simply a great predictor of events? Or was he just very lucky? I'm kidding! Of course he'd tell it then because otherwise where's the interest?

All kidding aside, I commend this story as a decent read. It's of its time and unrealistic in the sense that far too many dystopian novels are: they show everyone conforming whereas in real life such a thing would never happen because there are far too many rebellious and non-conformist souls who would never submit, but it does carry a valid warning about too much dependence on machines and that resonates now more than ever with technology occupying such a huge proportion of our lives today.

Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Rating: WARTY!

This was written in the eighteenth century and published in 1798 the year after the author died. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest feminists in the UK, and was the mother of Mary Shelly. In a way this is a sort of fictional sequel to an earlier book, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published six years earlier.

While writing that earlier treatise very quickly, it seems Wollstonecraft struggled with the fictional form, and had not finished it when she died from septicemia after giving birth to Mary in late 1797. Her husband, the philosopher William Godwin cobbled together what she had written and added a commentary here and there explaining that parts were missing and some parts were confused in that Wollstonecraft had perhaps wanted to tell it one way at the beginning, but changed her mind later and told it a different way, but never had the opportunity to go back and correct the earlier part.

The story tells of Maria, and begins an asylum for the insane, where Maria's husband, George Venables has had her placed so he can avail himself of her money. He also took away her child and the child died in his 'care'. The story begins with Maria managing to contact a fellow inmate, Henry Darnford, via an intermediary named Jemima, a helper at the asylum. The two begin by exchanging messages, and then Maria gets access to the man's books and eventually, the man bribes the guards to allow him to meet Maria face to face. This part is fine, but after a short while, the story devolved into a diatribe about the way society demeans and devalues women, and I'm sorry to report that it starts falling apart then.

For me it felt far too preachy - even while it is accurate. It just rambles though, and provides precious little in the way of engagement for the reader. The main character is shown to be weak and easily dominated even as the author tells us she is strong, and in the end, she clings to a man. For me this was the wrong way to write this book, and I felt it cheapened Maria's story and devalued it, which is precisely what society did back then to women - and still does today in far too many ways. This is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read despite my admiration of, and support for, the author.

Death in a Hansom Cab by Kerry Segrave

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
Having missed being at the track on the Monday and Tuesday, he last sighting was on the Sunday when he was spotted in a restaurant with Randolph" - His last sighting? The last sighting?
"While her performances in Floradora do no seem to have garnered any critical reviews" - do not
"Them he grew neglectful, despite her protests" - then he grew
"continued her statement by stated she first met" by stating / by relating?
"and no bullet hold in the coat pocket" hole? This is a quote, so it may be original, but there was no attempt by the author to clarify.
"left lung and lodged in the fourth vertebrae." - vertebrae is a plural. The word should have been vertebra.
"this account at least correctly the false reports" - corrected?
"Soon Mrs. Young head abut the affair." - heard about?
"Young "wrecker" his home" - wrecked?
"and give it out that she was one of the members of the Floradora chorus but had tired on the stage." - gave it, tired of?
"Patterson knew abut the Europe trip and possible separation" - about
"reported that Nan had no eaten" - not eaten
"Throughout the period of Nan's incarceration it was regularly noted, from time to time" - regularly or from time to time? It can't be both!
"and I am amazed that the man should pursue such a coarse." - course - again this is quoted speech with no confirmation of original
"before thee Smiths finally resurfaced" - the Smiths.
"Smith had said to her; "You will have to do it," ad she answered; "I won't." - and she answered
"where the water from a simple faucet dripped into a wooden paid." - pail?
"Another long article abut Patterson appeared" - again with about
"Over four month in Washington Patterson was said" - four months
"Nan responded to rumors that he husband Leon was going to divorce here by saying such speculation was untrue." - one sentence, two errors, both of which should read 'her'
"That a report surfaced from Cincinnati that Nan had been named as corespondent" - then a report, and correspondent is misspelled.

The impression I got from this author is that she has access to a bunch of newspaper archives from a period of time from around 1850 to around 1950 and she scours them for book ideas. She's written about drive-in theaters, vending machines, shoplifting, police women, and many other topics. It felt like at some point she came across this death in perusing the papers, and decided to write about it. The problem with this particular book was that there were so many errors (I list a score of them above) and so much repetition in it that despite my initial interest in the curious story and my bias in favor of reading it, it quickly became rather tedious to read at times.

Some of this repetition was due to poor editing. For example, I read:

"Whenever Miss Patterson disapproves of a talesman who is satisfactory to both counsel [each side], her lawyers promptly reject the man."
side], her lawyers promptly reject the man."
year-old retired merchant.

Clearly this is poor editing, and the book would have been immeasurably better if it had a spell-checker and a grammar check run on it. Most of the errors I report above would have bene caught by such a precaution. It's really a lot to ask a reviewer to approve a book when it's in such a sloppy condition.

Another instance is where I read,

third point was that on the afternoon of June 3 Young took a pistol away point was that on the afternoon of June 3 Young took a pistol away caliber revolver; fifth point

There is duplicated text here, and the fourth point is missing completely!

Some of the text was just plan rambling:

Nan Patterson was called to the bar for once again, to be tried for murder in the first degree, for the third time.

It's tautologous to use 'once again' and 'for the third time' - only one of these is needed. Later I read:

Forty-two of the 60 peremptory challenges allowed to both sides were used (30 allowed each side) with the defense using 24 of its peremptory challenges while the prosecution used 18 of its challenges.

This is just repetitively rambling, as is this:

Another over-the-top exaggeration about Nan and her reaction in court supposed came on April 24 when the defendant was supposedly overcome

The basic story is that in early June 1904, a man by the name of Frank Thomas "Caesar" Young was riding in a hansom cab with his lover, an actor by the name of Anne Elizabeth "Nan" Patterson. Young was married and supposedly on his way to board the Germanic, a White Star Lines cruise ship heading for Europe. Germanic was a precursor of the Titanic which would be built starting just five years later.

The ship was supposed to depart at 9:30 am, so the author says, but another account I read indicated 9 pm. The author never addresses any question of whether it was a morning departure or an evening departure and goes with the morning. I take her word for it since it seems that such ships would tend to leave in the morning or mid-afternoon, not at night.

One thing that is certain is that Young was not with his wife on the dock. Instead, at 7:30, he called Nan who was staying with her sister and her brother-in-law at a hotel. He picked her up in the cab at Columbus Circle around 8:00. The plan, she understood, was to travel together to within a block or two of the ship, and then drop her off. Young's wife knew of the affair, and since she controlled the purse strings, she was ordering Young away from Patterson. How that thing with the purse strings happened goes unexplained, since Young was the one with the fortune, but his wife was insisting on this trip to try and break up her husband from his mistress.

The cab traveled alarmingly slowly apparently, because according to this narrative, Young insisted they stop on two different occasions to get a drink at a bar, and on a third occasion to buy a straw boater! This conflicts with an earlier account in the book, in which the author tells us the cabbie claims nothing untoward happened on the journey until the shooting. It's quite a ride from the Paul Hotel where she was staying, down to the pier from which the ship would depart. How he hoped to board in time is a mystery, but the author never addresses this. Perhaps he had no intention of boarding.

The incident occurred around nine, at a time when you would think the ship would have pulled up the boarding gangways and be making ready to depart, but there's no word about what Mrs Young was doing at this time. The author, in her focus on Patterson seems completely uncaring about what was happening with Mrs Young. The cabbie heard a muffled shot, and it was discovered that Young was dead, shot in a way that made it look like suicide was not an easy explanation, although suicide is how the case was treated initially, and which partially explains why forensic evidence was so poorly attended to.

Later, Patterson was arrested, and despite three trials over the next eleven months, the prosecution was unable to get a conviction, and Patterson was let go, but not acquitted. She was not tried again, and ended up remarrying the man she had left for Young, although that guy apparently took ill and died, and Patterson seemed to show no interest in his welfare. The author glosses over this in her laser focus on this supposedly wronged woman, who later married again, and then fell into obscurity and likely died a pauper's death.

The author is right in that Patterson was hounded and smeared by the newspapers none of which thought an actor could possibly be a person of decent or moral character. The author makes a big deal throughout the story of calling out various assertions about Patterson as lies, but without offering corroboration as to how these lies were exposed. For example, I would read, "or so the account would have its readers believe. It was a lie." There is no evidence or argument offered to explain why it was a lie; we're simply expected to take the author's word for it.

This sort of bland assumption appears often. For example, at one point, I read this:

"Certainly no account ever appeared anywhere else about a constantly raucous and unruly crowd of spectators. Thus the above story was another fabrication and perhaps was published only to display the not so subtle misogyny of the newspaper."

There really is no ground whatsoever for making such an assumption! First of all, the author herself does report other instances where the crowd was unruly, but she makes no real distinction between reports of unruliness inside, versus outside the courtroom, thereby confusing things.

One glaring example of biased reporting is the disappearance of Patterson's sister and her husband for several months. The author makes much of how the police on the one had are supposedly tailing them, but on the other do not seem to be able to arrest them, but she makes no inquiry whatsoever into why the sister of a woman accused of murder would disappear, together with her husband right when Patterson is going to trial - nor why they are gone for so long.

To me, this is highly suspicious because it relates to the question of a man and a woman purchasing a revolver in New York City which was likely the one discharged in the cab. The author simply assumes, with little evidence, that it was Young's gun. She never once asks why, when Patterson is in dire trouble, her sister, with whom she'd been living, was nowhere to be found. Not only is that suspicious in and of itself, it's also suspicious as to why the author fails to ask hard and obvious questions about this bizarre behavior on their part.

It's this bias and the lack of any sort of gray-shading that spoils the value of the reporting here. The repetitions and the score or more of grammatical and spelling errors further detract from the story, taking attention from the woman who the author would like to gently place at the center of this story and focusing it instead on the problems with the book. In view of all of this, I cannot in good faith commend this as a worthy read.

Without Hesitation by Talia Jager

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"Empress' face" - this needed an apostrophe S - 'Empress's face' since it's a possessive and empress is not a plural.
"but there were still quite a bit I didn't recognize" This needed to read either 'were still quite a few', or 'was still quite a bit'! It can't be both!

I liked this book to begin with, because it's not a bad story at all, and in some small ways it reminded me of my own Femarine. Set a millennium into the future, when Earth has been rendered uninhabitable (that part is getting here already), this sci-fi adventure tells the story of two women who encounter each other as antagonists out in the reaches of space where human colonies have been taking over habitable planets wherever they are found. Faster-than-light travel (although in reality precluded by the laws of physics!) is the means by which these far-flung societies maintain contact.

Everleigh is the captain of a mercenary outfit which has been tasked with capturing the Empress Akacia, who rules over one of the colonized planets. I'm not at all sure how she got to be an empress. She's not royalty. She rules over a relatively small and homogenous colony on one planet. It's hardly an empire! But there's no information on how this works exactly. Was she appointed? Was she elected? We don't know. It seemed a bit much to me, but I was willing to let that go for the sake of a good story.

After a failed kidnap attempt, Everleigh and Akacia were thrown together by accident, and I have to say I was surprised that Akacia trusted her so readily, but then there is that attraction between them. At times that was a bit much, like when the Empress describes her kidnapper (during the kidnap attempt!) like this: "She was beautiful" The kidnapper is likewise enthralled: "The Empress had a weapon I had never encountered before. She was beautiful." That also was a bit much. His is where the story really began to go downhill for me.

The book description assures us that "Labels and stereotypes are a thing of the past and gender and sexual identity are as fluid as love", but here we have two female characters in a book written by a female author reducing two women to the shallowness of skin depth. It was worse during a scene where one of them was injured and I read: "Did she have a head wound? Was she hurt? And how did she manage to make that look sexy? Oh, God. There I went again with the whole sexy thing." I said to myself, "Seriously?" when I read that! No labels, huh?! This really felt inappropriate to me.

I don't like that kind of writing because it isn't realistic. Maybe when she recalled the incident later she might have added that thought about how sexy she looked, but at the time, when someone is injured, you really don't think like that - not if it's someone you honestly care about. You think about what bad things could happen and what you can do to prevent those things. So to me it was not authentic. Any one or two small items, I would be willing to let go, but this book kept adding to the tally of things I wasn't willing to let go in the end.

What kept me reading for a while, was the story in general and the hope that it would flourish, but it kept failing me. In many ways it was very unsophisticated, even simplistic, like it was written for a younger audience. Part of its initial charm was the plan text, that told the story without trying to fly to any great literary heights, but after a while it seemed too simplistic. Normally I rail against first person voice, and twin first person is twice as irritating. I didn't like that approach, and it only got worse, particularly when the empress falls into the hands of those who would abduct her and she's tortured. This is written in first person voice and it seemed so completely unrealistic that I gave up on the story right there. No one realistically writes about their own torture in such a way. It felt fake and shallow, and constitutes only one of a score of reasons why first person should be avoided like the plague unless it's deemed truly and absolutely necessary to telling a story. The best plan is to not use it.

I'm not a fan of flashbacks either, which bring any story to a shuddering halt and typically make me lose interest. I read the story to find out what's happening now and every time the author defeats that desire by rambling on about some past that's typically irrelevant or contributes little, it just pisses me off, so this was another strike against it. In this case, the Empress starts her story three years earlier, when she was sixteen, but she's older when the main action takes place. I honestly could not see the point of doing that. Any such reminiscences could have been slipped lightly into the text as it flowed, without halting it.

While on the topic of the Empress's age, I have to wonder how she gauges it! We're told early in the story that her planet "had almost no axial tilt, giving it a mild, almost boring climate." No axial tilt means no real seasons. The winter/summer roundabout on Earth is caused because the globe is tipped on its axis by 23.5 degrees, making the northern hemisphere garner less sunlight for half the year, and more sunlight the other half, exactly alternating what the southern hemisphere gets. This is what delivers both hemispheres a winter and a summer every six months.

A planet with no axial tilt would be very much the same climate year round, so there would be no noticeable winter - or other seasons - at all. It would be a little bit like living on the equator for everyone, with the temperature varying only by latitude, not by season). Why then does the Empress open with this clause: "Three years ago, when I had passed my sixteenth winter..."? On a planet where winter isn't a thing, wouldn't there would really be another way of measuring age? Certainly a non-existent winter couldn't be used as any sort of measure of a year's passage! The author evidently didn't think the consequences of her (lack of) axial tilt through very much! Little things like that can matter in story-telling. For me this wasn't in itself a story-killer, but added to all the other issues it became one more thing that turned me off the story.

The same thing applies to the use of 'earthyears' as a measure of time. I don't see how that would work a thousand years from now when Earth is a distant memory for everyone. Who would care about Earth years, really? This tells me the author really didn't think this through properly. Some to the text was a bit weird to read too, such as, "From her long neck to her supple breasts" I'm by no means convinced that supple applies to a woman's breast! How exactly is a breast supple?! 'Supple' is an adjective meaning that something can bend and flex. It would seem right for an arm or a leg, or even a back, but a breast has no real muscle or bone in it. I wonder of the author maybe was looking for something like 'ample'? or maybe soft, or fulsome? I dunno. Supple just wasn't right.

I read a description of Akacia given by Everleigh, which read, "She smelled like honey and...milk" That seemed a bit off to me. Like Akacia was a baby! Another instance was when I read, "I seized her lips and deepened the kiss. When Akacia pulled away the tiniest of moans escaped my mouth. A smile played on her lips that I swear tasted like honey." I'm not sure how you would seize someone's lips when kissing! Carpe labia! But the idea of a smile tasting like honey is just off.

Like I said, I made it to the torture scene and that was just too much. I could make no more excuses to continue reading this and ditched it. I need something better than this - more depth, more realism, even if it's fiction. I can't commend this as a worthy read.

I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane

Rating: WARTY!

I believe I saw the Armand Assante movie based on this novel, and evidently I found it unmemorable. I started reading the novel and it was so bad that I could not get into it at all. I know it's a novel of its time (1947), but seriously? Frank Morrison Spillane was working in a department store and he got his start in writing through concocting super hero stories for the comic book industry right before Pearl Harbor. Maybe it was his military experiences that hard-boiled him, but Mike Hammer's debut was penned in just 19 days when Spillane was looking to make some money to buy a nice house.

I think that two-week gestation shows in the writing, but it's the Trumpian treatment of women which bothers me. "She had million-dollar legs, that girl, and she didn't mind showing them off...[she] wore tight-fitting dresses that made me think of the curves in the Pennsylvania Highway..." Hammer leaves his girlfriend at a party, going off into the woods outside to have sex and then returns. Spillane's books are racist, homophobic and misogynistic. I can't commend this one and I'm definitely done with this author.

The Girl Who Fell Below Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M Valente

Rating: WARTY!

This sequel really wasn't needed, but you know there's pressure from Big Publishing™ to milk a successful title for all it's perceived worth. This is why ten years after The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins is coming back to milk it some more with a story that's pretty much the same thing over again. Doubtlessly it will be made into a movie. That's not my world at all. I only started in on this one because I already had it in my possession. If I hadn't already bought it when I bought the first one, impressed by that one's title, I would never have read this.

This story was even less engaging than the first, which is entirely unsurprising. It felt like a series of sketches rather than a story - a litany of set pieces which really had no real connection with one another. The basic plot is that September misses fairyland, and jumps at a chance to return, but she finds it a different place to the one she left: her own shadow is now queen of the underworld. She goes by the name of Halloween (now there's an original) and is stealing everyone's shadow.

Why this is even a problem, I have no idea, but of course just like in Peter Pan (yawn), shadows have personalities here. Why September's own shadow is evil, again I have no idea. It makes no sense. Maybe it's explained in the story, maybe not, but I'd be willing to bet that any explanation offered is as limp as a shadow. Fortunately she hasn't yet stolen the shadow of the dragon which September befriended in the first story, so at least she has a friend.

That reminds me of a funny picture taken by comedian Rick Gervais of his wife and tweeted to his followers, and that one image had more soul than this story. I can't commend this any more than I could the first one, and I am done with this author.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente

Rating: WARTY!

I am not a fan of series, but I loved the title of this middle-grade book, so hoping against hope, I bought both it and the sequel since they were on sale at a bookstore. I gave both of the titles a shot, but neither impressed me.

I think I made it about a third of the way through this one, but the story was so rambling and dissipated that it felt like it wasn't so much a story as it was a boring sort of a diary. Apparently the author crowdsourced funding to work on this. I should be so lucky! Then she put it online for free and it was discovered by a publisher, so a success story in that regard, but the story itself left a lot to be desired for me.

Taking a leaf out of wizard of Oz, the author starts her story out on the plains, in Nebraska, though, rather than Kansas, and has her young girl whisked away by a powerful wind, to a fairy-tale land. The child is a 12-year-old named September, who is apparently the only one who can fix a problem. Why this is, I don't recall, assuming it was ever revealed. She needs to recover a talisman, and of course she does and all is put to rights - until of course things necessarily break down in order for a sequel to be written.

The story didn't entertain me despite my gamely plowing into it quite a ways - about a third or so, as I recall. Despite the author's attempts to add whimsy and novelty, it was still your typical story, requiring a cis girl to meet a boy (named Saturday - seriously?) and solve the problem. I couldn't get into it and I cannot commend it based on what I read of it.

The Adventures of Rockford T Honeypot by Josh Gottsegen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This middle grade chapter book was a little long and involved for my taste, with two voices and two tenses, so it's not your common or garden simple story, but for the avid young reader, it should provide a wealth of adventurous pursuit and engrossing reading.

Rockford T Honeypot is your usual reserved and retiring chipmunk, albeit with a healthy respect for germs and hygiene, but circumstances are about to throw him into an unwilling and unwitting adventure that will change him all-around and make a ground squirrel out of him! Until he ruins the family business and is abandoned by his strict father and ne'er-do-well brothers, the only adventure he has is reading of his favorite fictional hero. Little does he know he's about to personify that spirit he so admires and make a story all of his own.

Framed by an older Rockford looking back on his life, and told over the course of many chapters, with occasional interruptions, Rockford learns to fly (sort of), learns to fight, learns to be fearless, and to face problems head on. He learns to spot business opportunities and to supply a need when he sees one, as well as mastering exercising his brain in solving problems. He travels and has adventures, makes friends and meets the girl of his dreams. And he creates the perfect roasted hazelnut recipe.

The adventure has thrills and chills, danger and amusement, and tells a whopping great story about the little guy winning through. I commend it as a worthy read.

Cat and Rat by Melinda Thompson, Melissa Ferrell, Doug Oglesby

Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated sweetly by Doug Oglesby, this is part of a series of books aimed at beginning readers, and this one focuses on short vowel sounds. The book set has 100 or so pages divided into eleven books, and begins with a rat trying to steal a piece of cheese. I'm very fond of rats, not so much cats, so I admit to a serious bias here! I have my own The Little Rattuses™ series which is a about halfway through its run before I move on to something else.

Having seen some of those ambitious subway rats on various videos taking a whole slice of pizza with it, I have to say that this is a very fair rat! It's not taking the whole chunk of cheese, just a small piece. Unfortunately, the cat happens to see this. Rats aren't known for their negotiating skills (except in my series!), but everything seems to work out well in the end for all parties.

The second book focuses on the verb 'see' and follows the story again, repeating that word and inviting the child to see everything in each picture. The third set repeats and amplifies this, but focuses on the rat - see the rat! You can't not see a rat. I found this amusing because just yesterday I was watching an episode of the TV series House, a series which has now run its course, but which was popular and usually entertaining in its time. It featured a rat in part of the story. It was clearly a domesticated rat - not a wild one at all - which was to be expected of course.

Anyway, having seen the rat, we move to book four where we see the cat. Book five introduces a new verb, 'can' and book six focuses on person: 'you'. Book 7, focuses on the verb 'look' and the preposition 'at'. Book 9 covers 'and', Book 10 'stop', book 11 'that', and in each book the sentence structure becomes a teensy bit more complex, slowly leading the child into full sentences, questions, observations, and story-telling. "Can the rat stop the cat? Look and see" and so on.

The books are highly structured and repetitive, which helps a child put everything into a clear context, and not just learn the word, but really understand what it means. My kids are way beyond these books now, and this is my first experience of this style of 'book-leaning', so I can't speak from personal experience of using this method, but to me it seems smart and logical, and I commend this as a worthy read.