Things You Might See on an African Safari by Louise Lintvelt

Title: Things You Might See on an African Safari
Author: Louise Lintvelt
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Do Thai Thanh

This is one of a pair of reviews I'm doing today of books by the same writer (Louise Lintvelt) and talented artist (Do Thai Thanh). This particular one depicts some interesting life you might find if you went on an African safari. Not that many of us get that chance, but that's why we have books and TV, huh?! A sad omission, again, was plant life. Plants are alive, as indeed are they 'things'! I wish people would pay more attention to them, because they're are critical for life such as ours. Of course, children are not likely to find them as appealing as a lion or an elephant, but that said, I think it's important to get children, even at an early age, to realize how important plants are.

On that same topic, I think it's also important to point out to children what's right under their noses (not literally, although there is bacterial life there!), but in their own back yard and in their neighborhood. Life there is just as important, if not quite as exotic, as that in Africa. Although on a microscopic scale, the life in your own belly button is rather exotic - and very specialized! However that's not what this book's aim is. Here we visit Africa and learn how to count to ten, starting with one crocodile, which is more than enough to make us want to quickly move on to two!

We visit several different ecosystems, but again here, the focus is exclusively upon large mammalian life - apart from the bird at the beginning, which isn't even part of the counting, and the crocodile which kicks it off. There isn't even a flavor of the local people for us to enjoy. It's for this reason that I can't rate this book positively despite another display of fine art from Do Thai Thanh.

It's easy to be cynical about children's books. I try not to be, but in very general terms, they're such insubstantial things, with so little to them: simplistic drawings and barely enough text to tell a story, let alone stimulate young minds. Children don't demand much in this regard, admittedly, but when you see a book which appears to be pumped out for no other motive than mercenary, it's impossible to look upon them benignly.

Most children's books that I've reviewed are not like that, and this one is not one which I would put into that category either, but just because a book isn't created for what appear to be mean motives doesn't mean it merits an automatic positive rating. That way lies insanity! I think our children deserve better than that, and when I see a book which to me is uninspired - even one with gorgeous illustrations like this one, it doesn't inspire me to look upon it favorably in return.

I would have loved to see this author stretch and go off the road most traveled, and bring us something fresh and new. She was getting there in the other book I reviewed: Things you Might See Swimming Under the sea, but this one doesn't even look like it made that much effort, and I can't therefore recommend it.

Things You Might See Swimming Under the Sea by Louise Lintvelt

Title: Things You Might See Swimming Under the Sea
Author: Louise Lintvelt
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Do Thai Thanh

This is one of a pair of reviews I'm doing today of books by the same writer (Louise Lintvelt) and illustrator (Do Thai Thanh). This particular one depicts some interesting life you might find under the sea. As usual, none of this life is plant life - apart from a brief mention of coral. For some reason, non-animal life always seems to be given back seat in these things. We do get a refreshing variety of animal life, though - from invertebrates to reptiles to fish, and mammals. We're also treated to a wrecked galleon sporting pirate treasure.

One of the interesting factors here (other than the sea life, of course!) is that the book is devoted to teaching colors, so in each case the color of the animal is recounted (and illustrated with colored text). We get a veritable rainbow of color as well as no color (black) and all colors (white).

The art work is rather well done. I particularly liked the rather impressionistic view of a sunset over the ocean, and the expression on the sea horse's face, while not realistic (they do not have binocular vision!) was highly entertaining. Of course the sea horse is actually a bizarre fish, but calling it a sea fish is far too vague and just doesn't get it done, don't you think?!

The story is educational, too - beyond the colors. At the back there is a section giving brief details of the animals featured in the illustrations. It was a wee bit small for that particular text to be read on a smart phone however, so I'd recommend this for a mini pad or larger, or the print version, but I do recommend it.

Bheki and the Magic Light by Janet Hurst-Nicholson

Title: Bheki and the Magic Light
Author: Janet Hurst-Nicholson (no website found)
Publisher:
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Samantha van Riet

This is a well-written and charming story set in southern Africa that I adored completely. In a manly sort of way, of course….

Bheki is a grandfather now, about to show his family the benefit of finally being hooked-up to the electrical system so they can have an electric light at night instead of candles. It reminds him of something which happened to him when he was a kid. His own father gave him a magic light when he was young. It was a torch (a flashlight to US readers!), and it fascinated him. He had no idea how it magically produced a stunningly bright light which outshone, with a steady light, any candle he had ever used, and which made him a celebrity in his village.

Prior to this magic coming into his hands, he had been largely without respect and all but friendless, feeling left out of everything because he was young and small amongst Zulus who are definitely not height-challenged. He had no possessions to speak of, and no status. Suddenly, he has a light in his life – literally, and he’s thrilled by his status and the interest people show in him because of it.

But the problem with battery-powered torches, just as with wax-powered candles, is that the power source, being non-renewable, weakens and the light fades. Eventually it goes out. It’s the same with false status, isn’t it? Bheki was just as befuddled by this dying of the light (against which he didn’t quite rage, but near enough!) as he was by there being light in the first place. He did the smart thing, though – he took the scientific approach and experimented with the magic light to see if he could persuade the light to come back. Nothing that he tried worked, and once again he was back in the old position of lacking status, his popularity fading along with the light from the torch.

Bheki decides upon a course of action which a young boy has to be brave and resourceful to undertake. He’s going to find out what’s going on with the light, but in the end, he discovers something different, and more important. It’s not something about the light, but about himself, and it lasts longer than any battery.

The beauty of this gentle, but adventurous story lies not only the welcome trip outside the US which it provides, bringing us into acquaintanceship with lives which are very different from our own pampered and privileged existence. The value of the book lies also in the scientific perspective too, whereby it goes into some detail- not too much, though - about electricity, how it works and where it comes from - and how dangerous it can be when mishandled. I found that refreshing and useful for younger children. I thoroughly recommend this story. I must confess a desire for a sequel, too - you know, the one which tells us where the light goes when you switch it off….

Sleepy Beach by Scott Harpole

Title: Sleepy Beach
Author: Scott Harpole (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Illustrated by Jill Reed

This is a short, illustrated young children’s story about a family trip to camp on a beach. I was not really very thrilled with this one. I don’t apply the same rigorous criteria to children’s books that I do to adult books, but I do expect a decent story, or a whole lot of fun, and preferably some educational content, but this one just left me with a whiskey tango foxtrot kind of feeling. I got the impression that the author was simply describing a day he and his family spent at the beach which would have been fine, but I could not figure out where he was going with it and it all seemed to fizzle into nothing, like the sea sinking into the sand as the wave rolls back out.

The art work was okay, but rather tame. I had thought that the idea was to take this somewhere because there were hints of a face showing up throughout this story, but it never turned into anything. We started with the face on the cover, which was one of the kids going on the trip, and then the first image we get looks like a reference back to the cover image – it looks like the top of someone’s head, with the grass and trees making the hair, and something on the beach (which was the forehead) which looked like eyebrows. That’s where the image cut off, so I wondered if the story was going to end up building a face, but it never did.

The very next image is like we’re looking down on the top of someone’s head, with the bushes making the hair and the sand making a forehead again, and this time there was a small island just off the coast making a nose. Shortly after this we get a large eye reflecting activity in the water, and I tried to fit this into the facial imagery, but it never worked. Yet later still we get the family sleeping on the beach on oddly-shaped sleeping bags which looked, the way they were arranged, like lower eyelashes, but that went nowhere either.

It was like both the story-teller and the artist started out with a bright idea, but then ran out of ideas when it came to figuring out where to take it and how to end it. I know that feeling. All writers have no doubt been there, but they haven’t done that! Getting stuck in the sand doesn’t mean we say “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead with the publishing!” No we figure out how to make that boat float; then we damn the torpedoes! This story just didn’t do it. It was flat and dull, like nothing interesting was going on, and I can’t recommend it.

Ming Li and the Charmed Phoenix by Marina Bonomi

Title: Ming Li and the Charmed Phoenix
Author: Marina Bonomi
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

If you think this sounds like a Chinese rip-off of a Harry Potter Story, think again. It's a nicely-written tale set in a fantasy land where there is a war of wills between two magical beings, one of whom is the feared Dragon King of Dongting Lake, and poor Ming Li is trapped in the middle of it.

For someone as smart as Li, you would imagine he would be able to keep himself out of trouble, but when he passed his exams with flying colors and then some, he naturally went out to celebrate with his friends, and who can blame him for wandering home late at night and a little worse for wear?

Even so everything would have been fine except that in a deserted street, Li finds himself kidnapped and taken to a cavern in the forest, where someone asks for his help and Li, not remotely sober yet, volunteers it. He wakes up in the morning expecting to have fond memories of a weird dream, but in practice, he's still in the cavern and now he finds himself bound by honor to go up against this dragon or suffer the shame of having his word taken to be worthless.

There's an error in the text where someone offers Li to do their "outmost" to help. What's really meant is that this person will do their "utmost". There were also some instances where a word ran into the one preceding it because there was a comma after the previous word, but no space after the comma.

The story resorted to a really old challenge presented to Li, whereby he can leave an area only by one of two doors. One of the doors leads to safety, the other to death, but the doors are guarded and of the two guards, one on each door, one always lies, the other always tells the truth. Li can ask only one question to determine which door he may safely choose. This is a well-known (although perhaps not by this author) 'Fork in the road' type of puzzle. It was also used in the movie Labyrinth.

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That aside, the story is inventive, charming, warm, sweet, and beautifully written. I recommend it.

The Great Depression for Kids by Cheryl Mullenbach

Title: The Great Depression for Kids
Author: Cheryl Mullenbach
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a fascinating story aimed at kids to help them understand that no matter how bad things got a couple of years ago with the Bush depression, things were far worse in the 1930’s as government cluelessness, the runaway greed of blind capitalism, and even nature herself conspired to put more than one in every ten people out of work. There were sad children, and marches on Washington put down with police brutality, and a heck of a lot of hungry people with no one to help them. It was like American became a third world country for a while.

People like to think of the previous decade to the depression as the roaring twenties when everyone had a good time, but as author Cheryl Mullenbach points out in this evocatively-imaged story, a lot of people were suffering an economic depression before the 1930s took hold. The USA has suffered for its expenditure on two recent Middle East wars, but it was the only nation in the world to profit from the two world wars of the twentieth century, coming out of each of them positioned as an economic and productive powerhouse.

While the outcome of World War Two cemented the US into a position of economic leadership that was to last for decades, the outcome of World War One was not so long-lasting. It went south rather quickly, but the effects of this permeated through the buoyant economy quite slowly and we’re not felt by everyone until the end of the decade as this book shows. What had begun as a binge for many reasonably well-off people had by the end of the decade, lost its oomph through foolish loans and speculation in stocks, and through a complete blind spot as to how the economy really works, and bone-headed reliance on business perks to solve social problems.

This book gives the story in nice bite-sized pieces and lays out the sorry mess from start to finish in seven chapters:

The 1920s Roaring Towards a Crash
America Looks to Its Leaders For Help
Broken Cities and Bread Lines - Urban Life
Droughts, Dust Storms, and Pest Plagues - Rural Life
Growing Up in Tough Times
Helping hands and a “New Deal” Awaken Hope
Finding Fun in Gloomy Times

Each of these sections has one or more activities associated with it, and the activities vary widely, so there is something for everyone in here somewhere. The range of topics covered is quite staggering, running from racism to malnutrition, to entertainment, to libraries, to sports, and on and on.

Economic factors and government and business blunders were not the only factors in play here, as I indicated. It seemed like nature unleashed the plagues of Egypt upon the US during this decade, too. There were floods, there were droughts, there were plagues of grasshoppers. None of this helped local economies. This book covers all of this and more, and is accompanied by very moving images of suffering and deprivation, although in view of the intended audience, there is nothing too graphical – just very sad.

It was humbling to read this – to realize, that no matter how badly-done-to any one of us might feel due to personal circumstances, back then, about ten times as many people had it worse. It’s a testament not to the backbone of the nation but to the backbone of so many individuals that so many families managed to make it through that decade and pick up life’s reins at the end of it, worse for wear, and perhaps lesser for it, but determined to get on with life. The sad thing is that these survivors had no idea that the worst war ever to plague this world was the very next thing on their schedule. I recommend this book not only for kids, but for adults too.

Scarlett Undercover by Jennifer Latham

Title: Scarlett Undercover
Author: Jennifer Latham
Publisher: Little, Brown
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
“Funny” on page 67 is missing a closing quote.

The last message on Jennifer Latham's website (as of this posting) is that she's here in Austin! Yeay! The website gives no clue as to where she is exactly, however; then I'm not a fan boy so I wouldn't go anyway, but I could have at least told you guys! Maybe it's hidden away on her website, but I sure don't have time to search for it.

Now this is an intriguing novel she's given to us. Scarlett is a smart (so we're told) and precocious 16 year old who graduated high school two years early, but has yet to take up college life. Judged by her bio (which we get about half-way through the novel), she hasn't always been so smart, but a good-hearted cop (or is he?) set her back on the straight and narrow, and that's how she got into the private detective business. In the meantime, she lives off...I have no idea who or what she lives off. Her parents are dead and she lives - nominally - with her older sister.

She seems to do very little with her life save for taking Muay Thai lessons, and those only half-heartedly. She holds down no job as far as I can see, unless you count the "job" of unpaid, part-time detective. Her new case is a nine-year-old girl who reports that her older brother is acting weird lately! Scarlett is inclined to take this report with a pinch or two of salt until she starts looking into it. An examination of the kid's room while he's not around, leads Scarlett to the discovery of a series of mysterious patterns scratched onto the back of his bedroom door.

Scarlett's "love" interest has the unfortunate name of Decker, and he equally unfortunately sports the young adult cliché of having gold flecks in his eyes. Seriously? He works part time in his mom's greasy-spoon restaurant, but the interesting thing here isn't the gold flecks; it's the fact that Decker is Jewish, whereas Scarlett is Muslim. They have more in common than you might think, as this story slowly reveals.

Given this knowledge of her origins, how the heck Scarlett ever got her name is a bit of a mystery. At first i thought she was Arabic, then I thought that maybe she's African American, then maybe she's Indian. The novel never says and ultimately it's not important except in that finally, we have a majorly kick-ass non-Anglo-Saxon protestant female main character. Why is it so hard for you female authors to come up with these characters?!!! Kudos to Jennifer Latham for introducing us to this one!

Decker informs Scarlett that the pattern which she's convinced she's seen before, but can't bring to mind, is called Solomon's Knot (although it's actually a link, not a knot). It's not only in her mosque, it's also in his synagogue, but neither place is where she's seen it. Decker's mom, who also waits at this restaurant which she runs, turned very nearly to stone when Scarlett showed her the image. She refused to discuss it and wouldn't say why. When Scarlett investigates, she gets drawn into an ancient web of danger and mystery that has her fighting - sometimes literally - to stay ahead of.

In addition to an interesting mystery, Scarlett seems to have picked up not one, but two tails, since she took this case. She managed to give both of these girls the slip (and not the kind you wear), but what the heck is she going to do when she meets a guy on a bridge, who is himself the size of a bridge and wanting to take her down hard?

As I mentioned, I have to wonder where Scarlett gets her money from. She takes taxis, eats breakfast and leaves ten dollars on the table, hands out five dollars to a homeless person. She has an office! Maybe she lives off her dead parent's insurance money? Her sister is a doctor doing a residency, which means she works long hours, is always tired, hardly home, and gets paid diddly for all this, so we know the money isn't coming from her, so this access to endless cash is a big plot hole, but that aside, I can't find any fault in this novel.

I do find fault in the cover. The flimsy child-model on it in now way, shape, or form even remotely represents the outstanding girl depicted inside. Why they ever let jackasses do the cover who quite evidently have never even read the novel is a complete mystery to me. It's the price you pay, however, for going the route of Big Publishing™. The cover is out of the author's hands, and while I don't blame her for this disaster, I do feel awful for her that she got saddled with a trashy cover like this for the superior novel she's written.

Please do completely ignore the cover when considering reading this one! I never judge a novel by the cover. it's a colossal mistake. This novel is beautifully told, expertly paced, has major action, danger, intrigue, and narrow escapes, all of which are believable, and it has a romance that's done to perfection - i.e. this is not a romance novel masquerading as a PI novel like one I reviewed quite recently, it's a serious private eye story with a pleasant - for once - dash of romance. It's told - perhaps tongue in cheek - with the best private dick story-telling technique (which I think some reviewers simply didn't get), and the romance is a minor side-shoot which neither dominates nor ruins the story. I praise Jennifer Latham for that and assure you she is a writer to watch.

Gotham Academy Volume 1 by Becky Cloonan

Title: Gotham Academy Volume 1
Author: Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher
Publisher: Time Warner
Rating: WARTY!

Illustrated by Karl Kerschel

This is an advance review copy ARC), which despite this age of instant electronics, we're cautioned to consider uncorrected and to not treat as final, but with a nod and a wink to that, I have to say that the reading experience in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) was odd to say the least. It reminded me of that old Monty Python vinyl record (I think it was the Matching Tie and Handkerchief) which you can't really reproduce in any other medium. The record actually had two spiral tracks on one side instead of the usual one, and what this meant was that whenever you played it, you would randomly get one version or the other dependent upon where the stylus set down when you played it. It was confusing - even creepy - until you realized what they'd done, and this comic felt like that because of the way the pages presented themselves.

On the iPad, it was fine, but in ADE, the numbering on the bottom of the ADE app would sometimes jump two pages instead of one when you click to the "next page". I've seen this before and never noticed anything odd about it (other than the apparent jumping of a page), but in this particular case, the comic actually was jumping two pages, because if you click back having moved two pages forwards, you would not return to the page you just left, but to an intermediate page which you had skipped right over when you clicked forwards the first time! It was like the pages were almost randomly choosing to appear. Had this been a supernatural comic, that would have been really cool, but it's a super hero comic, so, not so appropriate!

In the opening pages, which were rather self-indulgent (the same image was repeated once in color and once in gray-scale for example, and there were several other random pages like this) and a grotesque waste of a good tree, this didn't matter from purely a reading perspective, but it made me wonder how many panels I would be missing reading the story if the comic was going to be randomly jumping pages like this.

Another issue was that if I slid the bar to return the comic to the first page (an orange-toned image of a startled-looking girl with a shaded bar down the right side proclaiming a welcome to Gotham Academy) and then closed the comic, it would open at a different "first page" - one which showed the current choice for cover as of this version! That image has a green-toned background and depicts two girls in plaid school uniform skirts descending a rope with an ominous shadow of batman behind them.

Starting from the opening cover, one page click shows the same cover (but now as page two), from which a click-back shows the "original" orange-toned cover described above. Clicking forward from the cover takes us to half of a "rogues gallery" image showing (presumably) a handful of academy students. Another click shows us the second half of this same picture. Another click shows us the green cover again, but with no text. Another click shows us the cover yet again, but in gray-scale, no text). The publisher and writers/artists must really hate trees! A click to page eight shows this same image, but a click back shows us what I took to be the first page of the actual story - a full-page image of a clock tower, showing, at five minutes to seven, a lightning strike on the tower. Maybe Marty McFly is parked nearby?

A click forward shows us the same gray-scale image of the two girls, descending via a rope from the top of the tower - but inside the tower, rather than on the walls outside. At this point I gave up on the clicking back and forth experiment and tried to enjoy the story, hoping I was missing no pages in the process! I didn't seem to be until we got the skip-page routine again around page thirty, where it was definitely jumping over a story page that you could only find by clicking back. Clicking forwards missed it every time. But let's move on.

The art work was good - moodily colored and very appropriate to the creepiness of the text, but the artist really needs to learn what a sabre (saber) is. It typically sports a curved blade, and has a hand guard. A regular sword does not. The lettering once again was way too small to read comfortably. Naturally you don't want it so large it obscures the images, but the story is just as important as the art - at least for me it is - and I certainly don't want to be rewarded with eye-strain for simply trying to follow the story!

So what was the story? It's Gotham Academy, an ordinary high school with nothing special about it except that it's housed in a creepy old building which was built from stones even older than the academy, which I thought was a rather evocative thought. Every stone, we're told, has a story. It's almost a Gothic tale, except that it's set in contemporary times.

My problem immediately was that the story we're being told here was scattershot. It seemed like it had a portion missing, and we were coming into it a few minutes late - like the movie had already started and I'd missed the opening couple of scenes. It was annoying, but it slowly came into focus after being all over the place.

One problem was that I didn't get the relationship between the girl named Mia "Maps" Mizoguchi and the other main character, Olive Silverlock. Olive is supposed to be showing Maps around the academy - like this is her first year, but it's clear that they knew each other from the previous year, so this made little sense. Maps is the younger sister of Kyle, the guy with whom Olive just broke up, so it's possible the reference is to them knowing each other outside of school, but it's not depicted that way.

Olive's idea of showing the "new student" around is to take her into the most dangerous parts of the school and almost get her killed. The weird thing is that big brother Kyle has absolutely no issues with this at all, but later, when Olive takes Mia into the North Hall, a trip which is a lot safer than what they went through with the fall from the tower, Kyle gets all bent out of shape. This tells me that at best he's a complete jerk, and at worst, an absolute moron.

There's a ban on students going into the North hall and there's a creepy eye - of which Olive is unaware - peering into her room from a tiny crack in the wall. A student with the highly unlikely name of Pomeline Fritch is playing Malfoy to Olive's Harry Potter, although to be fair, it's much more complex than that, and doesn't go the same way. There's even a character named Heathcliff. There's also, supposedly, a ghost in the North Hall, and Mia, Olive, Pomeline, and a guy named Colton Rivera, decide to break into the hall one night to investigate, and find something way more disturbing than a ghost.

I have to say that the story (even without the oddball hidden pages) was far too choppy. The cutting from one scene to another was startlingly abrupt making me think I'd skipped a page. An example of this is around page 80 where we go from the idiot thespian misidentifying his sword as a sabre to what feels like the middle of an interrogation of one of the students about a symbol he'd drawn in his notebook. It's obvious what the symbol is right from the start, so no mystery there. The scene with the actors could have been skipped and the pages devoted to a softer segue to the interrogation instead of the breakneck switch we got.

Overall I can see how the story might appeal to young, desperate, indiscriminate readers, but then the imagery is a bit scary for really young ones. Older children who can handle the story might well have a problem with it being less than thrilling. Neither of my kids showed any interest in it! It's for these reasons that I can't recommend this graphic novel.

Quick, Quick I feel Sick! by Allira Bell

Title: Quick, Quick I feel Sick!
Author: Allira Bell (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!
illustrated by Tim Carter

This is my 1,000th review on my book blog!

I don't know Allira Bell yesterday (and technically I still don't know her today!), but she has hit my radar with the effect of raspberry jam (kudos if you know which movie that came from). That's why I'm reviewing two of her books today. The first one some people might not give a ghost of a chance to, and this one might make you sick, but I loved both of them. In a platonic sort of way, understand.

Beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated (just like the other one!) by Tim Carter, it nauseates me how quickly these books made me smile and enjoy them! This one is about a family taken ill on a car trip. Now tell me who would even think of an idea like that, much less get a readable book out of it? Ring a Bell?

The car is stopped and out gets Dominic. The rhymes are delightful. He's followed by sister Daffodil, in the flower of her youth. Next comes dad, followed by granddad and mom. Some people might argue that there ought to be an inquiry into how it is that mom was left until last, but I don't think the locals could stomach it.

The only one who seems to have escaped this ill-omened event is the baby. Now what did this child have for lunch today? The coloring and drawing were great, the rhymes bouncy and fun, and the whole thing crazy. I started wondering what the heck was going through the author's mind when she dreamed this one up, but decided it would probably give me a tummy upset. Let's just say I recommend this one for fun and color and craziness. And even some educational value given the recent food recall by a certain ice cream manufacturer!

Where Do Ghosts Go When They're Not Spooking and Scaring? by Allira Bell

Title: Where Do Ghosts Go When They're Not Spooking and Scaring?
Author: Allira Bell (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Tim Carter.

I like children's books to have some educational content, but not many of them really do. However, there is another category of education that doesn't involve spewing out facts, and that's exactly the category into which this one falls: it's not a factual book by any means, but it does make kids think, and stimulating imagination with fun concepts, even wacky ones, is a worthwhile aim, if it's done right. I'm pleased, therefore to be able to review two books by the same author (and not un-coincidentally, I suspect!).

This one asks the very spooky question; what is it, exactly, that ghosts get up to when they're not haunting you? I know you yourself must have been haunted by this question! You must have asked yourself this - because hoo-oo-oo else would you ask?! I mean seriously, I think we have a right to know! We don't have a ghost of a chance of understanding these poor souls if we don't learn more about their activities!

So the author speculates extensively. Do they turn into mush? Do they hide? Do they nap? Maybe they ghost write books? Actually, she doesn't ask that last one (at least not in so many words), but she should have. I wonder what she's hiding? Is it a con-spirit see?

So yes, this is an important book that every child should know about. Keep on hand for next Halloween. It's actually not that far away, and Beltane is only a week or so away as of this posting!

Ryder: Bird of Prey by Nick Pengelley

Title: Ryder: Bird of Prey
Author: Nick Pengelley
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
One of the Russian phrases at the start of chapter 21 didn't render properly in Adobe Digital editions. In place of characters or spaces are two boxes with an 'X' in them (page 104 of ADE version)
Page 141 (end of chapter 30 "...when'd he'd" should be "when he'd"

The Ayesha Ryder series is a highly fanciful cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones, with some Dan Brown tossed in for good measure. It's evidently set in an alternate universe - an assessment with which the author may disagree, but I have to disagree with him on that score in return: this "world" is so fanciful that it's honestly not realistic. In it, the Israelis and Palestinians are living in a shared nation, and air travel is by Zeppelin, to name two of the unlikeliest differences between this and the real world.

Although there are three books in this series out now, this is only the second of these stories that I've read. The first one by-passed me somehow. You can read them as stand-alones as long as you remember that you may find yourself missing some of the references if you do. I was favorably impressed with volume two, Ryder: American Treasure, but this third outing simply failed to make the grade.

The first problem showed up early, and it's that Ayesha Ryder is really Mary Sue! She can do no wrong, although she's always inexplicably suspected of (or blamed for) wrong-doing by someone each outing. I was impressed by her in the first one I read because she was not the trope white American. She's Palestinian, which is a refreshing change, although she was also a terrorist, so how an ex terrorist came to be, in effect, working for the British government is a mystery to me (which may or may not be covered in volume one - I don't know).

In this edition, we meet Ayesha hanging out with the British Prime Minister, who in this world is female and gay (although that latter characteristic isn't widely known). With the two of them is the Prime minister's secretary, who is female and bisexual as well as being a BDSM devotee. Or addict, more accurately. All the villains in this series are far more oddball than ever they need to be, which to me makes them more of a joke than a threat.

Ryder and the other two take part in an archery 'contest' trying out a replica English longbow. The PM can't even pull the string. The secretary, Bebe Daniels, handles it expertly and hits the bull's eye roundly in the middle, but Ayesha of course, splits Bebe's arrow with one of her own. This was where this book and I began to part ways in terms of it retaining my favor. It's quite okay, you know, to have your main character screw up on occasion. In fact, it's preferable to having her be Mary Sue, Handmaiden of Perfection, as she's depicted here.

Very shortly after this, the Prime Minister is reported to be dying of polonium poisoning, and Ayesha is the main suspect, being sought by MI5, the police, and Special Branch, and if the deputy PM Noel Malcolm has his way, the British army, too. Ri-ight! Here's where we encounter another departure from the real world. The prime minister seems to have surrounded herself with traitors and scoundrels, which is simply not credible. Yes, there may be a mole or a turn-coat on a team, but here it's like every edition of this series turns up yet another traitor at the gate. I simply could not credit that the government would be shot through with such people in the highest positions, especially someone like Malcolm, who's completely delusional.

In the deputy prime minister's case, he wants to break-up the United Kingdom and shed England's ties to the WTO, NATO, and the European Union. He also wants to force upon Scotland the independence it turned down just a few months ago, and force upon Northern Ireland a subjugation to Eire, which NI has consistently - and oftentimes literally - fought against. It's simply not conceivable that the prime minister, who is against all this, would have as a deputy someone who is diametrically opposed to her core beliefs.

By this time I was about a quarter the way in and I was already losing interest in what had, by this point, become a classic British farce, populated with grotesque caricatures, but incredibly it was about to become yet more farcical! The next thing we learn is that the Maltese Falcon (of Dashiel Hammet Fame) is not only real, but contains a second-rate Dan Brownian clue-cascade leading to the lost sword of Harold Godwinson (King Harold of the Battle of Hastings fame. The deputy PM is of the opinion that if he can only find the sword, it will magically convince everyone that he's right and England will be freed of its shackles! Drool much Noel?

Thus, a pell-mell chase for the sword is on, with Ayesha and some dude from the library at the institute where Doctor Ryder (Doctor Jones much?) works, directed by a clue in the Maltese Falcon, and descending into London's catacombs to find clues in Æthelred the Unready's (aka Æthelred 2.0's) grave which supposedly directs them to king Harold's grave. The problem is that none of this really was very well done or very gripping. This novel was not as well put together as Dan Brown's efforts, and he's hardly a sterling example.

Another major issue was that of American influence in British governmental affairs. The depths to which it supposedly runs in this story is simply not credible. Rather than turn out to be an enjoyable and mature yarn about spying and intrigue, this turned out to be more like the Spy Kids movies, which were fun as far as they went, but hardly to be taken seriously.

The one thing that kept me reading for a while was that I have actually been to the site of the Battle of Hastings, and to the ruins of Battle Abbey which stand hard by it, but Pengelley's fantasy that Harold's body is discovered intact and as well-preserved as if he just died is nonsensical. This is in a porous sandstone cave close by the salty ocean, and we're expected to believe everything has been preserved for a millennium? That's reality leaving on the bus over there.

The truth is that there are the remains of a headless and largely legless man in Bosham church which is a likely candidate for Harold's actual skeleton. He was reported as being dismembered after dying in the company of his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine at which point, and having no leadership remaining, the English, who were on the verge of winning not long before, finally collapsed and William of Normandy became England's new ruler. It was the last time England was successfully invaded. And no, the story of the arrow in the eye is by no means verified, and may well be due to a misunderstanding of the graphic novel known as the Bayeux Tapestry!

One of the most annoying aspects of this novel was the random flashbacks. Most of these were Ayesha's (to her Gaza strip past), but there was also one for the CIA operative, Danforth. This took the novel to ever more ridiculous heights, whereby we have Zeppelins flying over the Taliban. how absurd is that? They have rockets. The author apparently didn't think for a second about what a monstrously tempting and easily assailable target a gigantic Zeppelin would be to someone with a surface-to-air missile at hand.

I began routinely skipping these flashback chapters because they really contributed nothing to the story and were, frankly, really annoying interruptions. They felt like nothing more than padding (without which the novel would have drifted perilously close to the sub 200 page arena, I might add). It's never a good thing when the author includes paragraphs and worse, entire chapters, which actively encourage readers to skim and skip.

At about 70% of the way in, at the start of chapter 38, this novel became far too ridiculous to continue reading, even by its own standards. Ayesha is at this point in an ancient underground hall where equally ancient tombs are preserved, yet she starts a gunfight whereby damage galore is inflicted upon the ancient artifacts - and this woman is supposed to have earned herself a doctorate? If she had any smarts at all, she would have fired on these people before they got down the stairs, not afterwards where they have all kinds of room to maneuver and places to hide. At any rate, it was too laughable to continue, and I quit reading right there. I can't recommend this cartoon.

Last Shot by Eve Gaddy

Title: Last Shot
Author: Eve Gaddy
Publisher: Belle Books
Rating: WARTY!

This author got on my good side in only the second paragraph when she wrote: "Brown hair, so dark it was almost black.". If you've read my reviews you'll realize that at times I've taken an author to task for writing something dumb like "black hair so black it was almost blue". It was nice not to see that here, but the novel still packed an awful lot of clichés and sadly formulaic writing, not least of which was the title. Last Shot? Barnes and Noble has three web pages of titles just like this, but I can't rate this positively because its biggest problem was positioning itself as a murder mystery when it's really just a tawdry romance.

I thought this was to be a murder mystery from the blurb, even as I realized that there would be romance "... and no matter how hot he is, she's not interested." I knew that was an outright lie! Della is obsessed with Studly Do-Right's body from the start - not his personality, not his integrity, not his decency, not his warmth, not his friendship, not his reliability, but his body from minute one, and she never lets it go, not for a minute. if a guy had been written with this same one-track mindset, the author would rightly have been pilloried for objectifying women. How is it any different here?

She's obsessing on his body non-stop despite witnessing a close friend get shot. Even when stud-muffin Nick is lying in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound after saving her life, she can't get her mind onto anything but his body. In short, Della Rose disgusted me every bit as much as a male character would if he were obsessing on a female in this same way, so why does Della get a bye for objectifying a guy? What, sauce for the goose is saucy for the gander? Is that it? I don't subscribe to that.

What makes this truly sad is that Della was an interesting character and this was a good set-up for a story. She's a single mom with a past. Her boss is shot. No one knows why. The Sheriff is dishonest, her only hope is a burned-out cop? How cool could that have been had it been handled properly, i.e. not put under the cookie cutter of trope romance?

Even her attraction to Nick wouldn't have been so bad had we not been treated to repeated descriptions of Nick's "beautifully rippling muscles" which really cheapened the story for me immensely. Can we not have a story about ordinary people? Do we have to dwell on buff carnality - which quite frankly destroys the artistry of romance with the caustic paint stripper of lust? I wish more authors would make the effort to grasp the crucial differences between the two. I could have liked Della and rooted for her, but after three chapters of her monotonously boundless lust, I was truly nauseated.

It only got worse when I realized that Eve Gaddy is yet another writer who doesn't know the difference between 'staunch' and 'stanch'. For me personally, I'm a staunch supporter of those who stanch blood running from open wounds. Too many writers are not!

I made it to page 75 in this story and it was just too boring and predictable to stay with it. There was nothing interesting going on, and the author was far more interested in rambling on and tediously on and endlessly on about how hot Della thought Nick looked and how hot he thought she looked. There was no mystery here, no thrills, no adventure, no danger. It was boring. I can't recommend this novel.

I have to issue a final warning on this, too. While this novel read fine in Adobe Digital Editions, and also in my Kindle, on my iPad, the novel read backwards. I am not kidding. It started on page 234 (or whatever the last page was - I forget), and to read it you had to swipe backwards to progress forwards through the novel, watching the page count go down instead of up! It was weird. I've never seen a novel do that before. I even downloaded it afresh, thinking it was just a bad download, but it wasn't. The iPad edition is screwed up.

Kabuki Dreams by David Mack

Title: Kabuki Dreams
Author: David Mack (no website available)
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!

According to Wikipedia, kabuki is a word made from three Japanese kanji characters ( 歌舞伎 ) which in English mean sing, dance, and skill, but the word itself may be more closely related to ‘kabuku’, which is taken to indicate what we in the west might term ‘experimental theater’. None of this has anything to do with the story being told in this graphic novel, however.

This is a sequel to Kabuki Circle of Blood, a relatively long graphic novel which I did try to read, but which turned me off by its vague rambling sparsely-written text and a story which seemed to be going around in circles. This graphic novel I viewed differently, however. It is much shorter and is depicted in full color, and it's very well illustrated. It featured the woman who was badly wounded at the end of volume one, who now lay across her mother's grave marker, lost in reverie.

I decided to treat this as an illustrated poem, because it really wasn't a novel in any meaningful sense. Viewed in this way, I was able to enjoy it and this is why I am rating this positively despite having rated its predecessor negatively. The art work was beautiful. Much more effort had been put into this than had been expended on the first volume, which consisted, pretty much, of black and white sketches.

The story really doesn’t go anywhere, as I've indicated, but the art in Dreams was really well done, very true to life in some instances, while being much more abstract in others. There was something really appealing about it that I did not find in the first volume. It’s for this reason that I recommend this, and you might want to try it at the library before you decide if you want to buy it. There are many images from this series available online, too, so you can check them out there before you even decide if it’s even worth a trip to the library for this!

Kabuki Circle of Blood by David Mack

Title: Kabuki Circle of Blood
Author: David Mack (no website available)
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!

I found this in the library, and a quick flip through the pages made it look interesting, so I took it and the companion volume home to read. I was very disappointed. Actually the companion volume was not bad if you thought of it as illustrated poetry which is how I decided to treat it, but this graphic novel was a complete mess.

It’s rooted in Japanese culture. According to Wikipedia, kabuki is a word made from three Japanese kanji characters (歌舞伎)which in English mean sing, dance, and skill, but the word itself may be more closely related to ‘kabuku’, which is taken to indicate what we in the west might term ‘experimental theater’. None of this has anything to do with the story being told in this graphic novel, however, which is more along the lines of Yakuza and gang activities.

I honestly can’t tell you what the story was really about because it was scrappy and disjointed, and it made no sense to me, so I quickly lost interest in it, but in the beginning we’re introduced to eight young, highly sexualized Japanese women who are evidently assassins, but who have western names, so the story already started downhill, yet managed to go further downhill from there.

Like is aid, by this time I’d pretty much lost interest, so I skimmed the rest of it, and I have to say that the art work, black and white line drawings for the most part, is really rather good, but then the creator had to offer something to make up for the fact that the tale-telling is sparse and far more like poetry than prose, yet it wasn’t improved for all that. It explained very little, and that’s why I gave it very little regard. I cannot recommend this.

We Can Fix It! by Jess Fink

Title: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-can-fix-it-jessica-fink/1020236032We Can Fix It!
Author: Jess Fink
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!

Jess Finkenstein has a time travel machine so the first thing she does with it is go back to the past and make out with her younger self? I can't count how many kinds of creep that reflects, but the most important one, as another reviewer put it, is that it reflects a level of self-absorption and self-indulgence that actually requires a time travel machine to actually go back and properly appreciate.

The juvenile obsession with sex and even the puerile fart jokes could have been justified had the story actually gone somewhere, but there was no story. It was merely an author's sad attempt at self-medication through art. And the art really wasn't very good. It was, barely, passable for the most part, although there were some serious bugs in it. For example, on page 87, she's kissing a boyfriend, and he asks her why she kisses with her eyes open, yet the drawings depict her kissing with her eyes closed. It's only a small detail but it shows the same kind of sloppiness and lack of close attention to good story-telling with which the story itself is shot through to the core.

The "story" here merely takes the author's completely unexceptional past and tries to tart it up so that it looks cool, funny, and interesting. It fails dismally, although it's highly revealing of her psyche that she repeatedly makes out with her past selves which is not only incestuous in the worst possible way, it's borderline pedophilic on occasion.

This conceit (and I really mean conceit in this case) perhaps would not have been so bad if it had had something original or interesting to convey, but it fails on all counts with the cheapest cop-out of all: everything in the past made us who we are today so changing it is a bad idea. Clearly it's not a bad idea, because to argue otherwise is to argue that it was a good thing that over six million people died at the hands of the Nazi regime, that it was perfectly fine to burn women for no other reason than religious superstition, and we're fine with that. I'm not. Count me out. On a personal level, it's also to argue that we should all have been the cruel, mean, thoughtless, and careless people that we all were on occasion, and that's fine too. No, it's not!

I call bullshit on that one because the selfishness inherent in that line of thinking is truly staggering. It's all about us? No. Not a single one of those things is all about us. Every one of them is about what we did to others, and the author is arguing here that it's fine to leave it like that, no apology necessary, not even when we can honestly apologize by going back and fixing what we did wrong.

Even if you do confine it selfishly to yourself, then it's to argue that it's fine that some people have debilitating guilt and regrets over past actions. I don't buy that. The only reason we're forced to buy it is because we actually don't have time travel, but we recognize that it isn't fine. That's why there's a thriving industry for therapists, and while some of that is undoubtedly pure indulgence, a heck of a lot of it is performing a real and valuable service.

Of course you can argue that this would change us, then we wouldn't be who we are and perhaps we wouldn't feel any need to go back and fix things, but if we changed the bad things we did there would be no need to go back and fix them! Besides, the way these things are presented here is so simplistic and mindless as to be pathetic. Despite the fact that the author goes back and does change things, and does repeatedly and seriously mess with her time line (and the time lines of others, don't forget), there isn't one single consequence. Nothing changes in her present, which begs yet again the question: what was the point of all this? Was it merely to do the exact same thing that all the other clichéd time-travel stories do - that nothing changes and it's all for the best that it doesn't? Again, what's the point of that story?

The author acknowledges time-travel influences from other stories, which hopefully explains the rip-off of the dashed line and arrow logo from the Back to the Future movie trilogy which adorns the cover, but for all her worship of this genre, she fails to grasp that there really are some great time-travel stories with interesting things to tell and ways to tell them. She may well have loved those stories, but she's quite evidently learned nothing from them, which is what's truly sad here. The problem is that she doesn't worship them enough to grasp that she needs to do far better if she's going to try telling one of her own.

The final insult was the profligate employment of white space. No one wants a rigidly-regimented presentation in a comic book for goodness sakes, but I have to yet again express the wish that writers and publishers would consider trees when they design these things. It doesn't matter in ebooks, but in a print book which is what I read, every page which isn't filled with imagery is really a waste of a perfectly good tree. Naturally, you want to design your comic to be visually appealing (otherwise why go graphic!), so all I'm saying is, when you're having these cool and experimental ideas run through your imagination, ask yourself if it's worth destroying a beautiful tree for. If you think it is, then go for it, otherwise, please think again.

I cannot recommend this story at all; in fact, I actively dis-recommend it. And no, the jumpsuit isn't cool. It's degrading and demeaning to women. The assertion that 'we can fix it' evidently was ignored when it came to quality control in this story.

Masks and Mirrors by Sue Duff

Title: Masks and Mirrors
Author: Sue Duff
Publisher: Crosswinds Publishing (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

This is book two of the Weir Chronicles, the first volume being Fade to Black which I have not read. Judging by how many novels are out that which share this title, (and that's not even counting those titled "Mirrors and Masks") I think a better title could have been chosen - both for this and the predecessor, which is also a very oft-repeated title.

I read to page one hundred in this volume, which is roughly a quarter the way through and I could not get into it at all. I was assured that although this is the second book in a series, it can be read as a stand-alone but that's not what I experienced at all. I was very much lost as to what (in the bigger picture) was going on - or even why it was going on!

There was nothing in the opening chapters to recap, however fleetingly, however tangentially, what had brought us to this stage in the story. Obviously no one wants a huge info-dump or god forbid, a prologue in a volume two, but certainly some intelligent hints at what has gone before would be useful, even to those who may have read the previous volume, just as a refresher. There was no such help to be had - at least not in any way that caught me up.

That said I might well have been able to get into this had there been anything of substance to get into, but there was not. Nothing really happened in the hundred pages I read. I asked myself, when I finally gave up, what would have been lost from the story had this entire century of pages been omitted, and I honestly couldn't think of a single thing, which begs the obvious question as to why these hundred pages exist in the first place!

This was supposed to be sci-fi, but all it amounted to in this first quarter of the story was a domestic tale of a young couple trying to come to terms with the fact that they couldn't be together, and that was pretty much it. yes, there was a bit of "shyfting" between dimensions/worlds/realms, and some sort of barrier which actually prevented them touching, yet failed to prevent them breathing on one another, but that was it for sci-fi. How that worked is a mystery, and the domestic back and forth wasn't remotely appealing to me. There was really no action, with what was not devoted to domestic events was confined to as bland talk about vague events and threats. There really was nothing to move the story forwards in any meaningful sense

There used to be a children's show on British TV titled The Magic Roundabout wherein this character named Zebedee would randomly appear. He had a single spring for "legs" and having appeared, he would say something and then equally unexpectedly disappear, and the main character in this story, Ian, reminded me of so much of that character that I couldn't take him seriously. His random comings and goings really made no sense, and I felt it had little to bring to the story in the portion I read.

As I said, I've not read volume one, but from what I did read, I got the impression that this book and the first book could have been compressed into one volume if all the fluff and filler had been removed, and the characters had been allowed to get on with the story instead of discussing kitchen damage, new suits, flowers, and so on.

I realize that this is someone's hard work and I sympathize, believe me I do, but there has to be something there to pull a reader into the story even in volume two, and I felt no pull at all. I was given no reason to care about any of the characters I met, and many reasons to eschew them.

Indeed, these characters didn't actually strike me as either appealing or likable, and I was given no basis for empathy with them. Most of them seemed to me to be spoiled rotten and living a life of ease and luxury, yet harboring undercurrents of dissatisfaction and complaint! I can neither empathize with, nor sympathize with characters like that when other people are so much more worse-off than they are.

Yes, maybe they felt threatened, maybe they were hiding out, maybe someone was out to get them, but I got no sense of that! The text imbued me with no feelings of fear or oppression on their behalf, and no sense of imprisonment, entrapment, or looming danger. There certainly was no evident impetus on their part to go out and attack whatever it was which purportedly threatened them. They seemed to be living a life of Riley, swanning around doing little-to-nothing of utility. I'm supposed to feel bad for them or feel like I should root for them? I felt no such thing!

On top of this there was what I took to be a love triangle which is a huge no-no. Maybe it wasn't; maybe I misunderstood it coming in at volume two, but I cannot take love triangles seriously and neither should you. They're an almost ubiquitous, ridiculous, and completely artificial conceit of YA novels these days. They make no sense, and they do none of the participants any favors, so if this was one, it would also have turned me off reading this.

In short, based on what I read and acknowledging that I have not read volume one, I cannot in good faith recommend this as a worthy read. I should know better than to try reading a book which has the word 'chronicles' on its front cover, but I must say that it wasn't written in first person, so it did have that much going for it at least! Maybe you will find it more enjoyable than I did. I hope you do!