RavenStorm Witches by Misha McKenzie

Rating: WARTY!

This is a very short novella/novelette/short-story/collection of short stories (I don't know the word count, but it's only about 100 pages), which I read as an advance review copy. Technically the writing was not bad. I discuss some issues below, but there were no major grammatical or spelling gaffs, which I appreciated; however, overall it was very dissatisfying and I cannot recommend it. It was subtitled "A Coven of Bitches " and they really were, which was not at all endearing to me. Note that it's going to be difficult to describe the problems I had with this without giving away spoilers, so beware!

Since my blog is about writing, I'd be remiss if I failed to raise some writing issues. There were some oddball aspects of the writing here, like when we read of two of the witches at home, making "homemade pasta". What else would they be making at home?! There was a similar redundancy issue where the words "woman's vagina" were used.

At one point I read: " Rounding the front of the 1970 Mustang Shelby GT500, she slid behind the wheel. Turning the key, it roared to life. Backing out, she steered in the direction of Grayson's place." This was really awkward phrasing, having three sentences, one after another, with the very same sentence format. It sounded like a children's playground chant an brought me right out of the story.

Here's an interesting writer's issue. One of the characters says "...was never good enough for the crowned prince." The phrase is "crown prince" meaning the heir to the throne. A crowned prince would actually be the king! However, this was not in the narration, but in the character's speech, so she might well have said something like that - people misspeak or speak in ignorance all the time. The important thing here is that the author knows the difference when writing these things!

The story started out great - I loved that Maeve came stamping into the story pissed off and almost spitting nails, but the problem as that she quickly became lost amongst a gaggle of witches, not one of whom had any real identifying characteristics to differentiate her from any of the others. They had nothing about them to truly individualize them, and so they pretty much all blended into vague facets of the same person. It became impossible to separate Delilah, Hildie, Maeve, Malise, Sheeva, Tatiana, Vanya, and Viana

That wasn't even the worst problem. The biggest issue for me was that while there were half-a-dozen stories, all of them were pretty much exactly the same, with only a detail or two changed here and there. Once you've read the first one, there's really nothing new to follow!

The template is this: it begins with one of the witches being pissed-off because she has been badly done to, or more rarely, that someone or something she cares about has been badly done to. Nearly all of the cases were of personal betrayal in one way or another. For example, Maeve is upset that Kimmi has treated their friend Grayson shabbily, and wants revenge on his behalf even though Grayson has requested no such thing. In another case, a guy is breeding dogs for fighting. In another case, one of the older witches is pissed off with their stepmother. In another case, one of the witches loses her job because another employee cruelly set her up as being a corporate spy.

In each of these cases, the witches' response is exactly the same. They chant a very simplistic rhyme, and the deed is done, the deed being a problem visited upon the offender which is supposed to give them empathy and thereby teach them the error of their ways. Also in each case Sheva, one of the older witches, takes matters into her own hands and carries out another spell simultaneously. Her spell is paradoxically always juvenile. For example, Kimmi, the betrayer of Grayson is given diarrhea. In another case a woman is given a bad case of gas. I can see this in a middle grade boys story, but here it just came off as mean, vindictive, petty, and sad.

Inevitably, the bad person sees the error of their ways and reforms in just a few days, and the spell breaks. Nothing ever goes wrong and no one who has a spell put on them ever fails to reform! The spells are always one hundred percent successful, and even though it's known throughout the town that these girls are witches who can bring about real magic, no one ever thinks twice before crossing them, and worse, despite slinging these spells bringing discomfort and real harm to people, if only temporarily, none of the witches ever falls afoul of the authorities. In one case, a cop actually helps the witch. None of this made any sense or provided any kind of balance to the story.

It made as little sense that the witches never considered the authorities as a resolution. Admittedly it would do no good in the case of a girl dumping Grayson, but in two of the cases at least - the corporate spying, and the dog-fighting - the authorities should have been the way to go, yet the witches took the law into their own hands and paid no price for it. The casting of spells doesn't even cost them anything and none of their spells ever goes wrong. It's like Hermione Granger grew up, and started her own coven. It was far too unrealistic - even given the supernatural element - for my taste. All of the witches were really Mary Sues.

The least thing which bothered me about this is that the witches are completely passive and retro-active. They seem blind to problems as they are emerging and ongoing, and only react when things reach crisis proportions - or at least when it seems like a crisis to them. This doesn't imbue me with much respect for them or inspire any feeling that these girls are very smart or perceptive.

One of them, for example, kept going back to the same guy time after time even though he was a complete jerk, but joy of joys, after a spell in someone else's shoes, he magically changes and becomes the perfect guy? The woman who dumped on Grayson completely, and almost instantly reforms and leaves town? The stepmom who wrecked their home life when they were kids reforms and changes her ways and all is fixed?

I don't even get that last one. These girls have been witches all their lives. Why did they let this woman ruin their lives when they were younger, and then wait until she's an old woman before they picked on her? None of it made any sense, and the more I read, the more I felt like these witches were really the bad guys here. They're really nothing but evil megalomaniacs deep down. There's nothing to curb them, and they never learn the error of their own ways. I didn't like them at all and began rooting for their victims.

This is why I can't recommend this. I think the overall idea was a great start, but the execution of it was unworthy of the idea itself. This makes me sad because it could have been a really great story.

Young Terrorists Volume 1: Pierce The Veil by Matt Pizzolo

Rating: WARTY!

The story in this graphic novel (of which I read an advance review copy) was rather different from what the blurb had made it appear to me, which annoyed me. In very broad, general terms, the two were similar, but this particular novel gave me the impression of being a prologue. I don't do prologues! I did read this all the way through, however, and I found nothing about it which pleased or thrilled me.

The premise is a tired one: youth fights the mega-corporations of the future. Animal testing is thrown in to try to garner some sympathy, but it's hard to have any sympathy at all for people who think that throwing bombs is the best solution to something which displeases you. There was no justification offered for it other than "rebel youth" which is pretty sad.

Both writing and artwork were average, and the story overall was dissipated and disjointed, making it irritating at best, and very forgettable at worst. I am writing this just a couple of days after reading the story and I can barely remember it. I think that pretty much says it all. I can't recommend this one, and I have no desire to pursue this series.

Junction True by Ray Fawkes

Rating: WARTY!

I didn't like this graphic novel, of which I read an advance review copy. The story made little sense, and we were given no justification or motivation for any of the characters' actions. Futuristic-sounding buzzwords were tossed into the mix without being defined or explained in any way, which didn't help. The art work was not particularly great, either.

The story is that a blogger suddenly decides he wants to join with a celebrity quite literally. He wants an illegal operation to render himself literally dependent upon her such that he must be physically linked to her for nutrition. If he's separated from her for more than a few days, he will die. He's her pet and puppet. She owns him.

Of course this neither starts nor ends well, and yet there are no consequences before, during, or after this illegal conjunction of bodies (not until the end) for being thus conjoined, even when this couple appears in public. The story made no sense whatsoever. It wasn't interesting or attractive to read or to look at, I have no interest in pursuing this story, and I cannot recommend it.

The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh

Rating: WARTY!

If I had known that this was a Newbery honor book (1955) I never would have read it. I avoid honor and medal-winning books like the plague because in my experience, they're universally trashy. This one dates from 1954, when people were a lot more clueless than they are now. It's very short - only one CD, which is the best thing about, it since it really has nothing to offer.

The book blurb claims, rather dishonestly, that this is a "true story of Sarah's journey", but the truth is that only the barest facts are known: that Sarah and her father traveled to this locale to build a new home, and that Sarah was in the care of the native Americans for about three weeks. That's it! Everything else in this story is the purest fiction. Indeed, the journey is very short in the book. Nearly all of the story is about events taking place at the destination, not about the journey at all.

No one knows why Sarah went or what exactly, she did. They sure as hell don't have a clue what she said or thought, or how she interacted with her father or with the locals. They have no idea what Mrs Robinson or her kids actually said. All we have is Alice Dalgliesh's very creative and very dated fiction, colored by the 1950s and by Dalgliesh's religious faith, not by the early eighteenth century and anything which happened in reality.

The locals were the Schaghticoke, whom Sarah and her father met after they had made the fifty mile journey. Not far by our standards, but a week-long journey by theirs, taken on foot. I find it extremely hard to believe that she knew so little about these people before she got there. The very fact that her father leaves her in the care of the locals shows that he obviously knew they were no danger at all. Courage doesn't enter into it, and whatever strength this girl showed here was no greater than scores of other children have exhibited. Even surviving getting lost in the store or in the mall takes courage. This was no different from that that, and Sarah Noble's "courage" was of no greater order than this. The reason given in this work of fiction for her father's leaving her with the locals is laughable: that it was a long journey? It was exactly the same journey she'd just made, so this is purest bullshit and poor writing.

They saddest thing about the arrival of the Nobles was that they pretty much stamped their colonial imprint on the place the moment they arrived. The place was originally named something beautiful like Weantinogue. Now it's the pedestrian and mundane 'New Milford'. The river, at least, still retains some majesty. It's unnamed in the book, but is now known as the Housatonic, which is indeed a welcome tonic, but there was no attempt made to understand the locals or their culture. Their very names were changed to suit the colonials. Given that native American names tended to change with maturity, behaviors, and endeavors, perhaps this wasn't quite the nuisance or pain to them that we perceive it to be today, but it's still immensely disrespectful to simply change someone's name because their actual name is "too hard".

That said, I've seen some rather blinkered reviews which take this novel to task for what they describe as racism. I'm sorry, but they simply don't get it. This novel depicts a young girl's views, not the author's, and not any politically correct or incorrect agenda. Depicting a young girl as seeing native Americans for the first time, and observing that they are brown, and observing that they "talk funny" or that they don't speak English has nothing to do with being racist. It has to do with accurately describing how the girl might have really felt back then. Depicting her playing with the children, even riding on the back of one of them isn't enslaving the natives or demeaning them. It's depicting what might well have happened. A native American can't carry a white kid on his back across a river - by his own choice - without being subjugated?! Nonsense! I think observations of that nature about this book are lamentably short sighted and biased.

The biggest problem for me with this novel is that it tells us nothing which we cannot more ably learn from better books. Alice Dalgliesh is not by any means an expert on colonial life, or on the Schaghticoke, and this novel, commendably enlightened as it is for the time it was written, once again goes only to prove what a colossal waste of time it is reading Newbery medal winners. I dis-recommend this book for these reasons, but primarily for it being pure fiction masquerading as fact.

Brave Faces by Mary Arden

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
(Note that there were no page numbers and I do not trust the ebook "location" numbers to be valid across all platforms. However, a search of the book's text will find these based on the information I give below)
"...pull myself together, all the Derwent family, had known Henry since..." I trimmed this so as not to give away spoilers, but this entire sentence, taken as a while, made no sense.
"...the jeep slowed down and stopped next to us...the lorry..." It's either a jeep or it's a lorry (a large truck) - the two are not the same thing!
"Wren Writer’s" used when it should be "Wren writers"
"...William kept petering him with endless questions..."! This could be taken in several ways. I rather suspect though, that it should have read "pestering" rather than "petering".
"Aunt Beth said she’s wait for me" should be, I imagine, "Aunt Beth said she’d wait for me"

This is one of those books where names have been changed to protect the...whatever. 'Mary Arden' is not even the author's real name. While I can understand the need to protect the innocent from embarrassment, it does make one wonder, when so much is changed, how much of what's left is completely reliable. Note also that this is written British style with single quotes (') for speech instead of double quotes (") as Americans are used to.

It’s been seventy years since the end of World War Two, and this huge length of time - a lifetime - might make people wonder why it's worth reading any more stories about it. The answer is in the very fact that it has been a lifetime. We’re at the point now where nearly all of those who were alive during that war are dead. Very few are left, and it’s important to know their stories before it’s too late because soon there will be no one left alive who actively experienced those years, let alone remembers them.

This story in particular was fascinating to me because the woman to whom it belongs was so very young. She didn't sacrifice her life to the war as so many others had done, but she did sacrifice a portion of her childhood and of her formative adolescent years to it. It’s important for other reasons, too. She came from a very privileged background as compared with most children then, and her education was therefore much more than simply learning to do without the luxuries she had enjoyed, and lending a helping hand to the war effort. For these reasons and for the gentle, easy, candid, and very accessible way this story is told, I found this a very worthy read.

It was well-written, too. There are assorted errors of one kind or another that I spotted. This book could have done with another read-through before it was sent out to advance reviewers (as my copy was), although some gaffs are arguable, such as when I read, "...was the worst night of The Blitz, so far and I was very worried..." In that case it seemed to me the comma was out of place and should have post-ceded the 'so far' instead of preceding it, but that’s no big deal.

This 'landed gentry' perspective was particularly odious, especially when I read of her "coming out ball" which was attended by a young duchess because the king (he of The King's Speech) and the queen do not come to these anymore because of the war. She went on to describe the "hugest" cake. So these guys are celebrating their privileged status, wearing expensive gowns and jewelry, and eating giant cakes while others are scrimping and saving and having to suffer egg rationing. Frankly, this part made me sick, especially when I read this sentence later in the book: "my father would consider it inappropriate to hold anything too lavish during wartime". That said, to have gone through the horror that "Mary" did in so short a space of time, and to come out of the other end of it and take up the work she did with a positive attitude and good humor was commendable.

No-one can be blamed for the circumstances into which they are born, be they poor or rich, or anywhere in between, but the family's insistence that "Mary" got to finishing school and be "brought out" at a royal ball while World War Two was going on was amazingly blinkered. It was like this family was still living in Victorian times. That said, "Mary" took her own path in life and served in her own way. While the stories she told of her naiveté were often cringe-worthy, they were also often endearing. It was really quite eye-opening, and sometimes quite staggering to discover how sheltered and cosseted she had been growing up. She grew up fast, however, after joining the WRNS ("the Wrens"), and really got a real world education, and she handled it well - other than not knowing the difference between a union flag and a union jack - something which someone in the Navy, of all services, should know!

As the memoir begins, the threat of war forces the Arden family to return from their vacation in Normandy, not knowing what a site of horror those same beaches would be a handful of years hence, and before "Mary" knows it, she's working to feed and take care of the wounded coming back from Dunkerque, bandaging wounds, and scuttling into precarious shelter as Germans are bombing London. It’s not long before people she knows are dying.

One aspect of this book which turned me off was the frequent reference to ghosts and ESP. There are no ghosts. There is no ESP - not according to the best scientific evidence, and for someone to blindly believe in this stuff - her first thought, at one point, on hearing mice scuttling inside a wall was that it was a ghost, not mice! - and keep injecting these references into the text really took a lot away from the very serious and factual topic of the war. I could have done without that, frankly.

That said, there was humor which was very in keeping with wartime attitudes, and with "Mary's" lack of a real-world education. I was highly amused by this exchange:

...thought that I had better start thinking about what clothes I was going to take on my honeymoon, and asked Jane about what I should wear in bed. ‘Nothing you silly cow, that’s the whole point!’ Jane shrieked, ‘you are so naïve, Mary, surely you know what goes on by now, or I should say in!’
‘Jane!’ I exclaimed, ‘you haven’t have you?’
‘Certainly not!’ she said, ‘but Bridget has, and she told me all about it, in some detail I might add.’

One particularly hilarious comment from "Mary" was right after she first had sex with her new husband, and she exclaims, ‘Oh Duncan, why didn’t we do this before?’ Another was "She can't be pregnant she's not married." which "Mary" uttered after learning that her sister-in-law was pregnant. The sad thing is that the book ends so abruptly that we never do learn what happens to some of the people we have lived with through the entirety of the book - people such as Jane and the subject of this last comment. It would have been nice to have had one more chapter tying up loose ends.

Overall, I rate this a worthy read. I found myself readily drawn into the story, and wanting to read on, to find out what happens next. It felt a bit like reading a good thriller. It was an easy, comfortable, and very informative read, and I warmed to "Mary" very quickly. It's for these reasons, despite issues I had with some aspects of this book, that I recommend it for anyone whose interested in real-life World War Two stories and the handicaps with which privileged children are born.

Life on the Edge by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili

Rating: WORTHY!

I received this beautiful hard cover print book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review. It was such a pleasure to see this because most of my reviews are of ebooks which are so insubstantial as to almost non-existent. I can't donate ebooks to my kids' school library. This one, I can!

I routinely skip introductions, prologues, prefaces, etc. and I never miss them or find myself having to go back and read it to figure something out. I believe that if it's important enough to be read, then it's worthy of including in chapter one or later. These authors evidently have been reading my reviews (no, not really!) because they titled chapter one "Introduction"! Okay, guys, you got me! Now I have to read it!

So who are these authors? Johnjoe McFadden has a PhD on fungal virus genetics from Imperial College, London. Jim Al-Khalili has a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics, and is current president of the British Humanist Association. Both are professors at the University of Surrey. You will note that neither puts their academic credentials after their name on the cover. This, to me at least, is a hallmark of a serious scientific book. You may note that a lot of fringe books have author names sporting a string of acronyms after their name. I don't take those books seriously!

This book (as you might guess from the credentials of the authors) takes a look at the intersection of biology and quantum physics. I'm not convinced, as the blurb on the book's flyleaf claims, that the missing ingredient in the creation of life is quantum mechanics. Frankly I don't think we're missing anything except the original cooking pot where life began. I am convinced however, that what this book says about quantum biology is accurate and is one of the most exciting and useful frontiers of biological - and indeed medical - discovery.

This is written in clear, accessible, and precise language. It's difficult to give examples of the quantum world because it's nothing like the world with which we're familiar, but while qualifying their examples carefully, so we do not misunderstand how quantum mechanics works, the authors do supply very clear examples to emulate, in a simple way, what is happening in the more obtuse world they're actually discussing.
Real life examples, but nonetheless fascinating.

Starting with the European robin which has an amazing ability to navigate by tracking the magnetic lines between its northern nesting grounds and its winter vacation in the Mediterranean, the book launches into an engrossing and informative discussion of just how quantum mechanics not only pervades life, but it as essential to its functionality as it is to all of the modern electronic wonders we enjoy today, from computers to Blu-Ray disks, to MRI machines. One chapter title actually includes the words "quantum robin" which sounds like the title of a Jackson Five song, but I won't hold that against them!

On page sixty, a nanometer is correctly defined as one billionth of a meter, yet on page 78, "...just a few nanometers..." is incorrectly referred to as "millionths of a meter". Something is wrong here! You would need a thousand nanometers to be one millionth of a meter. A few nanometers is hardly a thousand! That aside I noticed no other errors. I can't speak for the science. I am not a scientist - I don't even play one on TV - but I am well read in the sciences, and the science here seemed fine to me. I'll leave it to the real scientists to pursue that aspect of this book, though.

I found one or two areas slightly lacking in detail for my taste - others may disagree, of course! One example of this was the double-slit experiment. I am by no means disputing the results. These counter-intuitive findings are well-established fact. What I would have liked to have read is a bit more detail about how exactly the experiments were set up and run, specifically: whether or not they've been performed in a vacuum. Some of this was addressed a bit later rather than in context, but I still would have liked to have known more. That said, there were other areas where I was overwhelmed by the science and had a hard time keeping track.

In overall terms, however, this book was very well done, covered what was, to me, a fascinating and cutting-edge topic, and was written for the most part in layman's terms - that is, if you're a laymen with a bit of science to give you a handle on these topics to begin with. I rate this a very worthy read and recommend it.

Tabatha by Neil Gibson and Caspar Wijngaard

Rating: WORTHY!

I favorably reviewed Twisted Dark by this author back in April 2015. Even so, this comic was much better than that one, being very inventive, truly engaging all the way through, and in color!

Luke delivers mail and puts up with a lot of crap, and not only from his boss. He thinks he's in love with this young woman who lives at one of his delivery addresses, but it's probably just infatuation (which she appears smart enough to recognize; she probably gets it a lot!). He lives with his brother, Fin, and his brother's wife. Neither he nor his bro seem to have a really good handle on heterosexual relationships - which might be important later.

Luke gets through his day by reminding himself to keep his eye on the prize. He has a purpose for putting up with all this crap and it's not long before we discover what it is: he's actually been casing houses for a series of robberies he and his crew (bro, bro's wife, bro's wife's bro) are planning. All goes well until they enter this one house which is evidently owned by someone who works in movie special effects. The resident is also very much into this sex doll he has.

The guys decide to pose the doll and decorate her with flowers - and not in a nice way. They don't dream for a minute that this petty act of juvenile vandalism will come back to haunt them big time when the psychotic movie effects guy returns home and sees what they have done. You see, he held this particular doll in very high regard. Worse, he knows where they live.

Just when you think you know what's going on here, you find there's another twist. Twisted is what this story is, on several levels, and all the way to the end. Or is it?

I really enjoyed this one from start to finish. It moved fast, kept me guessing as it frequently insisted upon wrong-footing me, and it delivered a great story. Note that it's rather sexual and gory, with rather more objectification of women than I like to see, but in that I'm nearly always disappointed when it comes to graphic novels. On the other hand, the main female character was a strong one, which was nice to see, so those concerns aside, I recommend this one.

Ragnarok Volume 1 by Walter Simonsen

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another graphic novel advance review copy which fails to sport even a semblance of a cover, much less any information about the creators. I found that rather insulting to the creators! I assume that will be corrected in the final release, but why there were not place holders for the cover and so on is a mystery.

So the story begins right on the first page. It's steeped in Norse mythology, of course. The story here being that of Brynja, an elf assassin who seeks to kill Thor for reasons which were not exactly clear to me, but when she fails, she asks his aid in protecting her daughter Drifa, which the skeletal Thor grants.

As Thor, now free of his chains, starts to pick up the threads of his long past life, he discovers that all the other gods are dead - fallen at the hands of their enemies. As the Hulk would say, "Puny Gods". The world has changed dramatically, and seems to be in the hands of extremely violent mutant dictators.

That's how the story went right up through the half-way point which is as far as I could stand to read, because it really wasn't a story; it was merely a litany of violent encounters which Thor had with the mutants, and which he inevitably, predictably, won by slamming them violently in the face with his hammer. I grew tired of this in short order.

I cannot recommend this unless you're seriously into slide shows of blood splatter patterns.

Alice Cooper Welcome to my Nightmare Volume 1 by Joe Harris, Brandon Jerwa, Eman Casallos, Nacho Tenorio

Rating: WARTY!

On page 23 (in Adobe Digital Editions), one of the characters asks, "What's going on?" and at that point, coincidentally, I was asking the very same thing, because nothing I had seen or read to this point made any kind of coherent sense. Maybe it was Alice's nightmare while he lay unconscious, his snake talking to him with tediously stereotypical extra 'S' letters in the words, but School's Out for the count on this one. Hello! Hooray? I didn't expect billion dollar babies, but I was hoping for - but through long, sad experience not expecting - something more original in a comic book series about Alice Cooper. Instead, all I got was a Halo of Flies. I admit that the Vincent Price look-alike was mildly amusing - even as it remained a cliché.

The entire comic - at least as far as I read, which as just over half way through - was a nightmare, and not in a good way. Nothing made any sense. There was no story except for the antique and tenuous thread of a Faustian bargain which trickled unimpressively through it. It consisted of one image after another designed to shock and consequently completely lost its shock value in short order. It became quickly boring and not worthy of Alice Cooper. At that point I decided that life was too short and this too long in the tooth. I cannot recommend it and it ain't gonna be Elected! So, no more Mr Nice Guy! Go listen to Alice Cooper's music instead. It's much more entertaining.

The Fly: Outbreak by Brandon Seifert and Menton3

Rating: WORTHY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love Volume Two Fox by Frédéric Brrémaud and Federico Bertolucci

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another beautifully illustrated look at wild life. No text, just images. The first one I read was The Tiger. This one follows the one-eyed fox which put in merely a cameo appearance in the other volume.

The fox is out, as ever, slinking through the long grass under the shady trees, searching for the next meal, observed by the musk oxen, but too busy itself to pay attention to the beauty around it - beauty which is shortly to be violently ripped away. From here we're led beautifully from one scene - one species - to another, encompassing mammalian, avian, and piscean animals, including a scary encounter between a whale, its calf, and a pod of Orcas.

All seems normal, everyday, ordinary in this world until a nearby volcano erupts, and then the world turns nasty, brutish, and short. As predators and nature itself - the greatest predator of all - take down one animal after another, and the world which these animals inhabit turns almost literally upside down, the fox has one, and only one thing on its mind - and it's not taking down the rabbit warren. It's not even self-preservation. It's something far more important.

I Highly recommend this series because the art work is truly magnificent. The authors also includes a pictorial glossary of species at the end so you can identify everything you've seen if you didn't recognize it from the story itself.

Eville USA by Julia Dweck

Rating: WORTHY!

Frightfully well-illustrated with absolutely monstrous colors by Fian Arroyo, this important book is a much-needed and long-overdue exposé of where villains, monsters, and other all around-bad guys vacation when they're not tearing up the pea patch, patching up the tears, or p- well never mind that. It's an important book.

Villains of all shades and hues are depicted here for your review. The story couldn't be much neater, told in nicely rhyming meter, and now as you will clearly see, that's all the poetry you'll get from me!

Some parents might deem this a bit much for their wee bairns, but there's nothing too outrageous, and most kids six and over will likely enjoy this look at the secret life of monsters. I think it's a fun story. This is the second Julia Dweck which I've reviewed favorably, so she's definitely a worthy read - and it's not just because I adore that name!

Tovi the Penguin Goes to London by Janina Rossiter

Rating: WORTHY!

Another in a series, the first of which (at least the first one I read!) I reviewed here. I wasn't that impressed with Tovi going camping. I was more impressed with this one.

It's raining in Tovi's neighborhood, so in order to get away from it, they decide to go to London. What? I admit that the weather has typically been nice whenever I've visited London, no fog or rain to speak of, but England isn't exactly known for being arid, so I'm not sure this was a charmed plan, quite frankly! But hey, it's penguins. Maybe penguin logic is rather different from ours.

I love the illustrations in this volume. The penguins are far too cute for their own good. Guess what? When they get to London, it's raining! But they press on anyway, as penguins are wont to do in situations like this. They visit the London Eye, and Tower Bridge (and yes, they get the name right - it's often mistakenly called London Bridge, but it's named after the Tower of London which sits next door. London Bridge is actually in Arizona as it happens....

They visit Big Ben tower, but they evidently don't actually see Big Ben, which is the bell ensconced within the tower. They only see the tower itself which is typically misnamed 'Big Ben'. They manage to visit the place and then take "the tube" to Heathrow where they have a quick cuppa before heading home where the sun is shining. Great trip! I recommend this one.

Boy and the Travelling Cheese by Junia Wonders

Rating: WORTHY!

Another odd and wonderful tale from the same story-teller who created Boy and the very Lonely Pony, and The Roll-Away Pumpkin, both of which I reviewed positively. This one is about a boy who wants to grow to man-sized proportions so he can have an adventure like grown-ups do. In order to aid this quest to grow big, Boy’s grandfather sends him a huge wheel of cheese that he made himself. The problem is, since everyone wants a taste of this magnificent cheese, will Boy even get to taste it himself, much less eat enough to grown big enough for an adventure? The answer to that question is the real joy of this story.

I read this on my phone and the text was large enough to be read without eyestrain except for one or two pages where it was superimposed over the stone wall of a house or over an orange sky, which made it pretty much illegible! The images refused to swipe larger, too, which was irritating. That said, though, the book was fun and inventive and stimulating, with fun illustrations by Divin Meir, and this is what’s important when it comes to stories for kids. I recommend this one.

Alex + Ada Volume Three by Sarah Vaughn

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Courtesan by Alexandra Curry

Rating: WARTY!

I had a really hard time getting into this at all, and it wasn't helped by the fact that three of the first four women we met were just plain obnoxious. This was an odd ARC because it was over three hundred pages, but the lines were very widely spaced. When I looked at it on the iPad, it looked like an early children's chapter book, with very large letters and widely spaced lines, and it would not allow me to change the size of the text at all. In an ebook, this really doesn't matter that much, but if this book went to a large print run, I couldn't help but wonder at how many trees would die for this profligacy of white space!

The novel is set in historical China, in 1881. That's the same year that Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell joined forced to create the Oriental Telephone Company, Alexander II of Russia is blown up, Billy the Kid escapes from jail, president James Garfield is assassinated, Pablo Picasso is born, and the Gunfight at the OK Corral takes place. The first woman to appear has lost her husband. Well she didn't actually lose him. She knows where he is, but his body is lacking a head. He was decapitated for some perceived infraction or other. He had a concubine as well as his "First Wife", and it was this concubine who had given him his daughter, Jinhua, whom he loved dearly.

His first wife resented this daughter just as much as she resented the concubine who had died delivering Jinhua into the world. Now that both of the child's parents were dead, this woman feels no obligation whatsoever to the poor girl, and she kept her locked away for a day and a half while she decided whether to kill her or not. Jinhua was saved, if you want to think of it that way, by a woman who came by with a contract offering to buy the girl. She takes Jinhua and sells her on to a brothel keeper.

So far, nothing out of the ordinary for the time period here, especially not for a nation which seems, even today, to bestow no value upon female children. What struck me as really off, though, was the words spoken by the woman with the contract: "Contract," she said. "You look. Tomorrow I come back.". This woman wasn't speaking English, in which case we might have believed she would speak like that if her English was poor. She was speaking Chinese to another Chinese woman. Why would she speak "pidgin Chinese"?! It made no sense to me. I guess you could argue that one was speaking Cantonese and the other Mandarin, but really?

That aside, and tolerating the problem of how slowly this story moved, it got off to an interesting start, forcing me to consider what would happen to this seven-year-old girl, but whereas I was expecting the story to move and we would soon see this girl later in life and follow her story from there, the story of her childhood dragged on and on, and endlessly on, depressingly like a prologue which didn't know when to stop 'prologging'. I don't do prologues. They're antiquated and irritating!

Parts of the story were entertaining and well-written, with some delightful words used to evoke sounds, but for the most part, the story really slunk along interminably for me, and it was a chore to read it. I eventually gave up after getting a little way into part two, which was about a quarter the way through it, being unable to face reading any more.

One thing I found to be particularly annoying was a habit I've encountered with other writers. It's that of using a foreign phrase and then immediately following it with the English translation. I can't speak for all readers obviously, but this just irritates the heck out of me. I wish authors would either avoid the foreign phrase altogether, or at least use it a way which makes it clear what's meant so that this tedious and rather spastic repetitiveness can be avoided.

I understood that this was to be a story about a young girl's unfortunate circumstances after the death of her father. It's one reason I chose to review this one, but it was an unwelcome chore to have to read a quarter of the book unleavened by anything approaching joy, pleasure, or even comfort, or of seeing any sort of indication that the story was going to ever take off.

I did not find myself even warming to, let alone liking Jinhua, the main character. She seriously lacked depth, and it was quite evident to me that none was likely to be on the cards when I left-off reading this. I do think this author has an innate talent for story-telling which has not yet been properly realized. Hopefully it will out in the near future. For me, it's not ready for prime time yet.

Toxic charity by Robert D Lupton

Rating: WARTY!

This book purports to show how charity backfires by inducing people to employ it as a permanent crutch instead of it actually being used to get them back on their feet. I can understand that. It’s like that tired old adage that if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day (assuming that their dietary needs are narrow and minimal and they have no dependents!), but if you teach them how to fish, you feed them for life. That, of course assumes they have a fishing ground nearby, and they can afford the inevitable license to fish there (along with a rod and any other necessary equipment)! LOL!

I would have had less trouble with this book's premise if it had not had two major problems. The first and worst was that it relied entirely on authorial anecdote, and there were no references whatsoever to support even those. All we got was personal stories in which the author was always the hero, and vague allusions to newspaper reports, not one of which was supported by any dates. This made the book worthless. In one or two cases where there were enough details to check up on, I found the truth not to be quite the stark black and white picture the author had painted.

My other issue was that this was told from a Christian religious perspective - about church charities. Nothing else was covered, and frankly those I read of here didn’t seem to be the best-run or best-organized services. There was another angle to the religious proselytizing, too, which can be exemplified by asking: why have religious charities at all? The author never addressed this. The answer seems obvious, but if you look at this from a religious perspective, you can see how faithless the charities are.

The Bible explicitly states in the NT that if you ask for something in Jesus's name, it will be granted. There is no small print, There are no ifs, ands, or buts. There are no conditions specified. Ask and it will be given; knock and it will be opened to you. Yet nowhere does this author address why prayer has failed so badly that we need to have charities. The age of miracles curiously disappeared with the last of the Bible writers. None have been seen since. Yes, there are claims for miracles, but none which can withstand dispassionate investigation.

This author's entire oeuvre seems to be taking an obscure, unreferenced, unverifiable anecdote and generalizing from it to grandiose conclusions. He talks of Janine, apparently a single mom trying to get back on her feet, who turned out to be a scam artist. From this he concludes that all such cases are suspect and we can't give them a thing without making them pay. Now I don't doubt that there are scam artists, but my guess is that they are the minority of the ostensibly needy. Besides, what does this author's Bible say? Does it say "Vet everyone and make 'em pay," or does it say give everything you have and follow Jesus? The auhtor is failing in his Christian duty every bit as much as "Janice" is.

This author brings nothing new to the table - there is nothing he discusses here which isn't already known - and widely known to those who care to ask about these things. I gave up on this book precisely because the author evidently thinks his audience is both ignorant and stupid not to know (or at least to suspect) these things. He had nothing new to offer and evidently could find no shades of grey anywhere, which is suspicious in itself. I cannot recommend it.

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first in a bizarre series which goes to at least volume three or four followed by two or three novellas, but there are also volumes 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4. Definitely a Whisky Tango Foxtrot series. This author's entire oeuvre consists of ripping-off of Franklbaum. This story sounded great from the blurb, but then don't they all? Unfortunately, as the start of a series (which I didn't realize when I picked it up from the library) it's nothing more than a prologue, and I don't do prologues (introductions, prefaces, etc.). Yiou could undoujbtedly skip this and go straight to volume two because, although I DNF'd this one in short order, I'm reliably informed that nothing happens here. Certainly nothing happened in the portion I read.

Once I got started listening to the audio, told in worst person PoV and read irritatingly by Devon Sorvari, I decided this wasn't such a good idea as the blurb suggests it is. The first few paragraphs were an exercise in how much cliché and trope an author can cram into a YA book. A main character who is a flat-chested (check!), bony (check!), disaffected teen (check!), attending a school where bullying is rife and unchecked (check!!) by a girl with breasts (check!) and a non-descript side-kick (check!)? A protagonist who has quite literally no friends (check), can get no justice (check!), whose father isn't in the picture (check!), and whose mother is not only almost permanently zoned out (check!), but who also resents her daughter for her miserable life (check!). A girl who thinks she has no chance with the cutest boy in school? Check. It's all there.

Amy Gumm (any relation to Thomas Harris's Jaime Gumb perchance?! More like it's Judy Garland's real name: Frances Ethel Gumm) is delivered to Oz by your standard tornado, but this is not your Dorothy's Oz. Or rather, it is. This Oz looks like it was hit by a tornado, but it was actually hit by Dorothy, who returned, took over, and completely lost it. Dorothy is now the paranoid dictator of Oz. Everything has changed. The one thing you might find familiar is the legendary yellow brick road, and even that's crumbling. This sounds like a great premise for a story, but if you tell it in first person, have the main character a whiny, weak-kneed trope (who fails in her objective), lard it with every YA cliché there is, you ruin your great idea and make a trailer trash of a novel. That's what happened here.

The saddest thing about Amy when we meet her is that she is entirely defined not by any noble characteristics at all, but by a boy - Dustin. So Amy isn't even a person, much less a woman. Instead, she's a male's brief afterthought as in "Yeah I'd do her if she brought her own brown paper bag." Some authors simply don't get it, and that there are still so many female authors - mostly but not exclusively in the YA genre - who still don't get it is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Creatively, they are as empty as the Tin Man, as writers, they are as full of hot air as the lion, and as for something to say? They're as stuffed with chaff as the scarecrow, with and no wheat in sight. That's them all over.

Amy's only detailed interaction with anyone at school is with Madison, the trope school bully, and their entire interaction is about Dustin, the cutest boy in school, whom Amy unaccountably lets copy her algebra homework (I guess Dustin thinks math is hard) whilst enduring relentless insults from his girlfriend Madison - none of which Dustin seeks to stop. Finally, when Amy indirectly calls the pregnant Madison fat (she evidently never thought of this before, and yes that's an unforgivably cheap shot, but entirely understandable in the circumstances) Madison actually punches Amy. Madison's friend pulls Amy by the hair. So far Amy's only 'retaliation' has been to give as good as she gets in the insult department, yet it's Amy who is immediately suspended without any sort of investigation. This is not a story. It's barely even caricature. It's a cartoon channel reject.

Let's take a minute to examine Amy's parentage and how this author evidently can't come up with a plot that doesn't insult one or other sector of society if she tries. Absentee dad? Check. Dad is dismissed completely in a few words. Judged by how bad the mom is, dad can be excused for abandoning her (but not his daughter), yet the only take we get on dad is how awful he is - nothing else. So he's gone and forgotten.

Do we then get at least a good picture of mom, winning out despite her husband leaving her with their child? Nope. Mom is just as bad, as this author's misogynistic take on single moms would have it. Mom isn't shown as taking care of her; she's shown as not working, and not even capable of maintaining a decent home - not even a rental apartment. She's depicted as work-shy and living in a trailer park. Does the author despise single moms? Evidently, as judged by this.

I'd recommend boycotting this book (as I intend to now boycott this series and everything else that comes out of FFF) based on what Wikipedia (and other sources) says about that book mill:

In 2009, Frey formed Full Fathom Five, a young adult novel publishing company that aimed to create highly commercial novels like Twilight. In November 2010, controversy arose when an MFA student who had been in talks to create content for the company released her extremely limiting contract online. The contract allows Frey license to remove an author from a project at any time, does not require him to give the author credit for their work, and only pays a standard advance of $250. A New York magazine article entitled "James Frey's Fiction Factory" gave more details about the company, including information about the highly successful "Lorien Legacies" series, a collaboration between MFA student Jobie Hughes and Frey. The article details how Frey removed Hughes from the project, allegedly during a screaming match between the two authors. In the article, Frey is accused of abusing and using MFA students as cheap labor to churn out commercial young adult books.

Based on this report (and other such details I've read from various sources), full fathom five appears to be how deeply you're buried as an author if you sign on for this. There is no reason at all for anyone to commit to the sweat shop this appears yo be - including Big Publishing&Trade; which is in many ways no better, in this age of ebooks and self-publishing. I refuse to recommend this book or anything from that stable, and I have no intention of reading anything else that has James Frey's sweat stains on it.

You Know You Love Me by Cecily von Ziegesar

Rating: WARTY!

Which imbecile decided that it would be a really great idea to lard up audio books with random jarring, too loud music? Ugh! The music has nothing to do with the story and was never in the original typescript so get your heads out of your high hats and quit it already!

I had my doubts about the blurb on this one, but it sounded like it might be interesting if written the right way. What finally tipped my choice was that it was read by Christina Ricci, but this turned out to be a bad indicator. Her reading voice wasn't that great, but the reading material was the most flaccid dreck imaginable. It's part of the gossip girls series and I seriously and honestly fear for the mental welfare of people who find this trash remotely engaging.

The best thing I can say about it is that it was commendably short, but even then I skimmed the thing. The entire short story consisted of the most boring descriptions of snotty, spoiled high-schoolers getting ready to attend college, and consisted of boring interactions, tedious shopping trips, and uninventive partying.

The entire thing was sodden with vacuous, juvenile, and clueless talk of losing virginity before college, and this is the only thing the story had going for it, which amounted to nothing at all since nothing actually happened (or if it did, it must have been a quickie which I missed when skimming from track to track). I flatly refuse to recommend this or anything like it unless you're in dire need (and I do mean dire) of sleeping draft.

The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern

Rating: WARTY!

Even Tim Curry's excellent voice could not save this novel. I couldn't stand to listen to the entire thing. I tend to be a lot less picky in my choices of audio books than ever I am when picking print or ebooks, because they're more throw-away to me - I am trapped in the car an hour a day so it's nice to have something to listen to even if it's not really that appealing.

A note on choosing your novel's title! Goodreads lists two pages of titles that are the same as this or are close variations on it. That's not a good thing if you want to get your novel noticed - and especially if you don't have Big Publishing&Trade; owning your work and ostensibly promoting it. It's worth thinking seriously about your title.

This audio book, read beautifully for once by an actor (Tim Curry), is historical fiction set in England at the end of the eighteenth century when England and France were not technically at war, but close enough. I had a hard time getting into it when I first began, largely I think, because I wasn't the only person in the car. The next morning, driving to work in the dark alone, it sounded a lot better to me.

1795 was a happening year for the French. They invaded the Netherlands, got a new king (Louis 18th - although it took a while to make it official), signed peace treaties with Spain and Prussia, recaptured St. Lucia, had Austria, Britain, and Russia sign a pact against them, and had a royalist rebellion crushed by young artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte.

In the fictional world, Jonathan Absey works for the Home Office and is tasked with exposing French spies. He has two problems in addition to this one. First of all, his young daughter was murdered and the crime remains unsolved, thus he visits Bow street, home of the renowned Bow Street Runners, to pursue crimes related to redheads and discovers that there has been a new one of which he wasn't notified. This is annoying to him, to say the very least, and his obsession causes serious problems for him at work.

His other problem is his homosexual half brother, Alexander. Jonathan is disgusted with this brother but nonetheless has to recruit him. His brother is an amateur astronomer, and is Jonathan's only realistic means of infiltrating an international society of astronomers, the Company of Titius

This "company" is purportedly dedicated to finding the planet that's theorized to lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but Jonathan thinks it might be a haven for spies. Johann Daniel Titius, after whom this company is named, was a German astronomer who suggested there should be a planet at that location based on what is now known as the Titius-Bode law (not related to Jude Law!). The book blurb mistakenly claims they're looking for a long-lost star, which just goes to show how much Big Publishing&Trade cares about your novel Ms Redfern. Self publishing - it's the only way to be sure!

The problem was that after a good start, the book slowly descended into a boring rambling work which quickly lost my interest. There was not enough happening, and what did happen took forever before it got going. In the end I did not finish this and I cannot honestly recommend it based on what I listened to.

Joplin's Ghost by Tenanarive Due

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book read uninspiringly by Lizan Mitchell.

This novel is centered on Scott Joplin - not Janis Joplin, who doesn't even come close to him as a musical talent. Phoenix Smalls is an R&B singer who had an almost deadly encounter with a piano at the age of ten. Fourteen years later, she's launching her career in music, but during a visit to St Louis she encounters Scott Joplin's ghost and worse, his psychotic piano. As ragtime - a musical genre that wasn't invented by Joplin, but for which he became a popularizer and ambassador most notably with his Maple Leaf Rag - starts to infiltrate her very bones, the question becomes one of survival. Can Phoenix rise from the ashes of Joplin's career and his ghostly influence and own herself?

If Stephen King had written this novel, no one would have thought twice about it, but because this story about the King of ragtime wasn't written by the so-called King of Horror, and instead has the astounding name of Tananarive Due, it appears it's come in for some criticism. I can understand some, but not all of it. That part I do understand is how wordy this novel is - far too wordy in the style of Stephen King, who can't tell a story without vomiting the entire life history of even minor characters. That said, while this book started out interestingly enough, it soon became tedious with the main story being brought to a dead halt by fictionalized flashbacks to Joplin's life. For me that spoiled the story - the modern haunted story which is what I wanted to hear.

And what's with the music? Way the hell too many audio books want to add music to the mix - music which is jarring and screechy and too loud and nothing whatsoever to do with the story. For the love of beat leave it out! In this case the story was about music, so I could see a case for it, and I understand (rightly or wrongly!) that this book, in print form, may have come with an audio disk, which is all well and good, but to add snatches of unidentified Joplin music randomly throughout the disk was nothing but annoying and was one of the things which turned me off this.

Joplin contracted syphilis and suffered dementia in 1916 onwards, dying a year later in a psychiatric institution at the age of 49. He was pretty much forgotten until the early seventies when three albums of his work, and a movie (The Sting) - which had nothing to do with him, but which featured his music - were released. That was about the same time that his anonymous pauper's grave finally got a stone identifying him. That was a tragedy but not as big of a tragedy as this book turned into. I can't recommend it.

Any Way The Wind Blows by E Lynn Harris

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book from the library, and it was read amateurishly by Dominic Hoffman, Bahni Turpin, and Mirron Willis.

Singer Yancey Harrington Braxton, aka Yancey B is in LA, her New York wedding to John "Basil" Henderson having been killed off at the last minute. Her first single "Any Way the Wind Blows" contains secrets about Basil, and Bart Dunbar might know what they are.

That's the sad plot of this absurd and pathetic effort at drama. First person PoV is the worst voice choice for most stories, and it's made much worse when its multiplied by three. It's worst still when it's read by people who don't even remotely capture the characters they're reading for, and instead make them irritating to listen to instead of interesting.

Yancey was one of the most boring and self-centered characters I've ever encountered. It was a actually a pleasure when someone else took over the narrative, but he was worse than Yancey. After listening to one disk of this audio book I had had more than enough. It was awful and I cannot recommend it. Twenty years ago, bisexuality might have been a big secret, but today you need more than that to be your novel's pivot point. Add unsafe sex proudly championed, and these characters are really nothing more than trash and not even recyclable trash.

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

Rating: WARTY!

This was an advance review copy, and we reviewers are always warned to keep that in mind, but what I keep in mind is that in this day and age of electronic publishing, publishers and authors have little excuse to put out a review copy that hasn't been properly vetted for errors. In this novel, some of the phrasing, granted not much, but still some sounds like it was run through Google translate, such as "Yet it sat with Zacharias ill to overturn..."

Additionally, there were also some odd words mixed in, some of which were evidently made up yet nowhere where they defined or set in a context so it was obvious what these words meant. Some parts of the novel were run together, and I suspect that this was caused by the transcription process into Kindle app format rather than anything that the author did. The following is a copy of how an example of this appeared in my smart phone Kindle app:

Damerell waved him away. “Have some sense, man!” he gasped. “Don’t interrupt!”“What can you mean?” said Rollo.

I seriously doubt that the author made the absurd line breaks, the oddball line spacing, and the random font changes that I saw in my Kindle Android app copy, but this is an issue which needs to be taken care of!

Those things aside, the story got off to a great start. It was, once again a story where magic is in decline, and once again a story where women are all but forbidden to use magic. How that works is a mystery to me. Yes, women have long been forced into second place (assuming they were granted any place at all in society), but this was in regular everyday life not in a magical world where things are very different. What we have here is such a world, yet we're expected to believe that this made no difference to how society developed. I didn't buy that, but it's that shaky premise that we have to deal with here. Other than that, it began as an engrossing story.

Set in England, during Napoleonic times, we enter a world where the new Sorcerer to the crown is a black man - a protégé of the previous magician, who was highly regarded. Popular sentiment is turning against Zacharias because he is resented for being black, but "worse" than this, he's seen as an ideal person to blame for the decline in magic in England.

In order to escape the calumny, Zach takes up an offer from an acquaintance to speak in his stead at a girls school. This will get him out of town for a few days at least. He doesn't know that there is a girl, Prunella, at the school, who is oozing with magic and who is, like Zach, not white. She has also lost her father as Zach has lost his father figure. You would think they would have a lot in common, and I was sure the author's intention as to bring these two together, but as it happened, they were as different as chalk and cheese, which would have been fine if they'd had some chemistry and had no chemistry, but they did not. None at all.

Prunella was quite impressive as a character to begin with, but then she discovered something during the visit of the Royal Sorcerer, and promptly turned profoundly stupid. She discovered something in an old bag her father left for her - something which would be of huge benefit, and she knew that she needed professional advice on how best to employ this material, but never once does she think of approaching the Royal Sorcerer!

He was right there at the school. She was in his company at the same time as she had this knowledge, yet never once did it cross her mind to approach him, and neither were we given any reason - let alone a good reason - why she failed to do so. This made no sense and for me was the first false step in this story because it made Prunella look like a moron.

Let me side-track for a minute to say that I don't get how these two characters are named, and no explanation is forthcoming from the author, not even a poor one. Prunella hails from India, where Prunella, believe it or not, is not a common name. Prunella is, in fact, Latin in derivation. Zacharias is supposedly African, where again, Zacharius was nowhere near the first name of choice. It is in fact the Greek form of the Hebrew Zechariah. Neither name was applicable. Character names are important and for me, these were failures.

Back to our regular programming. I can see how an author might want to keep their main characters apart for as long as possible, especially if there's a romance in the offing, just to increase dramatic tension, but if you're going to do this you need to offer valid reasons, not poor ones, and especially not ones which make your main female character look like an idiot. You certainly don't want to bypass that altogether in the evident hope that the reader won't see the plot hole. Trust me, there aren't many readers who are as dumb as Prunella appears to be, and it's insulting to your readers to suggest otherwise!

I don't get why Prunella was so appallingly slow to share with Zacharias her discoveries in the attic. In the end she didn't share them so much as he blundered in on them. I like that she bonded with Mak Genggang (which is an awesome name), but that relationship was short lived and never really went anywhere. It was like Mak was nothing more than a key to open a door for Prunella, and was then discarded.

I kept bouncing back and forth between delight with the obvious Asian influences the author brings to her story-telling, and being frustrated at how slowly the story progressed. Some people are never happy, huh?! LOL! A little tighter, with some more momentum would have been appreciated, but I did maintain my interest even through the frustration.

This story was different and had a freshness to it despite using a lot of tropes, and I enjoyed how fresh it was. I liked Prunella initially, even as she irritated me at times, but my appreciation of her deteriorated as the story progressed until I had no time for her. Zacharias I never did warm to. He seemed to be such a Mary Sue in that he was more like wallpaper than an app. He really wasn't a protagonist in that he was not proactive at all. Everything happened to him. He did nothing himself which made him totally boring. He seemed far too content to float down the river in a tube rather than fire up a speedboat and get where he needed to be. Given the derision in which too many people held him, and the repeated attempts on his life, his lackadaisical attitude was simply incomprehensible when it wasn't laughable.

Prunella had a lot more oomph to her, but she seemed to be marching to her own obscure drumbeat. For two characters who were supposed to be thrown together and develop a relationship (however it was intended to turn out), they were completely at odds, and not in a good way. They were not a team nor did they look like they were on their way to becoming one.

For a novel which is supposed to be about, inter alia inequality (of race, of gender, and of wealth), this novel seems still to go out of its way to segregate women in some regards, such as in how they are titled. Zacharias is a thaumaturge, yet he insists that Prunella is a thaumaturgess, and later a Magicienne. Why? Why can she not be a thaumaturge as he is or a magician? For that matter, why not a sorcerer since she has a familiar? That's sorcerer, please note, not sorceress.

I didn't get why the author went out of her way repeatedly to segregate her as a woman when the whole book was supposed to be about integration. People are welcome to disagree, but for me, it’s time we shed these gender-confining distinctions. We got rid of "miss", so why retain the idea of mistress - that is to say, why retain the -ess suffix for women? Someone who acts, for example, is an actor, not an actress. We don’t call female doctors doctresses! (and let's have no more of 'dress'! From now on it must be dror! LOL!).

Here's one reason why I ended up not liking her: "Prunella took to the ballrooms of London in the spirit of ruthless calculation of a general entering a battlefield." There were other times I did like her, but in the end, she was all over the place in my estimation and my liking dwindled to nothing. There were examples of her doing good and supportive and grateful things for the opportunity she'd been given, then there were other times when she would turn immediately around and act like the most stupid person in the entire Kingdom. I don't expect a character to be perfect. That would be as absurd as it would be boring. I don't mind a main character starting weak, or stupid, or clumsy if they improve, but when a protagonist like Prunella starts out likable, and then turns a reader off them, they're written poorly, period.

One classic example of her stupidity was when she attended a party and observed a magical orb sitting on a table. Later she encounters that same orb at Zach's house causing mischief and mayhem, yet never once did she share her inside knowledge with Zach. Instead she secretly snuck out, leaving an obscure and ambiguous note for Zach, to break into the house of her friend's greatest enemy for no better reason than to see if the orb she had seen earlier was still on the table in that house!

If it had not been there (no matter what other reason there might have been for its absence) she would then "know" that this orb that had delivered chaos to Zach's home was one and the same. Instead of leaving the orb behind her, she took it with her and thereby delivered it straight into the hands of her enemy, losing her evidence! Classic stupidity. I can’t go to bat for a character who is so relentlessly clueless, nor can I harbor any great wish to read more about her.

Inertia was one of the worst traits of this novel - no one did anything. Even Prunella, the most active of the protagonists, barely moved except to go to parties to try and pick up a husband, and nowhere did she count love or companionship as one of her expectations from this hoped-for betrothal. She worked for nothing yet gained everything. In another inexplicable example of inertia, I have to ask why was it, exactly, that despite the bountiful threats against his protégé from every quarter, did Sir Stephen's ghost wait to act until we were three-quarters the way through the book? And then failed to deliver anything? What was the point of this ghost? I saw none.

Deus ex machina was another issue. Prunella's stupendously growing powers were coming out of nowhere. We were offered no reason whatsoever to explain why she started out doing small but impressive low-level magic and then in a matter of a few days or weeks at best, she had grown to be the most powerful magician in England if not the world. Yes she had some training and read a couple of books, but this was, judged from the way the story has it, a limited and cursory amount of both training and reading.

Yes, she had three familiars, but nowhere are we given any indication that these three are contributing to, much less actually enhancing, her powers that she should become so strong so fast. Indeed, nowhere is it explained exactly what familiars these represent, what they are supposed to contribute, or why they are so important.

Other have reviewers, I've noted, have complained of lack of character development and world-building. I don’t worry over much about those kinds of things if the story itself is good, but what I do care about is huge gaps in the story-telling - where things happen out of the blue, with no presaging at all, or where huge changes take place with little or nothing to account for them. Too many things are completely glossed over in this story.

The sad corollary to all of that is that When we finally reach the point at which Prunella is unleashed and enters her first magical battle, it’s skipped completely - we only learn of it after the fact, and then get no details, only the result. It’s like the author was too timid or lacking confidence to write the thing, and we had all of this build-up with nothing to show for it. The ending rather fell apart. It dragged out far too long and a major character was callously killed off by Prunella which made me really actively dislike her at that point. I was very disappointed in how all this played out.

I know this was a début novel, and both the premise and the promise are great, but this was simply not ready for prime-time. The sad thing is that the novel deserved some real pre-publishing support from the publisher and it evidently got none, or at best, insufficient, which forces me to ask once again in this age of self-publishing, what exactly is the benefit and point of going the Big Publishing™ route if what could have been a masterpiece is so badly let down? I cannot recommend this novel as a worthy read, but I confess that having read this effort, I am interested in following this author's career. She has an awesome name, and I think she has places to go. I'm curious as to where she goes next!