Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Title: Catch-22
Author: Joseph Heller
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!

Read by Jay O Sanders who does a really good job. The only complaint I have about the audio side of this is that there is loud music at the start and end of every disk. I appreciate that the start and end of each the disk is marked - that's useful - but does it have to be with a full thirty seconds of loud music which appears to be some sort of weird combination of "God rest ye Merry, Gentlemen" and a drum cadence...?

What can I say about one of my favorite novels of all time that isn't just embarrassing gushing? I am so in love with this book. The odd thing is that I have read other material by Heller (Good as Gold Something Happened, and found it horrible. Indeed, I am so turned off by his other material that I rejected a chance just yesterday to pick up the sequel to this (Closing Time) written 34 years later, for only one dollar, based on that and a quick read of one or two pages. It looked like it sucked. Catch-22 is only this one of his which made any impression on me, and that one really hit the sweet spot. In fact it hit the suite spot because it settled down and made itself at home.

I first read it when I was living on a kibbutz in Israel, and some kind soul left this behind in the desultory "library" and I just went head over heels for it, which is funny because the first sentence in the novel is: "It was love at first sight". The novel pretty much bombed in the US when it was first released, but it sky-rocketed to number one in the UK. Maybe that's why I like it - my UK genes! I think the Americans don't have a finely developed sense of the absurd and the ridiculous that the UK has - at least they didn't in 1961. This is why The Goons, and their bastard son Monty Python's Flying Circus bloomed in the UK, and the US had to rip all that off by developing Saturday Night Live to get to the same place spiritually!

But beware! Catch-22 is a jigsaw which the reader has to put together, and I've never had so much fun with a jigsaw in my life. The novel is not chronologically rational (or at all rational for that matter!), jumping back and forth and going over the same events more than once, filling in missing details each time until the picture becomes clear. It's like starting with a pencil sketch over which each of the primary colors is laid, one by one, eventually producing a full-color image.

According to wikipedia, the novel almost wasn't called Catch-22. It began as Catch-18, and went through incarnations of Catch-11, Catch-14, and Catch-17. It’s a great example of a novel which did poorly when it first came out and finally took off as a paperback before becoming an institution and donating its title to the world lexicon, yet even after fifty years in continuous print it has sold only 10 million copies. The lesson here is that you should not be disheartened if your own novel doesn’t do well to begin with - but don’t expect your own novel to fly like this one has, either!

The amusing thing about the novel's title is that Catch-22 actually doesn't exist - not officially. It’s merely a ruse to allow the powers that be to do whatever they want and Captain John Yossarian, the main protagonist, is very impressed with its efficacy:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. (p56)

Catch number 22 also is very versatile. It’s referred to as a justification in other contexts throughout the novel, such as the one which says that "they" have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. "We" is the multiplicity of characters in Catch-22, all of whom have intriguing stories, but the glue of the novel is Captain Yossarian, a bombardier on one of the B25s, flying for the U.S. Army Air Forces from a base on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa. Heller warns his readers in a note in the front of the novel that the actual island of Pianosa is too small to hold everything depicted in the novel, but we’re glad that didn’t prevent him from writing all those things. Heller himself was a bombardier who flew sixty missions in 1944, and the novel is rooted strongly in his own experiences and impressions of the war, and his disbelief that he survived when statistically, he should have died three times undertaking that many missions.

We see the bulk of the novel from Yossarian's rather warped perspective, even in those parts where he doesn’t appear, because Yossarian is so crazy about the big picture that he's sane. He's right that everyone is trying to kill him, he's just wrong about their motives. The thing about him is that he's a good and brave bombardier who is effectively a victim of PTSD. He would have actually been able to complete his missions and go home if he didn’t keep sneaking off to the hospital to hide out with trumped-up medical complaints. He even earned a medal, which is a real problem for those in authority who would like to do something about him, but can’t because of his mild celebrity status - of which they also try to take advantage.

The best way to tell this novel is the way Heller himself does it - through the characters. Here they are listed alphabetically by the title and name.

Appleby
is from Iowa. He's relatively new to the squadron but quickly asserts himself as an over-achiever. He tries to get Yossarian into trouble over the Great Atabrine Insurrection. Appleby has flies in his eyes, but he can't see them because of the flies in his eyes.

Captain Aardvark
is known as Aarfy and is the perennially lost navigator in Yossarian's plane. He got lost in Rome and he never knows where they are when flying missions. He's completely unaware of, or at least unperturbed by the dangers of being shot at or of being hit by flak, and he constantly aggravates Yossarian because he crawls up the narrow tunnel between the bombardier's bubble and the nearest escape hatch to sit with him in the front of the airplane. Yossarian hates this because he knows he'll be obstructed by Aarfy if he has to escape the plane in the event of an emergency. Aarfy's bumbling persona is destroyed at the end when he rapes and murders Michaela, a maid at the whore-house/hotel where the bomb crews go on leave.

Captain Black
wanted to be squadron commander when the Major was killed over Perugia, but Major Major Major Major was slapped into that position by Colonels Cathcart and Korn, who considered having an extra major on the roster to be a black eye. Promoting him to commander removed the black eye and replaced it with a feather in their cap. Since Black is at no risk, he has no problem scornfully telling the air crews to "eat your liver". Black initiates the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade and all but paralyzes the squadron with it. He peevishly prevents Major Major from taking an oath throughout the crusade, and he delights in 'buying' Nately's Whore and then relating to Nately everything he 'made her do'.

Captain Flume
is the squadron's public relations officer until Chief White Halfoat drunkenly threatens to slit his throat open from ear to ear one night whereupon he becomes a nervous wreck, eventually retreating to live in the nearby forest. He becomes even more of a recluse than is Major Major, who also threatens to slit his throat from ear to ear when Flume accidentally scares him whilst the Major is heading home through the forest one afternoon.

Captain Piltchard
is in charge of operations along with Captain Wren. They are almost always mentioned as a pair just like Gus & Wes, Doc Daneeka's orderlies. They're both present at the nudity episode when Yossarian shows up to be awarded his medal butt-naked. They're the ones who inform Colonel Korn that Yossarian is naked because his clothes have Snowden's blood all over them and he refuses to wear clothes any more.

Chaplain A. T. Tappman
is the Anabaptist minister with whom Yossarian falls in love in the very first sentence of the novel. He's abused by his assistant Corporal Whitcomb, who's an atheist. The Chaplain is always trying to assert himself and do right but he fails persistently in his quest.

Captain Wren
is in charge of operations along with Captain Piltchard. They are almost always mentioned as a pair just like Gus & Wes, Doc Daneeka's orderlies. They're both present at the nudity episode when Yossarian shows up to be awarded his medal butt-naked. They're the ones who inform Colonel Korn that Yossarian is naked because his clothes have Snowden's blood all over them and he refuses to wear clothes any more.

Chief White Halfoat
is a native American. His tribe was forced to become nomadic because where ever they settled, oil was discovered. Eventually the oil companies were second guessing them and kicking them off land before they had even arrived there to settle. During the Great Big Siege of Bologna, after he turns over a jeep one night because he's drunk, Halfoat decides that he'll die of pneumonia as a joke, and he does.

CID man #1
is the first of the two CID men who come to Pianosa to find out who is signing Irving Washington's name on censored enlisted men's letters, and later who is doing it to official documents. He never does discover that it's Yossarian in the first case and Major Major Major Major in the second case. He becomes highly suspicious of the second CID man when Major Major Major Major tells him that the second guy was asking about Irving Washington.

CID man #2
is the second of the two CID men who come to Pianosa. He becomes highly suspicious of the first CID man when Major Major Major Major tells him that the first guy was asking about Irving Washington.

Clevinger
is the foil for Yossarian's craziness, getting into apoplectic rages at Yossarian's wacky statements. He and Yossarian mutually believe the other is crazy. Clevinger is the one who tries to rescue the drunken crew in Chief White Halfoat's overturned jeep one night and almost gets dragged into the jeep with the rest of the sorry, drunken crew. Clevinger and his entire air crew vanish inside a cloud one day and are never seen again.

Colonel Cargill
works with General Peckem, and before the war was much sought after by businesses which wanted tax write-offs, because he was so inept that he could run even the most successful and buoyant corporation into the ground. He's always pleased when he screws-up - as when he refers to an assembly of enlisted men as officers - because it means he hasn't lost his disastrous touch.

Colonel Cathcart
is the psycho commander of Yossarian's squadron, who constantly raises the number of missions his aircrews must fly in order to try and curry favor with the higher-ups, namely Dreedle and Peckham. The missions begin at 25 and escalate routinely. He talks himself into and then talks himself out of getting Chaplain Tapmann to say prayers before missions to try and get his name into the Saturday Evening Post. Because he persistently raises the mission quota, Dobbs conspires to murder him, but Yossarian talks him out of it. Cathcart owns a tomato farm on the island in partnership with Lieutenant-Colonel Korn.

Colonel Moodus
is General Dreedle's detested son-in-law who is busted in the nose one night in the officer's club by Chief White Halfoat, when Orr attacks Appleby for beating him in every one of the first five serves at ping-pong. It's Moodus who talks General Dreedle out of shooting Major Danby at a briefing after the Great Moaning Episode initiated by Yossarian.

Corporal Kolodny
is the assistant to Captain Black, and he signs endless loyalty oaths for him so that Black can pretend he's more loyal than anyone else. It's Kolodny who reports that Bologna has been taken by the Allies. Bologna looks like it's been taken by the allies because Yossarian has changed the bomb line on the map so he wouldn't have to go bomb Bologna and risk his life. Bologna turns out to be a milk run much to Yossarian's chagrin.

Corporal Popinjay
is the doomed clerk can read shorthand, and who is unfortunately present at the hilarious trial of Clevinger. The case against Clevinger was open and shut - the only thing missing was something to charge him with. Popinjay is threatened with having his stinking guts ripped out by the officer in charge of the trial, who tells him as soon as they're done with Clevinger, Popinjay is next. He ends up in jail.

Corporal Snark
is the ex mess sergeant. He was demoted for purposely tainting sweet potatoes with GI soap, giving the squadron diarrhea. He tainted the potatoes at Yossarian's request so that Yossarian could get out of bombing Bologna.

Corporal Whitcomb
is an atheist who makes a career out of taunting and abusing his superior, Chaplain Tappman. Tappman, inspired by Yossarian, eventually busts Whitcomb right in the chops.

Dobbs
is a pilot who loses it over Avignon, wrenching the airplane's controls away from Huple, who saves the day by wrenching them back, but only after they've re-entered the nightmarish flak. He's the one who keeps calling "Help him, help him" when Snowden is fatally injured by that same flak. Dobbs is truly on the edge, far more so than Yossarian, and he hatches a scheme to murder Colonel Cathcart to stop him raising the number of missions any more. He has it all planned out, and the only thing which stops him is Yossarian's refusal to tell him to go ahead. Later, when Yossarian decides he wants Dobbs to go ahead with the assassination, and indeed will help him this time, Dobbs refuses, because he's completed his missions and can (in theory) go home.

Doc Daneeka
is the squadron flight surgeon. He's a good friend of Yossarian, but won't ground him because of catch-22. Whatever it is that soldiers come to him complaining of, he always has something worse. He's pretty much delegated his practice to his assistants, Gus & Wes. He's afraid of flying, so he has McWatt put him on his flight roster even though he's not aboard, so he can still collect flight pay. This eventually backfires, leading Daneeka to become a ghost!

Dr Stubbs
is Doc Daneeka's opposite number in Dunbar's squadron. He has no problem with grounding anyone he thinks merits it, but his professionalism and decency is all for naught because everyone he grounds eventually ends-up back on active duty. Stubbs himself ends-up transferred to the Pacific arena because he keeps grounding aircrew.

Dunbar
is Yossarian's best friend and is very much alike him in many ways. He's in a different squadron, but they hang together quite a bit. In fact, they're so close that Yossarian can recognize him from the sound of him shooting a pistol. Dunbar has decided that boredom prolongs life, so he loves any situation that he hates, because it makes time go slow. We first meet him faking illness in the hospital with Yossarian. Dunbar refuses to bomb an innocent Italian village (for the sole purpose of blocking the highway below it on the mountain side). He deliberately drops his bombs wide of the target. Dunbar is always ready to back Yossarian in any craziness, but is also not exactly inept when it comes to creating his own. He's the one who tosses the higher ranking officer's clothes out of the window, thereby depriving them of both rank and authority when he, Hungry Joe, Nately, and Yossarian rescue Nately's Whore from their clutches when they're trying to make her say "Uncle" and failing dismally. He's the one who starts a blind panic in one of the funniest episodes when he and Yossarian check themselves back into the hospital so Yossarian can apologize to Nately for busting him in the nose the night of the Great Machine Gun Disruption caused by Sergeant Knight and another unnamed perpetrator. Dunbar immediately espies the Soldier in White in the hospital, and though it's clearly a different person from the original, there can be no doubt that it's the same person. Dunbar's panicked, shrill wails of He's back!" and "There's no one inside!" cause mayhem, for which Dunbar is "disappeared" and neither we nor Yossarian ever see him again.

Ex-PFC Wintergreen
is always an ex- something because he keeps going AWOL, and is consequently busted down to buck private. Later, he becomes an ex-corporal and an ex-sergeant, and subsequently develops an ambition to become an ex-general. He's put on punishment digging six-foot cube holes, in which he takes great pride, wishing the soldiers at the front line would execute their duty to win the war as well as he does his in digging six foot cubes. He's in a small rivalry with Milo Minderbinder in selling Zippo® lighters (he beats Milo's price) and eventually he's put into the mail room, where he takes delight in hampering all of General Peckham's mail (which he considers to be too prolix), because it was Peckham who first busted him back down to private.

First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder
is the mess officer in Yossarian's squadron. He wangles his way into a position of such immense power that no one can order him around, by taking over the mess hall and then all the mess halls in the war theater. He has vehicles and airplanes assigned to him which all carry his M&M logo - a logo which is him, but which he added the ampersand so that it looks like a co-operative. His planes have carte blanche to fly anywhere, even behind enemy lines without being attacked. He is all about profit, and this supersedes patriotic duties. He eventually has the entire squadron turning over their entire paycheck to him just to eat in the mess halls. One time, he hires the Germans to bomb his own squadron and makes a profit from it which he completely loses when he corners the Egyptian cotton market and no one wants to buy it - except the Egyptians, who buy it from Milo when he dumps it on the market at rock-bottom prices, and then sell it directly back to Milo at his contract price. Milo is forced to bomb the Egyptian docks to stop this, and he tries to get the men to eat chocolate-covered cotton to get rid of it. The only person he trusts is Yossarian, because Yossarian wouldn't take advantage of his free pass to get all the fruit he wants because "he says he has a liver complaint".

General Dreedle
is the commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces in Pianosa and an arch-rival of General Peckem (the head of Special Services in Rome). He is known for his nurse and for his no-nonsense style. He supports Yossarian's right to collect his medal in the nude.

General Dreedle’s Nurse
accompanies Dreedle everywhere, and she is the cause of the Yossarian-inspired outbreak during the Great Moaning Episode in a briefing which General Dreedle attends and where Major Danby is almost shot until Colonel Moodus explains to Dreedle, his father-in-law, that he can't simply shoot anyone he wants.

General P P Peckham
is the head of Special Services in Rome and a huge rival of Dreedle's. He doesn't know that his disputes with Dreedle are settled in Dreedle's favor by ex-PFC Wintergreen because of Wintergreen's control of the mail flow. Peckham wants to take over Dreedle's combat operations. It was Peckham who demanded "a tight bomb pattern" for no reason whatsoever other than that he could.

Giuseppe
is the soldier who sees everything twice. Yossarian imagines Giuseppe to be a genius and emulates him right up to the point where Giuseppe dies; then Yossarian suddenly starts seeing everything once. The irony here is that Yossarian even gets to impersonate Giuseppe when he dies, because he has to stand-in for Giuseppe when his family comes to visit. They're told he's dying, not that he already died. When they address him as Giuseppe, Yossarian tells them his name is Yossarian, and Giuseppe's brother takes him at his word, thinking the family has had his brother's name wrong this whole time. It never occurs to his parents that this isn't their son.

Gus & Wes
work for Doc Daneeka and are mentioned as a pair, like Piltchard and Wren. Their sole job is to take sick airmen's temperatures, deciding on their disposition by whether their temperature is below 101 degrees, above 101 or exactly 101. They also paint airmen's gums and toes with gentian violet solution and give them a laxative to throw away into the bushes. They refuse to declare Daneeka ill and send him home, so Daneeka is convinced that they're incompetent.

Havermeyer
is a serial peanut brittle eater, who lives in a tent next door to Yossarian. He puts everyone at risk by flying his wing dead level and straight over the target, and is consequently the best bombardier in the war theater according to his superiors. He stole the gun from the dead man in Yossarian's tent and uses it to ambush field mice which stray into his tent at night. His loosing off shots at the mice almost gets him shot when Hungry Joe loses it one night, looses off an entire magazine into Havermeyer's tent, failing to hit him even once.

Hungry Joe
spends his down time trying to take up-skirt photographs of female performers, or trying to talk women into posing nude for him, but his photographs never come out because he always forgets something, like film, or the lens cap. He used to be a photographer for Life magazine. He's miserable when he's reached his mission quota and is flying no more, waiting for his orders to go home, and he has horrific nightmares every night under those circumstances. He's happy when the missions are raised again and he can fly more, so he has no nightmares at that time. His moods are a reverse barometer for the rest of the airmen.

Huple
is the under-aged owner of the cat with which Hungry Joe had a fistfight. Hungry Joe was declared the victor because the cat fled. The cat sleeps on Hungry Joe's face every night. Huple and Hungry Joe share a tent on the wrong side of the tracks.

Kid Sampson
is another under-aged airman. He's sliced in two by McWatt's airplane propeller when McWatt is goofing around in his plane over the raft where the airmen and the nurses go to swim. The horror of what he's done causes McWatt to deliberately crash his plane into the mountain. Since Doc Daneeka was listed as flying with McWatt that day (to collect his flight pay), Daneeka is also listed as dead, since he wasn't seen parachuting from the plane before it crashed!

Kraft
is killed at the bombing of a bridge at Ferrara which is where Yossarian won his medal because he went over the target twice and succeeded in flattening the bridge. Consequently he blames himself for Kraft's death.

Lieutenant Scheisskopf
is the training unit commander with whom Clevinger and Yossarian interact during basic training. Scheisskopf loves a parade, won't whip he wife not even when she begs for it, and hates Clevinger, bringing him up on charges when Clevinger stumbles while marching and thus merits having the book thrown at him. he's charged with “...breaking ranks while in formation, felonious assault, indiscriminate behavior, mopery, high treason, provoking, being a smart-guy, listening to classical music, and so on...”. Scheisskopf is later promoted to Colonel working under Peckham, and eventually to General.

Lieutenant-Colonel Korn
is Colonel Cathcart's assistant and collaborator. It is these two who offer Yossarian his deal - that he can indeed go home if he agrees to like them. Korn embarrasses himself crucially when he takes over the mission briefing from Major Danby after the Great Moaning Episode, which was initiated by Yossarian in response to the overpowering appearance of General Dreedle's nurse.

Lieutenant Edward J. Nately III
hails from a wealthy family and in Rome, falls in love with "Nately's Whore", who remains nameless throughout the novel. She has a kid sister called "Nately's Whore's kid sister". He wants to marry his "whore" and take her and her young sister back to the USA with him, but she has no love for him at all. She even taunts him and teases him as she goes off with other men when he runs out of money and can no longer 'retain her services'. This goes on until she finally gets a good night's sleep after the rescue conducted by Dunbar, Nately, Hungry Joe and Yossarian. When she wakes up, she's so refreshed and revived that she falls deeply in love with Nately. It's Yossarian who has to tell her that Nately has been killed during the German raid of Pianosa, which Milo organized and paid for. From that point onwards, she blames the messenger, and tries repeatedly to assassinate Yossarian.

Lieutenant Mudd
is the dead man in Yossarian's tent, who reported to the ops tent to ask for directions as to where to report in to the squadron, but who gets sent directly on a mission, and is killed in action. Since he never officially "arrived" at the squadron and is now gone, a reverberating bureaucratic nightmare ensues until new recruits (who are assigned to Yossarian's tent after Orr disappears) toss Mudd's equipment and belongings out into the railroad ditch, and there the entire episode ends.

Luciana
is another sex worker with whom Yossarian falls in love and has many endearing conversations. She's full of contradictions and seems to disappear too, and Yossarian cannot seem to find her again. This may be because, like a moron, he did exactly what she predicted he would do, and tore up the address she gave to him right after she left his sight. He regretted it, of course, but by then it was far too late.

Major ___ ___ de Coverley
Major Blank Blank de Coverley looks like Odin. Everyone lives in terror of him. He seems to have no duties and spends all his time pitching horseshoes and making trips to captured Italian cities, including Rome from whence he returns one day with an eye injury and a clear eye patch Which was cut from one of Major Major's celluloid windows. No one dare even ask him his first name. It is he who single-handedly overturns Captain Black's Great Loyalty Oath Crusade when he demands "Give everybody eat" at the mess hall one day. He is responsible for heading into newly liberated cities, renting apartments for the enlisted men and the officers, and stocking them with girls. He disappears after Yossarian moves the bomb line to include Bologna. Major ___ ___ de Coverley heads directly there to rent apartments for the enlisted men and for the officers to stay in when they go on leave, thinking it's in allied hands. He's never seen again.

Major Danby
is a complete ditz and lives only to try and impress senior officers. General Dreedle orders him to be taken out and shot during the Great Moaning Episode during one of his briefings, when he moans after all the others have stopped moaning, but not because of Dreedle's nurse.

Major Major Major Major
was born to Mr and Mrs Major, and because his wife was so wrecked after a 36-hour labor, his father took advantage of her indisposition to give their new son a first name of Major, and a middle name of Major. When he joined the USAAF at the outbreak of war, an IBM computer joined in the joke and promoted Major Major Major to the rank of Major directly from Private, causing all kinds of grief to him and his fellow officers during basic training. which he completed in record time because no one wanted a Major in basic training. He eventually finds comradeship playing endless games of basketball with the officers and men, until he's suddenly promoted to squadron commander, whereupon everyone turns on him and he becomes a pariah. He eventually manages to become a complete recluse, refusing to see people in his office except when he's not in the office. He takes a leaf from Yossarian's book and begins signing Washington Irving's name, and then John Milton's name to the official documents which cross his desk, in place of his own name, thereby keeping the two CID men in business.

Major Sanderson
is a psychiatrist who thinks Yossarian is losing it, because he's not crazy. Unfortunately, Yossarian is unable to turn this into a trip home because some other airman accidentally gets sent home in Yossarian's place.

McWatt
is Yossarian's Scotch-Irish pilot who is losing it just as much as everyone else, but doesn’t show it until the sad episode with Kid Sampson. One time Yossarian almost kills him for his crazy flying when Yossarian is on board, and McWatt thereafter ceases buzzing Yossarian's tent.

Michaela
works in the apartment block where the officers stay when on leave in Rome. She speaks no English and ends up being raped and murdered by Aarfy.

Mrs Daneeka
is Doc Daneeka's wife. When her husband is declared dead, even though he isn’t, right after McWatt's suicide, she moves away from Daneeka's home and leaves no forwarding address.

Mrs Scheisskopf
is Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife, who pouts and pines because her husband is so busy organizing one parade after another that he won’t pay her any attention. She consequently sleeps with any cadet who will have her, and all of them do have her because they all want to get back at Scheisskopf. She's a very liberal and compliant girl who will indulge any fantasy and has quite a few of her own.

Nurse Cramer
is a very upright and proper, and very caring nurse who works with Nurse Duckett and is her best friend until Duckett starts dating Yossarian; at that point, Cramer refuses to have anything to do with Duckett and won’t even speak to her.

Nurse Sue Ann Duckett
Neither of the two nurses initially like Yossarian, but Duckett changes her mind and they start dating until she wants to marry a doctor, and dumps Yossarian so he won’t interfere with her plans.

Orr
shares a tent with Yossarian and is a pilot. He gets shot down almost every mission, which is why Yossarian refuses to fly with him despite endless entreaties that he do so. Orr has set up their tent with a cement floor and a heater, which provides hot water. He's always tinkering with something, and taunting Yossarian about all kinds of things. He seems genuinely hurt when Yossarian flat refuses to be his bombardier. Yossarian feels sorry for him even though he's one of the most capable people Yossarian knows. One time, he's shot down and fails to return to base for once. Later, we learn that Orr was the smartest one of all. His crashes were all on purpose so that he could gain sufficient survival skills to escape to neutral Sweden and ride out the war there. Orr inspires Yossarian to emulate his escape at the end of the novel.

Sammy Singer
is Yossarian's tail gunner. He's the one who repeatedly faints when he sees Snowden's wounds

Sergeant Knight
is Yossarian's turret gunner who causes panic during the great Big Siege of Bologna when he hurries back to the supply tent before the raid, and picks up extra flak jackets, causing everyone else who is flying to do the same.

Snowden
is the radio gunner who was fatally hit over Avignon. Yossarian fails to diagnose the most serious injury, instead attending faithfully and expertly to a relatively minor leg wound whilst Snowden bleeds to death from a gaping wound to his abdomen, which is referred to as 'spilling his secret'. His death has a huge effect on Yossarian and colors a lot of his attitude and behavior throughout the novel, especially at Clevinger's educational meetings, which eventually brings those meetings to an abrupt close.

The 107-year-old man
is the dissipated wrinkled subversive man in the apartment/brothel in Rome where the officers stay when on leave. He drives Nately nuts by contradicting his most treasured beliefs in American success and superiority. He's also the man who is responsible for Major ___ ___ de Coverley's eye injury by hitting him with a rose stem when Major ___ ___ de Coverley was in the vanguard of the push into Rome.

The Soldier In White
(the one who isn't Lieutenant Schmelker) is completely wrapped from head to toe in bandages. He has a bottle of clear fluid dripping into the crook of his arm, and another bottle collecting the outflow of a zinc pipe which he has cemented above his groin. When the bottle on the floor is almost full and the one dripping into his arm is almost empty, Nurses Cramer and Duckett switch the bottles with admirably efficiency. Dunbar accuses The Texan of killing the Soldier In White, but Yossarian is of the belief that it was Nurse Cramer who killed him because she's the one who took his temperature and first realized he was dead. This doesn't prevent him from siding with Dunbar when he accuses The Texan of the soldier's death.

The Soldier In White
(the one who is Lieutenant Schmelker) is completely wrapped from head to toe in bandages. He has a bottle of clear fluid dripping into the crook of his arm, and another bottle collecting the outflow of a zinc pipe which he has cemented above his groin. He's the one who causes Dunbar to lose it when he and Yossarian tramp into the hospital after the missions have been raised to seventy. Dunbar's reaction causes such a turmoil that armed doctors and military police have to be called in. Thereafter, no one ever sees Dunbar again. I have a theory that they wrapped him in bandages from head to toe, which means there actually is third Soldier in White!

The Texan
is the guy who is admitted to the hospital at the opening of the novel, He's so likable that he drives everyone else out of the hospital. Dunbar, backed by Yossarian, accuses him of killing The Soldier In White. He's still in the hospital when the second Soldier in White shows up.

I thoroughly recommend this novel for anyone who is not faint of heart and everyone else, too. Unless you have flies in your eyes, in which case see Doc Daneeka so he can refer you to Gus & Wes who will paint your toes and gums purple, and give you a laxative to throw away in the bushes.

Bobby Ether and the Academy by R Scott Boyer

Title: Bobby Ether and the Academy
Author: R Scott Boyer
Publisher: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform
Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
p5 "…but he wretched them free…" should be "…but he wrenched them free."

I couldn't finish this novel. I know it's not written for my age range, not even close, but I've read other novels written for this same age range and had no problem with them; with this one, it seemed I had nothing but problems. Bobby Ether is an entry-level young-adult in high school, who can manipulate reality to a limited extent, to get what he wants. For example, when he throws the winning throw in the final basketball game of the season, he knows it won’t go into the basket, so he kinda wishes it would and something happens to the ball - something subtle, which apparently only he can see, and which gives it that extra oomph and gets him the basket and his team the win.

Bobby isn’t the only one who knows about his power, as he discovers during that very game. A mysterious and striking-looking woman is watching him from the very seats where his absentee parents normally sit. Yeah, another YA novel with missing parents: Bobby expected them to be there but they're not. The mysterious woman appears in the boys' changing room afterwards and has a few words with Bobby; then she disappears when other team players start coming in. Bobby isn't as freaked out by this as you or I would be, taking it completely in stride! But then he's special, right? Inexplicably, Bobby has to walk home after the game - several miles home - since there is no one to give him a ride. Really? He's the star player who just won them the game, and no-one is there for him? There's no after-game pizza party? The coach doesn’t know he needs a ride home? This was a "suspension of disbelief is suspended" moment for me. Maybe the intended audience won't think anything of it.

Who should pick him up when this fourteen-year-old suddenly doesn't have the energy to make it home, and instead starts vomiting at the roadside? The mysterious woman, who's named Cassandra, and who knows his grandfather - and who knows where Bobby lives. Bobby hops into the car without a second thought. Cassandra fixes him up and take shim home, but before she can tell him something of the truth about who he is and what he can do, she and Bobby are forced to escape 'the bad guys'. Fortunately Cassandra has a Porsche 911 on hand and they escape to…The Academy! DUHN Duhn Duhn! This is evidently the start of a series!

This novel appears to be written for a younger audience than Bobby, which is odd. The cover illustration seems to confirm that. I can see how eight to twelve year olds might like this, but then they would likely get lost with the new age material and the physics, yet it isn't really a young-adult novel either. One reviewer has remarked that it has some similarity to the Harry Potter series, and I would add that the similarity is a bit more than superficial. We have an orphan (purportedly) who's the chosen one, attending school away from home. He becomes pretty much insta-friends with another guy and a girl who support him mindlessly. There's a younger Colin Creevy type, and a trope evil villain, although this time it’s a blonde girl rather than a blonde boy, so she cannot play with her waxed Salvador Dalí mustache as she cackles evilly. At least I assume she cannot. The principle - a headmistress rather than a headmaster - has secret plans for Wunderkind-Boy, and there's also a shadowy evil Voldemort-style figure lurking in the background.

Here's a minor point regarding writing: on page 23, Boyer has Bobby settling down to sleep in the Porsche's "patent leather" seats. I'm far from an expert on luxury cars, but I seriously doubt Porsche ever puts patent leather in its 911s. Maybe Boyer doesn't understand what patent leather actually is? It’s the really shiny leather typically found in shoes. It looks like cheap, shiny plastic, but it isn’t; it’s leather which is specially treated to repel water. Cheap-looking shiny seats don't sound very 'Porsche' (not to say posh!) to me, but who knows? Besides, he gives himself an out by making the car almost like a prototype, so he can always argue that this is something not on the market yet. That's a smart move, but I would have gone with something like "rich leather seat" which is relatively nondescript and therefore safe, and still gives a nice impression.

Here's something which also occurred to me as I read this: each chapter in this novel starts halfway down the page. Were this book to be printed, that represents an awful lot of wasted paper. Ah, you say, but this is the age of the ebook, so most people who are likely to read this will get the e-version, and no paper was harmed in the making of this book! Tree-killing? It’s all on old-fashioned fuddy-duddies like me who enjoy real books. You know what? That's really a very valid point (all issues of problematical ebook formatting aside!).

But it’s much more complex than that, and you knew it, didn’t you? Ebooks are dependent upon ebook readers, and whether they be a Kindle or a Nook, or an iPad or an iPhone, or your computer, they're all made using energy, and are composed of some seriously toxic chemicals and materials, as indeed is their construction process. Ah, but you answer, so is the production of real books, which use energy and materials, some of which are toxic, too. So here’s the thought for the day: which process is most benign to the environment, and as an author, how much can you do to protect the planet? The second thought for the day is: will it even make a damned bit of difference no matter what I do, when thousands of other writers and millions of other readers are expressly not doing those things?!

Back to the novel: I have to report, and sadly so, since Boyer is a fellow Create-Spacer, that this novel started going downhill somewhat for me as we arrived in the vicinity of page 30. Cassandra takes Bobby to her 'hi-tech to out-tech all hi-tech' headquarters, and starts babbling about 'living energy'. I was just starting to wonder whether I wanted to read any more of this new age nonsense when Boyer dropped the S-bomb! That's when the author of any given novel claims that there are things which science doesn’t understand, and the inevitable non-sequitur which goes hand-in-hand with that claim depends upon what the book is supposed to be about. If it’s a witchcraft or magic book, then the answer is of course 'magic', which explains (supposedly) that which science cannot. If it’s a religious book, then 'god' explains it all! If it’s an 'aliens are among us' book, then alien technology explains those things.

In this case, this 'living energy' fiction (the "oneness"!) explains those things. Of course, if you call 'they who express that attitude' on this, their knee-jerk response is that 'you don’t know everything!" or "Are you a scientist/expert?", but they never issue those same challenges to themselves! They also carefully ignore the steady and remarkable progress scientists have enjoyed. Never once do these authors consider that a hundred years ago there were scores of things which "science couldn’t explain", but which it now can. Four hundred years ago there were even more things. A thousand years ago, even more. In each case, after the passage of some time, and once religious obsession got its fingers out of the science pie, science has been perfectly capable of explaining one thing after another, including things which were considered impossible to understand a mere century ago.

For me, however, the real joke here is that the author of this particular story then goes on to use the science of particle physics to explain these things which he has just got through telling us science can't explain! He has the character Cassandra issue a rather less than honest statement that science cannot explain 'truths' like auras, clairvoyance and telekinesis. The sleight of hand here is that since such claims have actually never been established, there's nothing to explain or refute! Why should scientists have to explain someone's gullibility, or delusional state of mind over and over again?!

The truth is that science can explain how people are deluded into believing in these non-existent phenomena, but magicians - and I'm talking about professional illusionists, not fantasy world magicians - can often do a better job by showing how easy it is to fool people with these cheap parlor tricks. There's nothing inexplicable (and certainly no magic - either fantasy magic or sub-atomic physics "magic") going on here. There's no life force at work. There are no invisible waves or magic rays employed here. It’s lies, fraud, and human blind credulity. Now you may be asking why this tirade? Why is this important? It's just fiction!

You're right - it is fiction, and I don’t have a problem with novelists telling stories about these things as though they're real, but when they write like they've set out to denigrate science - the same science which gave them the very computer upon which they wrote their novel, and which gives their readers the devices upon which those novels will be read, I have draw a line! By all means tell your fantasy story; everyone loves to read a good novel about the magical and the supernatural, but don’t pretend this stuff is real, not outside of the framework of your fiction. Don't trash the hard work of thousands of women and men the world over who have devoted their lives to making your life easier and more interesting!

Anyway, lecture mode: Off! Bobby decides to run away - which isn't a bad idea. He's effectively been kidnapped and no one has made any attempt to tell his parents where he is. His escape results in him being kidnapped by the very people whom Cassandra warned him against. Despite being within sight of his parents, the men take him prisoner and remove him thousands of miles away from the city. He's later told that his parents were killed the car accident he saw, and that it was engineered by a man in Cassandra's employ, who was himself later found murdered. The only "proof" they offer is a series of photographs. I guess Bobby never heard of Photoshop®! I would hope that anyone of Bobby's age and older, who has had a decent education and can think for themselves, would realize that only a moron would swallow all of this story whole. It makes no sense that on the one hand he's been irremediably suspicious of Cassandra from the off, yet on the other hand, he's completely trusting of his new captors. So gullible is Bobby that he demands that this new organization train him so he can wreak revenge upon Cassandra! And that's all the spoilers I'm going to post!

One problem I had with this story is that it has too many tropes, from the 'mystical eastern arts' to new age mumbo jumbo, to high school bullies and bitches. Maybe kids of the age it’s aimed at will not see these things as flaws, but they patently are. In any other context, these tropes might fly. Indeed you can make a good argument that they're stock-in-trade in a story like this, but exactly how do bullies and bitches fit into Boyer's world of harmony? Short answer: they don't; it makes no sense even within his own context.

That's not the only problem; there were several others. For example, although this is a school in Tibet (of all places), the entire student population seems to be white Anglo-Saxon protestant Americans. There is no language or culture barrier. Indeed, there's no culture at all. Another issue was that despite having it made graphically clear to Bobby (with photographs, even) that both his parents died tragically (a claim which I am not yet convinced I should buy into!), Bobby shows no real signs of grief over their deaths, instead hanging with his buddies, playing with Jinx (the Creevy clone), and cracking jokes. It doesn’t ring true.

A third issue was the two trope henchmen who evidently derive their evilness not from their actions or thoughts, but purely from their appearance: one has Snape-like "greasy hair", the other is overweight, so you just know that such people have to be evil. I'm sorry but that's not only a trope, it’s insulting and rather bigoted. Do all bad guys have to be overweight or ugly, or have "Snape hair"? I don't think so, and I think it's entirely wrong to keep teaching children that people who have such traits are probably evil. Just in passing, in the Adobe Reader version of this novel, on page 88 there's a bizarre clickable link back to chapter five. I have no idea why. Chapter five has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s being discussed in chapter 20. It must be the patent leather effect! Perhaps this was an author's reference which did not become expunged on final read-through?

The whole package Boyer is selling us here is that of living in harmony with nature, thereby availing oneself of the secret powers which such harmony will grant, but the first thing we see as Booby settles into school life is bullies and bitches, not one of whom is even remotely in harmony - and these are people who supposedly grew up in this harmonic world! It makes zero sense. I can't understand why Boyer wouldn't see this as a serious problem, unless he's going with the idea that all these people are the bad guys (as I mentioned earlier), and so it makes all this behavior acceptable. It’s not acceptable to me. I know you need to have some conflict, but seriously?

The novel is all over the place in terms of a philosophy. Every new age and junk science trope is tossed into the mix for no apparent reason, meaning that the end result is a mish-mash of ill-fitting pseudo-scientific 'rationale' for the way things are, and it’s such an unwieldy mess that it collapses under its own weight for me. It also has far too many inconsistencies and contradictions in it. For example, in one portion we’re told that the students don’t eat meat at the academy because killing an animal is bad for its energy aura (or whatever - I lost track of the trope du jour) and consequently bad for those who eat the flesh.

Later we discover Bobby's Buddhist teacher, Master Jong, practically battering a charging bear into submission. Excuse me? What happened to living in harmony? What happened to balancing the chi (or balancing the cliché!)? Master Jong's excuse for beating up on the bear is (he says) that he was a way with animals! Yeah, he sure does. In the course of this incident, Bobby has badly injured his ankle, yet Chi Master Jong apparently can’t call on Cosmic Forces to heal the injury. He can't call the heel to heel and heal it?! I guess not. Again, inconsistent.

Bobby's prayer at the end of chapter 16 is a bit of a joke. Instead of asking for guidance, he makes demands and tries a bargain, still intent upon his idiotic revenge. Well, while the son of his god was supposedly all about forgiveness, the god who was purportedly the 'father' was all about violence, so maybe Bobby is praying to the right one! There are Biblical precedents for this behavior, but the fact remains that nothing fails like a prayer. I’d have a lot more respect for Bobby if he was thinking for himself and trying to figure things out rationally instead of blindly dedicating himself to a misguided course of action. But then he's only fourteen going on twelve. What does he know?!

I looked at some other reviews once I'd decided where these things were leading me in terms of a review, and I found that I appear to be an outlier. It's always good to know if you missed something, or you're ...divergent! No I didn't just write that! Seriously, many other reviews I read were positive. Of course, Kirkus finds everything completely adorable, so their reviews are meaningless, and publishers love such meaningless reviews because they're always so positively fluffy. There was little on Goodreads, but what there was trended towards positive.

None of this caused me to change my mind, because I really can’t trust, for example, a review which says that Bobby was thrown for a loop by his basketball shot when the text makes it quite clear that he wasn't. Another review suggested that it was the principle's idea that Bobby study at the academy, develop his powers, and seek revenge, when it was actually Bobby's own idea (the principle of this school which is all about balance and chi and karma merely didn’t talk him out of it!). You have to wonder if some reviewers actually read the same novel that I did, or if it made such a poor impression on them that they didn't register things. It happens to all of us, but it takes a lot better set of arguments than those I read to persuade me to change my position in this case!

I tried and tried to keep on reading this, but by chapter 30, roughly half-way through, at the point where Evil Ashley Doll slaps Lovable Lily Doll across the face, I was done with this novel. I would have really liked to support a fellow independent writer, but I cannot in good conscience associate my name with a positive review of something as messy and nonsensical as this. This novel is not worthy in my opinion!

The Bitches of Brooklyn by Rosemary Harris

Title: The Bitches of Brooklyn
Author: Rosemary Harris
Publisher: Chestnut Hill Books
Rating: warty!

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

Each year, five women: Abby, Clare, Jane, Rachael, Tina meet at a beach house (or maybe it's a bitch house? they were known as the Bitches of Brooklyn in their teens...) for a reunion and some fun and relaxation away from the men in their lives. Abby sometimes doesn't show up, as is the case this year. Instead, she sent them a basket of fattening goodies with a note saying she had run off with one of their men.... My immediate suspicion was that there would be a good and innocent explanation for this. The big question was whether I could stand to read the entire novel to get to it!

The story of the remaining four women's weekend at the beach house is wonderful. I enjoyed reading it immensely. It was eventful in at least one unexpected way, and it was entertaining and amusing. The problem began when they returned to the city, and the story ground to a jarring halt. The mystery of Abby's whereabouts and behavior continued to dominate their lives when it really should not have. These women were disturbingly insecure, which did nothing to endear me to them. None of them really knew what Abby meant by "one of your men". Since all of their men were also on trips, they could see that it was possible that Abby had literally run off with one, but did "men" equate with husband or boyfriend? Or did men simply refer to a business acquaintance or partner? Abby ran a PR business, so did "men" refer to some person not directly connected with them, but instead, a celebrity whom they all liked?

The story really began to drag for me when we started getting random flashbacks for some of these four women, which did nothing whatsoever to entertain me or to move the story forward. Indeed, any forward motion at that point was solely downhill since the flashbacks were much more like hold-backs in that they held the story back from being told. I really didn't care what history these women had. I was more interested in what was happening (or in this case not happening!) right now. Consequently, I skipped screen after screen of badly-formatted text (in the kindle version) because it wasn't interesting and did nothing for the plot or for me. I have to say that in this day and age, there is no excuse for a poorly formatted review copy.

The novel was weird in some regards. For example, there's a lot of talk about cussing, but no bad words beyond 'bitch' are ever used. I didn't get that. If you don't want cussing in your novel, fine, don't put it in there. I'm fine with that, but to go on and on about it and then never have the courage to use it is just weird to me. The word 'bitch' is no better or worse than any other cuss-word in my vocabulary: it's just as obnoxious, and to grant that word a privileged status, yet balk at other cuss-words is entirely illogical.

To cut a boring story short, this novel simply deteriorated from bad to worse to even worse. I don't want to tell any more for fear of giving away critical spoilers, but let me simply say that it held no surprises, and the way it went downhill into nothing but a series of vignettes of various gaggles of these girls drinking too much in dive bars and elsewhere made it a truly uninteresting read even when the grand reveal came. I recommend the first few chapters, but nothing beyond that. I felt completely let-down by the needlessly drawn-out ending.

Not Dead Yet by Peter James

Title: Not Dead Yet
Author: Peter James
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum
p78 "...unlit cigarette gripped louchely.." should be "...unlit cigarette gripped loosely..." There is a word 'louche' but it’s not applicable in the context where it’s employed here!

This is yet another novel where the title competes with a dozen others. I ran into an amusing example of this kind of thing on Net Galley. Here are two novels, both released in November 2013, within ten days of one another, both Sci-Fi/Fantasy, both written for adults, both with precisely the same title:

It's not as though the title is a rare one; on the contrary, it's a cliché, and there are two of them right next door to each other and that's just on Net Galley. How many more are already out there in the market? If someone says, "Hey, I read a great sci-fi novel. It's called Into the Fire!" then how in hell are you going to track it down? Common sense should have told these authors not to go with that, but to pick something that isn't a cliché or a trope. The very title dissuaded me from even thinking about asking to read one of these. Just another warning for those of us in the self-publishing business!

This is also the first time I've read a Peter James so, new author, new novel; what can go wrong?!! This novel begins with an attempt on the life of celebrity rock star Gaia Lafayette who of course, wants to be an actress. She's won the rôle of Maria Fitzherbert in an historical drama about British King George 4th and the love of his life. The stalker hates her for this because he wants his struggling actress girlfriend Dana to get that part. Not only does she not get it, the stalker doesn't "get it" because he's a moron and a wack-job, but he's dedicated. Unfortunately, he mistakes Gaia's assistant for Gaia, and shoots her instead. Next we're transported to a chicken farm in southern England....

James has a whole series of Roy Grace novels, of which this is the eighth. All of these novels tediously and predictably have 'dead' in the title. Really? I hope no one confuses him with the "Dead in the Water" Charlaine Harris. He's written novels in other genres, too. One of those also has 'dead' in the title. I wonder if anyone bought that, thinking that it was part of the King Grace series?!

This novel started out interestingly, but as soon as Grace came on the scene, it became far less graceful! It started spinning lines in all directions and completely lost its focus for me. There's far too much going on, and far too many threads, and it detracts from the very thing which the cover blurb trumpets as the focus of the novel! The blurb is all about Gaia and the problem she represents from a policing perspective. That's why I picked up this novel. To start reading it and find out that she represents nothing more than a drab and tiny thread in the rich tapestry of Roy Grace's problematic life panorama was a real downer for me. Hey guess what? I don’t frickin' care about King Grace's epic life! I do care about what the book blurb evidently lied to me was the plot! Yeah, I agree, I'm a moron to actually believe a publisher, so it’s my bad. I can’t help but wonder though: how long do publishers hope to stay in business in this day and age, by lying to the very people who keep them in business?

So here's Grace's baggage: his wife, Sandy, disappeared without warning, and without a trace many years before. He now has a new girlfriend, Cloe, who is pregnant, yet despite claims on both sides of being deeply in love, they're neither married nor talking about it. Cloe discovers one day that her car has been trashed, and a threat to her baby scrawled on the hood (or is that the bonnet?!), yet neither she nor Grace makes an official police report on the vandalism and threat. Grace is put in charge of Gaia's security as she moves to Brighton to begin filming. This is the same Grace who was just put in charge of a major murder investigation (and he wasn't exactly unemployed even prior to that).

I call bullshit on that one. I know that police can multitask, because they have to, but having the same guy who's literally just begun a serious and difficult murder investigation centered around a dismembered torso, also put in charge of a completely different topic and area - music diva security - sounds like purest bullshit to me. I don’t know - I'm far from an expert on British police procedure, and I haven't lived there in years, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t find someone with an uncluttered schedule to be in charge of a high profile star. If they fail to protect her, not only does she die, which is awful enough all by itself, but her child is left an orphan, and the police are going to look like shit in the eyes of the world. I sincerely hope the Brits aren't this incompetent and short-sighted.

I actually wanted to pursue that story (Gaia), not the story of Roy Grace's cluttered life! I don’t care that he's yet another tired, walking cliché spawned from the detective genre. I despise such novels almost as much as I despise first person PoV novels. I realize that James probably had nothing whatsoever to do with his cover, more fool him, but he does have control over what’s between the covers (more or less - he did sell out to "Big Publishing" after all), and that's the problem with character novels, isn’t it? In a series where the story becomes about a character rather than about a plot, how can the story not go downhill? I know authors love them because they require no effort to create, and readers love them because they require no effort to read, but once the character takes over, the plot goes to hell because it’s no longer of any importance; the novel becomes all about that character, and plot be hanged - around the character instead of around something original and intriguing.

Anna Galicia, Gaia's sick "#1 fan" is a really sad joke. Perhaps there are characters like this in real life, but she's written way too extremely to be taken seriously in this fiction. If James was offering this as his first novel, I'd bet that it would be rejected wholesale by publishers as being too amateurish, but because he has a series, he can evidently get away with anything. Well, so can independents! Lol! But that doesn’t mean it's always a good thing. OTOH, I would honestly love to know where Galicia gets her funds from to buy all of her ridiculous Gaia paraphernalia. I can imagine just how many books I could buy with that kind of cash - and new, too, not used - and it makes me sad to see it wasted on what is, in the end, not fandom, but a medical condition! Then maybe my love of books is, too?

Did I mention that Grace is a superintendent? So why then is he going on a visit to a tailor to try and identify a piece of fabric found with the dismembered body? He doesn’t have detectives to whom to delegate such chores?! I know the pathetic cliché is that the detectives are always, without exception, as overworked as your typical Star Trek captain, but if he's so short-handed that he has to make door to door enquiries in person, then how in hell is he going to find time to properly organize and supervise the protection detail for Gaia? And if they're so overworked, why are two of them making this visit instead of just one? This novel doesn't exactly strike me as well thought-out. It seems that James was so obsessed with rendering Grace as a tireless and industrious hero and champion, that he's forsaken all attempts at writing realistic fiction and blown straight through parody and comedy into pure fantasy. Grace doubtlessly has magical powers, and a sword hidden away somewhere with which he has, no doubt, slain dragons.

It’s smart when you're pushing a character (as opposed to a plot in a series like this), to give that character some personal traits, a flaw, a weakness, a hobby, an interest, whatever, but the one thing you don’t want to imbue them with is stupidity (unless, of course, the series is decidedly about a character who's stupid). In a detective series, it seems to me that it’s never a good idea to make your main character look stupid unless she or he is doing it on purpose to mislead someone. So when Grace picks up Smallbone, the career criminal who just got out of jail and who is his main suspect in the trashing of Cleo's car, it's nothing but stupid to antagonize and piss-off the guy. Grace isn’t the one who is threatened here, it’s Cloe, and his actions are the deranged acts of a bully, not a smart cop, and they put the supposed object of his care under greater, not lesser threat.

If Cloe has been threatened, where are Grace's actions designed to protect her? He could be home with her, but instead he chooses to stalk Smallbone, waiting several hours to pick him up late at night, drive him five miles out of town, threaten him, then dump him and leave this sixty-year old lag to walk back home in the pouring rain. Now he's made an enemy where one effectively didn’t exist before. A more restrained confrontation would have been much smarter. And in doing all this he left Cloe alone and unprotected for several hours. This man is a moron. We're repeatedly told how much he cares about her but we never see this reflected in his behavior. Meanwhile the poor pregnant girl who has already been hurried to hospital after a collapse at work is still working (as a pathologist - hardly a desk job) and still ignoring medical advice. I guess she cares as little for her baby as Grace obviously does for her (as judged each by their actions).

We learn of a journalist who apparently has a spy in the police force since he learns of crimes almost as soon as Grace does. There's a reason for this. The journalist has hacked into Grace's Blackberry and is getting the inside track on Grace's phone calls as soon as he makes or receives one! I can’t believe that a senior police detective hasn’t thought to try detecting how this information is leaked! I can’t believe that it didn’t at least cross his mind that his phone was bugged, especially given how fast the journalist discovered the latest news. Again, it's yet another example of Grace's ineptitude. This is hardly a recommendation to read or to keep reading this series.

Well I stuck this out as long as I could, but James insisted on larding it up with one inane issue after another. Not content with merely tossing in the kitchen sink, he wants to include the disgusting antiquated garbage disposal under the sink. As if there aren't enough misfits in play, Grace's long missing wife shows up next with Grace's kid in tow (about which Grace knows nothing) and starts harboring evil thoughts about him and his intended. Is there no son of a bitch in this novel who isn't harboring evil thoughts about some other son of a bitch? Honestly? This novel is unfinished trash, period.

Samantha Sanderson On The Scene by Robin Carroll Miller

Title: Samantha Sanderson On The Scene
Author: Robin Carroll Miller
Publisher: Zonderkidz - website unobtainable
Rating: warty

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

Errata:
p56 "...turn stall..." should be "..turn stile..." (let’s face it, that whole sentence needs a re-write!)
p81 Samantha's dad "...wouldn’t be up to ordering pizza"??? Is he that big of a deadbeat? Seriously what effort is needed, exactly, to order pizza - especially when he has a slave-girl right there in the house?! Or did Miller simply not write this properly, and meant instead that her dad wouldn't be in the mood for pizza - wouldn’t be "up for pizza", not "up to pizza"?

The advanced review copy was very badly formatted for the Kindle. I don’t know why this is. It used to be, in the old days, that books had to be laboriously type-set, and long galleys sent to the author for correction, which then had to be re-set, but this is no longer the case. In these days of WYSIWIG (What You Send Isn’t What I Get!), which is far from perfect, but which is passable, there's no excuse for poor quality review copies. In Adobe reader, my other option, the formatting was a lot better.

I adored the title of this novel - it’s so immediate and self important that it really tickled me. Unfortunately, the novel failed to live up to its title. There is a whole bunch of these novels about other characters, too. You can find out about them at www.faithgirlz.com if you're interested. 'Samantha Sanderson at the Movies' was one which intrigued me, since I'm such a movie fan. I'm not sure how you would end up with a whole novel based upon that particular title, but there you have it. I thought at first that Samantha was an amateur detective. It turns out that she isn’t - not by 'profession', but she is by ambition.

I was a little surprised to find out that this was an overtly Christian novel. That;s not made very clear in the book blurb on netgalley. I'm not a fan of Christian stories because I have no faith in faith, and such novels have consistently proved to me to be empty at their core. The real problem with faith-professing stories is that the faith itself is of zero utility in the novel. Never in these stories (unless they're of the completely absurd "I'm in love with a manly angel" type) do we ever see any kind of divine presence or any acts of any gods, not even hints of it. Indeed, if we did, readers would cry foul at the absurdity of it! Critics would cry "deus ex machina"! How paradoxical is that?

The consistent fact of faith novels is that people solve their own problems with no help needed from any gods (just as they did, in fact, in the Bible!); yet the fiction that a god is somehow behind the scenes making things happen is trumpeted loudly. It amazes me that so few people see through this sham; that so few recognize how impoverished and vacuous this paradigm really is. These novels all profess to be about faith in a divine providence which never appears. Just as in the Bible, it’s never any gods who do anything of utility, it’s always people who get it done. Gods are employed solely to justify human acts, and your god can never lose, since every success, no matter how much it is wrought by human agency alone, is attributed to the god, yet all failure is blamed completely on the human - or on "Satan"! How cool is that for a god? So these stories are fundamentally fraudulent in a very real way, but then all fiction is, isn't it?!

As I shall highlight as I review this, these novels are not remotely logical or rational in their telling o' the faithly tale, not even within their own framework; however, that doesn't mean that the story - ignoring all mention of the supernatural - cannot be entertaining, and this was my dearest hope going into this one, since I started out predisposed towards liking it from the title and the cover illustration alone. That hope remained even as I discovered where it was coming from, but that hope was thee one which failed to find itself in this story, and I'll tell you why.

Samantha Sanderson is in school, and has a strong ambition to be a reporter just like her mom - not a cop, just like her dad. We're offered no immediate explanation for this, but there seems to be a not-so-subtle vein of genderism running through this novel, inconsistent with modern values, but entirely consistent with Biblical values. I shall point those instances out as we go. Just one more thing which I find interesting is that a Christian novel has a main character sporting a 'heathen' name, Samantha. There was a time when Christians would have frowned upon naming a child with a non-Biblical name. This is important in that it indicates a needed and welcome decline from Bible standards (which are not to be confused with moral standards).

We first meet Samantha interviewing a team player who was injured in the previous week's game. Now why this interview took so long to put in place goes unexplained; I guess Samantha wasn't in the scene! This is odd, because she's a cheerleader. More in this anon. Fortunately, we soon get to the real theme here, which is bullying - in this case, a form of cyber-bullying, which visits itself upon one of Samantha's school-mates via some insulting text messages. This is an admirable topic to investigate, and my immediate suspect was the injured boy!

These messages focus on the intended victim's weight, but since the victim isn't even remotely overweight, the entire bullying premise falls completely flat before it even gets started! Indeed, the supposed "victim" weighs less than Samantha who, as you can see from the cover illustration, is anorexic to begin with; and is that her African American BFF Makayla on the cover with her? If so, then why isn't she actually African American?! Either this illustrates my point that cover illustrators never read the material for which they illustrate, or Samantha's BFF is dissed by being excluded from the cover!

I must note here that Samantha herself is exceptionally, even dangerously svelte. How easy is it then, for her to take the moral high-ground standing with 'lesser mortals' and protecting them from bullying? It would be really nice in a novel like this to have a protagonist who was less than perfect for once in a YA novel. Yes, we do see them, but nowhere near often enough. I guess Job, with his loser status and his skin complaints isn’t a very appealing muse, huh?!

Samantha discusses the bullying with her father (she's quite the gossip!) as she prepares the evening meal that day. Her mother is away on assignment, but she prepared meals for her husband and daughter before she left so Samantha could heat them up as needed. Here’s where the genderism struck me right in the face: why is a working mom expected to do the household chores too? Her husband can’t cook? He doesn’t lend a hand around the house? Why? Because he's too important? Because he's a police officer? Because he's a man in a Christian home? Here's a shocker: he does lend a hand around the house, but he takes care of manly things - like fixing a squeak in the garage door, because no woman could ever do that, just as no man could ever prepare a meal! This really irked me.

If we’re writing novels to teach young women how to handle life and fit into society effectively and comfortably, is it really the thing to teach them that they must be servile to men? Is it the thing to teach men that women should be expected to be servile? 'Servile' is merely another way of saying 'so vile'. I know that this is what the several thousand year old Bible prescribes, but we've moved way beyond Biblical dictates in 2014. I find all this to be an appalling thing to set before impressionable girls. This scene would have been better written if both had prepared the meal in concert with one another. In that way it would have shown how well men and women can work together to achieve a goal; it would have shown that nothing should be beneath either a man or a woman when it comes to home-making, and it would have sent a much more equitable message.

Samantha is a cheerleader, as I've mentioned. I detest this kind of thing in a novel. This is another trope which needs to be done away with, and this is another part of this novel which smacks of genderism. The guys take on the 'tough' he-man job of playing that hard game, but the lower-status 'weak and fair maidens' are fit only to cheer them on? And then there's this 'argument' claiming that cheerleading is on par with martial arts. Ahem! Excuse me?! Having registered that complaint, you can argue that this novel is doing no more than reporting what we see in real life, so why blame the author? I think we can blame the author for not trying to break molds and stereotypes - especially in a novel which is ostensibly aimed at moral and emotional support explicitly for girls!

Then comes the team prayer. Actually, it doesn't, not formally, but it seems to be in the air as the supporters of the one side pray to beat the opposing Christian team. I find this objectionable, not so much in this story, which to its credit, doesn’t get down and dirty with that, but in real life. Do these people who insist upon abusing the establishment clause of the US constitution really believe that the creator of the universe cares who wins a school football game or basketball game? Really? Do these people believe that he will support one team over the other? Suppose both sides pray? If all prayers are answered, does that mean both sides will win? Will they draw? Does the most sin-free side win, or is it the side which prays most fervently? Maybe it's the side which dons the most ragged sackcloth and has the most ashes in its hair? See? It’s patently absurd. Worse than that, it explicitly states that "our team is so useless that we routinely need divine intervention if we’re going to have a hope of winning"! Do coaches not grasp that praying is an insult to their team and a sad commentary upon their coaching skills?! And an insult to their god, for that matter (not that that bothers me). Fortunately we don’t have to deal with that in this particular novel, so kudos to Miller for avoiding it, but prayer does play a large part in the novel and not one of the prayers is answered!

With Samantha becoming ever more focused on the bullying, and whilst we’re on the topic of prayer, I have to ask here why doesn't Samantha pray for the bully to be exposed, or to change his or her mind about bullying? This goes right to the core of my opening remarks: why pray to win the game, but not pray to divine (literally) the bully's identity? If there's a benign god and prayers are answered, there's your solution right there. Of course, it cannot be this way because then every faith novel would be one paragraph long! It cannot be this way because even a Christian novel cannot pull a deus ex machina! It’s quite simply not credible and even faith writers know this. You see? It’s irrational even within its own framework. So art that point one has to decide to quit or to persevere, putting religion aside since it’s already proven itself to be useless here, and try to ignore it while enjoy the rest of the story.

The problem with that plan was that the rest of the story was rather less than tolerable, too. For example, on the topic of genderism: the only things of note about Samantha's mom that we're offered is that she's a journalist and she's pretty. How superficial can you get?

Samantha is supposed to be on the cusp of becoming a "young adult", around twelve or thirteen, but she behaves rather younger than that, and her parents treat her like she's eight or nine. Her dad consistently calls her 'pumpkin' (how original - and no initial cap!) and her mom calls her 'my sweet thing' which is sickly if not outright sick. I sincerely hope not all Christian families are like this one!

On the topic of the bullying, initially I'd been convinced that Nikki, the girl being bullied, was overweight, but it turns out she's not. Not even close. This makes it truly bizarre that she would be bullied in this way, and even more bizarre that someone as snotty and spoiled as Nikki would even pay attention to it. This by no means makes the insults acceptable, but it seriously cheapens the point which Miller seems to be striving to make. It would have been a much stronger novel if Nikki were actually overweight. As it is, this renders the treatment of a serious subject into something of a joke, and thereby achieves precisely the opposite of what Miller was supposedly trying to do here.

It’s disturbing in the extreme that the nominees for Homecoming queen and "court" (aka the losers) are all cheerleaders (except for two who work with Samantha on the newspaper). How misguided and sad is that: only two girls in the entire class who were not cheerleaders were considered worthy of nomination? What happened to the Biblical injunction against pride and adornment? Something about gilding the lily...? This obsession with looks isn’t confined only to the nominations, it spills over into the rest of the narrative too, with people being described as "cute" which is religio-speak for "hawt". It has nothing to do with personality, because the only worth anyone can have, apparently, in "Samantha world" resides in their looks.

Not a word is said, for example, about how decent a person Nikki Cole is (or isn’t) or how smart she is (or isn’t), because all that evidently matters is the superficial: whether she's "cute" or not. The same applies to Thomas Murphy. No word on how smart or decent he is (or isn’t), it all boils down to whether he's "cute" or not. And because he's a bit of a loaner, he's dismissed as "odd" - and by Samantha, who is supposedly a Christian. I expect this in your regular YA novel because, generally speaking, that's all that ever seems to matter in the majority of those novels (although thankfully there are some really good exceptions), but given that this is a Christian story, supposedly professing certain values and standards, I would have expected it to rise above pettiness and blinkered bigotry, and I would certainly not expect Thomas to be relegated to the same category as a school stalker, regarded with suspicion as a potential bully for no other reason than that he's looking at a "cute" girl and is a bit of a loner! Is Samantha really this short-sighted? If her Christian upbringing cannot make a better person of Samantha, then of what value is it?

Indeed, the more I read of this novel, the more Samantha seemed to be on something of a witch-hunt, which is fine, I guess: the Bible does explicitly order us to kill witches! Fortunately Christians don’t do that (except maybe in Nigeria), which only goes to prove that even Christians do not recognize the Bible as a moral authority. But Samantha rejects the Bible again here, specifically the portion which says something to the effect: "judge not, lest ye be judged", because the new girl, Felicia, immediately becomes a suspect. Samantha is as judgmental as you can get! Or maybe she's just mental? I liked Felicia, though. Felicia was apparently expelled from a Christian school for fighting! So much for "forgive those who trespass against us"; Christians obviously don’t practice what they preach! At that point, I was seriously interested in Felicia; she sounded much more intriguing than ever Samantha could be - or any other character I've so far met in this novel. Unfortunately, Felicia hardly appears in the novel - merely a brief glimpse in passing, here and there; so much for her big entrance! But here’s the rub: Felicia was a cheerleader and also on the school newspaper! What the heck is with cheerleading and newspapers in this novel? But Samantha's judgmental attitude spreads like a disease, way beyond a single fight at a school. In Samantha's condemnation-obsessed head, this one incident gets blown up into Felicia being "mad at the world"! Exactly what kind of a bigot is Samantha?

In many ways this novel cheapens bullying: by making it about a weight issue, yet dumping it into the lap of a girl who has absolutely no such issue! It evades any real bullying entirely. The bullying portrayed here, whilst technically bullying it is, or more accurately perhaps, harassment, it's barely much above the level of teasing: a handful of texts, and a couple of notes calling non-fat Nikki a "fatty". When Nikki finds a small carton of diet bars in her locker, Samantha melodramatically declares that this "ramping it up to the next level". Behavior like that is never acceptable, but I found it appalling that this weak definition of "bullying" was the best (or worst, if you like) example Miller could think up to address in her story. It just made it into a joke rather than a serious issue which needed to be nipped in the bud.

And I found it laughable when Samantha goes though her "I'm not naming my sources" phase, and her mother backs her up form a professional journalism perspective! Samantha is not a professional journalist! She's just a school kid. She does not have the protections or requirements that a real journalist has. She is, primarily, required to abide by school rules, not by the professional rules of journalism. Yes, she does have the constitutional right to remain silent, but there is another factor in play here which is that she's supposedly a Christian, and yet she refuses to render to Caesar that which is Caesar's!

So, whilst I still love the title of this novel, I was sorely disappointed that it offered so little and I cannot rate it as a worthy read. I don't get how this is sold as Christian novel, because there really isn't anything Christian going on here. If you removed all references to faith, religion, and church, you'd still have exactly the same novel, the same plot, the same story, and the same people behaving in the same way. That's what I meant when I said that faith novels are hollow at their core. They're just regular novels featuring regular people. The faith angle is nothing but a sham - a gossamer veneer which is, ultimately, entirely irrelevant.

Rocket Robinson and the Pharaoh's Fortune by Sean O’Neill

Title: Rocket Robinson and the Pharaoh's Fortune
Author: Sean O’Neill
Publisher: BoilerRoom Studios
Rating: worthy!

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

Here it is: THIRTY ONE TITLES IN THIRTY ONE DAYS - and they said it couldn't be done!

This is a comic book or graphic novel adventure featuring Ronald, aka "Rocket" Robinson on the trail of treasure and villainy in early 20th century Egypt. The novel appears to be written for a pre-young-adult audience and in general it's a pretty good adventure for the age range, with mystery, thrills and dangerous adventures. I'm willing to rate this as a worthy read, but I do want to highlight some problems I saw in it.

I found it a bit sad that the villain is made 'villainous" by means of giving him only one eye (the other is covered by a patch, and making him bald. I know a graphic novel has to portray the villain somehow, but it was taking rather an easy and clichéd out by drawing him thus. That aside, the artwork is really good, and the lettering is done neatly and very legibly, which I always appreciate! I'm not sure of the point of his monkey, but at least it doesn’t talk. For me, it (and many points in the story in general, for example, the chase across Cairo) were far too reminiscent of Disney's 1992 Aladdin movie.

Rocket begins his adventure traveling by train in Egypt, and he's bored with nothing but sand to look at. He quickly learns of some evil machinations, but his dad - who looks way too young to be an important official for the US State Department, doesn’t believe him, of course. It would be nice to see one of these tales where the father does believe, or where he 'believes' but only that his son is playing a fantasy game.

The richness of their rented house in Cairo doesn't seem to match (on the inside) the appearance of the house on the outside! That was a small oddity, but it's an accumulation of oddity and incongruity which can trip up even a good story. For example, the pigeon English spoken by one of the villains is bad. He wouldn’t speak English to himself and his own thoughts in his native language would not be pigeon! That felt a bit klutzy to me. Worse than this, though, was the "gypsy" girl who speaks perfect English even though she's living on the street in Cairo. That seemed unlikely at best, and although 'gypsy' was probably the term which was used back then, it would have been nicer to see her correct his employment of that term with a more accurate and less weighted description, such as Romany or Traveler.

But these qualms aside, the story is interesting and moves quickly and with determination despite some unlikely events. Rocket ends up with a paper with hieroglyphs which make no sense even to an expert. The eye-patch villain, Otto, is trying to recover it and villains under his employ kidnap Rocket. There's really no reason for this since they only want the note that he can’t read, and he has a copy so he has no reason not to give it to them, especially since they do get it in the end.

One panel depicts a misspelled version of Archaeology in "Archealogy Digest" on page 111. Maybe it’s not a journal of archaeology but of the study of an ancient form of bacteria called archaea?!

I did like the cool code-breaking by Rocket - this would definitely have impressed me were I in the intended age range, but then we hit the downside of the improbability of having a canal under the Nile - into which the Nile drains! It would flood! The Nile would empty! But I'm betting that most children in the intended age range would not be so critical, so perhaps I should not be either! There was lots of daring action, and thrilling escapes from some rather sneaky pyramid booby traps, but our heroes were no boobies, and they successfully navigated them all, supporting each other and sticking together to the end. Overall, this is a great romp for age-appropriate audience, delivering lots of fun and offering a good ending. When all's said and done, I rate this a worthy read!

Quincy and Buck by Camille Matthews

Title: Quincy and Buck
Author: Camille Matthews
Publisher: Pathfinder Equine Publications
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Michelle Black

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

Michelle Black's artwork in this novel is beautiful. I do not know how she did it exactly, but it looks like it's oil on canvas (for all I know, it may well be!). The painting at the end, which made Quincy look like he was smiling without making it look absurd was absolutely priceless.

My apologies to the author, but in a book like this, it's the artwork that makes the first impression! But rest assured it's not all art and no substance to the text. The story is excellent too, teaching valuable lessons about bullying and bravery as young Quincy and the older, rather meaner Buck take their riders out onto a desert trail for a nice day's ride. There's no preaching here, no strident lessons, simply a tale as soft and easy as a comfortable horse-ride on an old and familiar saddle.

I defy anyone to not like this. I rate it a worthy read.

Angels by Alexis York Lumbard

Title: Angels
Author: Alexis York Lumbard
Publisher: Wisdom Tales Press
Rating: warty!

Illustrated by Flavia Weedn

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

This is a children's book, mostly art with a line of poetry here and there, for children's sleepy-time (not bedtime! heaven forbid! Children will sleep when and where they want - just be sure to have this or something like it ready for when and where they're ready!

I'm not a believer in angels or a fan of stories about them - and particularly not young-adult angel stories! (that is until and unless I write the definitive angel story!), but young children are a different thing altogether, for which we all should be ever grateful. They need to have their imaginations titillated at every opportunity otherwise they'll grow up to be cantankerous curmudgeons like me! So if this is your thing, you might like to try this one, although I am not able to recommend it. There were several issues that I had with it.

The first is that the formatting is totally trashed on Kindle (at least this review copy was on mine), so I had to read it in Adobe Reader. The second is that I simply wasn't impressed with the text or the artwork. I'm not the intended audience and young children - the audience for whom this is intended - will probably not care, but it didn;t look very good to me. There's no real story as such here, just a simple rhyme which young children might find appealing, but it didn't seem to offer enough, for me.

This book is promoted as non-denominational, but I found that claim to be rather disingenuous. Angels appear in one form or another in several cultures, but they really are a very Christian fiction, especially these days, and especially as depicted here, in a western setting. I would have liked it better if the settings were more culturally diverse: if the angels were depicted as a variety of ethnicity, and were depicted as people doing more worthy tasks than floating around in clouds: not only nursing (which is depicted), but also soldiering, policing, and so on, and not even just the services for which we're normally grateful, for that matter; a school bus driver and a crossing patrol might have looked good here, too, amongst other things. As it was, the angels were not depicted doing much good at all.

It was really sad that the artist showed us nearly exclusively white, Anglo-Saxon "Catholic" angels, and the writer and publisher let her get away with it. Given that the bulk of the world's population isn't white, that seemed rather inappropriate to me, and misleading to children, so for this and the other reasons I've discussed, I'm do not feel comfortable in giving this story a worthy rating.