Not Just a Princess by Mary Lee

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of a really fluffy set of children's books written, I suspect, by a mom about her daughter. The drawings - presumably by the author herself, since no artist us credited, are completely charming. I read this book on my cell phone and it was perfectly clear and legible, but one thing I missed out on is that you cannot get the double-page spread when you read the book in electronic format. You get each half of the double page on a separate screen which ruins the effect. I've encountered this same problem with graphic novels when reading them on a tablet. I think publishers and writers really need to understand that you can't write a half-way book like this - it needs to be written either for e-format or for print. It can't straddle both unless you create two separate editions, one dedicated to each format.

That said, the book was eminently readable and charmed even me, so I imagine it will delight children. This is very much a girl's book however, so while very young children will enjoy it regardless of their gender, as your boy grows older, he may not find this as engrossing. The pictures were colorful and sharp, and the drawing was perfect for the intended age range. The text was simple without being dumbed-down, and there was a real story being told here.

Mia is a feisty and self-possessed little girl who has a very active imagination. She's not in a princess mood today however - anything but. She's a lioness at breakfast, snarfing down her cereal. Note that 'lioness' is the author's term, not mine. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. While lioness is a technically accurate appellation for the female of the lion species, note that it's only the lion, really, that gets this distinction. Yes, there is tigress, but it's rarely used. There isn't cheetah-ess or leopard-ess, or a cat-ess (you have to go to Tom and Queen - or maybe even quean for a feisty cat) . I wonder why? For animals, it doesn't bother me so much, but when human females are subject to the same treatment, it smacks of genderism to me. I'm very much against adding 'ess' to a word and declaring that the confine of the female of the human species. Why actress? Why not just actor? Why authoress? Shephardess? Progress? Am I kidding with that last one?). It's worth a thought.

Moving along now, I recommend this story overall, because although she was typecast with lioness and cowgirl, Mia steadfastly refused to be otherwise constrained, taking on a variety of personas through her day, and even in her dreams. I didn't doubt that she would live her dreams as she grew up. This book is also available in a trio of Mia books.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Wraith World by Cavan Scott, Mark Wright

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one-disk audio book, read impeccably by Elisabeth Sladen who played Sarah Jane Smith in the long-running BBC TV kids' series, spun off from the even longer-running Doctor Who, was excellent fun. Very much in the spirit of the TV show, but separate form it, this story was about an aging fantasy writer, who has just published his last book in his most famous series. Little do Sarah Jane and the young adults she works with, dealing with or even combating alien visitations, realize that another one is going on right under their noses.

Being a big fan of the series, young Rani visits the author with Sarah Jane, but little do they know that the author, because of the alien paper he wrote on, quite literally made up the series - and precipitated it in real life. Before long, there are worm creatures, which can congregate into evil aliens (note unsurprising similarities to season nine of Doctor Who!, which is current as I wrote this.

This story isn't brilliant by any means and the Beeb lards it up with too much special FX, but that aside, the story was a fun romp for youngsters, and I enjoyed revisiting one of the most loved companions of The Doctor, who died long before her time. The only companion so far to have had her own spin-off series. RIP Elisabeth. You will never be forgotten.

Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson

Rating: WARTY!

I had previously favorably reviewed two Sanderson books, The Rithmatist in September of 2013, and Steelheart in March of 2014, but this short audio book rubbed me up the wrong way from disk one, and I was going to give it another day, but when I picked it up just now to make some notes, I simply could not stand the thought of putting it back in the drive when I had other books waiting in the wings, so out it goes (back to the totally excellent local library).

The first problem was with the reader, Ramón de Ocampo. His reading voice just made my skin crawl. It felt like he was saying, in a subtext, "Hey! Check out how wonderful I am, going over the top with this novel!" I couldn't stand to listen to it even had the book been good. In that case I would have got the print or ebook version and read it myself, like I did with Vampire Academy. That option was out though, becuase the actual text was jsut as bad as the reader's voice. It felt like the aiuhtor was hitting me over the head with every word he spoke, and it was jsu tthe worng tone, the worng voice, too stupid for words.

I don't know what the plot is, other than grandpa, orphan Al, and evil librarans, and I really don't care. I can't recommend this book.

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Rating: WORTHY!

The only other Katherine Applegate I've reviewed was Eve and Adam, which I rated a worthy read back in February 2013, shortly after I started writing this blog.

I listened to the audio book for this. It's a very short book, less than four hours listening time. The reading is by Adam Grupper, whom I've never encountered before. In some ways his voice sounded perfectly right, in others not so much, but on balance, he did a really decent job with it. I particularly liked his take on Bob, the terrier mutt, and Ruby, the newbie elephant.

I liked this novel despite it being a Newbery winner. I read some of the negative reviews for this, and they seemed not to get it. There were reviews stating things like, "animals don't talk to one another". Well, duhh! That's exactly what I mean by them not getting it. The fact is that animals do talk to one another - they just don't do it in plain English, but they do communicate, particularly elephants, dogs and great apes (and yes, you are a great ape biologically speaking whether your ignorant religion likes it or not. Humans are genetically closer to chimpanzees than rats are to mice). The thing these reviewers are missing is that this actually isn't a story about animals which can talk to one another, it's how animals might talk to one another if they could. More realistically, it's a commentary on how humans treat animals spoken from the perspective of some of the animals we abuse so badly.

The ignorance among some reviewers about the smarts and sensitivity of the animals portrayed here was scary, and indicative of the second-rate science education which is proudly delivered to US citizens. Yes, gorillas, elephants, and dogs are sensitive. Yes, they do feel things in ways similar to humans. No, they don't speak English, but yes, gorillas (and chimpanzees, and Orangutans) have been taught to express themselves using American Sign Language for the deaf. Look up Koko and Kanzi and those are just two names off the top of my head. Yes, gorillas and elephants (and chimpanzees) paint pictures with paints and draw pictures with crayons in real life. Deal with it.

I started listening to this with a feeling of déjà vu, like I'd read it before, but either I didn't read the whole thing, or I read something else that was similar to this, yet not this, because after that initial feeling, the story went in ways I didn't expect, which diminished the feeling considerably. I thought this was a story where the animals would bust out of their confines and go on the run. That's not how it ended. The fact that they didn't break out made it more realistic and more sad, for me.

The story is told in first person from the perspective of Ivan, a silverback mountain gorilla who has been in captivity since infancy after he and his sister were kidnapped and his parents killed and turned into ashtrays. His sister died from the shock of confinement, and Ivan has been alone since. Since then, the only other wildlife he has seen has been on the cranky TV he has view of from his cage.

Ivan is stoic and limited in his perceptions. He's an ape of few words, although he's allowed poetic expression from time to time. He knows only what he sees, and doesn't think too much about what was or what will be. Most of what he sees is from behind the glass window into the mall, where he looks at ill-behaved passers-by and starers-in. He's allowed crayons and paper which he uses to draw what he sees, although both his artistic skill and vision are limited. His pictures are sold in a store near his cage. In his heyday, he had fans (the 'one and only' comes from the billboard on a highway near the mall), but now, the Big Top Mall and Video Arcade has gone downhill, and there are fewer visitors and even less money for maintenance, food, and treats.

Ivan's closest friends are Stella the elephant, who is sick from an infected foot the owner can't afford to get treated. Nevertheless she's expected to perform once-a-day for paying visitors, where she walks around while a poodle runs on her back and head. The placid Ivan does his turn there too. Nothing changes. Until young Ruby arrives - an infant version of, and replacement for, Stella. Ruby kicks things up a notch and the questions she peppers Ivan with are hilarious. Ivan gets "outside" news from Bob, the terrier mix who sleeps with him at night, but spends his time foraging and avoiding humans during the day. For me it was Bob and Ruby, not Ivan and Stella, who made this story. They represented hope which the gorilla and older elephant no longer had.

The blurb suggests that Ivan takes action to improve things. He doesn't. He has no power. Instead, he has actions performed upon him, and in the end, although far from ideal, these actions do improve his life and Ruby's considerably. I recommend this as a worthy read and a good discussion book to share with children of all ages.

The Empty by Jimmie Robinson

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of the most amazing graphic novels I've read in a long time. It's highly original, and though the science is questionable (seven thousand years isn't enough time for the evolution we saw going on here), I was willing to let that go and bask in the glory of the story. Tanoor is a fiercesome hunter in her impoverished desert land where gangly, somewhat disproportioned people eke out a dwindling existence.

One day Tanoor encounters a strange woman in the ocean, and she's smart enough, and desperate enough to know that this brand new thing in her world - a woman who looks like Tanoor and not like Tanoor, maybe the break-through they need to overcome the poison roots which are spreading and destroying everything in their path. Her fellow villagers, however, disagree, and banish both Lila, the new girl, and Tanoor into the harsh land of the Mool, a savage race which lives across the chasm. Lila, however, who has proved ot ahve unexpected and beneficial powers, discovers that the Mool are peace-loving and just as threatened by the encroaching roots as everyone else. Traveling with her pet, the foxelope, and her two new companions, Tanoor eventually discovers more wonders, and eventually, the deadly secret which has brought the world almost to extinction.

I really loved this story. The artwork was excellent, the story intelligent and brisk, and despite my scientific misgivings, I felt this did more than enough to overcome the reservations I had. I recommend it.

Sidekicked by Russell Brettholtz

Rating: WORTHY!

It's really hard these days to come up with something original in the way of graphic novels about super heroes, but I think there's still some solid gold to be mined (or even mind!) here, and this creative team proved it with a really great, original, and meaningful story. Set in contemporary Chicago, this novel is about a world of selfish super heroes - and let's face it, is there really any other kind than the self-absorbed, super-powered, suited sentry? In this case, each hero seems to come equipped with a much put-upon sidekick, and the sidekicks are treated like dirt. So they go on strike!

It's not long before the super villains, who have hitherto been getting the worst of the deal, take up the slack and start exploiting this vacuum for their own ends. Teaming up as they never have before, they start taking out the super heroes until only the sidekicks are left. That's when the sidekicks team up and start fighting back. This is also a selfish attitude, but it works for them! Their experience in supporting their heroes proves invaluable in working together - something which the egotistical super heroes were never able to master. But there's more to the story than this. Villains have sidekicks, too....

I really liked this story. Yes, the sidekick shtick has been beaten about the bush before now, but never quite in this way in my reading experience at least, and I liked the way the dynamic played out. The characters seemed realistic and were interesting, with different motivations and personalities. It was a really good, engaging story, and the artwork by Miguel Mendoça was suitably heroic. I recommend it.

Death Vigil Volume 1 by Stjepan Šejić

Rating: WORTHY!

I loved Stjepan Šejić's Rat Queens, not so hot on his Dresden Files, but this particular series was another win for him in my book - or for me with his book, I guess. After reading two less-than-appealing graphic novels prior to this one, it was a breath of fresh air to encounter the sotry and artwork here. It wasn't all plain sailing, but overall, this was a very worthy read.

It's a great life in the Vigil. The only drawback is you have to be dead - and then get invited to join because of some special quality you possess. Oh, and you must accept that your hair color will change to white. But not your skin color. I didn't get the distinction there. The evil dudes have, of course black hair, but not necessary black skin - because that would be racist, right?!

Once you're in, though, you get a weapon, and a cool bunch of fun friends. On the downside, you have to fight horrific demonic beasties which try to break through from the abyss into the upper layers. The beasts were sadly clichéd, I'm afraid to report - all scarlet and teeth. The death vigil crew, and indeed the bad guys, all curiously shared the same face - with a change of hair style here and there, and maybe some facial hair or a slightly more square jaw if it was a guy. Sometimes it was hard for me to tell the difference between once character and another from their image, although they all had different personalities. Indeed, when the hair color unexpectedly changes on one of the good guys, she became pretty much a twin of one of the girls on the evil side. I don't think that this was intentional, but who knows - the series isn't over yet!

There's the superficial plot - cracks develop in the barrier, evil beasts break through and the Death Vigil dispatches them, calling in help from their powerful female leader if they get into trouble - and an underlying story arc, and it worked well on both levels. That was what was commendable and different about this series - the guys were not in charge here. This is a very female-centric series, with both good guys and bad guys having a strong female figure calling the shots. On the good side, there was more than one interesting female character: try five!

Bernie (Bernadette) is the leader - an ancient and powerful female who rules the roost, advising and guiding her apprentices. She has two younger females working with her and as the story begins, she adds a third, who serves as the passport for the reader to learn how this set-up works. The newbie is amusing in her own right; she has real personality, but she;s also fascinating in that whereas other vigil-ers have swords and pick-axes for fighting demons, she ends up with a feather. It proves to be far more than it seems, however. Last but not least, later in the story, there's an Asian female from another team who, along with her male colleague, joins with Bernie's group to fight a particularly dangerous threat. This is what really won me over. It's rare in comics and it was nice to see it bloom here.

I really enjoyed this story. There were some issues with poor printing of speech balloons. I don't know what that was about. Some of it was intentional - red print on a black background for some of the evil characters, for example. That didn't work - it was very hard to read and simply annoying. In other cases the speech balloons were transparent and this looked unintentional - like someone had forgot to put in a white backing for these balloons. Some of the text was hard to read on an iPad in my advance review copy, because it was so small, necessitating an annoying need to enlarge and then diminish the page to read the text. That was a minor upset compare with the generosity, warmth, complexity, and humor of the story, so titanic good v. evil battle clichés aside, I really enjoyed this and recommend it as a worthy read.

Descender Volume 1 by Jeff Lemire

Rating: WARTY!

I felt disappointed in this from the start. This was an advance review copy, but it felt so unfinished that it was like reading a rough draft or a spec script. I can't speak for the print version because I saw this in e-form, so may be that the real thing is better-printed, but Dustin Nguyen's art in this format truly sucked. The colors were washed out in many images, as though CMYK coloring had been employed and one or two of the colors were missing! Some of the drawing looked like rough story-boarding from a movie set rather than comic book imagery - as though the frame had been penciled in quickly, with the intention of cleaning it up afterwards, but then it had been forgotten about and never finished.

The images are smaller on an iPad or other such tablets (and not a mini, a full sized pad) than in a printed comic, which often makes the text hard to read at best and illegible at worst. Both were present here. My advice to comic book publishers is that if you're not going to specifically tailor your book to the electronic format, then don't publish it in that format at all. It does you no favors to compromise between two different media, and it's even worse to design for one medium, and then try to promote it in the other. It doesn't work, and I despair that publishers, especially graphic novel publishers and creators, are never going to actually grasp this.

These problems were all apparent in the first two pages, before the story ever got going. When it did get going it was a sorry disappointment - a pastiche of movie and TV show clichés and tropes that offer no originality. If you missed season three of Star Trek: Enterprise, then you can pretty much catch up here: there's a variety of aliens working together, including insectoid and humanoid (and also one species mentioned which has become extinct), the unprovoked attack from a mystery spacecraft, the quest to find out where the craft originated before it's too late.

There's a huge dose of the movie AI; there's a juvenile Iron man who is all robot; there's a lackluster KAF ("Kick Ass Female") straight from central casting. There's a mechanical Hulk in the form of a drill-bot which has way too many smarts for a real drill-bot, but not enough to make an interesting character. There is an evil species which is , naturally, super-sized and all teeth. There is ridiculous unabridged cruelty and savagery in a supposedly civilized federation of planets. None of it came together to make any sense, let alone an engaging story.

The supposed story is of a robot designed to emulate a ten-year-old boy and be companion to such a child, which begs the question as to why it's armed with a deadly Iron Man style palm energy beam, which only made 'sense' in Iron Man because he needed the energy to fly. The kid robot has your stereotypical sci-fi alphanumeric name: TIM-21. The story here is that Tim has similar programming to the giant space bot which wrought havoc on the planets, but since one of the nine planets in the federation was already laid waste, the programming doesn't seem too smart in that this planet was also attacked! I could not get into this at all. it offered me nothing, and I can't recommend it.

Model Undercover: London by Carina Axelson

Rating: WARTY!

In this outing, teen model Axelle Anderson is in London. This is the second of these that I've read, and though normally - and thoroughly - disdain the fashion industry and fashion consciousness as the most self-absorbed, self-indulgent, abusive and wasteful activities ever devised, I found myself curiously liking the character and enjoying the story in the first volume, even though the title 'undercover model' is really wrong. She's actually an overt model and an undercover detective! There are three volumes published so far. I missed the second volume, so this is only my second outing. it didn't work out very well for me this time. It became obvious pretty quickly what the mystery was (hint: twins), yet the "detective' didn't even consider this forever, which spoke badly to her smarts.

The hardest thing for me to read in this series is the frequent mention of fashions, but I found in the first volume that if I ignored that, I enjoyed the rest of the story. This one didn't start out well, and the sad YA tropes started thick and fast, such as flecks of gold in the male's eyes: "...eyes (brown, with flecks of greengold..." Yes, 'greengold' is now a word! But seriously, can we get away from this flecks of gold nonsense? It's so tired now that it needs to be retired. I think maybe the 'greengold' was an accident because in the kindle app edition I read on my phone, I noticed there were quite a few such pairs of words run together. It seemed to be primarily where the word pair would normally have a hyphen between, and perhaps the conversion process to the Kindle format had missed a hyphen here and there? An example of this was in " state-of-theart", and this same phrase was used just a few paragraphs later with the hyphenation correct, so exactly what the problem here was, I can't pinpoint. The greengold eye disease revisits later: " I could see flecks of gold flickering in his eyes."

The chaptering was also messed up. I don't know if the original had dropped caps, but in the Kindle app version it had dropped lines! For example, if the sentence at the start of the chapter began, say, "As we quickly hurried for the train...", the Kindle app version would have the first letter 'A' on one line, the second letter (s) on the next line, and then the rest of the sentence on the third line. There were no screen-breaks between chapters, either; they just followed pell-mell after one another on the same screen as the previous chapter. It looked messy. This was an advance review copy which doesn't excuse shoddy presentation in this electronic age, but hopefully these flaws will be fixed before the final edition is released.

Some of the gaffes were amusing. This phrase belongs in the glossary of misheard song lyrics: " Thorough route aside," I think the author may have meant to write "Though that aside." How you would get what we did get from that, I don't know unless the word processor is doing automatic correction, or the text was being dictated, which in this case wouldn't surprise me.

In a similar vein, I read, "...a small pavilion in the far left corner of the Palace of Westminster caught my eye. I hadn't seen it before- it was small and whimsical..." Small is repeated, and repeating is, well, repetitive! Since it had already been described as small, then the second 'small' should have been left out. Something like, "... a small, whimsical pavilion in the far left corner of the Palace of Westminster now caught my eye. I hadn't seen it before..." would have worked a treat.

There were some plot problems. The beginning of this story is that photographer Gavin, the boyfriend of a friend of Axelle's, is apparently "mugged" when he was down by the River Thames investigating something. He's in a coma. Later his apartment is ransacked as though someone was trying to find or recover something. Axelle is brought in to see if she can discover what is going on. The mystery involves celebrity fashion designer Johnny Vane, and seems to center around a picture of Vane as a boy, arms around his twin brother Julian, who evidently died in a drowning accident in the Thames at the very spot the picture was taken. It was at this point that most of the plot became quite obvious even to me who usually gets these things wrong.

Despite the fact that Gavin is mugged, has his apartment ransacked, and is later discovered with the life-support unplugged in his hospital room, no one seems to think it's necessary to mount a guard on his room, not even the police! That's really insulting to the Greater London Metropolitan Police Service based at Scotland Yard (which is actually now New Scotland Yard!). The author appears not to appreciate that there's a distinction between that and the City of London Police Force which covers the City of London. The action centers around an area in the City of Westminster, however, so she is correct in specifying Scotland Yard.

One thing I didn't like was that Axelle doesn't come off as very smart in this story, and dumb main characters is not something I can abide. I don't mind if they start out dumb and wise up, but when they start out in a series as reasonably sharp, but become painfully, obstinately dumb by volume three, it's pretty clear that the series has lost its fire. The very first thing you should wonder, if you're dealing with one dead identical twin, is: "Is the surviving twin who he claims to be?" Is it Johnny who is still alive, or Julian, posing as Johnny for some reason - and how can you tell? This never crosses her mind - which made me suspicious! Whether this is the solution or not, it's not a good thing for the "detective' to have failed to even consider it.

Only the twins and their nanny were present at the drowning, so unless she could tell them apart, the surviving twin could have been either brother. Or if she could tell them apart, was she in on a murder or a cover-up? Or was it really just an accident and Julian really was the one who died - in which case, what's the significance of the photograph, if any? One twin is inevitably older than the other. Was one of them favored over the other? Did the older one stand to inherit? Was the older one Julian? Axelle never asks any of these questions, and while this may serve the author's plot, it doesn't serve her flagship character if it makes her look clueless. She looks especially so when we're told time after time about Johnny's love of wearing gloves - how he's never seen without them, and we get heavily pointed smack-you-hard-on-your-head hints about close ups and the photo of where both boys hands are visible. it just makes the main character look stupid and sad.

Talking of which there was some dumb text, such as this example: "... often find that looking at a person's house... can give away a lot about a person's preferences and lifestyle." Nope, always looking at a person's house gives these things away, and it's not something which takes a keen eye or a detective to figure out.

At one point Axelle is trying to find out information from the twins' nanny, but is called away by her boyfriend, who's helping her on this case. The reason he calls her away is that someone is coming to the house, but instead of sneaking into the yard after the visitor goes inside, to see if they could overhear what takes place, the two hurry away, thereby failing to avail themselves of a golden opportunity to find out something more. This tells me Axelle really isn't much of a detective after all.

There's your cliché teen love triangle here, too, with a new guy on the block, a rock star who starts coming on to Axelle. Never once does she ever clearly, unequivocally tell him she's in a committed relationship which is pretty pathetic on her part. Failing to do this means she is actively encouraging his attention. Then she acts surprised by the media attention she's garnering because she's photographed with this guy! If I were boyfriend Sebastian I'd think twice about allying myself with a woman who encourages male attention and invites trouble by failing to set clear boundaries.

This is another example of how dumb Axelle behaves in this story, and it's not remotely endearing. By continuing to effectively flirt with rock star Josh, she is, in a real way, being unfaithful to Sebastian. He doesn't strike me as the sharpest knife in the box, and he's rather immature, too, but he's a decent faithful guy and he deserves better than this. None of this made me warm-up to this story, and it made me actively dislike Axelle. At about sixty percent in I was ready to quit, since I pretty much knew the ending. I read to the end to make sure I was right about what I thought I was, and consequently this novel left me feeling tired and bored. It felt way too long and too much of a drag - in short, very different from the first one. I can't recommend it.

The 8th Continent by Matt London

Rating: WARTY!

This is an absurd excursion into absurdist humor for young children aimed at drawing their attention to the problem of recycling and responsible waste disposal, but as I started to read it, I began to feel increasingly that it was rather too far divorced from reality to make it effective. In addition to this, it proffered some really bad science and poor plotting, so overall, I honestly don't feel I can recommend this series because it's ultimately a wolf in recycled sheep's clothing.

The Lane family, which in the opening adventure consists of George the dad and kids Evie, and Rick (mom Melinda is at work which is another issue) are eco-nuts who travel around in a hollowed-out Sequoia tree that had been brought down by lightning and now has been turned into a hovercraft. At the start of this story, they're trespassing on a wildlife preserve that has been turned into a garbage dump by a corporation owned by the father of one of Evie's class-mates, Vesuvia Piffle.

They're spotted, and get into trouble with Winterpole, the global policing organizing that fights any change at all. I found that amusing, except that Winterpole is more like the Nazis than ever it is like Interpol. They don't even have a trial any more: they simply impose a penalty! While there is no problem with a bird being killed by garbage dumping, it's against the law to remove that bird from certain death, because it's in a protected preserve! Sounds like something George Bush invented, huh? Actually Winterpole mostly reminded me of the bureaucracy in the Terry Gilliam movie, Brazil which is brilliant. Winterpole, not so much.

Some of the information included in the novel is a bit misleading at best. Yes, there is a North Pacific Gyre, but it's a oceanic circulation system which encompasses pretty much the whole of the North Pacific. It's not like it's a little whirlpool, so to talk about an island of trash here is misleading, not only because there is no such island, but also because it makes the North Pacific Gyre seem small and inconsequential, and it's not. Far from it. Yes, it is true that if you collected all the floating garbage in the Pacific together, it would make an impressive island of trash, but the trash is spread out thinly and as such, is not readily observable - which makes it all the more insidious and difficult to combat.

In this book, the story has it that the "island" is slowly being munched-down by three robot elephants invented by dad, which are turning it into floating plastic blocks. Dad's plan is to create the eighth continent here as a wild-life preserve. To me this was a completely wrong-headed lesson to give to children. If the plastic is toxic and dangerous, then how is making a whole continent out of it improving anything? And what would a floating continent do to Earth's oceanic eco-system? Very likely it would interrupt the North Pacific Gyre and precipitate an ice age. None of this is addressed, and the plan is fundamentally flawed, as I shall point out shortly.

Without that gyre, Earth's climate would change even more than it is already. Indeed, some scientists fear that global warming will kill these gyres (there are many of them, all important) and hence kill global oceanic circulation and bring on a new ice age. That sounds paradoxical, but it's actually a real danger. Almost worse than this, though, is the idea that we should abandon the rest of the Earth to corporate depredation and pollution, and build a little wildlife preserve in the middle of the Pacific to "protect" them. Such a deluded plan would inevitably fail.

You can't get the endangered species from the entire Earth and put them all into a microcosm in the North Pacific. There are too many species in widely varying eco-systems, in too many diverse locales to be able to 'fix it' by concentrating them all in one place. This sounds disturbingly like the Nazi plan of concentrating 'undesirables' in one place - the concentration camps - to 'fix' that 'problem'. It doesn't work because it's a fundamentally (with the emphasis on 'mental') idiotic idea to begin with. You can't fix our problems with global destruction. Nor can you fix them with a sci-fi version of the Noah's ark fantasy.

There were other minor issues - such as the fact that Switzerland doesn't celebrate Arbor day! I don't know what nationality Mr. Snow from Winterpole is, but it's odd to hear him talk of Arbor day in Switzerland, even if he is American. Another issue was the hypocrisy in having Lane senior obsess over global pollution when his own home is a polluted mess. At one point the kids go down through several basements, and there is a complete mess down there, including the results of explosions that have never been cleaned up, piles of junk, and rusting remains of archived artifacts. How is this any better than the pollution they were bewailing earlier? Yes, at least it's confined to his home, but it was a poor example to set and a poor choice by the author.

Why the male figure in the Lane family is portrayed as the scientist and the woman as your standard clichéd corporate rep is a genderist mystery I don't have the patience to go into here. Suffice to say this was one in a plethora of issues I had with this book. In one instance, Rick, wearing a SCUBA said he could smell Evie's breath. That's hard to believe (even if it wasn't her breath he was actually smelling). The author evidently didn't grasp the 'self-contained' part of the underwater breathing apparatus.

In this same section, the author has these kids diving in the Arctic ocean wearing wet suits. No! It's a dry suit for the bitterly cold water, otherwise you'll freeze! That wasn't even as bad as the fact that they were near the North Pole and yet there was no ice save for a few icebergs. I didn't get whether this was meant to be in the future where the North Pole ice has all melted because of climate change, or whether the author simply didn't grasp that near the north pole, the water is frozen. Maybe he meant 'near the ice cap' instead of' near the pole', but that's not what he wrote. Maybe he doesn't actually understand the concept of the North Pole (or the fact that here are two of them!), because if he did, he could have offered a great, and for children, rather mind-blowing teaching tool here. The magnetic north pole is all over the place. Even the geographic north pole moves because of the Chandler wobble. The North Magnetic Pole, which is what we typically count on as being due north, was determined in 2001 to be in Canada, almost ten degrees away from the geographic pole. Now if that doesn't offer a stupendous potential for an hilarious story, I don't know what does. But it was lost here.

There was a so-called "thermal-charge power plant" which appeared at one point in the story, but this is just another name for a perpetual motion machine, which is impossible and as unscientific as you can get. The biggest "impossible" of all, however, was this compound which supposedly converts all inorganic matter into organic matter, and which is what supposedly will help them make their eighth continent livable. I mentioned I would address this, and I see two problems with it.

First of all, the "continent" is to be created from the plastic garbage in the Pacific, but the compound only works on non-organic matter, and the plastic is organic, so it would not work! I think the author doesn't understand the definition of "organic" in this context. It doesn't mean things which are grown without artificial fertilizer or without antibiotics. It doesn't even mean "living things". In this context, it means things which contain carbon. Plastics made from oil contain carbon! The compound would have no effect on it!

The second problem is, if you have a compound which converts everything non-organic into organic matter (which would be an amazing thing that defied the laws of physics), then how do you contain it? This is a two-fold problem, first regarding storage and second concerning containment in a much broader sense. In what vessel would you store such a compound? You can't keep it in a metal container or a glass container: it would convert it and get loose! You could keep it in an organic container, but what happens as soon as you unleash it to do the work it's designed to do? Recall that this is supposed to be unleashed on a continent surrounded by water - which is inorganic (no carbon)! The water would be converted, and without water the entire planet would die! These people are not scientists, they're morons. I know this is a children's book but does that mean we have to make it stupid?

A separate issue I encountered is one which is common in children's stories involving a school: the unrelenting and unpunished bullying and rampant snobbery. I shudder to think what kind of horrific schools these writers encountered in their youth for them to write in this way. Snobbery is not a crime, but bullying is - or ought to be - in schools. Why were these people able to get away with it? Why were the parents of the victims not up in arms over it? The fact that this is tolerated as a fact of life here is a sad example to set in a book aimed at children.

In one part of the story, when running around in Winterpole's headquarters, the two Lane kids, upon discovering piles of paperwork, made a point about the waste of ink, yet not a word was spoken about the waste of trees! This is so sad in a book which purports to be about eco-consciousness. It was doubly sad, because it was at this same point in the story where things really picked-up and started to be rather entertaining, as Rick and Evie ran around trying to avoid capture. At the risk of being hypocritical myself, I longed for them to wreak more havoc than they did here. Setting the place on fire or blowing it up would have been the wrong way to go, but could there not have been some mulching device turned loose, and shredded the whole building, or something?! No, there could not, and the story never did regain the spark of riotous mischief it had here.

That was the only part of the book that I really enjoyed, yet still I felt let down by it. The rest of it was passable in terms of technical considerations, and in terms of it being the kind of story young kids might like, but in terms of fulfilling its ostensible objective, I found this book to be a serious disappointment and I can't recommend it, and I know my kids would reject it. But then they have a decent science education.

The Blue Nowhere by Jeffrey Deaver

Rating: WARTY!

Read by Dennis Boutsikaris, this audio book went nowhere for me. The reading wasn't very inspired and the subject matter was boring, so I think this is the last Deaver I'm going to read, too. I didn't like his take on James Bond, and that really takes some skill to be able to write a James Bond novel and make it suck. I couldn't do it.

The premise here is that there's a hacker who is also a serial killer. He hacks into his victim's computers and spies on them, learning all about them, which enables him to socially engineer his way into close proximity - because it's all about feeling them tremble as he knifes them. He sees them as characters in a vast computer game, nothing more.

Naturally the police free a hacker from jail to counteract the exceptional skills of their perp, but the levels of incompetence and thoughtlessness these people routinely display is a caricature. The counter-hacker and the police department's own computer experts are scary in their cluelessness, and it's actually insulting to these people. I honestly don't believe they don't have better people than this working in law enforcement. It's also a very male-centric story, with women just put in as victims or set decoration, so it wasn't really very interesting there, either.

I made it through three of the five or six disks and decided there are better books waiting for me and life's too short. This was too much Jeffrey showing off how much he'd read about hacking, and not thinking things through properly. No wonder it's so short.

Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue Deconnick

Rating: WARTY!

Kelly Sue Deconnick was batting a .500 with me. Now she's down to .333! This one sounded like a fun romp from the blurb, but isn't that the blurb's job - drag you in no matter what it takes? The fact is that I didn't like this. Others may disagree, but to me it didn't seem very supportive of - or complimentary to - women. It also seemed disorganized and wasteful of paper. I read the e-version, so no trees suffered, but this was clearly designed for a print version, which was itself problematical. The problem with e-versions of comic books is that the regular tablet screen is smaller than the printed comic, so the images and the text are all compressed somewhat, making for a read of sometimes questionable quality.

Two-page spreads simply do not work on a pad, because (at least in Bluefire reader on my iPad) it will show only one page at a time, and even if you rotate the pad to landscape view, it merely makes the page smaller - it doesn't show you the other page in the spread. There are probably settings to make it show two pages at a time, but then you're screwed because it's too small to read. Yes, you can enlarge the image, but then you're screwed because you're constantly having to slide the image around to see all of it. In short, it doesn't work in the e-version and comic book creators don't seem to be able to get this into their heads.

There was one other issue, too, in the e-version. Pages 118 and 119 were completely devoid of text. This isn't down to this comic alone. I've seen this before in other comics I've read in e-version. The speech balloons were there, but no one was home! I don't know what causes this, and it was just these two pages, but the images alone failed to convey what was being said there, not even vaguely, so this was a serious fail form more than one perspective.

So much for technical problems. What about the graphic novel itself? Graphic novels are all about imagery, but for me unless they're also about story, they don't work. I mean if I want simply to look at pretty pictures I can go to an art show or buy a coffee-table book. I need a story to come with the images. The images alone, especially in this case where they were less than wonderful as they were here, don't do it unless the comic is designed for them to do it, such as the Love comic series, for example, which has so far been excellent. So art work having failed, the entire thing came down to the story, and this story made little sense.

First of all, it's a rip-off of Margaret Atwood's The Hand-Maid's by way of the movie Rollerball, and the intention is to presumably and eventually show these oppressed women as victors, yet here they are starting out from a position of defeat when they had previously - i.e. in our own time - been gaining successes after previously being in a position of oppression for centuries. How are we supposed to imagine them being victorious when clearly the premise here is that they've obviously been thoroughly defeated and humiliated, and when nothing has changed since that defeat, whenever and however it came about?

Worse than this, nothing was offered to explain how this sorry state came to be from what we have now. How did women become even more objectified, even more doll-like, even more subjugated than they already are today? What this story says to me is that women were somehow weak or inadequate, or passive that they descended from the hard-won position they're in today - not ideal, I admit, but a lot better than they had a hundred - even a thousand - years ago. How did this happen? What went wrong? This is an important question and it's unanswered - at least in this volume.

I found the central idea of this novel to be contradictory. The idea that "bad women" - in this novel, those who fail to conform to a male-centric view of how a woman should be - are actually then rewarded by this absurdly punitive and oppressive society, in that they're treated to an interstellar trip to what, for all intents and purposes, appears to be more akin to holiday camp in another solar system than ever it does to a penal system - or even a penile system! On this "prison" planet, they don't have to deal with men at all! That's like punishing homosexuals by locking them up with a bunch of sex-starved and horny male prisoners! We've wised-up about that, but here, we're being told that if the evil men-that-be are intent upon punishing or even reforming these women, they send them on vacation?

Interstellar travel is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. It's definitely not the the modern equivalent of shipping convicts to Australia and leaving them there. It cannot be justified given the premise we're presented here: that women are second class and devalued. Why would this be the result of infractions in the future, when today men and women are - at least on paper - equal, yet women are routinely treated as second-class, objectified, and raped? Wouldn't the future be worse if this is truly a society in which women are openly and actively treated as second class citizens? Understand that I'm certainly not prescribing such a thing, but the novel seemed like it wasn't very well thought out to me, given this and other plot points.

Note that there's a lot of nudity and bad language in this story. Talking of objectivity, the nudity is all female. This doesn't bother me, but it may bother others. What I found intriguing about all the nudity (aside from comic book artists complete lack of inhibition over portraying nude females contrasted with their fastidious avoidance of male nudity) was that in this future world, all women no longer shave. There's no explanation offered for this. Not that I have any say in it, but personally I prefer a natural look; however, that's not the fashion today in the US, so again we have a circumstance holding for which there is no explanation offered. It's one more unanswered question amidst many.

Perhaps the biggest problem though, is in the way these women are "allowed" (from the plot) to try to escape this slavery. It isn't through smarts. Once again it's through exploitation of their bodies - through sports, and not even via intelligent individualism! Seriously? Yet again it comes down to: "Hey, don't concern yourself with what's in their pretty little heads, just focus on their bodies, because let's face it, that's all they really have to offer, isn't it?" I'm never able to avoid raising eyebrows at the sheer number of female authors who evidently buy into this, at least as judged by how they write.

Maybe things change in future volumes? I can't speak to that, but for this volume, I honestly think a story is insulting to women when they're put into a position of having to act like male stereotypes, or of kow-towing to men to garner a victory. There are a lot of different ways of being a kick-ass female; I just wish female writers would explore more of those instead of confining their lead females to being 'men with tits' as the phrase has it. I can't recommend this, and I have no desire to read any more in this series. I think this needed a far better grounding and a lot stronger plot than it has. The way it is, it simply doesn't work in my opinion.

Try Not to Breathe by Holly Seddon

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an advance review copy of a "murder mystery" novel, although technically no murder occurs. It’s set in 2010 in Britain and uses a lot of colloquialisms, so if you're not British and not a Brit-o-phile, you may find this a little obscure in places, but overall, I think this is well-written and a worthy read. I had some issues with it which I will mention, but overall, the characters are complex, flawed, realistic, and well portrayed, and in general terms it was well-written.

One example which tripped me up more than once (since it involved the same verb) was where the author would write something like "his parents rowed in sharp little bursts." The word I read as rowed, as in 'they rowed the boat across the lake', was actually a British word meaning argued and is pronounced to rhyme with "Ow!" such as a person would say if they hurt themselves. I think the author would have a better chance of transatlantic success if she changed that out.

On another occasion the author wrote "told Any that I was getting married" where she meant, I assume, 'Amy' rather than 'Any'. A spellchecker isn't going to catch hat! Only a good beta reader or editor will. One sentence which made me wonder was the one which ended thus: " and scorched some guesses where they lay." I think the word the author intended here was 'scotched' (meaning to end or to foil rather than 'scorched' meaning to destroy by fire. There's only one letter difference, and 'scorched' did make some sort of sense, so maybe I'm wrong here and the usage was intentional, but it didn't read right to me.

The story has changing PoVs (although thankfully only one of them is first person!). There are flashbacks which I normally do not like. In this case they were not bad to begin with, but frankly became a little tedious as the story progressed. The story is told from three perspectives: Amy, the girl who is raped, Jacob, the guy who dated her in high school, and Alex, the alcoholic journalist who is trying to get back on the rails, and to discover what really happened to Amy fifteen years before.

I'm not a huge fan of murder mysteries although I've read a few and once in a while find one that looks interesting. This one was interesting because it wasn't a murder mystery - it was an attempted murder mystery - and the victim, Amy, is in a vegetative state and has been since she was attacked when she was fifteen.

The rapist/would-be murderer was never caught, and Alex is trying to sell this story to a national newspaper for which she used to work many years before, and which she left in disgrace. They won't buy it without some new breakthrough in the story - like other murders or attempted murders done in a similar style, or new evidence showing up. The police have pretty much abandoned this since it's so old.

The alcoholism works in that at one point, Alex thinks that someone has broken into her house and stolen a look at her notebook where she's writing down the results of her investigation. She was sleeping upstairs at the time and thought she heard noises, but was too paralyzed with fear to investigate, and now, because of her alcoholic fuzz, she can't be sure anyone broke in at all. There was a window open and nothing was stolen, so she doesn't report it to the police, thinking they won't believe her. Her ex, who is a police officer in a different area, doesn't believe her. He's pretty much lost patience with her because of her past alcohol abuse. The idea of the break in itself made no sense to me, but that aside, it was well-written.

The novel is set in 2010 for reasons I did not grasp. For a good story, one year is as good as another, but why 2010 instead of 2015, or 2001, or whatever, I can only wonder. The story flashes back often to Amy, who is a disaffected fifteen-year-old who lusts after an older man. The problem is that when a chance finally comes for her to get it on with this guy, he (or perhaps someone else!) attempts post-coital murder. He fails in that, but leaves Amy hospitalized in a vegetative state. This was one of the problems for me. I don't want to post any spoilers, but I simply did not get the motive for this guy to do what he did. It made no sense at all to me, and to have it come down to him when he's hardly been in the story at all, felt like a real let-down.

Alex encounters Amy in the hospital, still uncommunicative, but apparently with some brain function. She also encounters Jacob, who is a volunteer visitor. Jacob has his own set of issues. He married his ideal partner, Fiona, but ever since then, the marriage seems to have slipped somehow and now is more fricassee than fantasy. Intent upon getting something out of her encounter with Amy that she could turn into a sale-able article, Alex starts delicately investigating what happened, and manages to get an interview with her father and some of her school friends.

I had a small issue with part of the story where Amy's father talks to Alex about his life before Amy was raped and nearly murdered. He is very slightly older than his wife: “Yeah, Jo was twenty-two when I met her. We had about eighteen months between us..." yet this is made out to be some sort of huge gap, whereas it really isn’t. I don't know of any young people of that age who could consider eighteen months to be such a yawning chasm, so I'm not sure whether the author got the age discrepancy wrong, or changed it later and didn’t adjust the text to compensate, or if she really does consider it to be a huge difference. It just seemed like a complete non-entity to me.

That said, there were very few problems with the writing in this novel, which was impressive and made for a nice read, although as I said, it started to drag towards the end. This was seventy-nine chapters, and although the novel itself was not really long, it felt like it was maybe twenty-nine chapters too long. I can't tell you how long this book actually is because there was no page numbering, not even in the iPad version. This is another failing of ebooks. The kindle app version was screwed up, too. For example, when I was sixty-one percent into the book, the little notification at the bottom of the screen told me I had six minutes left in the book - not the chapter, but the entire book! - which was pure nonsense.

But every book has problems, and this one, in general was a worthy read, so I recommend it, keeping the above-mentioned caveats in mind.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2009 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1969 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1910 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTHY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

www:Wonder by Robert J Sawyer

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

Vampire Academy graphic novel by Richelle Mead

Rating: WORTHY!

I favorably reviewed Vampire Academy (the original novel) back in May of 2014, and I favorably reviewed the movie, too. This is a third strike and you're in review since I liked this graphic novel, too.

I had no interest in the original print book version of this until I learned that some school (or schools) had taken the unprecedented and rather bizarre step of banning this entire series: not this novel per se, but the entire series, including unwritten future volumes! I thought this was so absurd as to be a joke, but then this is what organized religion does to people - it forces them to behave like morons. As for me, I was curious as to what it was that was in this series which had provoked such an extremist reaction. There was nothing to account for it other than religiously inspired stupidity. The first thing kids are going to do when they discover a novel is banned from school is to seek it out and read it!

This graphic novel, adapted by Leigh Dragoon and illustrated by Emma Vieceli, followed the original print book quite closely, but with a few necessary abbreviations, so I'm going to refer you to that review for details. With regard to this one, I enjoyed it. It was a fast read, well illustrated (if a little flatly) and it moved at a cracking pace. I recommend it, especially if you haven't read the novel.

Life Sucks by Jennifer Abel

Rating: WORTHY!

This graphic novel about vampires is hilarious. It deftly removes all the sickly sparkle from the modern genre (a sparkle which was never there in the early vampire stories save for the one written by John Polidori (The Vampyre), inspired on that famous night when Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein). In this story, there wasn't a glimmer of glamour. This one is more like a cross between Dracula and Clerks. The art work by the unlikely named Warren Pleece, and by Gabriel Soria was functional but nothing spectacular by any means. I wonder if this style was chosen precisely because it complemented the dressed-down" text? Who knows?!

The story is of a young man, Dave, who applied for a night shift job at a convenience store. He didn't know the store owner was a vampire, so went happily into the stock room where he was "turned" and became enslaved to his maker. I don't know who first invented that trope, but it is popular in the genre. Now the sort owner can get his employee to do anything he wants him to do for minimum wage and he can't be denied! Great business plan, huh? The sad thing is that from the employee's perspective, nothing has improved - it's all deteriorated. Dave doesn't get women fawning over him as vampires are popularly supposed to do. He still has to work for a living (so-called), and he used to be a vegetarian, so now his diet is appalling to him. He drinks plasma and substitutes, shrinking nauseously from the idea of actually biting someone. Un-life seems hardly worth living until he encounters a charming Goth girl, Rosa, a Latina.

Here's where the novel took a bit of a slide for me, because the only thing he (and his friends) have to say about the girl is that she's beautiful, so here we are once again objectifying women. Rosa is given no other credit. Admittedly the guy is lusting for her from afar and doesn't know her when the novel begins, and admittedly he's not the sharpest tack in the box, but this business of rating women solely on their looks is as primitive as it is obnoxious when you get right down to it. Graphic novels in particular need to get over this. In this case it was bad because Rosa is shown to be rather dumb and precipitous, so maybe they were right, and beauty is all she actually had going for her.

The funny thing here is that Rosa has a rather Twilight take on vampires and sees them as suave, sophisticated, wealthy dilettantes. She's unconvinced when Dave tries to educate her about how un-life actually is. Rosa starts falling for surfer vampire (now there's a concept) Wes, and Dave rails against it, pissing Rosa off, until she finds out for herself how Wes really is. Later, she learns of Dave's true nature. She wants him to turn her, but he won't, because he doesn't want to condemn her to his un-life style.

The ending is crappy, but it's worth putting up with that for the rest of the story. I recommend this as a worthy read.

The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia C DeFelice

Rating: WORTHY!
read by?

Read very competently by Christina Moore, this audio book is book one of the 'Ghost Mysteries' series. I'm not a fan of series mostly because they tend to be filled with fluff, repetitive, and un-inventive, but some are worthy or reading. This one isn't. I didn't even realize this was the start of a series until I read some other reviews for it, but at least it wasn't in first person PoV! The reviews were a bit odd; even one and two star reviews said this was a good read. I don't understand how you can rate a novel two stars and say it's good in any way. This is why I don't subscribe to the five stars review system. It's really meaningless. A novel is either worth the time or it isn't, period. For me, and acknowledging that I am not its intended audience, this one wasn't.

It started out great. It was age appropriate (it's middle grade) and had a gripping beginning: Allie the fossil-hunting explorer is stuck about a hundred feet up a crumbling shale cliff face and thinks she's going to fall when a voice comes out of nowhere and talks her down safely with no more than cuts and abrasions for her troubles. Allie starts to hear the voice more often, and finds herself the beneficiary of a nice old blank diary - in which words start appearing slowly, rather like the diary in Harry Potter #2.

The problem with ghost and horror stories like this is that it makes no sense that the mystery is slowly unveiled. I see this all the time in this kind of tale - the horrors or the ghostly visitations begin slowly with random bits and pieces building to a crescendo. Why? The authors never explain that. Obviously it's to draw the reader in and build tension, but within the story it makes no sense. The Exorcist was a classic example of this kind of build-up, although that did contain some rationale for the slow burn - it was to draw in the priests and keep people confused, but in the case of this story, where Lucy Styles was evidently murdered, why did the ghost simply not tell Allie "I was murdered by X" right from the off? Nothing is offered to account for this!

If the ghost can talk Allie down a cliff face, clearly it has no problem with communication. Why not say "I'm Lucy, I have some 'splainin' to do! My body is buried at location X, and I was murdered by person Y, you can find evidence for this hidden in spot Z"? Clearly it's so the author can spin this out into a short story, but when nothing is given to account for the lethargy, it makes the story sound amateurish and fake.

That wasn't even the worst problem. Obviously in a children's story, the children have to be the center of the action. You can't have them failing to solve a mystery and encounter no danger or delight of sudden discovery because they handed-off the evidence to the police or to their parents, but there are ways of writing those scenarios which make them bear at least a veneer of realism. This author didn't even offer a mocking obeisance to realism. Even though a lot of her information comes from the ghost, Allie has Lucy's diary which at the very least offers motive for murder. Any police officer worth their salt would see that this was worth a look.

Allie could have gone to her parents (although her dad was a bit of a dick) or to the police with a reasonable expectation of seeing justice done, but she didn't. Her best friend, "Dub", proved to be a dick because he made only one really lame attempt to suggest going to the police and never suggested going to her parents at all. Maybe he was wise not to do so: Allie's father could see she was plainly scared one night, yet it flew right over his head like he was a moron. This bad dad never even noticed how scared she was. Worse even than this was that in writing the story this way, all that's revealed is that we have yet another female author who apparently delights in showing her main female character to be clueless. This is particularly evident in the dénouement where she completely fails to call for help even though help is within hailing distance, and she knows it. The ending is entirely predictable given the beginning. It reads like fanfic or amateur fiction.

I can't get with stories like that, especially not when they are young children's stories, which exemplify kids - and for no intelligent reason - acting like imbeciles or airheads. Why not just make Allie a blonde to complete the ridiculous cliché? I'm sure that there are children in the intended age range who will enjoy this story, but I don't think it's a good idea to write stories like this and I won't recommend this one or the series if it's anything like this first volume.

Scenes from and Impending Marriage by Adrian Tomine

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a little square book - almost like a children's picture book outwardly, but containing a series of graphic novel sketches of the author's approach to marriage. From the last panel, it looked like his wife talked him into creating a graphic record of the planning leading up to the wedding which could then be given as a gift to attendees. Afterwards, I guess he decided to publish the story (with a name redacted here and there), so we have Adrian's little blue book!

After I skimmed a couple of pages in the library, I decided this looked like it might be a worthy read and it was. It was funny and not over the top. I'm not a big fan of births, deaths, and marriages, and I think too many couples put too much work and money into the wedding that could be better used post-nuptials on other things, but it is a special day, and if people want to go overboard on marking it, then obviously, it's up to them.

I just think that the more importance you heap onto this one short event, the more risk there is that you're setting yourself up for failure because of the immense expectations, not just over the event itself, but over the life which follows it. What makes marriage special to me has nothing to do with overt celebration. It's about the commitment you make when you say the words, whether they're in a registrar's office, or a cathedral, or on a beach, or a mountaintop. Without that commitment, it's all just a circus, isn't it?

The wedding preparations here might strike some as over the top or too rich, so this short graphic novel may have limited appeal, but it's always fun to learn about the lifestyles of others, and how they cope when going through the same thing you went through - or are planning on going through. it's also a great source of ideas for writing fiction, so to me this was fun and entertaining.

The artwork is relatively simple - black and white line drawings - but it's very good and also amusing, and the humor was enjoyable, particularly the single frame cartoon images which were interspersed with the more regular panel stories. I rate this a worthy read.

Lillian's Right to Vote by Jonah Winter, Shane W Evans

Rating: WORTHY!

Yes, it's definitely Jonah month on my blog. I've not only reviewed two novels with characters named Jonah, I now have a young children's picture book penned by a Jonah! This one is about exercising your right to vote. I remember some time ago someone coming to my door trying to 'get out the vote', and I expressed my refusal to do so, and she tried to lecture me that it was my duty to vote. No, it's my right to vote. It's my duty to exercise that vote or withhold it according to my conscience, and that year I was not going to hypocritically vote for person A simply to deny person B, when I couldn't stand A or B!

Lillian is a black female senior citizen - based on real life Lillian Allen (no, not that Lillian Allen, the other one) - and even though it means climbing this huge hill at her age, she is going to vote. When she looks up that hill into the blue sky, Lillian sees more than an opportunity to share in governance; she sees her great-great grandparents being sold in front of that same courthouse, where only white men were allowed to vote.

As Jonah Winter's writing is stirring, Shane Evans's artwork is rich, and intriguing, carrying an illusion of texture, just as the voting system carried an illusion of equality. It doesn't matter how impressive it is that a law was passed way back in 1870 denying exclusion based on race, color or previous condition of servitude, if the right people make the wrong decisions, the vote is lost.

This was the fifteenth amendment to the US constitution - the constitution which the founding fathers supposedly did such a brilliant job on! If the white folks in power could find a way to prevent the colored folks from voting, they found it and used it. They still do. Poll taxes may no longer be valid, but other methods are used now. Because the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, women didn't get the vote until the nineteenth amendment, half a century later!

Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, this book makes for a really good read. It's an important piece of history and well-worth reading to your children. I recommend it, but what I would like to see is a book like this about true empowerment, because despite bullshit web sites which claim to show that one vote is important, it really isn't. Lots of one votes pulling together are very important, but one, by itself, in an election where there are thousands of votes, makes no difference, not when your only voting options are limited to those with money, and essentially to an unchanging binary "choice" between A or B, since few who don't kow-tow to those two major parties ever get elected. It makes no difference even if your vote does count if it's really a vote for those who kiss the asses of lobbyists for big business - monkey business which can and does derail pristine legislation.

What I'd like to see is a story about how a child can grow up and become an honest, independent representative, voting for what's best for the nation regardless of what vested interests try to rationalize.

The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a brilliant novel and well-worth reading, but it was seriously larded with spelling and grammatical issues, which is actually quite shameful given that the author is, however admirably, a librarian! It does, however, prove my point that you can give me a novel that's less than exemplary, but if it's written well-enough in terms of characterization and plot, I'll rate it worthy despite technical issues. Note that this was an advance review copy, so troubles are always possible, but a lot of these were issues which ought to have been caught during the writing and editing process. We're no longer in the era of real galleys laboriously put together with little lead characters wedged into metal trays. In the ebook era, it's less and less easy to excuse this kind of writing, but I'm placing my faith in the assumption that these issues will be cleared up long before this ever hits the stores.

I list, on my blog and in my review to the publisher, the examples I noticed, but I'm not listing them elsewhere, because they detract from what was, in the final analysis, and viewed as a whole, a really, really good story that I warmed to exceedingly quickly, and stayed with throughout. There was never a time when I felt it was slipping, or becoming repetitive or boring. This was also a first person PoV novel which I normally rail against, but even so, I do always say that some writers can carry it, and this author evidently is one such writer - at least in this case! Next time he may piss me off to no end, but it actually makes me marvel that here, he has done a better job at writing a female main character than far too many young adult authors do in far too many YA series. I mean, seriously? Why can this guy write a better girl than some female authors can?

Of course, I'm not a female (nor do I play one on TV), so I'm willing to grant that my perceptions and expectations may be rather at variance with those of readers who have a hundred percent mark-up on the number of X chromosomes I have at my disposal, but having said that, we men do have fifty percent female in our sex chromosomes, whereas females don't have any male in theirs! Actually some do - we're no more binary in our sex chromosomes than we are in our genders, but that aside, maybe guys do have an edge when writing across gender? Maybe not! I'll leave you all to argue that out amongst yourselves, while I carry on with the review over here, quietly in the corner...!

It's not that Dahlia Moss is like a kick-ass character in the comic book sense - busting into places, taking down villains, making smart remarks, zeroing in on clues. Far from it: she's really a bit on the weak and retiring side, and she's not exactly the sharpest knife in the box, yet she wins through in the end, and looks good doing it. And by looks good, I don't mean she's a beauty queen. She isn't. But she's still fine; she still manages to have appeal to spare, leaving in shadow far too many female 'heroines' of YA literature. She even has to be rescued at the end - after a fashion - yet she is still, in my estimation, a kick-ass character. Note that while I keep referencing YA literature, this is more of a YA-to-adult book in terms of the age of the characters. They're all grown-ups here; young but adult.

Dahlia is hired by rich boy Jonah to find out who stole the "Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing." which is a virtual object in an online computer role-playing game. He puts Dahlia onto a member of his 'guild' in the game - a guy named Kurt, who seems completely uninterested in Dahlia or in talk of spears. By turns invested and dis-empowered, Dahlia starts investigating every member of the guild and slowly zeroes in on the thief, but what she doesn't expect is that almost immediately she begins this real life quest, Jonah is killed irl with a replica of the very spear he lost online.

Relationships which were rather complex to begin with, start to become ever more complex and obtuse now. I keep saying I'm not a fan of worst person PoV, but I keep saying once in a while there's a writer and a story which can carry it off, but it's rare that I get to say that such an exception is a great example of that incongruous confluence of possibility. This one is. I still don't like the voice, because it's so full of self-importance and limitations to your story-telling, but here it works and works well. Besides, how can you not at least start out liking a story that begins, "The only time I ever met Jonah Long he was wearing a fake beard, a blue pin-striped captain's outfit, and a toy pipe that blew soap bubbles."

And now a word - or several - about the errors. There were errors of bad grammar, spelling, and punctuation. A simple final spell-check would have caught the most egregious of the spelling issues, but actually, the bulk of these problems were subtle enough that only a good editor or beta reader would catch them. A lot of the 'misspellings' were homophones, where the word was spelled correctly, but it was the wrong word for the context. No spell-check will catch these. There were examples of a homophone and misspelling in the same sentence. As for the grammar problems, it was a mixed bag, with some bad grammar, some words missing, text oddities, and words out of order(!) or other issues which obscured the sense. There was also a slight continuity problem with the sharpness of the spear!

This things aside, I rate this a very worthy read and recommend it.

There were times when I thought maybe the author had written a given sentence that way intentionally for subtle humor or because it was some geek thing of which I was unaware, but the sheer number of these mitigated against writing them all off with those excuses. There were also times when it looked like the author had dictated the text and it had been misheard during transcription. So here they are.

Bad grammar/punctuation
"I can state these rule" (wrong number: 'these rules' or 'this rule', not a mix!)
"something ,then" (comma in wrong place)

Misspellings that a spell-checker would catch
"Ddriver"
"Gunpiont"

Spelled correctly, but wrong word(s)
"the king of thing that pisses me" (kind of thing)
"wedge the sticky T-shirt down her hallow" ('hallow' should be 'hollow')
"They'll be food, at least." (there'llbe food - might have been funny if the story had been about cannibals or zombies!)
"task now is more difficult that simply taking a boy out" (than simply taking a boy out)
"crossed-referenced a list" ('cross-referenced')
"And Nathan was back to his usual amiable self. Whatever had troubled them there had been just a momentary blip." (whatever had troubled him there...)
"it's not big deal" ('it's no big deal' or 'it's not a big deal')
"had an unreasonably head start" (unreasonable head start)
"Sylvia, it had to be said, looked remarkably like her sun." (like her son)
"probably the result of a guilty conscious crumbling at Jonah's posthumous largesse." (guilty conscience)

Misspelling and wrong word in same sentence
"given that I had planted my phone in a knoll on the murderesss." (knoll is a small hill. This word was used many times wrongly in place of hollow. Also, murderess has one 's' too many, and I have issues with the 'ess' part irrespective of spelling. Why must we specify a 'murderess rather than simply murderer? It's a form of genderism to me, but I see it frequently: actress, murderess, hostess, mattress (that last one might not be real...)

Missing word
"Why would do that?" (should have read something like "Why would she do that")
"At the risk of coming as completely callous" (coming off as....)

Obscure English
"I felt like a combination having an earworm and heartburn. My best option was to chance the subject." ("combination of an earworm..." and 'change' instead of 'chance')
"The certainty that she had put on a bug me hit all at once" (seems like words were unintentionally transposed here)
"as though it were pitched outside of the normal of range of human hearing." (too many 'of's!)
"'Ndiyo,' said Francis, which I assumed was yes for Swahili." (Swahili for 'yes'?)

Text oddities
"or for tanking aggro off a raid boss" (I have no idea what this means - maybe draining off, leaching off? Taking aggro off? )
"sort of muddled about in folding chairs" (muddled about amongst the folding chairs?)

At one point Hindi is spoken, but the text appears as minuscule black characters on a white background in a Kindle app on my phone. Note that I have the screen background black, and the text white as a battery saving measure, so the text looked like it was in the negative to me. No matter how much I enlarged the text in this kindle app on the phone, the Hindi text was never large enough to see it clearly.

"queen of England" - Elizabeth 2nd is the queen of the United Kingdom (inter alia), which includes England, but given that this was a character's speech, you can get away with it because people do speak in ignorance like that.

"dominated my life a little bit" - contradiction in terms! Again this is something you can get away with in a 1PoV novel since it's the character speaking, but it's worth keeping in mind that it makes no sense!

"...I have been out cashing favors."
For Charice to say that was ominous. Almost everyone seemed to owe her, somehow, and who knows what strange circumstances would occur from a cached favor?

This was an example of "Was the author trying to be clever, or was it merely inattention?" Caching, in computer geek speak, means holding something in memory ready for immediate use, so I liked the wordplay between cashing and caching, even though it didn't make a lot of sense. When I ran into so many other such issues, I decided this was a mistake, and not a play on words.

Problems with continuity with the spear point
"The blade itself was sharp and shining,"
[It was] "Sharp enough to do the job"
"He shouldn't have made the thing so sharp in the first place"
"the spear wasn’t actually all that sharp"

Note that there was more than one copy of the spear, but the problem here was that it was not made clear until almost the end of the novel that all but the first copy - the murder weapon - were purposefully blunted, but this didn't rob me of my point, because Dahlia never had access to the murder weapon. She only ever saw copies, so from her PoV, she was talking about the same spear in effect. This was the root of the continuity problem. That said, I liked this book and would read a sequel. I'd even beta read a sequel if it would help!