Mason Meets a Mason Bee by Dawn Pape

Title: Mason Meets a Mason Bee
Author: Dawn Pape
Publisher: Good Green Life Publishing
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

This is a wonderful young children's story about the fact the bees are slowly becoming extinct, and when they do - if we do not prevent it - we're going to be in a much sorrier state than ever we will be through climate change. Climate change will screw up this planet, I promise you, but losing bees will hit us with a gut punch from which we will have a seriously hard time recovering.

Dawn Pape, a self-described "lawn-chair gardener" has a degree in Environmental Studies and a Master's in Environmental Education, and this story features her own son meeting a bee and learning all about what bees do and why it's important. It's told in a sing-song rhyme and illustrated with photographs, some of which are augmented to make the bee look a little more human, with startled eyes and smiles!

At first, Mason is scared of the bee, but slowly he comes to realize that it's not interested in him. It's just "wants to do its job" - gathering nectar and pollen for its own purposes, but incidentally pollinating the plants as it does so. This is a symbiotic relationship that's been going on for a hundred million years - that is until humans came along at the very end of that huge time period and started screwing things up.

Contrary to what you may have heard on Doctor Who(!), bees aren't aliens! There are some twenty thousand species of them, all evolved on Earth and they range in size from a variety of "sting-less" bee measuring only two millimeters (believe it or not - Trigonisco duckel!) to the Mason bee, featured in this story, which can grow to almost 40 millimeters.

The death of a beehive is referred to these days as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - that is as long as it meets certain criteria. Forms of it have been noted for a hundred and fifty years on a small scale, but over the last forty years, the problem seems to have become far more serious than an occasional outbreak, with wild bee populations going into decline, and "domesticated" colonies being hit noticeably. By 2007, "...large commercial migratory beekeepers in several states had reported heavy losses associated with CCD. Their reports of losses varied widely, ranging from 30% to 90% of their bee colonies" (wikipedia).

There is a variety of causes for CCD "...such as pesticides, mites, fungus, beekeeping practices (such as the use of antibiotics or long-distance transportation of beehives), malnutrition, other pathogens, and immunodeficiencies. The current scientific consensus is that no single factor is causing CCD" (wikipedia). The author of this story book seems to place the blame on neonicotinoids a component of pesticides, and there seems to be a scientific consensus supporting her conclusion: "A 2013 peer-reviewed literature review concluded neonicotinoids in the amounts typically used harm bees and safer alternatives are urgently needed."

So there it is. It's an important topic, and it's one of a type which you do not usually see tackled in children's literature. That's why this book is important, and can be a useful part of any young child's environmental education. I recommend it as part of a complete environmental education that every child should have.

As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust by Alan Bradley

Rating: WORTHY!

Flavia Sabina De Luce has been banished to Canada! Toronto to be precise. It’s a girls boarding school, which she has reached by extensive travel by ship and train, and on her first night there, due to some extraordinary circumstances (which you will never guess at, so read it and squee), a dead, desiccated body is discovered in her room. And that's just the first three chapters!

By about page two I was in love with this book and with Flavia, shameless cradle-robber that I am (Flavia is fourteen, the youngest of three daughters, the other two of which are Daffy and Feely. I want to meet the whole family). Alan Bradley is a talented writer who reminds me a lot of Gail Carriger - not in his looks, you understand, but in his style - although having said that, make no mistake that this is his style and not hers. If you like Carriger's writing, and you like some Brit in your lit, you'll doubtlessly like this.

I must confess that I'd never heard of the author until this novel came up for review. He's a Canadian writer who evidently has a really good grasp of English life (either that or the Canadians and the Brits have far more in common than ever I'd hitherto understood!). This isn’t the first in the series; there's a half-dozen others, none of which I've read, but which I'm now definitely planning on investigating forthwith:

• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
• The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
• A Red Herring Without Mustard
• I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
• Speaking from Among the Bones
• The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

Fortunately, the stories are apparently self-contained because while reading this I never felt like I was missing any vital information. No novel is perfect, of course, so there were some instances where I had cause to question the writing, or more accurately, the thinking behind the writing, but there was nothing spectacularly adrift with it. It was generally well-written, with no spelling or grammatical errors that I noticed, and the problems were minor.

One of these relates to how Flavia's name is pronounced. The first syllable is 'flay', not 'flahh'. When a teacher mispronounces it, it's understandable, because she sees it written before she hears it, but when the police inspector mispronounces it, it makes no sense, since Flavia has already introduced herself to him by name!

Either this novel was not well-written in this particular aspect, or the inspector is stupid or nowhere near as perceptive as an inspector ought to be! This is a writing problem: you’re so used to seeing the word on the page and reading it rather than hearing it, that you forget that this is supposed to be a view of life - of people living and moving and having their being, part of which includes conversation. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget that words have sounds, otherwise you make mistakes like this.

To balance this out, let me add that I'd initially thought there was another instance of bad writing which turned out not to be so. Flavia knows who Diana Dors is. I found it highly unlikely that a 14-year-old from Flavia's background (even one who is well-educated) would not only have heard of an actor who died thirty years ago, but was also familiar enough with her to formulate the remark which she makes. It was only later that I discovered that this series is actually set in the fifties! This was quite amusing to me, because for the first page or so, I'd also thought the main character was a boy, and even when that was corrected, I'd thought it was a contemporary story!

Other than questionable instances like those (including questionable perception on my part!), the writing is excellent - and very entertaining. Flavia got into a spot of bother in Britain. She was drummed-out of the girl scouts for one thing, and so this hying to Canada was deemed to be the best thing for her. Endearingly, this girl who (literally) dreams of riding bicycles up stairs and running a chemical laboratory, was not in the least bit discombobulated a have this fascinatingly deceased body plummet into her life like a Christmas present from hell.

Here's another minor correction: we're told that the body is wrapped in a Union Jack, but that's a mistake. It's only a Union Jack when it's flying from a ship, otherwise the British flag is called just that: the Union Flag. To be fair, most people get that wrong, and though the author's "Brit speak" isn’t perfect, but he does a dashed good job of it, what? I was impressed.

On her first full day in the academy, Flavia rapidly becomes acquainted with a variety of other girls, but she never really makes friends. Some of those whom she meets, however, she purposefully cultivates in pursuit of her desire to solve this murder mystery. Evidently the body in her room is not the first girl who has gone missing at Miss Bodycote's Female Academy!

The story really starts to pick up when the principal, Ms Fawlthorne, shares a secret or two with Flavia, and this is the start of a trend. There are secrets galore, and weird behavior, and secret societies, and oddball behavior, and secret activities, and did I mention hidden secrets? Lot's of people are not who they seem to be. Through all of this, Flavia keeps her head. She's no Mary Sue, and far from perfect, screwing-up and breaking the rules, but she never gives up on her pursuit of the murderer. She's determined, resourceful, inventive, and eventually, she gets, as they say, "her man" (not that the perp is necessarily a man, understand).

That's not to say that Flavia is a Mary Sue by any means. She makes mistakes, but she's really smart, deeply interested in science, is feminine without being a wilting violet, she has times of strength and times of weakness, she has flashes of brilliance and flashes of dufus, and guess what? here's a YA novel with no male (or female!) love interest at all. How refreshing is that? As happy as I am to absorb a novel like this, I have to confess it makes me a little bit sad to think that it was a guy who created such an awesome and strong female character. How come he can do it and so many female writers fail in the same quest?

This was an especially refreshing read which I highly recommend, and I'll leave you with this amazing quote which made me laugh out loud. It does help if you properly understand British idiom, however:

"How are you finding it?" Merton asked. "Miss Bodycote's Female Academy I mean?"
"Frankly, Mr. Merton," I said, "Just between you, me, and the gatepost - it’s a bugger."

The Lost Years by Mary Higgins Clark

Rating: WARTY!

Read acceptably by Jan Maxwell

So today's the twelfth of the month, which means that it's time to post a review for a novel beginning with the letter 'L'.

What's the deal with two slight variations on the same cover?! I know lots of novels are reissued with a different cover, usually for no good reason, but these two are pretty much exactly the same! What's the point? Did they think we would think it's a different novel? Is it supposed to be better somehow? Is it more artistic?! Which genius came up with this, and how much do they get paid for their 'inventiveness' and 'originality'? No one puts their head deeper in their patootie than does Big Publishing™, I swear!

This novel was supposed to be a detective story, or so I'd believed when I picked it up at the library, but the detectives were only minor characters here! What? I am not kidding you! At least that's how it was for as far as I listened to the audio book, which wasn't very far. The book read (or rather 'listened') like it was a daytime TV soap opera with nothing interesting going on, and populated with boring characters who held even more boring conversations at every turn. It was like the murder was merely a prop for people to get together and mindlessly gossip about anything and everything other than the murder.

The premise is that an ancient letter was discovered, supposedly written by Jesus to Joseph of Arimathea, and that it was in the possession of Biblical scholar Jonathan Lyon, who intended to hand it over to a museum when he had finished studying it. Someone evidently didn't like this plan, and shot him.

It was Mrs Lyon in the study with a revolver - who was discovered with her husband's body lying slumped over his desk, by their daughter Mariah. The wife was suffering some form of dementia, and it seemed obvious from the start that she wasn't the perp, even as she was found holding the gun and covered in blood. Way to trumpet "Red Herring!". OTOH, she may have been the perp. I can't tell you because didn't get past disk one of the CD set. That's how chronically boring this story was. I didn't regret abandoning it, either. The next audio book I moved onto proved to be highly entertaining.

It's hard to believe that an established and experienced writer like Mary Higgins Clark makes the amateur mistake of having a character's description flow from her reflection in a mirror. That's considered, rightly or wrongly, a no-no, and would alone get a novel rejected by your typical agent were it written by any writer who didn't already have their foot firmly in the door. It just goes to show the crap you can get away with when you're not a newbie, doesn't it?

From what I've read in the reviews of others, this ancient letter is irrelevant because it plays no part in the story other than being the motive for the murder. It's also absurd in that this letter, had it been real (not that it could have been, but if) would have been a sensation, yet it's essentially treated as completely unimportant - at least as judged from the portion to which I listened.

I'm an atheist and don't believe there ever was a son of a god. There were lots of Jesuses (or rather Yeshu's or Yeshua's or Yehoshua's since Jesus was not a Hebrew name). Some of them may even have been rabbis, and some may have been crucified. A heck of a lot of people were, but there's no evidence to suggest that any of them was a son of a god, so this part was irrelevant to me, as indeed it was to the story.

The novel was completely uninteresting. Not even a bit of it was worth the listening, so there's nothing more to say except that I can't recommend this based on the portion of it that I suffered through.

Karma by Donna Augustine

Title: Karma
Author: Donna Augustine
Publisher: Strong Hold Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"loosing" should be "losing" (12% in)
"Battlestar Gallactica" should be "Battlestar Galactica" (chapters 6 & 8)

Well today's the eleventh of December so this must be the day I post a review of a novel beginning with 'K'!

This is book one in the "Karma" series, of course, because, why go to all the trouble of giving birth to a potential new cash cow when you can keep on milking the old? I started out thinking that I really wasn't going to like this, then I warmed to it, but nowhere near enough to want to keep reading more of the same.

The premise is rather juvenile. Twenty-seven-year-old Camilla Fontaine dies in a train wreck (a literal one) and finds she's being recruited by Harold, who is the Mr Jordan of this story. Harold thinks she's perfect for taking over the role of Karma - the celestial being which is responsible for seeing that everyone gets their just deserts. Of course there is no such thing in real life because life isn't fair. There is nothing out there keeping accounts or maintaining balances.

The problem in this story is that Camilla/Karma is a transfer - someone recruited from the newly dead, rather than being a lifelong inductee, and fate isn't kind to such recruits, particularly the Hand of Fate - the guy with whom she must work. It's so nauseatingly obvious from her completely unjustified and over-the-top hatred of him, that she will be falling in love with him before long which was frankly rather sickening to me.

I have to say that I'm not a big fan (actually I'm not a fan at all, with few exceptions) of supernatural novels where the supernatural world is exactly like ours except supernatural. That is to say, it turns me off to read a vampire novel (which I purposefully try to avoid for just this reason), where there is a royalty - with king vampire and/or queen vampire, and princes and sheriffs, etc. One of the weaknesses of the Harry Potter series for me was the Ministry of Magic and all the laws and rules and the farcical policing.

To me, that was completely nonsensical, trite and tedious, and it kept reminding me I was reading a novel, pulling me out of suspension of disbelief, but at least Rowling seemed to realize this, and made an effort to put some absurdity and humor in there to make it just about palatable. I've read too many other stories (including one last month) where this kind of thing goes on mindlessly and it's ridiculous, for example, in how the supernatural investigator comes back to the office and has to fill out paperwork. I'm like, what? What paperwork? Who is asking for this?! What possible purpose can it serve? It's stupid.

Back to the story in progress! So here, Karma - whose real name is Camilla, but who is renamed Carma (seriously?) when she's reincarnated - works in an office, lives in a beach house, drives to work in an old car. No one tells her squat, so she's completely in the dark. Even though she changes her mind about doing this job, it's because of formalities and paperwork that she can't get out of it immediately and has to work for thirty days. Since this is a series, we know for a fact that she's going to stay in the job, so this was farcical at best.

Day after day goes by with no one telling her anything. I mean people literally don't say anything to her except "Hi!" and "Bye!" She gets no training whatsoever despite being a 'transfer' who quite evidently needs it. She keeps getting told that she'll have to wait and she will know when it's her time to do anything, but she's given absolutely no clues whatsoever about what's going on, what she might expect, and what she might have to do about it. This is dumb because we're told the job of the people in the office is to correct imbalances caused when the universe forgets to maintain a balance by itself, yet it's the universe - evidently - which notifies her when it's her time to intervene. Huh?

She shares the drab office with several other such beings: the Hand of Fate (who is a complete jerk, and creepy to boot), Lady Luck, the Jinx triplets (who are really teenage brothers), a leprechaun, Murphy of Murphy's Law, Kitty, who is in charge of the black cats, and so on. None of them seem to do anything. Given that there are seven billion people on the planet, I find it hard to believe there isn't more to do - unless there are offices like this all over the country, and all over the world.

OTOH, if the universe is so good at doing this that there's is so little to do, what does it matter if one slips through the cracks here and there? What harm does it do? Again, no explanation! Why does there even need to be a balance? There's no explanation for that either. I wouldn't mind the office and the paperwork, and the rules and regulations so much if I were offered some sort of justification, or if some attempt was made to make them make some sense, but none is. This is a classic example of a really good plot idea thrown down the toilet with piss-poor execution.

Karma's first task comes in the form of a dream about a bad guy who has, through several incarnations we're told, cheated and otherwise been very naughty. Apparently neither the universe nor previous incarnations of Karma did squat about him - so why is it suddenly important now? Again, no explanation is forthcoming. The current Karma's home-grown solution is to put a wild bee's nest in his car, so that he dies from stings. How does this correct all the evil he's done over several incarnations? I have no idea, and neither does the author as far as I can see! It doesn't actually fix anything. None of the people who he screwed-over gets a thing out of this, so how is this even Karma (in the sense intended here)? There is no justice served, no balance restored.

It makes no sense either, to have a "Karma" to restore balance and to simultaneously have a "Murphy", to upset the balance. How the heck is that supposed to work? What happens if Fate and Karma are at odds? Who decides who wins?

It was at this point that I found myself thinking that I honestly didn't know how much more of this I wanted to read. Camilla agreed to join the organization because she wanted revenge - but that's the very opposite of how one is supposed to approach the concept of Karma! Someone, we're told, purposefully caused the train-wreck which killed her, so why didn't Fate step in then? There's no explanation for that, either!

Karma initially starts out, after being rein-Karma-ted trying to visit her family and fiancé, but she can't. Whenever she gets near them, she gets horrible feelings that they're going to die. They can't hear what she's saying anyway. It's like she's only partly visible in her old world. She can go to a café and order coffee, but no one sees her dump the bee's nest in the car, and she doesn't get stung even once from doing this. She's initially brought in with the promise of getting justice for the train wreck; then she's denied it, and finally she's offered it again. How does any of this roller-coaster contribute to restoring balance to the universe?

This business of karma (not Karma!) makes no sense, especially in view of how it's depicted in this novel. The Indian idea of karma is that your actions dictate your future; bad acts make for a bad person and vice-versa. Duhh! It's hardly sublime! The problem is that this is popularly taken to mean that if you do something bad, then something bad will happen to you in return, and vice-versa, but this is a very blinkered view, and it really makes no sense, especially in a western civilization where reincarnation is not considered an option. It makes even less sense if it's being forcefully controlled as this novel suggests! Around 40% into reading this, it made even less sense, as I shall discuss shortly.

Looked at from another angle, I couldn't help but wonder what was going to happen to Carma for all the bad stuff she was perpetrating here. She was a lawyer, but she was a public defender, so does this mean she has dharma and punya for helping disenfranchised individuals to have a voice and find justice, or does it mean that she's larding herself up with adharma and pap because she has helped bad people to avoid justice?!

Taken to its logical conclusion, why is it so focused on bad stuff? If the bad stuff has to be balanced out, then doesn't the good stuff also? If you do something good, then "logically" shouldn't something bad happen to balance it out?! This is the problem with religious beliefs. They don't lend themselves to rational analysis, because once you do that, they fall apart completely.

I decided I was pretty much done with this story at this point. This is where Karma - against express instructions, kills a guy who is abusing his wife, thereby preventing him from killing her. She was supposed to have got his wife's blood on his clothes, thereby implicating him so he'd be arrested, but she lost her cool, and she done him in!

Here's the first problem with that: isn't she supposed to be in charge and do what she thinks is best? This is what we were told about her. Yet when she does precisely this, the weather changes to thunder, lightning and rain?! The universe is pissed off? How? If the universe missed correcting this, then how can that same universe declare what's to be done? Why would it even care? If it knows what's to be done, how can this be considered to be a case which slipped through the cracks? None of this makes any sense.

That's not even the worst part, and the juxtaposition of the abusive husband with Karma's next actions is completely ironical at best and downright criminally insane at worst. Here we have Karma going full throttle to seek justice in the case of an abusive guy and his wife, and next she's making out with Fate, who has done nothing but abuse her from the off?

Can no one see the hypocrisy of this paradox? Admittedly Fate had not beaten her up or anything like that, but he had physically (if in minor ways) and mentally (in major ways) abused her, and she has the hots for him? I'm sorry but this is entirely the wrong message to send to female readers and that's why I am rating this book WARTY! I've seen this in too many young adult novels, and though this isn't one of those per se, it's clearly aimed at adults who are at the young end of that range.

I can't condone a book which tells women of any age that it's okay to 'put up' with domination (in the broadest sense) and outright abuse, and as if that alone isn't bad enough, that as a young woman, you should be more than willing to lay down and open your legs for abusive partners, and fall in love with them too, if they require it. It's sick, and Donna Augustine and her publisher should be ashamed of themselves for purveying inappropriate and sick trash like this.

Venus in Love by Tina Michele

Title: Venus in Love
Author: Tina Michele
Publisher: Bold Strokes 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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

There was a prologue for this novel, which I skipped as I always do. I've never regretted not reading a prologue! If the author doesn’t deem it important enough to put right there in chapter one, it’s not important enough for me to expend time in reading it.

This novel is about Ainsley ("Lee") Rae Dencourt and Morgan Blake, and their "romance". Frankly I wasn't impressed by Lee right from the first page. At least she wasn't telling us this story in first person, for which I thank the author whole-heartedly, but the way that Lee comes off towards the bottom of the first page (which is actually page 16, not page one) of chapter one, she seems to me like she's irritatingly weak and needy.

Lee's father died eighteen months previously, so there's an understandable raw-ness to her feelings, but the way the narrative goes on about how he was always there for her, even when she rudely interrupted his meetings, and she was always seeking his advice, made her look like a really spineless, inconsiderate, and whiny brat! As I turned the page and saw that she then became angry at her father for his making her feel dependent, I sincerely I hoped she wasn't going to continue in this vain vein…! Unfortunately, she did.

When we meet her, Lee is heading to her favorite place in the world, which is the Louvre in Paris. In college, she met a girl whose name she never knew, and whom she simply thought of as Venus. This person is Morgan, and the two of them of course meet up later, but the meetings and interactions are so artificial and stilted that they were not even remotely natural and they were not entertaining, either. There's also a massive chasm between what we're told that the characters are feeling in this novel, and how they behave, and we’re offered nothing to explain why there's such a huge discrepancy.

It so happens that Lee's fantasy girl is employed at the Louvre, but instead of Lee seizing the moment and immediately going over to her to re-introduce herself as soon as she spots her, Lee hides behind a statue! It's nonsensical. Shortly after this, Lee once again proves how selfish and self-centered she is by using her privileged status as a gallery big-wig to talk a senior staff member at the museum into forcing Morgan to give her a tour.

Morgan is temporarily employed at the Louvre and is working on setting up an art exhibition, so Lee's selfishness and stupidity here drags Morgan away from something which is very important to her. That's the message I kept on getting - that it's all about Lee and her manipulative behavior, and the hell with Morgan's needs. By this point I really did not like Lee in the slightest. Morgan deserves better than someone who thinks that money can buy anyone and privilege can get you anything.

In contrast with that cynical perspective, we're also treated to the stupid perspective whereby, and despite the fact that both of them (we're repeatedly told, not shown) have flutter,s and weak knees, and throbbing hearts, they fail to pursue the relationship with any of the passion they purportedly feel! that night! We keep on having it drilled into us what passion they have for each other, but they never pursue it! Instead, they go to dinner together the next evening and though they kiss, they still take it no further.

The next night is the opening of the exhibition, and the two are supposed to attend together, but Lee finds a way to screw even that up for Morgan. Lee's mom becomes ill, and even though her mom is nowhere near at death's door, Lee immediately charters a private jet and goes home. Never once does she make any effort whatsoever to contact poor Morgan and tell her what’s happened, or to leave her a message. The two of them are also apparently phone-shy in the extreme, because they evidently don't trade phone numbers. Morgan never even got Lee's last name. This was way too artificial for me.

Once back in the US, Lee discovers that her mom has decided to retire from running the Dencourt gallery, so Lee is put in charge, and she cooks up a scheme to get Morgan working there - again manipulating her without even trying to talk to her. Their whole interaction is completely brain-dead.

This wasn't even the worst part, believe it or not. Never once during their entire interaction during the portion which I read, was there any indication of any real feeling here or the remotest hint of developing respect and consideration for one another. The entire relationship was nothing but pure, unadulterated adolescent lust. That's all we got. If the novel had been about domination, then it would have fit the bill a lot better, because nothing here spoke of love at all. It wasn't a friendship. Friends do not treat people like Lee treated Morgan. It wasn't even erotic - it was just trivial, artificial, and ultimately boring.

So after some seventy pages of this novel I couldn't help but conclude that it was thoroughly ridiculous, with patently phony scenarios set-up to create fake excuses in place of naturally developed tension. It was entirely unrealistic, and what we got wasn't at all well done. Most of the writing was conversation or long expository paragraphs. There was no real attempt to create any kind of atmosphere or warmth, or chemistry between the characters.

Neither was there any attempt to create any sense of place and life. This began in Paris, and it was centered around art, but there was no feeling of atmosphere, of an exotic locale, or of scents, or sounds or joie de vivre. Despite the art premise for the story, even the art was given short shrift. It felt far more like stage props, literally littered around the place to fake a background than ever it did real live art.

I honestly cannot recommend this novel. Morgan deserved better and so did the readers.

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Title: Just So Stories
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Tower Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Read by 2011 Best Voice in children and family listening: Jim Weiss

I always associate these stories with Watership Down which I reviewed in September. The two have nothing in common (other than that they're charming stories about animals), except that I associate them because they were both given to me as a birthday gift a long time ago (Thanks Ruth!). I have to say that these are hugely entertaining (not all of them, I found a couple to be a bit boring), and in large part I have to ascribe this not only to Kipling, but also to the reader of the audio book, Jim Weiss, who went way above and beyond the call of duty in relating these tales! Now that's what I call a performance!

Just So Stories was first published in 1902 and is remarkable for how well it’s aged. These children's stories sound just as good today as they no doubt did then and even before then, when Kipling's nurses told them to him as a child. Kipling won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907 and is still the youngest recipient to receive it, as well as being the very first English language recipient of it.

The essence of these stories is the fantastical; they're completely absurd tales about how various animals (and human animals are the subject of three stories) got to be the way they are today. There are twelve stories in all in the volume to which I had access to; the original publication, however, had one more story: The Tabu Tale, which according to wikipedia is missing from most British editions of these stories (as well as mine!). Why, I do not know, but it's another story about Taffimai, and you can read it here at wikisource, Best Beloved.

How the Camel Got His Hump relates that the camel was the most idle creature in all creation until the dog and the ox and others complained, whereupon the creator Djin resorted to ordering it to work, and giving it a hump of food so it had no excuse to stop for a meal break.

How the Rhinoceros got his Skin is a ridiculous story relating how the Rhino was perfectly ordinary but rather kleptomaniacal, and ended up with a disheveled-looking skin because it stole a cake, and the victim garnered revenge by filling the Rhino's skin (when he took it off to go for a swim) with cake crumbs, causing all kinds of unrelieved itchiness when the Rhino put it back on again, later.

How the Leopard Got His Spots is as a result of their being really poor at hunting zebras and giraffes when the latter two got their spots and stripes and became so well hidden. The answer lies with an Ethiopian who was friends with the leopard and suffered an equal lack of hunting success.

How the Elephant got his Trunk. The answer to this lies with a very curious elephant child and a rather feisty crocodile. Perhaps you can fill in the blanks, but maybe not as well as Kipling did.

The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo tells us how this antipodean animal came to have such a weird appearance and such a rare (among tetrapods) method of locomotion. There's a dingo involved. But isn't there always? The moral of this story is: don’t ask to be much sought after….

The Beginning of the Armadillos is a story about a hedgehog and a tortoise. No really….

How the First Letter Was Written brings us into acquaintanceship with the young and opinionated Taffimai Metallumai - a real charmer who almost foments a war.

How the Alphabet Was Made us a follow-up to the previous tale, with the same female main character.

The Crab That Played with the Sea explains why we have tides (it has to do with the living circumstances of a rather crabby character).

The Cat That Walked by Himself is a longest story, and it explains how cats came to be cats, which might be why I found this a bit tedious. Cats are way overrated!

The Butterfly That Stamped is about Sulaimon bin Daoud and his 999 wives. Apparently there's a problem with his domestic circumstances.

I recommend this - especially the audiobook. This and Libba Bray's Beauty Queens are books, I feel, that are actually better heard than read

The Red Bishop by Greg Boose

Title: The Red Bishop
Author: Greg Boose
Publisher: Full Fathom Five
Rating: WARTY!

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

p105 "bicep" should be "biceps".
p115 "The glass in the pitcher clinked loudly." should be either "The ice in the pitcher clinked loudly." or "The glasses and the pitcher clinked loudly."

Kudos to Greg Boose for putting his prologue into chapter one. He must have known it was the only way to get me to read it, and it was awesome! Now pay attention you dedicated writers of prologues: Greg Boose has shown you the way out. It can be done! Free yourselves from the shackles of the antique prologue and embrace it chapter and terse!

Does Porsche tack tacky chrome bumpers onto their cars? No. They showed other manufacturers the way when they incorporated the bumper it right into the body of the car. Now everyone does it and cars look a lot sleeker for it. Dispense with those rusty, blemished prologues! Incorporate! And let me warn you that the tale in chapter one is gruesome, so don’t read it unless you grew some of your own.

The Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel had no margins. The text ran all the way to the edge of the page left and right, and pretty much top and bottom, too, which looked a bit odd. The novel begins on page five and runs to page 219, so that gives us some 215 loosely-spaced pages in thirty chapters. It’s a quick and easy read.

Now on to the story: Lake Price is a seventeen-year-old adrenalin junkie, but not one who is into extreme sports - unless you class running track as extreme. That's why Lake set out with three friends to stay overnight at the supposedly haunted Chatham Manor. The original plan was to go alone, but one thing led to another and eventually it led to the four of them: Lake, Madison, Ell, and Logan - two girls and two boys (you sort out which name goes to which gender!).

They had to break into the place through the basement, and it was creepy as all get out (which they didn’t do), but it wasn't the house that was haunted - it was Lake, haunted by the unsolved disappearance of a younger brother Kimball four years ago. Is Lake just about cheap thrills, or is there a death wish buried the requisite fathom deep in Lake's unfathomable depths?

Okay, I'll identify one character name and gender for you: Lake is the red head on the cover (big reveal, huh?!) and I initially liked her not from the picture, but from her guts and gusto as revealed in her actions. This was a character to appreciate, to empathize with, and to feel a bit sorry for even as you admire her bravado. Unfortunately, it didn't last!

Still wanting to be alone, Lake waits until the other three are asleep in the not-so-haunted house and she heads out into the nearby forest, where she discovers a really haunted house, which roils even the imperturbable Lake. You see, one of the things she finds in the house are belongings of her long-lost brother.

On the downside, I have to say I, er, lost faith in this novel around page sixty when the author, after a great lead-in about palindromes, got to rambling on about how the wife of Judas, the supposed betrayer of Jesus, was a witch who seduced her husband for the sole purpose of luring him into betraying the purported son of a god. This is nonsense.

I don’t believe there ever was a Jesus, son of a god, but pretending for a minute that it’s true, just for the sake of argument, it cannot be otherwise than that Judas was not evil, nor was he a betrayer. He was working with Jesus, not against him. Under the inane and bloodthirsty Christian cult of death, Jesus was a blood sacrifice, without which our sins could not be expunged (so much for the Christian god being omnipotent!).

Judas was an integral part of the scheme! Without the sacrifice, there could be no redemption, so I've never actually understood how Judas is the bad guy here. It makes no sense, and serves only to show how thoroughly screwed-up in the extreme Christianity truly is. Christians really need to take a look at what the original word - the word they now read as 'betrayed' actually meant: paradidomi means to hand over. Betrayal is a meaning it came to hold long afterwards.

Fortunately this nonsense was soon swept away by Lake herself. Here's a line she spoke from page 64: "I have four years of teenage rebellion built up in me and I am not afraid to use it." That was a charmer, but her distance perception is off significantly if she really thinks that Wilmington North Carolina is several thousand miles away from Chatham, Massachusetts! It’s actually less than a thousand, and less than 700 if you fly direct.

But that aside, it’s not long before Lake discovers a secret about her heritage and she's not only haunted by her brother's disappearance, but also by witches. It was suddenly time to do battle. So far so good, but the story began to go seriously downhill after this, and my fondness for Lake with it. The problem is John Billington, a teen from Plymouth (new England) who apparently was abducted by a witch in 1621, and held in a form of suspended animation or more accurately of suspended aging since then, through witchcraft.

The witches take children so they can eat their hair which is sustenance, apparently. They were allowed this under a loop-hole in a contract signed after the Salem witch trials. Seriously, there was a contract? Why they don’t just get jobs in barber's shops goes unexplained. When Lake killed one of the witches and freed her captive children, Billington was among them, but he shows absolutely no gratitude whatsoever. On the contrary: he's rude, abusive, and insulting to Lake. At this point I was seriously hoping we didn't have a so-called "love" triangle developing with this jerk and Ell, towards whom Lake had been making advances - when she's not abusively cold-shouldering him. As I read on, it became increasingly clear that my dire wish wasn't going to be granted.

Despite his dismissive and arrogant attitude, Lake has, of course, the hots for the four-hundred-year-old guy. The problem is that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever in evidence for this attraction. There's even less reason when she meets him later, following a sadly ham-fisted breach between her and Ell tossed-in for good measure. The story went straight downhill for me, because until this point I'd admired and respected Lake. I’d been on her side, but once she began actively swallowing unwarranted abuse and disrespect from Billington, instead of becoming angry and shunning him, she was betraying the very character she'd shown herself to be up to that point.

It was not only sad, but sick and I had to ask: do we seriously need yet another YA novel which depicts a young woman rewarding thoroughly inappropriate behavior with the cut-rate YA excuse for love (which is all we typically get in these novels)? I'd been thoroughly on-board with the story, but I became increasingly ready to jump ship as this went on unabated.

The records of the settlers do record a John Billington and his son, also John, they do not record John Jr. disappearing (except for a day or two in the woods, whence he was found and returned by native Americans - and this was despite the rampant pillaging of native American food stores by the Mayflower thieves upon their arrival. He's recorded as dying young, but several years after his arrival in Plymouth, not in 1621.

The unrealistic thing here is that Billington shows no sign of being at all traumatized by his suddenly (from his PoV) waking up in 2014. Neither does he speak remotely like a Puritan. Even his "outrage" that, without his permission, Lake kissed him (it’s how she frees children from the witch's spell) rang false.

It got worse when Halstead the witch expert started "training" Lake to fight the witches. Billington is also present for this, and also trains with her. I could not help but wonder why Lake's friends - who have already gone through the real thing with her - were excluded, but Billington the bore was included. Of course it provides a really clunky and very fake reason why the two of them are hanging out together, but it was nauseatingly done and not welcome as far as I was concerned.

This novel seemed fanatically determined to evolve into a train-wreck. We're told that John Billington has gold flecks in his eyes and muscular arms! The gold fleck trope is so over-used that it's actually nauseating now to have to read it time and time again in one YA novel after another. On top of that, there's no reason at all to think he was muscular except that this is yet another trope.

John Billington Junior's family history is essentially unknown, but given from whence they hailed, John senior was likely a fisherman. He was also a trouble-maker in New England who was eventually executed. It seems unlikely that his son was the gentleman portrayed here! The author seems to forget that four hundred years ago, people were significantly smaller than they are now. Lake would have towered intimidatingly over young John.

Lake further retreats from rectitude as she plays with the back of Ell's neck while continuing to have the hots for John. At one point she's reaffirming to herself that Ell is her boyfriend, and shortly after that she's passionately kissing John, something she never does with Ell. She behaves far more like a fifteen-year-old than ever she does a seventeen-year-old, and at this point in the novel I quit even liking her.

No one in their right mind would expect a girl like Lake to be blind to boys or to behave like a nun, but when you set someone up as the main character, especially one with a mission, and you give her a set of admirable traits, it's an awful thing to betray those very traits by subsequently rendering her as an air-headed waif with neither focus nor integrity! We've been given no reason at all for her to fall for John, and yet she's obsessed with him. Meanwhile, we've been told that her sole focus for four long years has been her brother, and now she's all but forgotten him in favor of mooning over John. It just did not read right.

This wouldn't have been so bad if we'd been given some realistic motivation for her behavior, but we've had no such thing. It's quite clear that the only reason she's behaving like this is that the author felt it necessary to give her not one, but two male "love" interests in her life because that's what the YA rut (and I do use that word ambiguously) demands. I have a lot more respect for authors who do not kow-tow to mindless trends than I do for ones who are slavishly dedicated to perpetuating YA trope and cliché.

It's an interesting revelation of Lake's character that she performs no chores whatsoever at her grandmother's B&B where she lives in the basement for free. Nor does she ever offer to help out. And she gets an allowance! I found it hard to believe that she wasn't involved in running the B&B at some level. This makes it harder to see how she managed to transition to what she supposedly became at the end. On an unrelated topic - but about one of her relations! - it's also interesting that every time we meet her grandmother, we're treated to a detailed description of what she's wearing - something which we never seem to get for any other character! I found this peculiar at first, and rather irritating as it continued.

Lake's behavior isn't the only thing which is off about this story. Ell behaves like a schizophrenic: one time when he drops Lake off for her training, he talks to her really snottily, but when he picks her up a bit later, he's all BFF, yet we're given no good reason for his earlier behavior and even less for his complete turn-around shortly thereafter. That's a minor consideration in comparison with Madison, Lake's female BFF, however. They're best friends and then for no reason at all, Madison starts acting like a complete spoiled-brat jerk right out of the blue. It was entirely unrealistic.

There are also events - like the flooding of the changing room, which no one else in the school seems to notice! There are no questions about why Madison was screaming, why hers and Lake's clothing is soaking and torn yet no one comments on it, or why they have bloody scratches on them, again which no one notices! I guess everyone in this school is blind!

The worst part about this whole thing is that it isn't the whole thing. It's episode one. It's a prologue. Nothing is resolved at the end; rather than a complete novel, we get only an introduction to volume two, which I now have no interest in reading, I have to say. While this 'partial novel' started out great, had some original ideas, and featured some decent action, the real problem was that it devolved too quickly into cliché, and the characters never seemed realistic to me. I was strongly in favor of the main character at the start, but her behavior and actions made little sense and spoke badly of her, so she lost my support long before the end of the novel.

In the final analysis, my whole reading experience was dissatisfying, and the novel was nowhere near impressive enough to make me want to rate this positively, or to induce me to read more in this series.

The Indian Bride by Karin Fossum

Title: The Indian Bride
Author: Karin Fossum
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WARTY!

Translated by Charlotte Barslund (no website found).

If it's December nointh, then we're reviewing a novel which has a title starting with 'I'!

I don’t really have polite enough words to describe how god-awful this novel was. I've read Scandinavian works of this nature before and enjoyed them, so I thought this might be interesting too, but it was just the opposite. I managed to finish the book, because the writing itself wasn't technically bad (although this was a translation, I can’t speak for the original), but in terms of plot and execution, it was without a doubt the most insipid, ponderous, uninspiring, tedious, frustrating, meandering, clueless, vapid, dissipated so-called 'mystery' I've ever read.

I know full-well that in the US we’re overdosed on the formulaic and the shallow, and on the template-driven must-be-tidily-wrapped-in-forty-minutes crime stories from TV. I know the books aren’t that much better, but even when pushing that aside and adopting a more cosmopolitan approach to crime stories, this novel still stands out as being completely lackluster, and so bad it was squirm-inducing. Do police in Norway never ever do any forensic work? Do they never follow clues? Are they really more interested in talking about their sick dog with the prime murder suspect than ever they are in discussing the actual crime? I sincerely hope not.

We're told that the woman was attacked and ran and was finally brought down. We find a suspect with scratch marks on his face, yet never once is the question of whether the victim has skin under her fingernails raised. It’s apparently something which the forensic people failed to check. Seriously? I've never been to Norway, but my instinct is that their police and crime work is very much like it is in the US and any other modernized country, yet if we’re to trust this author's writing, Norway is no better than any severely underprivileged and under-funded third world country for how technologically backward it is! Frankly I don’t believe that.

Do suspects routinely submit themselves to endless hours of questioning without ever having their lawyer anywhere near? The main suspect's lawyer is in this novel for about one page and that's it. We never see or hear from him again! He is never once present when the suspect is questioned. The suspect offers all kinds of support for his assertion that he did not do it, and the police fail to follow-up on any of it. One of his items of supportive evidence is actually proven to favor him - but totally by accident, and it never gets raised again. Is this how criminals are brought to book in Norway - pick someone who seems a likely suspect and interrogate him endlessly without a lawyer until he breaks down and confesses - and then blindly assume that this proves that this guy did it?

I sincerely hope that Norwegian police are not as hopeless, clueless, mindless, and useless as Inspector Sejer and his assistant are. The assistant attracts the stalker-ish attention of one of the primary witnesses, who is a young girl, yet when she calls him to tell him she thought there was a man in her yard watching her, he tells her he's off-duty and can’t help her, and he turns over and goes to sleep. Later she's attacked, evidently by this same man. She calls this assistant and he tells her to call her mother! I kid you not. That's his response when a citizen tells him she was attacked; then he turns over and goes to sleep. What happened to her is never resolved or explained. It’s never even followed up. It’s just let go.

There isn't a single person in the entire town who steps forward and openly volunteers information. Everyone holds back and fails to report important things until they're outed by someone else, or until they finally break down and 'fess up what they know. There's no explanation at all given for any of this behavior. I guess we're just supposed to assume that Norwegians love to let major crimes happen and the perps get away with it! One guy - and for no reason at all - disposes of evidence in a lake. It’s just not realistic that every single person would be like that. There are half-a dozen suspects, yet not one of them is properly investigated. Does Fossum really want us to believe her country is like this? Her people are like this?

Inspector Sejer is the most misnamed character ever, since he inspects nothing! Usually the inspector in a story like this is someone who has something going for him: he's really good at seeing through the trees to the forest (or vice-versa!), or he's is acutely observant, or he's brilliantly deductive, or he's great at getting people to expose their own guilt. Sejer is none of these things. Sejer needs to be retired.

In the old TV series Columbo, Peter Falk played a rather rambling, bumbling detective, but underneath that you knew he was sly and calculating, and brilliant at getting people to admit things they really wanted to conceal. Sejer is just like Columbo, but without any of Columbo's positive traits or results! Instead, he really is slow, dull, bumbling, hesitant, un-stimulating, uninventive, unadventurous; a plodding chunk of sheer boredom. He shows no brilliance in anything. Finally he decides, for no good reason at all, that it’s this one particular guy, who has no solid evidence against him, and that guy's arrested and charged without further ado or investigation. We never actually learn if he really did it. This is a first for me in a murder mystery!

The writer is supposedly the Queen of Crime in her home nation, and I can subscribe to that if the crime is lousy plotting and atrocious execution, but if the title is intended as a positive one, meaning that she's the best, then the rest of the Norwegian crime fiction writers must be a sorry lot indeed. I weep for them, but I honestly don't believe that the writer of this novel is the queen of anything but cluelessness.

This book is one of several in the Sejer series. How this lousy approach to writing a detective series ever progressed that far is the only real mystery here.

The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison

Title: The City on the Edge of Forever
Author: Harlan Ellison
Publisher: Idea & Design Works
Rating: WARTY!

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

I'm not a fan of Star Trek (the original series) and indeed I have issues with all of the series, but the later versions, while still problematical, were far better than the original series which was ham-fisted and amateur, and not at all deserving of the praises it got or the following it has. It won a Hugo award, which tells me that Hugo awards are as meaningless as Newbery medals.

This episode is a prime example of many of the issues I've had with Star Trek, so I was curious to read Harlan Ellison's earlier treatment for this episode (which I also watched for comparison purposes). Note though that the story told in this graphic novel, while closer to Ellison's original treatment than ever the TV show was, is not actually his original treatment - it's more like a hybrid between what he first wrote, and the final shooting script.

Let's just chill for a while, Jimbo, Baby!

According to wikipedia there were some serious issues with Ellison's treatment for the show: it was a sci-fi story all right, but it wasn't a TV episode. It was too long and the pacing was off, and it wasn't in keeping with Star Trek etiquette, so to speak: there were issues over how the captain would behave. Given that most of the time Kirk was jerk in this show, this wasn't a problem from my PoV, but even after Ellison had re-written a lot of it, the script still needed major in-house re-writing to the point where Ellison was ready to take his name off it!

In the original story, there was a drug angle - in the form of narcotic jewels to which some crew were addicted, and there was a murder. This led to a crew member being taken down to an uninhabited planet to be shot! Yep! Shot! In the TV show and in the comic, the crew member beams himself down to the planet to escape.

This was one of my biggest issues with Star trek - every single series: their security SUCKS! It's non-existent! Anyone, at any time, can pretty much do anything they want on a starship! They can beam wherever they want, whenever they want, and they can steal shuttles without any problem at all! This never improved throughout the entire set of series they produced. It was laughable and ludicrous.

We've all had days like this....

Down on the planet happens to be a magic rock that can transport anyone to any time period on any planet, and this crew member jumps through it at a point which takes him back to - of course! - the USA in the 1930's because no other country is ever of any interest. In the filmed episode, it was Doctor McCoy, not some disposable crew member, and he lost it not because of drugs, but because he was accidentally shot up with an OD of medicine! Which is another failing: these med dispensers aren't set to deliver only one dose at a time?! Seriously?

Jim Kirk never had a 'number two' to delegate to as other Star Trek captains did, and he always went on missions even when it wasn't even remotely necessary for a captain to be there, which was the most risible thing about every Star Trek episode. That's like a general, instead of directing his subordinates on the mission's objectives and then trusting them to carry it out, leading every battle charge and every scouting mission! Ridiculous!

It's complete and utter bullshit and was one major reason for my festering dislike of these series, especially since every Star Trek captain is a monumental Mary Sue - always right, always noble, always selfless, always getting the girl! It was farcical! This particular story was even worse, because not only does Kirk go, but also Spock goes with him as well as Scottie and McCoy (although not on orders). This means every single one of their senior command staff was off the ship! Even Uhura is there. For what reason are the chief engineer and the chief communications officer required here? I can see that Spock might go, but why Kirk?

You don't mind if I do!

McCoy's presence was only because he accidentally OD'd, but why did he OD? Well he came to the bridge to administer a shot, so the question there is really: why was it routine for the chief medical officer to run around the ship giving shots? It's totally nonsensical! The "original" story makes a lot more sense, but whatever the lack of logic is, the problem for the story and the show is that the guy who travels back, changes history by saving a woman's life. In their own time, the Enterprise completely disappears. In the original story this didn't happen, something else did.

So, once McCoy has leaped back to the 1930's, instead of detailing someone to go after him, Kirk and Spock go - Spock being the most likely to stand out in a crowd of humans! There is a crew of four hundred and fifty people on the Enterprise NCC-1701, and there are no other senior officers? No mission leaders? No mission specialists? No engineers? No scientists? Absurd! If we discount the eight main characters, that leaves 442 people on the Enterprise who are obviously complete freeloaders, who have no training, and who apparently have not a single thing to do save die if they're wearing a red shirt, or otherwise idly saunter around Enterprise's corridors every day.

Once they're back in the 1930's, Kirk and Spock have to wait for that random officer to show up (in the case of the original story presented here). In the TV show they're waiting for McCoy. Spock builds a device that can see the future(!) on his meager fifteen cents a day wage that he earns for working in the soup kitchen where they hid out after arriving. As it happens, the woman with whom they're boarding is the one who must die to revert time to its original pathway. How convenient!

Jackass Kirk, so obsessed with the prime directive when it's other who are risking breaching it, abandons it completely here and hits on this woman under the guise of falling in love - which he never actually is. He then doesn't want her to die of course. This is supposed to represent anguish and conflict, but she does die, and McCoy is all better and everything is just super-duper.

Honestly, this Hugo-award-winning story is pathetic and I cannot recommend it. The artwork is rather good, but I don't get these stories solely to look at the art!

The Housewife Assassin's Handbook by Josie Brown

Title: The Housewife Assassin's Handbook
Author: Josie Brown
Publisher: Signal Press
Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
At then end of chapter 2: "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in site." should be "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in sight."

It's the eighth of the month so this must be a novel which has a title starting with 'H'!

Sometimes books like this work, and sometimes they crash and burn, but they're so appealing to me that I keep on picking them up anyway, in the hope of finding a gem. One of my issues with books like this is that there can be some subtle (and not-so-subtle!) genderism involved - yes, women can be just as genderist as men. I noticed this in this novel, but it was relatively mild, so I decided to let it slide.

The premise in this story is that Donna Stone was married, unknowingly, to a CIA field agent named Carl. Carl had infiltrated a Russian mob, and they'd discovered him. On the same day - almost a the same time - that the Stone's third child, Trisha, was born, Carl's Porsche exploded and very little was left of him. Now Donna has followed in his footsteps to revenge her beloved husband's death, and she's not at all squeamish about doing whatever it takes to achieve her aim.

I don’t buy for a minute that Carl is dead! There was no body - in any meaningful sense - to identify, but if he isn’t, he's sure taking his sweet time letting his wife know that he's fine. For over a year Donna was still maintaining the increasingly absurd fiction that her husband abroad, on an extended tour of duty for Acme corporation - for which he works/worked, and which is a CIA front.

Meanwhile she's a mom to three children, and having to deal with teen tantrums and transportation. Initially she was living off Carl's continued salary as even the CIA, for reasons of their own, maintained the fiction that he was alive and well, and living incognito. Unfortunately, after that first year, this stipend ended stupendously, hence Donna's need for employment.

It was at 25% into this novel that the real turn-off showed-up in the form of a character named Jack. I've sworn never to purchase another book with a main character named Jack because I'm nauseated beyond polite language by the fact that this is the cheesiest, most over-employed, most brain-dead, most clichéd, laziest, most stupid-ass trope character name ever. I'm serious. Are authors so utterly vacuous and so deeply entrenched in their rut that they can’t think of a different name? Must they be hide-bound by mindless tradition? I guess so.

Now, I still have some books on my reading list which no doubt have a character with this name in them - such as this one, for example - and I'm committed to at least starting them because they're on my list, but I'm by no means committed to finishing such books or to giving them a good rating. In fact, were I to rate using stars (other than the binary 'worthy' five star or a 'warty' one star ratings which I habitually use), I would drop two or three stars for this alone. I'd drop another two or three for the fact that this jack-ass, who is supposed to be undercover, is driving around the neighborhood in a Lamborghini Aventador (the same car that billionaire Bruce Wayne drove in one of the Chris Nolan Batman movies).

So I was at this point faced with a problem in that I was enjoying this novel until this character name showed up, and it’s not only the name - the circumstances of his arrival were completely implausible. That alone would merit a one or two-star drop, and a further one or two stars would disappear because he has his "broad, muscled chest" and it's bared, which is another one or two star deficit for maximum trope-age. In addition to that, he's a complete jerk, so another two for sure there. At that point, this novel has plummeted from a potential five star rating down to something in the region of a negative four stars to a negative nine stars, depending upon what mood I was in when I quit reading (which may or may not coincide with my finishing the novel)! All because of this Jack(-off). It took very little time to decide.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this woman - whom the author has gone seriously out of her way to drill into us loved her husband beyond anything, misses him tragically, and can't stop thinking about him - has no problem whatsoever in throwing herself at this guy even as she deludes her mindless self that she hates him. So we’ve gone from a delightful novel where anything could conceivably happen to a completely clichéd one where it’s is so absurdly and painfully obvious what’s going to happen that the story is no longer even remotely interesting. I rate it warty!

Dark Prayer by Natasha Mostert

Title: Dark Prayer
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic Ltd (website not found)
Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
p81 " Jungles' " should be " Jungles's " - since 'Jungles' is the guy's nickname, it's not a plural.

I've had mixed results with this author sometimes liking her work (two novels), other times not so much (one novel before this, now two novels). The problem in this case is that quite literally as soon as I began this novel I was simultaneously thinking that I wasn't going to like it.

A while ago I vowed never to read another novel which had a main character named Jack, and what did I read when I reached only the seventh word in chapter one? Yep. Jack. The problem is that when I made that vow, I still had a lot of novels in my reading list that I was committed to reviewing! A heck of a lot, including this one.

What's as disturbing as it is amusing is that a disproportionate number of those novels on my list seem to feature a character named Jack. Recently, post-vow, I even voluntarily took on a review of yet another novel with such a character as a favor to an author. Fortunately, that one turned out to be a worthy read, but I still didn't like the Jack character in it! I detest that name because it is the single most over-used and clichéd character name in writing history, and "Jack" - intended by the unimaginative author to be a rascal and a scalawag, typically ends up being a thoroughly obnoxious jack-ass.

It's tedious to have to keep on reading novels which suck on each other like so many incestuous vampires, re-employing so uninventive a character name just because they think it does all their work for them. It's also unrealistic, especially in this story. They're of Italian ancestry, Jack's father's name is Leon, yet he and his wife chose to name their son Jack? It doesn't flow. So here we go again!

Jack is of course (and quite predictably so) the spoiled brat ne'er-do-well son of a fabulously wealthy American businessman. He's given one last chance to reform or he'll be cut off by his father without a penny to his name. The bizarre thing is that his "job" is to fly to England to visit with an old college friend of his father's and provide whatever help he needs for as long as he needs it. This is almost as big of a mystery to Jack as it is to the reader. Why trust this perennial loser with an important task for a dear old friend? It made no sense to me, unless of course there was something truly under-hand going on and it involved Jack's own father as well as the college friend.

In England, Jack learns that the task with which he's charged is to get close to Daniel Barone's estranged daughter, Jenilee Gray. Jenilee went missing for almost two years and when she was discovered by a private investigator hired by Daniel, she was a different person, almost literally. She looked different, and behaved very differently from Jenilee, and now she goes by the name of Eloise Blake.

After she was located, Daniel had met with her and she had rebuffed him, yet he still feels a need to interfere because he thinks she's being targeted by someone who wants to kill her, but it seems more likely that he just wants to reclaim her. He sees her as a form of property. Unfortunately over the course of this novel, all we see change is that the property rights to Jenilee/Eloise are transferred from Daniel to Jack. In the end, that's killed this novel for me.

Jack is trapped in this reclamation plan of Daniel's, but his behavior still doesn't suggest that he has a decent bone in his body. Never once does he raise an objection, no matter how circumspectly, now matter how tentatively, to Daniel about how wrong it is to try and reel his daughter back in when she's made it quite clear she wants nothing to do with him. We can only guess at the reason she wanted out. Incest perhaps? Some dire family secret like misplaced parentage? Something else, like experimentation on a child? All of the above? Is it Daniel who's surreptitiously threatening her life and thereby trying to sway her back into his own fold?

The superficial reason why Jack is chosen to get close to her and find out what happened is that both he and Eloise are parkour devotees, and it may seem like a good reason. The problem is that Jack hasn't done parkour in ages, and it seemed to me unlikely that his cold and distant father would really know very much about his interests and habits, much less care about them to the point where he could bring this to his friend Daniel's attention. It's possible, I guess. Despite Kirkus's gushingly inane review of this novel (Kirkus almost uniformly positively reviews novels so their blessing is meaningless), Parkour actually plays very little part in it - at least in the portion I read, but I'm guessing it's somehow involved in a dramatic escape at the end.

My first real problem with Jack is how superficial he is. His only observation of this woman is how pretty Jenilee was, and how beautiful Eloise is. Admittedly he has at that point only photographs to go on, but this viewpoint doesn't change even after he gets to "know" her. His brainlessness is proven before we reach the half-way point by his blabbing that he loves Eloise when he barely knows her. It's pathetic, and so shallow that it's almost a parody.

I found it very sad that yet another female writer is promoting superficial looks right up front as the only important thing worth noting about a woman. I see this repeatedly in YA literature. It's abusive and it doesn't ameliorate it in the slightest to give your character odd eyes, like this 'makes her a bit ugly' so it's okay now to type her as beautiful and offer nothing else? And yes, rest assured that she does have the trope gold flecks in her eye! Here they're described as yellow, but it's still the same YA cliché that I see in almost every YA novel that has a so-called romantic angle. It's the LAW! Eyes have to have gold flecks in them! On. Pain. Of. Death! Deal with it! Sheesh!

This would not have been half as bad had Daniel given Jack a verbal portrait of Jenilee beforehand, thereby offering him something to admire, something to prick his interest or to stir his motivation, but this never happens. The meeting between Daniel and Jack is brief to the point of it being a prologue (there is also an actual prologue, which I skipped as I always do because if the writer doesn't think it's worthy of putting it right there in chapter one, then I don't think it's worth my time reading it - and I've never missed it).

The point here is that we learn nothing of the Jenilee who existed before the Eloise pushed her off stage - other than that she was overweight as judged from the photos! Jenilee 2.0, aka Eloise, is a slim & trim version because - once again the message is clear - only looks are important! All we're offered is the new "beautiful" contrasted with the old, out-dated "pretty" and that doesn't cut it any more. In fact, it's thoroughly inadequate. It's even sick. This attitude is further amplified on page 49 where Daniel's only important memory of two dead female family members is that "They were so beautiful" - because women have no other value than as set decorations. Yeah we get the message.

Women deserve a lot better than to be judged and categorized (and very effectively marginalized and dismissed from importance) by having some shallow loser named Jack rate them as "beautiful" or otherwise. It would have been a far more interesting challenge for a writer, from my PoV, to have Jack be the playboy he is, but then to fall for this woman (as we know he inevitably will because what is this if not yet another St George slaying the dragon and rescuing the helpless maiden story?) not because she's a snappily-dressed beauty queen, but because she's the very opposite: in short, that she's actually a real woman rather than a Barbie doll. Why won't writers do this? My feeling is that it's because it's a lot easier not to do all that work, that's why.

Back to the story. Superficially, it would seem that Jenilee simply got scared of something and purposefully chose to go into hiding, but we also get the story from Eloise's PoV, and it's clear that something's going on with her that makes this a bit more complex. It's like she has flashbacks or hidden memories threatening to resurface, or something, and she doesn't know what those are. She's all but living in poverty now, working on a market stall in London, and spending a lot of her time parkour running - and stealing books! Unfortunately the admirable parts of her character are all-too-quickly subsumed under the need to render her into a damsel in distress so "Dashing Jack" can rescue her. I'm really surprised that Jack isn't some sort of captain.

It struck me as odd, given the circumstances of her 'disappearance' that no one is even slightly suspicious that there must be something dangerous going on. Daniel thinks she's had some sort of dissociative episode, but he does believe that someone is trying to kill her (or at least that what the writer wants we readers to believe!), and no one seems to connect that with the curious details of her disappearance, which I'm not going to relate here. I was sorry that Jack didn't think to ask the private detective about Daniel himself and his mysterious house-mate Francis Godine. I think those two know a lot more than we're being told!

On page 72, there's a line of text taken straight from the movie There's a Girl in my Soup - a dear favorite of mine featuring Peter Sellars and Goldie Hawn, except that the line was changed in the movie from the original play (which at the time was the longest running comedy play in the history of the West End). Playwright Terence Frisby had it better: "My eyes feel like two rissoles in the snow". Unfortunately, the Americans don't know what rissoles are, so I guess that's why it was changed, but the changed version makes no sense in the context in which it's offered. The movie is very dated now (the play is from the mid-sixties, the movie from the seventies), but I recommend it; both Hawn and Sellars are priceless.

The ease with which Jack associates himself with Eloise is not credible. We're told that she's a highly suspicious person (as should be expected, given what's happened to her), yet she takes to Jack like a duck to water. I didn't buy it at all. It was too easy, especially given how they met, and soon they're bosom buddies, with Jack even resenting her platonic relationship with her muscular friend 'Jungles'.

At one point Jack harbors an unspoken snide observation about Jungles drinking green tea. He associated that with an aversion to caffeine, but unless it's decaff (which isn't specified here), green tea actually contains caffeine! Depending on how long it's brewed (which ideally is tied to quality: the higher quality being brewed for a shorter time) it can contain just as much caffeine as does black tea, so either the author or Jack isn't very well-informed here.

In the Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel, on page 97, there's a link to a New York Times article - a link which is broken. I don't know if this is on purpose because the article is fake or what. I've seen this in other novels too. It's just irritating! I suspect it's an error - a fake URL actually showing up as a real link in ADE. Anyway, to cut a long review short, the story progresses as it should, with Jack discovering more about Eloise, and becoming ever more intrigued as the mystery deepens. The big question is what's going to transpire when she discovers that he's been stalking her? Well, there's an app for that!

Eloise was not as impressive as she might sound from the early rushes. Given what she's been through, I would have expected more caution on her part, yet she displays a disturbing lack of it on too many occasions, which flatly contradicts her behavior at other points in the story. For example, one time she takes a bath and fails to lock doors even though she had a creepy (if unsubstantiated) feeling that there was someone in the house. This made no sense.

What really turned me off this story, however, was when I got into the 150 page range, where Super-Jack swoops in on poor, lost Eloise and takes over her life. It was at this point that I decided I did not want to read yet another story about how weak and ineffectual women are, and how desperately beholden they are that there are dashing men readily available to save them. I did not want to continue reading this story about a devilish guy named Jack telling a woman - a woman who had hitherto proven herself commendably independent and strong - what to do, and the woman submissively letting him take the reins because let's face it, women are really just little girls who desperately need a macho daddy figure to take care of everything for them, aren't they? That's the take home lesson here, at any rate, regardless of what sycophants at certain widely quoted review websites may claim!

I couldn't read any more of this after that point, so I can't comment on the ending except to say I already know exactly how it will turn out: Devil-may-care Jack (an American who says "Bloody!") will get his chickie. Of course he will. All I can say is I cannot in good faith recommend a novel which infantilizes women so inexcusably as this one does.

Girl Jacked by Christopher Greyson

Title: Girl Jacked
Author: Christopher Greyson
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another tedious trope novel with a main character named Jack. Yep, I know I swore off these rather vehemently, but I still have some relics in my collection which I need to read - which explains why I'm trying to get this one off the list asap. On the bright side, the way it began, this novel did make me feel quite strongly that it probably wouldn't be long before I was DNF-ing this F-ing cliché.

So what's the problem with "Jack"? Well, only that it's the single most gut-wrenchingly and nauseatingly over-fricking-used cliché character name ever where the purported hero is supposed to be some sort of an adventurer or a scalawag. Seriously - are authors so blinkered and entrenched in deep muddy ruts that they can't get their heads out of their boxed-in asses and come up with something fresh, new, different? Evidently this one can't, and Jack isn't his only problem.

Jack is a cop and we meet him as he's called to a bar around midnight in response to a 10-10, which is generally taken to mean that a fight is in progress. There is no fight, but clichéd men described as 'lumberjacks' are getting rowdy and refusing to leave unless they get a drink. Jack quickly sorts them out. As they're leaving the parking lot, a colleague arrives as back-up. She's your clichéd buddy female cop named Kendra, and her only qualities are evidently that she's athletic and beautiful - despite a scar! Nothing else matters. No one cares if she's good at her job, loyal, has integrity, is smart, is tough, can handle herself, always has your back, is sweet, is crazy, is a softy, or what the hell else. No, she's a woman so the only important thing we ever need know about her is whether she's beautiful. Not cute. Not pretty. Not average. Not good-looking, but beautiful. Got that? Embrace it and internalize it. I'm already really down on this novel at this point, but it gets worse.

Jack arrives back at his apartment - where he's having your standard trope clichéd problems, to find a young naked chick there who is the (foster) sister of his requisite dead black Iraq military BFF. Trope trope trope. And trope. This "kid" as he condescendingly refers to her, is here to report the disappearance of Jack's other BFF, Michelle, who went off to college on a scholarship, and then promptly disappeared.

When we hit chapter four and the action was suspended for a reminisce back to Iraq, I ditched this. I've never read a novel before where the boredom was interrupted to provide something even more boring! I simply wasn't interested in reading any more at that point and I have absolutely no desire to read a series about a tedious character like this in a tedious world like this. It was past time to move on a find something which can hold my interest and entertain me. I can't rate this novel as a worthy read.