Who Rules the Earth? By Paul F Steinberg

Title: Who Rules the Earth?
Author: Paul F Steinberg (no website found)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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 enough reward aplenty!

Erratum
Page 202 "...must make due..." should be "...must make do..."

Now here's a book that dispenses with forewords and introductions and gets right down to it. Kudos to author Paul Steinberg for showing that it can be done, even in a book of this nature! There was a problem with the Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel. This seems to occur a lot with PDF format ADE copies - whereby pairs of letters are blanked out for reasons which escape me. The letters are still there - for example, if I go to page 149 and search for the words 'stiff fines' the document search finds them immediately. It's just that I cannot see the entire words. Instead, what I see on that line is: "...are hit with sti__ _ines. __e..." Which, had the letters (marked by underscores here) been visible, I would have seen: "...are hit with stiff fines. The..."

The letter combinations affected here seem to be 'ffi', 'fi', 'ft', and 'Th' (note that lower case 'th' was not so affected!). Also, all numbers, including dates, years, and monetary amounts are banished to invisibility, too, making dates look really weird, like "May _, ____," (Note that I've added underscores because HTML annoyingly removes what it deems to be extra spaces). I assume that these issues will be fixed in the final version. The version I read was an advance review copy.

There was also a problem with the page selector at the bottom of the screen - it didn't recognize the pages - not even page 202 when it was on page 202!

The book opens with a story of a doctor's efforts to ban non-essential pesticides from use in the small town of Hudson, in Quebec, Canada. The effort is documented in a film; A Chemical Reaction, which I have not seen, but which looks, from the film poster on that page, to be one which plays to emotions (as judged by the prominent placing of the baby) rather than to cold, hard fact, but as I said, I haven't yet seen this documentary, so I can judge it only from the poster - maybe it plays to emotions and cold hard fact!

June Irwin, the doctor, prevailed, despite strong challenges from pesticide companies, one of which included the apparent intent of one of the prosecution to drink pesticide in the courtroom (talking of appeals to emotion instead of to rationality and science!). Fortunately, this wasn't allowed. A domino effect then went into play, with other communities, including the entire province of Ontario, seeking to regulate pesticides in the same way. A year after the rules went into effect in Ontario, concentrations of common pesticides in the waterways dropped by half.

The book mentions nothing of health issues here, unfortunately. Yes, pesticides were in use, yes concentrations fell, but what of the health issues? Where there pesticide-related health issues? Where these resolved or alleviated after the pesticide levels dropped? The book is disturbingly silent on this important aspect.

Almost needless to say, this kind of change couldn't happen here - here being the good ol' USA, where corporate lobbies are all-powerful and politicians kow-tow to them pathetically. Even if there are direct correlations between health and pesticide use, the lobbies are too powerful, and power and money speak a lot louder than children's health. The most powerful country in the world has clearly demonstrated this time and time again.

In the US, the pesticide-supporters (that is, industry and lobbyists) rallied and made an assault on the state legislatures, asking them to pass legislation preempting local communities. Is there anything less democratic than this? The number of such states went up by about six-fold. Of course, it's still in each individual householder's hands to choose not to spray pesticides on their own property.

But this book isn't merely a list of anecdotes, fascinating as such things can be. The opening chapter is merely a lead-in to explore how we came to have the rules we do have, and whether or not it's feasible to effect change. Should we give up on a good idea, because we think it's so good that someone, somewhere, must already have thought of it? Why is it that organizations are frequently ill-suited to the tasks they seem to have taken upon themselves?

I must confess that I largely skimmed chapter four, which was thirty pages of intense focus on the threatened Cerulean Warbler and its migration. Important as this knowledge is, it was a bit too much information for me! A shorter summary would have done it nicely. This felt like the author was painting a mural where a small line diagram would have served adequately, but better things were to come.

The very next chapter explores a variety of topics, from the initiation and final defeat of leaded gasoline to McDonald's fries (which have to be 9/32nds of an inch thick, don't you know?!), to Peruvian business laws, to the true cost of coal-derived energy, to Dutch tulips and cleaning circuit boards!

Whereas one chapter (such as chapter seven) takes a big picture - via a detailed history of the unprecedented international cooperation required to form the European economic community came together for example, another (such as chapter eight) takes a much more local view of how things get done - or fail to. That's where we learn this astounding fact, which is obvious in a background sort of way, but which is quite startling when it's stated quite baldly like this: "Forests absorb an astounding one third of all fossil fuel emissions each year; the destruction of forests today, primarily in the tropics, releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than is produced by the entire transportation sector." Sobering, huh? We desperately need the very trees that we're so gleefully slaughtering en masse

This book is associated with a video game called "Law of the Jungle" which I haven't played, but it's available at the link.

I recommend this book as a very worthy read.

Myths of the Oil Boom by Steven Yetiv

Title: Myths of the Oil Boom
Author: Steven Yetiv (no website found)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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 enough reward aplenty!

The author demolishes some widely-believed held oil myths in this worthy volume, such as that America's current (and inevitably brief) domestic oil boom will lower prices. It won't necessarily do any such thing because oil is a global phenomenon and the US doesn't control oil prices. How about the one that Saudi Arabia is an oil-price dove? Nope. Can the US president significantly control oil and gas prices? Strike that one, too. Surely if the US has a strong local oil supply, then we don't need to be involved in the Middle East any more? Wrong. Gasoline costs what you pay at the pump? Nope. The US boom will erase peak oil concerns? Nope!

By some measures, the US is on track to become the world's biggest oil producer. But guess what? The US used to be the world's biggest oil producer. Then it wasn't. What goes around comes around. The author is an award-winning expert on the geopolitics of oil, and one-by-one he takes down these myths and sets us straight. Someone needed to do it, because oil myths are rife, they're blind, and they're dangerously misleading.

How about this for a disturbing set of ideas: "Building an electric car industry does not mean that consumers will buy in, but neither is it true that a broad shift toward eco-friendly cars will have very little impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Most importantly, raising the level of domestic production will never solve America's energy and strategic problems, and may even worsen climate change, unless it is accompanied by a serious national and global strategy to decrease oil consumption"?

This is a comprehensive overview of where we're at with oil - where we're really at, not where the oil companies and politicians want you to believe we're at. Dependence upon oil is a cancer which needs a cure. It's books like this one (and others I've reviewed recently) that can help us get there. I recommend reading this one.

The United States of Excess by Robert Paarlberg

Title: The United States of Excess
Author: Robert Paarlberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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 enough reward aplenty!

Errata
"different" page 11 is rendered as "di__erent" (underscore added for clarity)
"conflating" on page 13 is rendered as "con__ating, and "confirmed" rendered as con__rmed
"first" on page 14 became __rst"
"reflects" on page 35 became "re__ects"
I will not point out any more of these, but it seems like every single instance of 'ff', 'fi', and 'fl' was blanked out. Obviously something got lost in the translation to PDF format! The iPad version was fine.

When a writer writes, and a publisher publishes, a book the topic of which the primary subject is excess, you'd think some thought would be given to whether excess is involved in the very production of the book! I skipped the introduction because they contribute nothing, for me, to the topic, and by the time I'd skipped through all the other lead-in pages, I was on page 22. That's eleven sheets of paper which have little or nothing to do with the meat. Each of these pages comes from a tree, which are the environment's best bet right now, for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Every excess page in a book contributes to destroying yet another of these trees!

In an ebook this doesn't matter, of course, because no paper (indeed, no page - we now have screens and locations!) is used, but if a book goes to a print run, and if the run goes to a large printing, then it does make a difference. And yes, I know that both tradition and organizations like, for example, the Library of Congress, demand a certain layout of a book, but screw them, I say. The environment is more important than any book-printing tradition, and it's far more important than the Library of Congress's antiquated book of ancient rules.

I say all this not to chide this publisher or this author, because this kind of thing is common place practise, especially in books of this nature. Instead, I point this out to illustrate just how easy it is to be excessive, and how blind we are to it in our habits. It's not just the pages, either - it's how much of the page we use. Naturally you don't want to produce a book where every blank space is crammed with tiny print. That would be foolish no matter how well-intentioned, but do we need to have so much white space? It's worth thinking about if your book is likely to end-up printed.

Even a book about excess isn't above carrying excess white space:

We could cut this back and save a tree - and help reduce the carbon dioxide pollution which is warming the globe.

But I digress! What does this book mean by excess? Well, two things primarily: Americans emit twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as the Europeans and the prevalence of obesity in the USA it twice that of the world average. This is despite modest declines in both in recent years.

The US is not he only nation with these problems, but it is the world leader. Is this how we want to be considered exceptional?! This change, we read, happened over the course of the first fifty years of the 20th century. It would seem that the USA was the only nation in the world which profited from two world wars. By 2008, even the poorest state in the union (Mississippi) "...had a GDP per capita greater than the E[uropean]U[nion]".

These issues are bad just from the bare facts, but what's worse is that the US is doing less than any other wealthy nation to combat these problems, but it isn't alone in inaction. We read here that although 40 nations have adopted carbon-pricing policies, these account for only a fifth of overall carbon emissions. Without dramatic measures to curb carbon dioxide emissions, it's already too late. We are going to start seeing catastrophic climate issues by 2050. This doesn't mean we should give up. It's not too late to start making important changes.

This book covers both excessive use of gasoline and excessive consumption of food. There are some connections and parallels. In a nation where 50% of the ads aimed at children are for food, is it surprising that obesity costs the USA alone $147 billion annually? The American Beverage Association (ABA) has spent literally tens of millions to thwart taxes on sugary carbonated beverages. Maybe we should organize a write-in campaign to have them rename their organization to American Sugary Soda Haven for Anti-Taxes?!

We learn that where federal government has failed to act to protect our children, local school boards and state government has, once again, stepped in - in some cases. The problem is that when you try to do things to engender healthier kids, Big Business™ objects. They'd rather have unhealthy kids and a healthy bottom line. This is why, in the USA, pizza is officially classed as a vegetable, and fries are very nearly considered to be an essential food croup. But, children get less than a third of their caloric intake in school, however, so there's a limit on what can be done there.

The book reveals that success can be had for those nations willing to discipline themselves. Hungary elected to tax foods with high sugar, salt, and caffeine content, using the tax money to fund health-care measures. It appears to be working. You gotta love the poetry of a nation with a name that sounds like 'hungry' addressing the obesity problem by taxing certain foods!

From chapter to chapter, we get an overview of what's going on with oil and over-eating, both looked at in a variety of ways. The USA, we learn, is the world's third largest producer of oil after Saudi Arabia and Russia, but the tax on gasoline in the US is only about 13% whereas in Europe it’s some 60%. Is this why the US burns four times as much gasoline as Europe? It's not quite that simple.

This book raises the disturbing question that perhaps one reason for rich nations dragging their feet on climate change is that out of 233 nations surveyed, the top twenty most at risk from deleterious effects of climate change were developing nations, not rich ones. The smallest voice and the most to lose.

The authors pull in many factors for consideration when trying to understand the large gulf which separates the US from other nations when it comes to controlling carbon dioxide emissions and weight. One fact which may not immediately come to mind is religion. The USA is one of the most religiously fundamentalist nations on the planet, which is hilariously ironic given that one of the tropes we're expected to buy is that people flocked here initially to find religious freedom!

A study showed that every one percent increase in soft drink consumption increases the obese adult population by 2.3%. The US is the second most guzzling nation - 31 gallons per person per year. Only Mexico beats the US at 43 gallons per year and they, too, have a severe obesity problem. We learn that out of all the well-off governments, governments, that of the US is uniquely designed to fail when it comes to top-down action.

It seems to me that we need a progressive health tax on foods, whereby healthy foods are tax-free, with taxes becoming the most punishing on items which are really bad for health. These dollars would then help pay for the health problems down the road which the food-abusers developed through unhealthy consumption!

Here's another issue: "Many governments around the world place restrictions on the advertising of food to children, but not the United States" (page 95)! Why would a nation which goes out of its way to protect kids (by having bright yellow school buses and elaborate halting of traffic whenever the bus discharges passengers, for example) not want to safeguard children's health? Is it the US government's official position that it's not okay to kill a child instantly by hitting them with a vehicle, but it is okay to kill them slowly by fattening them up to an unhealthy degree?! It makes you wonder, doesn't it?

As judged through a series of religiously-oriented questions, the US showed itself to be 50% more religious than the Israelis, and twice as religious as Europeans. Some 70% of US adults believe in the devil - which might make it easier to understand how polarized their view of the world is, viewed as a simplistic battle between good and evil. How easily such a precept can be transferred to other spheres of life! Despite some 90% of US adults believing that science and technology make for a better life, the mistrust of that same discipline when it comes to issues like climate change and evolution is stark. We're irrational! Nothing new there!

The authors provide a wealth of topics and issues, and of information and ideas, many of which might be as new or as surprising to you as they were to me. For example, families are consuming fewer meals at home, consuming more meals alone, and consuming more foods while driving. Women entering the workforce has had a surprising effect on our diet. That the large decrease in smoking has had a negative effect on weight isn't so surprising, but it may surprise you to learn that those who attend church or a Bible study group once per week are 50% more likely to become obese, and that there's a disproportionate increase in minority women gaining weight as compared with minority men.

So these issues are complex, and this book does an excellent job of laying out the facts and drawing solid conclusions. It's an important voice, and I'd recommend listening to it.

Transport Beyond Oil Edited by John L Renne and Billy Fields

Title: Transport Beyond Oil
Author: John L Renne and Billy Fields
Publisher: Island Press
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 enough reward aplenty!

This is one of two book reviews on books about the oil crisis which I am posting today - and yes, it is a crisis. Oil has powered civilization for getting on for two centuries, believe it or not (the first commercial oil was discovered in 1859), and it needs to stop. The US uses a fifth to a quarter of the world's oil. Believe it or not, this is less than it used to be, and it's very likely to be overtaken by the Chinese before long. Some 90% of the oil in the US goes, one way or another, into cars and trucks.

So obsessed is the US in prolonging its oil crisis that it's now using technology to frack the hell out of Earth's crust to suck out the last expensive, nasty, sludge-caked barrels of this vile substance - and who cares if it pollutes the water table? So what if some people turn on their taps and have "water" come out which you can literally set alight?

If you want to see an example of this, watch the documentary: Gasland. It's on Netflix. There's a preview you can watch on YouTube. It’s very revealing of the extent of our oil addiction and how much cheap oil has blinded us, that the US, which prides itself on being a technology leader, is offering no leadership whatsoever on alternative means of powering transportation.

Island Press is a non-profit organization dedicated to "…stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide." That's a fine-sounding statement, but when a publisher publishes a book with thirteen or fourteen pages - most of which are significantly, if not completely, blank - before chapter one even begins, I have to wonder how well thought-out is this commitment is to solving environmental problems! That's thirteen pages which come from trees, which are the environment's best bet right now, for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and every extra page in a book contributes to destroying yet another of these trees!

Yes, in an ebook this doesn’t matter, but if a book goes to a print run, and if the run goes to a large printing, then it does make a difference. I skipped those thirteen pages and went straight to chapter one. I don’t do forewords, introductions, prologues and what-not because they rarely, in my experience, contribute a single thing to the reading experience.

And yes, I know that both tradition and organizations like, for example, the Library of Congress, demand a certain layout of a book, but screw them, I say. The environment is more important than any book-printing tradition, and it's far more important than the Library of Congress's antiquated rule book.

Those observations and gripes aside, the topic of this particular book is one of critical importance because the massive bulk of oil use in the world is in powering transportation, particularly that of road vehicles. So what are the alternatives? As this book makes disturbingly clear, the alternatives are known - we’re just not moving to them.

Bio-fuels are being pushed as an alternative, but these are still carbon dioxide producers! They reduce emissions only 10% - 20%, and how are we going to grow them? Are we going to cut down more trees to make room for growing the bio-fuel plants? Are we going to cut back on food production? Actually it wouldn’t hurt to put the USA on a diet as the other book I review today will show.

The only truly clean alternatives are vehicles which use electricity or those which use hydrogen fuel cells. Electric vehicles, though, are only as clean as the fuel which produces the electricity they use. If the plan is to go all electric, but to use electricity generated from coal-fired electricity plants, then this is actually a backward step! This book discusses all of this.

Of course, you can argue that burning coal produces sulfur dioxide, which acts as a coolant on the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight, but this is a short-term "solution". The carbon dioxide we’re putting into the air now will still be here a century hence. Do you really want to screw your children and their children just so you can be selfish now? I hope not.

This book goes beyond a simple look at what we burn in our motor vehicles. Chapter two focuses on how we live and travel, surveying six cities and comparing how they developed and how the advent (or lack) of, for example, light rail, impacts something as seemingly unconnected as housing finance, and how the ability of people to live and work might be pressured by fluctuating oil prices.

The cost of using oil isn’t just a matter of what we pay at the gas pump - which in the US is a way-too-low spoiled-rotten price. Right now, in the US, where the price of a gallon is (as of this writing) significantly below two dollars, would be a good time, in my opinion, to slap a tax of ten or twenty cents per gallon on the gas and use that money to finance an alternative fuel infrastructure, diminishing our dependence upon oil and creating jobs at the same time. Of course, this is never going to happen in real life, not in the USA.

Chapter three considers the hidden costs of our chronic dependence upon oil. How about $25 billion to $50 billion per year in assorted subsidies? How about between two and four dollars of subsidies of one sort or another per gallon? Is it cheap now?

When was the last time you saw one of the big petroleum corporations running a deficit? Compare that with how many times they've proudly reported record profits to their shareholders. How many children would fifty billion dollars feed? How many homeless could it house? How many jobs could it create? How much of a clean fuel transportation infrastructure could it build? How much would a gallon of gas cost if it were not subsidized?

In a chapter on oil security, writer Todd Litman points out this startling fact: In 2009, the US had a $381 billion trade deficit. Of this, $253 billion (66%) was from oil imports. Another 21% of the total was from vehicle and vehicle part imports. Almost 90% of our trade deficit is tied to the oil nightmare! Imagine what it would do for all of us if the US really did become a leader in non-gasoline dependent transportation technology!

Other chapters in this comprehensive overview cover the role of walking and biking as alternatives to using motorized transportation, the economics of bio-fuels, and building an optimized freight transportation system. There's more, and extensive end-notes after each chapter facilitate those who want to verify facts or do more reading.

The bottom line for each of us is that we do not have to wait for technology to arrive or for blind governments to act. There are ways we can all start cutting back on burning oil now in our vehicles, and in our home.

I recommend this essential contribution to kicking the oil habit.

Walking on Trampolines by Frances Whiting

Title: Walking on Trampolines
Author: Frances Whiting
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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 enough reward aplenty!

I know it’s a novel because it announces itself as such directly there on the cover! I am so grateful for that, because I would never have known otherwise! It's about the relationship between Tallulah de Longland and Annabelle Andrews, who met when Annabelle strutted into her life at Saint Rita's School for Young Ladies, or as Annabelle insisted upon naming it, Saint Rita's School for Young Lesbians. And no, this isn’t a LGBTQ story, not even close.

This novel is set in Australia. I usually enjoy stories set in Australia because they seem so much like stories set in Britain. That sounds like a back-handed compliment but it's really not - I feel just as much at home reading an Aussie story (though I've never been there) as I do a Brit one. Indeed, it’s even possible to forget the location sometimes, and start feeling like it is set in Britain, but then along comes a reminder, and it trips me right up and it’s a real joy to read like that, ones where you’re being frequently shaken out of your cozy safety zone.

I vacillated (yes, vacillated, I shall have it no other way) over whether to rate this positively or negatively. The story is told in three parts and had it been just part one, presented as a short story, I would have, without question or qualification rated it a winner because part one was brilliant and beautifully-written. Unfortunately, then came parts two and three, and while part two only began a gentle downhill glide, part three tipped-up and dunked the reader into a swamp of maudlin Newbery-medal-winner-wannabe material which frankly colored me green - not with envy but with nausea.

If I were rating only parts two and three, I don't doubt that I would even flushed this novel unfinished. So what to do? I think on balance I have to go negative because I can’t rate only a part of it. As I've said before, I can’t say a book is one third worth reading. It’s either worthy or it's warty. There is no in between. If you can stand the sad betrayal of a main female character, as featured in parts two and three, then you should read this. If you are willing to pay the price of a glorious part one in the currency of a miserable parts two and three, then read it. Otherwise avoid it.

The first third or so was tightly focused and brilliantly written, but then it was like the author lost the thread of it or ran out of ideas, and instead of it being about Annabelle and Tallulah, it became about anything and everything, and was nowhere near as entertaining or as engaging as the first part.

I loved Annabelle, and I liked Tallulah in the first third, but Annabelle essentially disappeared after that, and Tallulah went off in so many different directions it was dizzying, and none of that was anywhere near as engrossing.

A new character, Duncan, showed up, and although the author tried to portray him as a good guy, he was, at his core, no different from Josh-the-Jerk, Tallulah's faithless first love. The only difference was that Tallulah worked for Duncan rather than dated him, and he was older than Josh. Otherwise they were the same person at different stages in life, both equally unsavory. Whereas Josh was shown for exactly what he was, for some reason the author chose to portray Duncan as somehow noble - really a good guy underneath his faithlessness, manic cruelty, and cynicism.

Tallulah's two friends: Stella, the stereotypical (in everything save name) Catholic baby-machine, and Simone, the requisite token lesbian friend. Actually, Tallulah's whole take on lesbianism is interesting to say the least. She's convinced that a woman by the name of Maxine Mathers isn't a lesbian because she spent one night in bed with Duncan. A girl can’t change her mind? Yes, if you want to be strict and technical, that makes her bisexual, but the issue here is that Tallulah seems to be under the impression that sexuality is a binary proposition: on or off, plus or minus, yes or no, one or zero. It’s not.

The novel see-saws back and forth between past - Tallulah's almost idyllic recollections of her long teen-age years with Annabelle - and the hellish present-day which Tallulah has created (and has had created) by two major events, the second of which we learn in the very first chapter: she slept with Annabelle's husband Josh, on their wedding night!

Annabelle the younger has the mildly amusing habit of making word mash-ups such as "glamorgeous" and "tediocre". This is faintly reminiscent of Frankie Landau-Banks's behavior in the eponymous novel by E Lockhart, but that novel was better.

Annabelle's parents are artists with all that artistry brings. They're renowned but retiring, friendly, and warm, and creative, really easy-going, flamboyant and rule-skirting. They also have personal issues with each other.

Annabelle lives in a wondrous house, surrounded by trees and beautiful flowers, and the garden rolls readily down to the water, yet for reasons which only slowly become clear, she prefers to visit Tallulah's house, which is smaller and doubles as the home-base of her father Harry's plumbing business. Her mother, Rose, had a difficult childhood, running away from a disastrous home and being raised in a orphanage where she learned to be an excellent cook and dress-maker. She names her dresses with female names which Annabelle thinks is 'astoundible'. When Rose is wearing her 'Doris' dress, it means she's having a Doris day - and that's not an encouraging sign.

The two young girls become inseparable and get along famously - that is when Annabelle isn't inserting herself a little too presumptuously into Tallulah's life. Even when Tallulah hooks up with Josh - her apparently devoted boyfriend - Annabelle is still very much an integral part of their lives. Anyone a little less gullible than Tallulah might have some pause for thought at this point, but she doesn’t. Nor does she devote enough attention to the most pressing two issues she has with Josh: his desire to bed her, and his desire to travel the world immediately after they graduate. The phrase goes, 'he who hesitates is lost', but that homily, notwithstanding its wording, is not actually gender-specific.

At one point in part three, Tallulah decides to open a B&B, but she does none of the work for it - from what the author writes, that is. Everyone and their uncle pitches in to lend a hand, and Tallulah spends all of her time directing everyone in what to do. She herself, of course, has no time to work on executing her own plans because she's fully-occupied 24/7 in griping about being a bad person who isn’t meritorious of the inevitable attention from the inevitable manly man who shows in the form of outdoors-man Will Barton.

Seriously, why in god's name would any healthy girl ever want to become involved with a city gentleman? Yuck, no! If he doesn’t have a rime of bristles on his chin, a few laugh wrinkles hidden in his tanned outdoors skin, and a really gentle manner despite his rough lifestyle, why the hell would any girl be even remotely interested? Where is your thinking at for goodness sakes?! Shape up now!

Will shows up half-way through and it’s glaringly obvious from the first time his name ever appears that he's destined to bed this flighty Tallulah wench. No surprises there. The fact that he's a jerk who runs off in a huff every time Tallulah, in her self-obsessed flagellation, rebuffs him has no bearing on the matter. Trust me.

The real killer for this getting a positive rating from me was chapter twenty nine and beyond. It took the story right into the crapper. This was, coincidentally, right where I’d started skimming a paragraph here and there because it had become so pathetic and maudlin that I couldn’t stand to read the actual words one by one, so the whole thing became more like a fairy-tale than a real tale and not a good one, either.

It felt to me like the author had sat down, and cynically and calculatingly made a list of what she could do to pull every emotional string she could get her little fingers to, and it was truly pathetic where this went. It was at this point, not coincidentally that I quit reading because I really didn’t care how it ended, even though reading only a few more pages would have told me. I wasn't interested in what had increasingly in parts two and three, become nothing more than an exercise in taking potshots at the easy targets in the fairground-stall of pop-the-hear-strings.

One thing which seemed to me to be definitive of this novel was the interview with the author in the last few pages of the advance review copy I had. In the Adobe Digital Editions version which I was reading, the interview is abruptly cut off at the point where the author is asked who her greatest love was, and she answers "My greatest love would be" and the page ends right there, with no more pages to follow! Lol! It was priceless and really summed-up this novel for me. I think Annabelle might describe this as terminknackered.

When I finally gave up on this I kept asking myself how the writing could have gone from being so brilliant to becoming, as Annabelle might have put it, so tediocre in only 260 pages - pages which took seven years to write, even when writing by numbers! I have no answer to that, and in the end I don’t care. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.

Man Eater by Gar Anthony Haywood

Title: Man Eater
Author: Gar Anthony Haywood
Publisher: Brash 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 enough reward aplenty!

This novel is an oddity at least in that the cover credits it to Gar Anthony Haywood, whereas the copyright page credits it to Dallas Murphy. Hopefully that's just because the author chose an unusual pseudonym for some reason, and not because of Murphy's law! It had a prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. If the author doesn't think it's worth putting right there in chapter one, I don't think it's worth reading, and I've never regretted skipping a prologue.

This is set in Tinseltown, where some people are trying to cast a movie titled "Trouble Town" and the whole chapter obsesses over Brad Pitt, whom I am sure realizes that 'thusly' isn't a word. There's a difference in putting a non-word into a character's mouth and putting it into the narrative text as it appeared here. You can even get away with it in the narrative if it's a first person PoV novel, but this isn't.

Needless to say, I hope, this was the start to a novel I DNF'd in short order because I quickly realized that it was not remotely interesting to me. It was rambling and full of tedious (to me) detail that did nothing to move the story and everything to irritate and annoy me. Life is too short to spend on novels which fail to grab you from the go, so I cannot green light this project.

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Title: Beauty Queens
Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

I've been somewhat of a fan of this author since I read the A Great and Terrible Beauty trilogy - a trilogy that made sense, was well-written, and enjoyable. I looked at other titles by Bray, of course, but I've never found one which appealed as much as that did. Until now!

Beauty Queens is one of the funniest and best-written novels that I've ever not read. I say that because I didn't read this - I listened to the audio book read by Libba Bray herself, and she does a damned fine job of it. I recommend getting the audio book over the print or ebook because she reads it perfectly.

This just goes to show how brain-dead it truly is to insist upon actors for reading the audio versions of published books. Actors may be fine at acting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're any good at all at reading novels for an audience, and audio book publishers simply don't get that for some reason. Another book I enjoyed in the audio book version was The Golden Compass narrated by Philip Pullman and read by an ensemble cast. The Subtle Knife was just as enjoyable in the same format. I haven't got to the third in that audio trilogy yet.

The big problem with audio books is the expense, of course: the CD versions are way expensive, but with the advent of audio ebooks, perhaps this will change - although with Big Publishing™, I wouldn't hold out much hope. I got mine from the Libba-rary(!), and once I knew how good it was, I went out and bought the hardback - which I got at a nice discount - just to have it on my shelf.

This novel gripped me from the start and made me laugh out loud repeatedly. I routinely by-pass introductions and prologues in books, but this is hard to do with audio-books, so I just let this play. I enjoyed every bit of it right from the start, fortunately.

The story begins with fifty teen beauty queens, one from each US state, surviving a plane crash on a remote island, and their dealing with the aftermath. The first couple of chapters were so hilarious that I was pretty much ready to give this a 'worthy read' rating even if the rest of it was crappy!

Fortunately, it wasn't. The author creates a whole set of characters (not all fifty get a significant part, but a bunch of them do), and each has a distinct personality and behavior - and they all have interesting back-stories. There was some serious work went into this one. The sly, anarchic humor runs rampant through every chapter.

It's not simply stranded beauty queens, which is hilarious enough in itself, especially with the author's writing subtly undermining the whole concept of beauty pageants. It's also the behind-the-scenes machinations by the pageant organizers and, believe it or not, arms running! I fully and highly recommend this one - the audio version in particular.

Henshin by Ken Niimura

Title: Henshin
Author: Ken Niimura
Publisher: Image Comics
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 enough reward aplenty!

I think this is the last of three manga I'll be reading for a while (I say that because I still have two more to get through and now, I'm not looking forward to those! I don't know what it is, but the Japanese graphic novels seem way too juvenile for my taste. This one in particular seemed like it was aimed at middle-graders (and maybe it was) but that said, there was really nothing in it at all to entertain a more mature taste. Note that I read this with my middle-grade son, and he got just as little out of it as I did.

This novel consists of thirteen "chapters" most of which have little, if anything, to do with one another, although there is a thread here and there which is shared. The stories are very short, and really have no ending. Indeed, they were so abrupt in some cases that I seriously wondered if pages were missing.

The stories themselves weren't interesting. Yes, a bit here and there was entertaining, a couple of bits made me laugh, and some of the art work was nice, but overall I was bored to tears reading this. I use the term 'reading' very loosely because there isn't very much to read. A whole bunch of frames and even panels have no text, which is fine if the images convey the story, but most of the time I was scratching my head wondering what the heck was happening.

This book also annoyed me through it's poor use of white space. It was a standard comic book format, but the images left huge margins (at least in the iPad, on the Bluefire Reader). With an ebook, this isn't a problem, but I feel for the wasted trees if this goes into a print run, with all that white space wrenched from some poor tree and then going unused.

I can't recommend this graphic novel.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Title: Pygmalion
Author: George Bernard Shaw
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WORTHY!

Pygmalion is the Greek version of a Phoenician name: Pumayyaton. Ovid (aka Publius Ovidius Naso, a turn-of-the millennium Greek poet) wrote an epic work titled Metamorphoses, in which one story told of Pygmalion - the sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.

In essence, that's what happens here, but if your only exposure to this story is from the 1964 movie titled My Fair Lady, then you'll find a few differences even though the movie followed Shaw's work quite closely in many regards. The original Pygmalion was a four-act play, not a story, but this version converts the play to a story whilst still retaining the author's original intentions.

If you are familiar with the movie, which I have to say I really love, then you will find many parts of this story unsurprising. It begins in a similar way, with Eliza running into Freddy (literally) and then into Colonel Pickering and Henry Higgins (figuratively), and Higgins tossing some money into her basket.

Just as in the movie, she realizes that she can make something of herself by using Higgins's own money to hire him to teach her to speak better English so she can find work in a flower shop. Higgins finds it irresistible, given how much she's willing to pay him when considered as a portion of her income, and unable to resist Pickering's bet, Higgins takes on the challenge with gusto, and the rest, as they say, is history!

Higgins does indeed win his bet and Eliza is indeed triumphant, but the triumph is short-lived, and in the book, when Eliza leaves, she doesn't come back. It's a lot truer to Shaw's feminist intent than ever is the movie, the ending of which frankly makes me uncomfortable.

I really liked this adaptation of Shaw's original play, and I recommend it.

Fox Forever by Mary E. Pearson

Title: Fox Forever
Author: Mary E. Pearson
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!

This is the third sequel to The Adoration of Jenna Fox which I read a long time ago and found it entertaining but nothing that made me want to read a sequel. Pave me over, break the flagstones, and call me crazy, I didn’t realize that this was even a sequel, much less the second one in this series. I soon grasped that as I listened to the audio of course, but I found myself skipping tracks on the very first disk. It was completely un-entertaining and I neither had nor could generate any interest in listening to it. I gave up after the first disk and returned it to the library, thankful that I hadn't bought this one!

There Will Be Phlogiston by Alexis Hall

Title: There Will Be Phlogiston
Author: Alexis Hall
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
41% in "sexually amphibious man"? Makes no sense! "sexually ambiguous man" perhaps?
48% in "with admirably calm"?!

This is a LGBTQ steam-punk novel with elements of fantasy, which is a novelty kind of a novel for me. It's about Lady Rosamond Wolfram, debutante in search of a marquess, about Anstruther Jones, the Phlogiston Baron, about his lover, Lord Mercury, and about the desire of Rosamond and Anstruther for each other. It's not your usual love triangle.

I have to confess that I fell in love with the title of this novel from the start. It's my considered opinion that you honestly need something deliciously warped running through your transom to even begin to invent a title like that; however, it makes a lot more sense when you realize that phlogiston is merely a synonym for fire in this context.

"There will be fire" wouldn't have caught my attention - except perhaps dismissively - and I'd be willing to bet that there are endless other novels out there already with such a title, but I'd be equally willing to bet that this novel is the only one with this title! Phlogiston "theory" held sway for a century, but the obsessive-compulsive drumbeat of scientists' search for comprehensive explanations eventually drove it out of favor. This novel pretends that it never did lose favor.

As I read the story, I found myself initially in alternation between moments both of liking it and of being quite unsure of it. I liked Lady Rosamond. I didn't like how weak she was when confronted with Anstruther's flaming desire, but then I didn't like the baron initially; however, he grew on me, as did Lord Mercury, in his sad and confused half-hearted passion. All three grew on me and I fell in love with all of them at the Copper Ball - one the like of which no society has ever seen. That joy was entirely due to the resolve, the bravery, and the civility of these three.

The baron is a self-made man - coming from a rough, common background, his control of phlogiston made him rich, but still unacceptable to society, hence his alliance with Lord Mercury, which commenced solely as a convenience for both of them. The baron's money alleviated Mercury's debt, whereas Mercury's position in society and his comprehensive knowledge of etiquette and the finer things in life repaid the baron capitally. This granted him an entrée into social circles from which he would have been disbarred otherwise, but Mercury never imagined they would become lovers, nor could he envisage a time when he would be comfortable with what they had, despite the baron's evident passion for him - an ardor which might have led to marriage had the two not been of the same gender and living in that era.

How complicated does it become then, when the baron discovers within himself a powerful passion for Lady Rosamond, whilst still harboring every lumen of his light for Mercury? Well, as it happens, not at all. You have to read the Copper ball scene to honestly appreciate how wonderful it is. Suddenly the Lady's engagement is shattered beyond repair - if not reproach - and the three leave the ball arm-in-arm, never looking back.

The novel is beautifully written, full of charm, exquisitely entertaining, but this is no mere romance, not even with a twist. If it were, Rosamond would not have a cyborg horse, rescued for her from the circus by Anstruther. There would not be phlogiston lamps lighting homes.

I was surprised that this came to an abrupt end when the novel-o-meter read only 49%. There was a second story, set int he same world, but about different characters (at least to begin with). I did not like this story and could not get into it, so I didn't finish it, but the first half of the novel makes it a very worthy read, especially since it's free (as of this review date) for both Nook on B&N, and Kindle on Amazon. If you're at all interested in this kind of novel, I urge you to read this one.

Ryder: American Treasure by Nick Pengelly

Title: Ryder: American Treasure
Author: Nick Pengelly (no website found)
Publisher: Random House
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 enough reward aplenty!

Errata:
On page 8 in the Adobe Digital Editions version, there is the full name of the Israeli organization, the Mossad, but one of the characters in the name is rendered as a box with an X in it (X-Box!). In the iPad Bluefire version, there is no problem with this name.
"...cavalry have arrived" is Wong. Calvary is singular. it should be "...cavalry has arrived"

This novel is a mix of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Robert Langdon, and I found it to be, overall, a worthy read despite some issues I had with it.

I love irony! On page nine of this novel, I read, "…the capitol the British had looted and burned in 1814, during the war of 1812…." This phrase was highly amusing to me because it makes it look like the British were two years late (and a dollar short) with their burning and looting, doesn’t it? The fact is that "the war of 1812" did indeed run for three years!

It’s important to this story because of the burning down of the White House. The conceit here is that something possibly taken from the White House at that time, a letter which might impinge upon the success of a candidate in the current US election campaign, was believed to have ended up in the possession of Lord Kitchener.

A problem I had here was with one of the central premises of this novel: it's not really believable! The contention is that a past US president knew of a spy in a high level position, yet did nothing about it. In that era, where spies were rapidly dispatched via rope or rifle, this made no sense to me, but there's a really nice twist at the end that I did appreciate.

1812 was quite a year. It was a leap year. It was the year when Lord Byron first addressed the House of Lords, the year Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Edward Lear were born, and Sacagawea died, and it was the year in which Napoleon introduced metric measurements in France and begun his ill-fated invasion of Russia. It was not the year in which Tchaikovsky wrote his 1812 Overture to commemorate Russia's defence of its homeland against Napoleon.

This novel is the middle of what's so far a trilogy: Ryder, Ryder: American Treasure, and Ryder: Bird of Prey. I have not read any of the others, but I plan on doing so, having found this to my taste, but nevertheless hoping for better in other volumes.

It's about Ayesha Ryder and her tracking down of this "treasure". Ayesha is tall and dusky, of Middle Eastern origin and already accomplished when the novel begins (from the previous volume, Ryder). She's at a ceremony where she was presented with the British George Cross for her services to the nation. She's trying to calculate how quickly she can leave this event without seeming rude, but she's trapped by the formidable trio of Dame Imogen Worsley, the head of MI5 (the Brit equivalent of the FBI), Susannah Armstrong, the Brit prime minister, and the American Secretary of State, Diana Longshore. How cool is that?

Yes, all women. I really want to know why it takes a male writer to put a host of women in prominent positions?! I've read far too many novels by female writers where women are given disturbingly short shrift (if not shift) and it bothers me. I know there are some excellent novels penned by female writers which do give due prominence to female characters, but there is nowhere near enough of these writers.

On the other hand, my fear at that point, once I’d seen this bevy of female influence, was that the author would betray it all by turning Ayesha into some wilting vaporous girl swooning in the arms of some tough American operative as the story progressed. I could only wait and see with baited breath (and baited breath is pretty disgusting when you think about it, so I didn’t like that at all...).

Rest assured that Ayesha turns into no such thing. There was, however, an issue with these powerful women which bothered me and which is hard to discuss without giving away too much, so let me confine myself to saying that lesbianism should be conflated neither with stupidity nor with women in positions of power. The two sets overlap in places, but they are not equal sets!

Ayesha is very much a female Indiana Jones - chasing after the ark of the covenant no less! She's irritated that she's been deflected from her course by some American nonsense in which she has no interest. What she doesn't know is that she's about to come into collision with someone else who has a much greater interest in finding what she's been tasked with uncovering.

In this world which the author has created, Israelis and Palestinians have united and formed a new nation known as the Holy Land, but some movers and shakers in both the US and the Holy land want to return to the days of Israel's independence. There are all kinds of unexpected alliances (and dalliances) and unusual undercurrents in play in this novel, and the power players are not neglected in this wild and crazy interplay, although some of them behave rather foolishly at times and it's a bit hard to credit that a woman would put her position at risk. Unlike men, women know they've not only worked damned hard, but succeeded against the odds to get where they are, and they're not so foolish as to put it all at risk like that. But this is fiction, so I guess it could happen.

As always, no matter how much I may like a given novel, there are issues to be found with it. In this case, the most disturbing one is that Ayesha isn't always presented as the smartest cookie in the box (or, since this is set in Britain, I guess I should say, 'biscuit in the barrel'. I can understand a need to have your prize character have flaws, and to put him or her into gripping situations in a novel like this, but in my opinion, integrity and faithfulness to your character trump excitement every time!

For example, at one point in this story, when under fire, Ayesha could have used a truck to shield her friend and protect him from gunfire, but she never thinks to do it, exposing him to the fire by her thoughtless inaction. Now you can argue that she wasn't thinking straight, but this takes place immediately after we're given a flashback which shows us how admirably cool and calculating she is when her life is threatened.

At another point, someone tries to set her up as a murderer. This stupid given who she is and how well-known and well-connected she is, but the plan is to kill her so she can't clear her name. This is also flawed (as the finale shows!). The author went for dramatics rather than realism, which can sometimes work and be more entertaining, but it can also back-fire. In this case it seems to me that a deadly killer like the one who is after her, would use much a more simple, sure, and direct method of assault. It's issues like this which repeatedly kick a reader out of a story.

At one point Ayesha directly observes an easily-identifiable man planting an object which will set her up as a murder suspect. Immediately afterwards, she runs into a cop who she knocks out. If she had taken a second to tell him that she saw someone plant the object and tell him where it is, before disabling him, she would have been in a lot stronger position. Instead, she knocks him out and runs, and makes herself look guilty.

Indeed, she assaults several police officers quite brutally over the course of her escape, almost killing one, and pays no kind of penalty whatsoever for this. That was too much of a stretch, and her actions only served as a confirmation of her guilt. I began actually disliking her during this part of the story and wondering if I really wanted to read on. I'm sure that's not what the writer intended, but it is what was achieved in my case. It's hard to like characters who are, we're told, smart, but who routinely act foolishly! Fortunately things improved.

Ayesha personally knows some very important people, yet never once does she consider calling any of them to let them know what's going on. Instead she runs like she's guilty, and acts like she's guilty, and thereby digs herself deeper into the hole which has already been opened-up for her by the very people who are trying to set her up! She plays right into their hands, which doesn't make her seem very smart.

Fortunately the villain is even less smart. He's one of these James Bond types who monologues instead of dispatching his captured secret agent and accompanying love interest du jour Fortunately, I was on-board sufficiently with this novel that I was willing to let a few clunkers get by, but I do have my limit! This author managed to avoid exceeding it, and on top of that gave us a non-white, non-American, non-male hero, and I think that deserves encouragement. So here's to more - and steadily improving quality - volumes!

Of Anime and the Baeci by Alessandra Ebulu

Title: Of Anime and the Baeci (I found no reference to this on B&N or Amazon)
Author: Alessandra Ebulu
Publisher: Less Than Three Press
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 enough reward aplenty!

The last novel I read from Less Than Three Press I rated positively, but this one I was not able to enjoy in the same way at all. It's one novel where the cover was actually better than what was between it! There was a prologue to this story which I skipped, as I do all prologues. If the author doesn’t think it worth including in chapter one or beyond, I don’t think it worth time reading it. I went straight into the story, but unfortunately it read more like fanfic than an actual story. I read about three-quarters of the way through and skimmed the last 25%.

This is a very short novel - only some 80 pages - but unfortunately, the story made no sense whatsoever to me. Superficially, it begins with two apartment dwellers. One of them is Ray Zielke, and he's disturbed by the loud music and TV show noise from his across-the-hall neighbor. When he goes to complain, he meets Cata Nanuq, a very feminine-looking guy who despises either label, who dresses Asian, and is into anime and manga. It turns out that Cata owns the apartment block, and a physical attraction quickly develops between the two of them, but it’s not a romance - it’s all lust and sex.

There's a twist to this story, however, since the story itself has anime elements to it. Ray isn’t human and is there to protect Cata, who is a Baeci (which describes a person who is externally one gender, but internally of mixed gender). Cata and other baeci are being hunted by another non-human who bathes in and drinks their blood, but Cata knows nothing of this, and Ray has not told him the truth despite being sexually intimate with him.

This is where the story makes no sense. We're told that Ray is specifically there to protect Cata, yet he evidently has no idea who Cata is when he goes over to complain about the loud music as the story begins. He's supposed to be watching over Cata yet he's working a job which occupies a heck of a lot of his time, so he isn't actually free to stand watch, which adequately explains how Cata is apparently abducted from his apartment while Ray is otherwise occupied.

Even then it makes no sense. There is blood on the walls of Cata's apartment, but when advised to seek Cata's 'flame' inside himself, Ray has no problem picking it out and determining that Cata is still alive - yet they still insist upon matching the blood in the apartment with DNA from Cata's toothbrush. Why? If Ray can see he's alive, then why does the blood even matter, and how come he cannot simply track Cata down to his location by his "flame" and save him?

Worse than that, Ray spends the next week not doing a thing to find Cata, but instead, sitting around in Cata's apartment hugging Cata's pillow, and watching anime on Cata's 72 inch TV! If this has been a longer novel, I would have quit reading it right there. Cata then shows up out of the blue with no explanation for his absence and no sign of any abduction or injury.

I cannot recommend this novel at all. It made no sense and had no rationale to it. The relationship between the two main characters had no chemistry at all and was purely sexual, so where was the story? I couldn’t find one to enjoy.

Ruined Abbey by Anne Emery

Title: Ruined Abbey
Author: Anne Emery
Publisher: ECW Press
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 enough reward aplenty!

This is a prequel to the Collins-Burke mystery series. I don't do series unless they're especially enticing and they rarely are, so this was a good one for me to review since it's not in the middle of anything and can be viewed as a kind of stand-alone. My conclusion having read 33% of it is that I'm definitely not interested in following this series. It's a bit frustrating, because I've had good success with at least one other volume from Entertainment Culture Writing Press.

The story is set in 1989, and starts out rather dramatically with father Brennan Burke, in New York City, receiving a call from his sister Molly, who's in jail in London. She's accused of being a member of a terrorist organization. He gets onto the first flight he can, and miraculously (he is a priest!) manages to get into the prison to see her first thing the next morning. She's soon sprung from jail. Her crime, evidently, was her obsessive-compulsive disorder vis-à-vis Oliver Cromwell. I kid you not. In short, this was all a stinking huge red herring which I actually didn't appreciate.

So right from the off, this novel made little sense. There's no reason a woman would be connected to terrorist organization just because she delivered a lecture complaining about Cromwell's behavior half a millennium before, in Eire. A police detective was also shot in his car that day, too, but although this is mentioned several times, the author never makes any attempt to show how this could possibly be connected with what happened to Molly (not in the portion of this book I read, at any rate. In short, it’s another red herring, and I have no idea why the author chose to juxtapose these two events.

The impression I got from the first few chapters of the novel, in fact, was that of some heavy-duty Brit-bashing going on, although this seemed to assuage after a while. It was weird to read it, especially since those events - the era of IRA terrorism in Ireland, and in cities like Birmingham and London in England - are now history. Maybe in some people's minds, they're still current?

I didn't get all this obsession with Cromwell. There is no doubt that he was a brutal man, but no more so than your average military commander in similar circumstances in what was a brutal era. The invasion led by Cromwell was preceded by the Irish rebellion of 1641, where the Catholics did the same things which Cromwell did, but to English and Scots protestants. The Irish Catholics and royalists also launched another attack right before Cromwell arrived. It's not like Cromwell & co just randomly decided to wander over there and Kilkenny.

Wexford was a different matter. Against Cromwell's wishes (he was trying to negotiate a surrender), his troops let loose of their own accord. Even then, the majority of those who died were military troops. Prior to these events there was, no doubt, something done to the Protestants by the Catholics, and prior to that, something done vice-versa, and so on ad infinitum.

Ultimately, this has nothing whatsoever to do with Cromwell or the English, or the Irish per se, as history has shown. I don't know why those who continue their pointless feud with Cromwell's dead body don't have the same antagonism towards Charles the Second, who betrayed his Irish Catholic allies by discarding the alliance in favor of a new one with the Scots Covenanters. It wasn't royalism, it was business!

The truth is that it was an ongoing religious war and even though, thankfully, the bloody violence is over for now, the religious war has not gone away nor will it, as long as there are religion-blinded factions which ignore their own Bible's injunction to turn the other cheek. In the end it had far less to do with Cromwell and royalists than it did with the Catholicism which Henry the Eighth rejected, and the Protestantism which was sucked into the vacuum that was left, because religion abhors a vacuum.

That said, the biggest issue I had in the first few chapters was in the chronic stereotyping of the Irish characters, making it look like all they were interested in was guzzling alcohol. It was like a page wouldn't pass by without one or other of them referencing alcohol, or planning on going to a pub, or drinking something alcoholic, even if it was only communion wine. Of course, that wasn't alcohol, it was blood. Seriously, this made me pity the characters, and view them with some disdain rather than identify with them. Is this what the author wanted?

The story was really rambling, too, like the author was so proud of the notes she'd compiled on character, plot, and location that she was really loathe to leave anything out. Based on the part I read, this novel could, without losing a single thing, have been edited down from almost four-hundred pages to two or three hundred and lost nothing in the process. In the end, what it did lose was my interest because of the tediously slow pace. I made it to the end of chapter 11, about one third the way through, and decided it was not for me. I'd started skimming paragraphs here and there even before that, because the ironically sober detail was leaving my glass more than half empty. Quite literally nothing was happening other than repeated visits to bars.

The main thrust of the story wasn't Molly's arrest, but her cousin Conn's arrest, and that didn't happen until almost a third of the way in. The novel could have actually begun there, but even when that event happened, nothing changed! I'd hoped at that point that things would finally start moving, but the pace did not pick up! The writing did not become more taut or exciting, and nothing significant transpired! A aged family member expired, but that was it. The entire story continued to plod on in the same old way, but I refused to plod with it. Life is too short, especially when there are huddled masses of potentially exciting novels invading my shore, clamoring to be heard.

Veronika Layne Gets the Scoop by Julia Park Tracey

Title: Veronika Layne Gets the Scoop
Author: Julia Park Tracey
Publisher: Libertary Co
Rating: WORTHY!

(I initially believed that Julia Park Tracey didn't know how to spell gravy (she adds an unfortunate penultimate 'e'), and that's how I opened this review, but I'm told by two people - neither of which appears to be the author! - that this was deliberate, so evidently I missed something! Believe it or not, that happens, so strike that one!). Thanks Betsy and Tuscany for keeping me honest!)

I'm not sure if main character Veronika is my kind of person, though. She abuses alcohol to a horrifying degree, and was liberally sprinkled with tats (of which I'm not a fan), which amusingly seemed to be all along a Little Mermaid theme, but that said, she was strong, diligent, smart (for the most part!), inventive, industrious, and really interesting, so she had a heck of a lot going for her which is why I liked her as a character. It was like the author had read my playbook before endowing her character with some of her traits, in particular, her environmental views. A lot of the time, she sounds exactly like me in her thinking and her rather caustic or humorous observations of life around her. It felt a bit weird!

Here's another way this got me: I'm not a fan of first person PoV, but in this case, it was done in a non-nauseating way, so even that wasn't an issue. It never felt like I was reading, "Hey look at MEEEEEE! How important am IIIIIII?", so I'm eternally grateful to the author for that! I'm not a fan of series, either, unless they're well done. All too often, they're merely a cynical and lazy way of making a buck by substituting tired templates for actual creative work, repeating the same story with only a twist or two here and there to try and warm it over, so it is indeed a compliment that I'm interested in reading future volumes in the "Hot Off the Press" series, of which this is volume 1.

As much as I loved this novel, I had, as you know if you read my blog, one or two inevitable issues. The only serious one of these was when Veronika bikes down to the building site one Saturday morning and sees the bulldozers churning-up what look like Native American shell burial mounds, and what look (to her) like bones. Instead of using her camera to take pictures, she panics and causes a scene, and then has to call in a man to man-handle her vaporous womanly ways - or her frantic teenage ways, however you wish to categorize it. I was a bit saddened by that, but willing to forgive it since it was that one time - and no character should be perfect since no person is. Besides, what are friends for?

There's another issue directly related to that one, which is that Veronika seems to have Eona syndrome, whereby (as in the dilogy of the same name), she has all the facts, but can't arrive at an intelligent and logical deduction from them. She ought to know exactly how long-time friend Aiden feels about her, but she's completely blind to it. This was the sole example of a trope or cliché which registered with me in this novel. Other than that, the novel as brilliantly written, studiously avoiding the common pitfalls, and being all the better for it. I salute the author for providing an object lesson to clueless YA and adult writers how to actually tell a good, original, and engrossing story.

Veronika's alcohol abuse was an issue because first of all it's always an issue and secondly, and more importantly in the context of the writing, it seemed out of keeping with her health-minded attitude to what she puts into her body, and in particular with her vegan mind-set. Veronika is a latter-day hippie, truth be told, with the tats, the body-piercings, and her dress sense and diet, but she drinks strong coffee and also alcohol to a disturbing degree.

Not that vegans can't do such things by any means, but it seemed to be too far out of her character zone to me. Maybe I misread her character! But again, these things happen in real life, so it wasn't a death-blow to my enjoyment of the novel. I just felt that if you were going to imbue her with some necessary flaws, there were better ones to give her than these. OTOH, she's not that long out of college, so maybe there's some maturing lying-in-wait for her there?

Veronika's sex life was a curious one, because it was conducted entirely in her mind, yet there was nothing in the text to indicate that she was fantasizing. I learned great caution after that first time, and so I almost didn't believe it was happening for real when it actually did. I was amused by that one - the sexual escapade described at the end of chapter 25, between Veronika and one of the other main characters. It was written as poetically as it was perversely, so I couldn't tell if the author had deliberately (and I do mean with deliberation) chosen to be lyrical and playful, or if she was just really shy about writing about that particular kind of sexual encounter. Or maybe I completely misunderstood what she was describing? Ha!

If that doesn't make you want to read this novel, then nothing will!

I'd say something about he cover: how its exploitative and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story or the main character, but the cover is rarely in the hands of the writer unless they self-publish, so let's leave that alone, shall we?! But on the other side of this coin, I've had good success with Libertary Co. They published The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan which I favorably reviewed last month.

So, overall, 100 thumbs up for this one. This novel and the precious few others like it are what makes it worth going through a dozen or two other annoying and predictable novels, because it's this one - this kind of story, the one the author really nailed, that I'm looking for.

It was beautiful, gorgeously written, with great characters and, amazingly, a wonderful plot! It was told well, in great English, and had just enough extraneous detail to make it feel realistic, without getting bogged down in reams of pretty prose which take the story nowhere.

I thoroughly recommend this one and if the author is seeking beta readers for the next volume, I'm in!

It's the End of the World As We Know It by Saci Lloyd

Title: It's the End of the World As We Know It
Author: Saci Lloyd
Publisher: Hachette
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 enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
In this book, there are so many deliberate misspellings that it's hard to tell what's intentional and what's not, but for the record, it's 'au naturel', not 'au natural'.

In this novel, chapter one starts on page five. It had a prologue. I skipped it. The Adobe Digital Editions version what a bit weird - it didn't recognize page numbers as you can see from the images on my blog. Type in page "27" and it tells you there's no page 27! I can assure you there was, as indeed there was a page 35!

The main male character is Mikey Malone, whose only interest is in getting into a girl's pants - and I don't mean he wanted to wear them. His inevitable female counterpart is Kix Kaloux who is inevitably hostile, so we all know exactly Where this relationship is headed.

Due to unspecified activity at CERN - the site of the Large Hadron Collider which is largely in France (with bits of it in Switzerland), and the place where, on July 4th, 2012, came the discovery of what appears to be the long sought-after Higgs boson, a rip is opened in space-time connecting Mikey's world (our world) with Kix's world - where things are so cool they're actually nauseating, but which is a dystopian world, nonetheless.

If had been just that, it might have been bearable, but Kix's world is weirdness squared - and sometimes cubed - and for me it wasn't a good thing. One of the main characters was the miniature bot named Bitzer, who became really annoying really fast. I have no idea what the author was intent upon creating, but it felt vaguely racist to me.

Pretty much the sole defining trait of Bitzer was that his speech had all the 'S's replaced with 'Z's. The result of this, from an auditory PoV was pointless because it sounded exactly the same, so I don't get why this was done other than as a rather pretentious attempt to make the text seem cooler, I guess.

A standard Bitzer sentence would be something like , "Thatz what we'z trying to work out. Quit it with the dramatix." It didn't work for me. Neither did the bizarre naming of the cube characters: Σëë and DØØ, who were given a variety of dyslexia for no apparent reason. Maybe this will appeal to younger kids?

Another annoyance was the authors insistence upon spelling out sounds to an irritating degree. At one point (p65) the word 'ping' was repeated 51 times. I really, really appreciated that. In fact, I dub it 'Area 51' in its own honor. My life could not have been as complete as it is today without this unique contribution to literature. In the end, that's what this novel became - a meaningless string of annoyances matched for sound and color, and it wasn't even that which turned me off. It was the sinking feeling in my stomach that this could have been so much more.

Please note that the role of the tracker-jacker in this novel is taken by the 'calabrones', little electronic hornets. Everyone throws up their arms at these evil little bugs, claiming helplessness and fleeing to hide amongst the tigallos (tiger buffalo hybrids - and yes, inexplicably two 'L's), when all it would take was a little EMP and the hornets would have been completely disabled. In the end a new too-cute-for-words character shows up ex machina and brings them down with honey, claiming he doesn't work in a bio-lab lab and learn nothing. Evidently, in his case he does, since these weren't biological organisms, but it made as much sense as the rest of this novel.

Mikey is so dumb that despite seeing how utterly different this parallel world is to his own, he's nevertheless convinced that somewhere in this world he has an inevitable counterpart Mikey who is inevitably getting into some girl's pants - and I don't mean he's wearing them. Mikey is completely obnoxious in all dimensions.

One third of the way through this novel, Kix observes, "We're in a hole, BitZ." and I couldn't agree more. That's where I climbed out of this hole and ditched this novel. Life is too short to waste on stories which don't completely thrill you. I moved on to a different universe.