Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin

Title: Starry River of the Sky
Author: Grace Lin
Publisher: Listening Library
Rating: WORTHY!

Beautifully read by Kim Mai Guest.

This is the companion novel to Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and was published first. If you've read one, you'll recognize some of the references in the other. I really liked this one, perhaps better than the first volume, which I read first because well, that's just me! It doesn't really matter in which order they're read. This audio book was beautifully read by Kim Mai Guest

I typically pay no attention to a book's cover because it rarely has anything to do with the author, and my blog is about writing - which is what the authors do. In this case however, I could not help but note that this marks the third book I've read (or in this case listened to) recently which are tied to the Chinese zodiac, or the "Shēngxiào" (which means "birth likeness"). The zodiac runs in this order, the first two animals of which (you will note) are on the book cover: Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig, Rat, Ox, Tiger.

The story here centers on Rendi, who ran away from home because the Moon is missing, and the sky is crying, and no one but he seems to notice. He wants to find out what's going on, so hiding amongst the large jars or "gangs" of wine in a merchant's cart he leaves home and ends-up working as hired help at a roadside inn in a tiny and isolated village aptly named 'Clear Sky'.

As he works his day away, increasingly dreaming of moving on and getting away from the dead village, Rendi becomes intrigued by the people, events, and stories which haunt this inn. He only got the job because the innkeeper's son disappeared, so what happened there? What's the deal with the innkeeper's daughter Pei-yi? What's at the bottom of the well? Why is there an absolutely massive stone pancake near to the inn? Why do Master Chao and Widow Yan detest each other so vehemently? How is it that Mr Shan, who seems as wise as he appears crazy, not be able to tell if his loyal pet is a rabbit or a toad?

The story becomes even more interesting when a woman, Madame Chang, appears at the inn apparently having walked there alone, and who knows a whole host of stories, because, well, half a host of stories just doesn't cut it in China...! The story titles in some cases struck me hilarious, such as "The story of the dancing fish" and "The story of the three questions" which reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail! In other cases they're simply intriguing, such as "The story of the man who moved a mountain" and "The story of the jade bracelet".

The stories together, plus Rendi's own story and quest, combine to make a charming and engrossing tale which is rich in Chinese folklore. I highly recommend this volume.

Where the Mountain meets the Moon by Grace Lin

Title: Where the Mountain Meets The Moon
Author: Grace Lin
Publisher: Listening Library
Rating: WORTHY!

Read charmingly by Janet Song.

Today is Grace Lin day on my blog! This is the companion novel to one I reviewed recently , and was published first. If you've read one, you'll recognize some of the references in the other. As I inadvertently proved, they don't have to be read in order. I really liked this one, perhaps better than the second volume. When I say "read" I mean "listened to" since I had the audio book version. It was charmingly read by Janet Song.

Min-li is a young girl who lives in poverty with her mom and dad, referred to only as Ma and Ba. Ba is in the habit of relating stories, which Ma hates. The only "wealth" the family appears to have is Minli's two copper coins kept in a rice bowl which has a rabbit design in the pottery.

Minli's world is colored and fruitless - literally. Her Village is known as the Fruitless Mountain village because nothing grows there, and few animals live there other than some desultory fish in the river. The whole area is a grey and brown mud and dust zone, which is all the color they have.

One day Minli decides to buy a goldfish from a traveling vendor, but even this is considered a waste by ma, because all it does is eat their precious rice. Minli eventually kow-tows to pressure frees it in the nearby river, whereupon the fish tells her a story which precipitates Minli leaving home and embarking upon a quest to find the Old Man in the Moon. Her plan is to ask him how she can change her fortune.

During her journey she meets - or at least learns of - the Buffalo Boy, the Green Tiger, the black tiger, dragons, a king, the twins, Da-Fu and A-Fu, and the very rabbit that was depicted on her rice bowl.

This story in engaging, and in parts hilarious, and I recommend it.

Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin

Title: Cycler
Author: Lauren McLaughlin
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

This is a story about Jill and Jack, and yes, I know I said I'd sworn off novels which feature a main character named Jack because it's such an abysmally clichéd name, this one was different enough that I let it under the wire.

The deal is that Jill and Jack are the same person, and no, it's not what you think. Jill McTeague isn't transgendered - not in the way you normally think of it. Whereas most females eventually begin undergoing an inconvenience, or a highly troublesome, or even a downright painful "time of the month", none of them have anything on Jill. Once a month, for four days, she literally turns into a male - who has taken the name Jack.

Yes, I hadn't read anything quite like this before, either, which is why I took it on, despite it being both first person PoV, usually a no-no for me, and had a main character named Jack, also a no-no for me.

I have to say, though, that I had some really mixed feelings about this novel, loving some of it and hating other parts. The book hasn't been a particularly big seller, but it has already been optioned for a movie, believe it or not. It just goes to show that you never really know where your novel may end up no matter how oddball or idiosyncratic you might think it is. WRITE IT ANYWAY!

Even though I didn't like Jack, I felt bad for him because he's confined to the house for the four days he shows up, and he lives in fear of being somehow erased by Jill, so his initial unsavory character softens slightly over time, especially when he realizes he's fallen for Jill's best friend. The problem is that he turns out to be precisely the kind of 'Jack' I detest in novels, particularly YA novels.

The hope I had for how this novel might play was quickly dashed. It went in a different, although initially interesting direction. On that score - on having a very rare bisexual character in a YA novel - major kudos to the author. The problem was that the author really blew it on handling how this character was dealt with - and she blew it in several different directions. More like vomited it really.

Jill and her friend Daria Benedetti, and best friend Ramie Boulieaux (yeah, I know) are working on Jill's plan to get Tommy Knutson (or Tommy Knutsack as Jack refers to him - Jack can access Jill memories, but not the other way around) to ask her to the prom. Her plan is completely stupid, so this was a bit of a downer for me. I don't like female main characters to be dumb-asses or shallow - unless, of course, they rise above it as the novel progresses. Nor do I like stories which repeatedly tell us how smart the female character is, yet consistently depict her as being boning-fido stupid! Jill obsessed more and more on the shallow as the story went along instead of wise-ing-up, unfortunately.

I really like the author's writing style, so it was hard to actually drop the novel. Usually when something starts going downhill like this, I have no problem dropping it and moving on to something else, but the more this went on, the more curious I became about where the author thought she was trying to take it. The writing itself wasn't god-awful, only the main characters, and since it was short and I could already see some changes dawning in Jack's personality, I decided to run with it, but in doing so, I really felt betrayed by the author.

My first really big problem (other than how stereotypically gross Jack was depicted as being), was when Jill and Tommy had their first real conversation. Right up front, Tommy brought up the fact that he is bi. Yes, you can argue that it's commendable he wanted her to know the truth and was being up front with her, but it was out of place and for more than one reason.

First of all, it's not like they were in imminent danger of having sex at that moment - far from it, so it didn't seem like his honesty fit the requirement. They were not even dating, nor was it certain that they would, so sexual history was hardly on the cards. Jill wasn't even looking for a date per se, only for an escort to the prom.

Let's look at it this way for a moment: suppose instead of telling her he was bisexual, he had told her that he liked girls with different colored hair from Jill. Suppose he said, "I usually like brunettes, but a lot of the time I like blondes, too!"? See how nonsensical that sounds? Who cares? And why raise this?

The way it was brought up here was that it made it sound like Tommy was going to date Jill, but he also wanted to be free to date guys at the same time. Who would countenance that? Well, some people might, but typically not. If he was going to be faithful to her during the time they dated, then who gives a shit who he liked to date before, or who he might date afterwards?

This whole thing made it sound like, yeah, I really want to go steady with you, but occasionally I plan on popping out and having a guy on the side. Seriously? It was just so badly-handled, which actually made it stand out like a sore thumb given that the rest of the writing was entertaining (if a bit dumb here and a bit gross there).

In some ways this made the whole thing homophobic: like, hey, I'm bi, so I might have aids. Well guess what, anyone might have aids, straight, gay or bi. It's irrelevant in and of itself! And it would remain irrelevant until and unless they planned on having sex, in which case their sexual history is important regardless of whether they're gay, straight, or anywhere in between.

So I did not get this approach at all. It was rendered in an especially bad light when Jill was grossed out by Tommy's revelation! If Jill had been a prudish, closed-minded person, then I could see her reacting like this, but she was not, and this Jill, recall, was someone who changed into a horny guy for four days a month - a guy for whom she had talked her mother into procuring porn. Why wouldn't she be completely thrilled to find a potential partner who was bi?! It made no sense at all.

One other issue with the writing was the aggravating over-use of two words: "deeply", and "mal". It was like at least one appeared on every page, and sometimes the same one would appear two or three times in as many lines. It was really annoying. Please don't try to be hip unless you're cool!

Jack, as I mentioned, was a disappointment. At first I thought he couldn't be as bad as Jill painted him. The novel opens as she "returns" from a four-day spell as Jack, and she makes him sound atrociously bad. He was actually worse than she makes him sound. Once he decides he has the hots for her best friend, he sneaks out of the house and stalks Ramie, spying on her in her room (from up on the roof, through her dormer window), and at one point is preparing to masturbate while spying on her, until he falls off the roof. He gets rewarded for this by Ramie inviting him into her room soon after, for a kissing and feel-up session on her bed. This was not acceptable to me. I had the hope, initially, that he would really turn himself around, but he just got worse, and he was obnoxious to begin with.

So what the heck was it that appealed to me about the writing, if I found so much to dislike? I'm glad you asked, but I'm not sure I can give you a satisfactory answer! The writing style was just my kind of style. It was a comfortable an easy read for me, with some amusing situations and some hilarious observations scattered through it, all of which really hit my funny bone, but that was canceled out, I'm sorry to say, by the extreme dumb-assery going on.

It was this, the general tone and pace, and the banter and dialog, which appealed to me and made me continue with this much longer than I would have done had this same story had a poorer way with words. Plus, as I mentioned, I was really curious to know how this author was going to handle this story, especially given where she'd taken it so far. Maybe I just wanted to know how she would dig herself out of the holes she had so blithely opened up! The problem is that the author didn't go anywhere with it. It turns out this is just the prologue. The second act comes in volume two. I felt robbed at that point.

In the end, it was the stark gender segregation and utterly insensitive stereotyping which killed this for me: that Jill is the ultimate in mindless, girlie-girl femininity, whereas Jack is the sex-crazed closet rapist, and neither has the first clue about the other despite quite literally sharing mind and body. I cannot in good conscience recommend this, and I shall not be reading the sequel, 'hilariously' titled (re) cycler.

Repeat by Neal Pollack

Title: Repeat
Author: Neal Pollack
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
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 requested to review this novel because it sounded very reminiscent of one of my favorites of all time: Replay by Ken Grimwood, which I reviewed last September. In that novel, a man in his early forties finds himself inexplicably transported back into his body as a college undergrad, and has to live his life over again - but he has all his memories intact from his original life. Rinse and repeat. There is a twist or two however, making for a varied and really engrossing read.

In this novel, a man named Brad Cohen, on the cusp of his fortieth birthday finds himself inexplicably being born again, and going through the entire forty years of his life once more, but with his original memories intact. Breast-feeding wasn't fun. Rinse and repeat. There are significant differences between this novel and Replay, the most immediately notable one being this issue of starting his life over from birth each time. Fortunately, we don't follow him through his formative years each time he cycles back.

After a speedy progression through his childhood in this first re-incarnation, we skip it in repeat visits to focus on the differing ways in which his life progresses because of the choices he makes. His first repeat is a much more industrious and serious life than his original was, the second much less so - and for me, boring because of it. I could have done without forty pages of his efforts to win on Jeopardy which for me, trivialized the whole reincarnation experience. I skimmed this part. In some ways it was understandable that he did this because he realized only too painfully after his first reincarnation that while he could predict accurately what was going to happen, he couldn't do anything to change it, and he'd given up trying. That surmise still didn't prevent it from being a boring read, though.

In his third reincarnation, the seriousness comes crashing back with a vengeance, but this is a very short recounting. Unexpectedly, the perspective changes after that and focuses somewhat on something upon which his focus has been entirely absent up to this point: his wife Juliet. I really appreciated this change of pace and view-point, but it didn't last long before Brad showed up, and this is where there's a really big give-away about what's been happening to Brad.

Two things bothered me here. The first is that Juliet wasn't bothered that Brad came across like a really creepy stalker. This kind of writing disturbs me. She doesn't know anything about him, but he knows everything about her, and whenever she expresses an opinion or a preference he tells her he knows, and this doesn't creep her out at all!

I know the both of them are pot-heads, but even given that, her evident lack of street smarts is off-putting to say the least. I'd have liked it better had it been written better here, especially the conclusion to this particular repeat. We know that Brad he isn't a stalker - at least not in the usually understood sense! - and we can believe that he's unlikely to do her any harm, but she doesn't know that.

The second thing which bothered me is Brad's complete lack of a clue on how to initiate his re-acquaintanceship with a woman whom he knew, in his original life, for years. You would think he would be smart enough to be circumspect on how he contacted her and how he came to ask her for a date, but he isn't. This shouted a complete lack of empathy for a woman he knew better than anyone else. It makes him look unfeeling at best, and like a jerk at worst. The fact that given his creepy approach, Juliet readily agreed to a date and was ready to jump into a car with him based solely on how cute she thought he looked was truly sad, and spoke badly of her mentality, too.

In the end I can't in good faith recommend this as a worthy read. Some parts are really good, but others (as identified above) were really not interesting. The basis of the plot was telegraphed way in advance, which in turn predicted the ending, so there really were no surprises, and it began to lag and drag a lot after that first reincarnation was over with.

In the end it seemed to me that this story was really a mash-up of Replay, Groundhog Day, It's a Wonderful Lifeand The Wizard of Oz, but it didn't have the best elements of any of those stories. This writer does have talent however, so perhaps another time, another story, I can reach another conclusion.

How (Not) To Kiss Your Dog by Susan Lash

Title: How (Not) To Kiss Your Dog
Author: Susan Lash (no website found)
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"but I am going to make popcorn," "Come on Albert." It seems that there needs to be an action in there, or the first half of the speech needs to be added to the previous speech (the one which did come before an action).

"He pushed his head under my arm with his head under my hand" (end of chapter 15) really doesn't make sense! Was it supposed to be something like, "He pushed his nose under my hand and worked his head under my arm" perhaps?

"German Sheppard" should be "German shepherd"

It’s hard to tell at what age range this novel is aimed. We're given the narrator, Jennifer Huckabee's age, which is actually twelve, but the writing is a bit lower on the scale than that. The novel is about your standard American family: Mom, Dad, one older boy, one younger girl, and the addition of one Jack Russell terrier which causes entirely predictable problems, most of which are the result not of the dog's antics but of the other characters' complete inability to show any evidence of smarts.

Despite that, it does have funny bits and will probably appeal to readers who are somewhere below the age range of the main character - and preferably male based on the humor. There's an amusing story when grandma comes to visit. She drives a British car which has the steering wheel on the right, so when she takes the kids for a drive, she sits the dog on a booster seat up front so it looks like he's driving the car. That was it for the humor.

There's very little descriptive prose - only enough to indicate getting from A to B, or to briefly describe a situation caused by the dog. The rest of it was all conversation, so it felt like a really odd kind of a read to me - like the author had made a list of funny things she could write about and then simply connected them as quickly as she could, filled in some conversation, and left it at that. It didn’t feel crafted at all.

In the end, I read that the author evidently based this on real events, so my early surmise was pretty much right on the money! The text felt really sparse, and not in a good way. There was very little to the characters, none of whom had a life outside of their relationship to the dog's antics. This didn't even get close to entertaining me, and I doubt either of my kids would be interested in it.

I have to say that there were some illogicalities here, too. Not that novels can't have them by any means, but I don’t know this writer and I found myself wondering sometimes about her choices, which detracted from the story. I can understand that a son having a dog and his sister being expected to baby-sit it and clean up after it would be a useful cause of friction, but this isn’t how it’s written. Once in a while that happens and we're shown how unjust it is, but sometimes the other side of the coin turns up, and there's no balancing observation.

For example, when Jenny's friend stops by and proceeds to stuff the dog with carrots, and it throws up on the kitchen floor, Jack is expected to clean up. It's really Jenny's friend's fault, but this fact isn’t raised at all, so we're given no sense of the injustice done to Jack here. At least a mention would have been nice. That was a big problem in this novel: there was no moral compass! There were no lessons imparted with regard to pet care or to getting-along with your peers. There was nothing delivered about the consequences of irresponsible behavior. Reading this felt like watching a bad Disney live-action movie from the fifties.

It would have been a better story had there been a little more going on in the main character's life, but there wasn't. Not ever! Her entire life consisted of homework and watching TV - and then her entire life started revolving around the dog. That was all she had. It's hardly surprising that she had chronically low self-esteem, but rather than show us how she overcame this, this author took the lazy way out and brought a guy into her life to validate her, thereby betraying all independent and strong girls everywhere.

Then there was the startlingly abrupt ending - like someone got bored with it and just turned it off like a TV - which actually was fine with me. I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.

Big Girls Do It Better by Jasinda Wilder

Title: Big Girls Do It Better
Author: Jasinda Wilder
Publisher: Seth Clarke (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

This author is supposed to have (according to her website) "...a penchant for titillating tales about sexy men and strong women" but none of that was evident in this novel, which was sad for me because I originally liked this idea: of a novel written for younger adults, but with a realistic female main character - i.e. instead of one who looks like a runway model and gets no boyfriends and thinks she's plain-looking, we get a realistic one who is plus-sized and thinks she's okay, and does get boyfriends. The problem for me began very early on when after her stint DJ-ing at a bar, main character Anna stops in a coffee bar and runs into (literally) a hot guy who asks if he can sit with her. This is Chase.

You;re right, of course! I should have known from the cover that this didn't have a hope in hell of actually offering any kind of a story, but I was so surprised by the appearance of a real woman on the cover as opposed to some anorexic teen-wannabe that I guess I just let my hopes trip up my reality again! Besides, this was part of a four-book (read: novella) set on sale at Amazon, and it looked like it might be a disaster or it might be really good reading, but the price made it worth taking a chance. The chance blew.

The story is about Anna and Chase - a curiously appropriate name for a stalker-ish guy. The book was part of a four-book set, but I didn't even finish the first and I'm certainly not going to read the others. The two talk for only a minute, and feeling shy, Anna quickly bolts for the door, but then it falls quickly apart and its true colors show.

As she's about to drive out of the parking lot, Chase wrenches open her car door, all but demands her phone number, and then kisses her without any pre-amble. I know this is meant to be dramatic and romantic, but in reality, it was really creepy and stalker-ish. It speaks badly of the integrity and decency of the guy - who is inevitably tall and muscular, of course - who would do a scary thing like this. It's something which, it seems to me, would freak-out any self-respecting woman, and it speaks badly of the mentality of a woman who would react to this behavior only in positive ways. I sincerely hoped at that point that this event wasn't going to set the tone for the whole story, but that hope was quickly dashed; it only went further downhill.

The guy shows up at the bar where Anna DJs, and he's dressed in leather pants and a T-shirt with no sleeves, showing off his heavily clichéd muscles and tats. He sings beautifully, of course. Indeed, there isn't a single thing wrong with this guy - except that he ogles her like she's meat, makes inappropriate remarks, and then he stalks her in back of the bar where she goes to take a quiet break between sets. She rewards this by going down on him.

What does it say about either of these people that they're having unprotected sex when they've "known" each other for a grand total of about ten minutes? It's not a love story. It's not a romance. It's adolescent lust! It's dumb-ass, unprotected sex, and not even in a place of comfort, warmth, and safety, but in the alley behind a bar next to the garbage skip! It's the least erotic erotica I've ever read.

And she's dumb enough that she's constantly unbelieving: "He can't want me! He can't find me attractive! He can't be drawn to me! O woe is me, maiden that I am!" How can she not be aware that there is a heck of a lot of guys will willingly have sex with pretty much any girl who's dumb enough to put out at the drop of a zipper? Dress size is immaterial because all they want is to get her out of the dress.

I'm sorry but that's the end of this story as far as I'm concerned. I not only cannot recommend it, but I actively dis-recommend it unless you enjoy print versions of porn movies under the absurd pretence that there's even so much as a story here, much less a romance.

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.