Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

Title: Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
Author: Judy Blume
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

In a continued and disappointing effort to read the classics, I happened upon this, which isn't an old classic but is nonetheless a modern classic, supposedly well-loved and well received, although it's rather dated now (it was published almost half a century ago). It felt like reading a peanuts cartoon to me, which I actually don't do, not being a Peanuts fan, but this is very short (~150 pages) so I figured it was do-able even if I didn't like it. As it happens, I did like it and I recommend it.

Margaret is a middle-grader who is moving to a new home and a new school, of course, but at least it's not your typical middle grade/YA novel where there is a orphan child and an evil clique. Margaret makes friends easily and immediately finds herself part of a secret girls club, where they (Janie, Gretchen, Margaret, and Nancy) meet once a week under fake names at the house of one of the members, and have to wear bras and write lists of boys they like and keep the list in order as these various guys' favor falls or rises. It's all very innocent stuff, part from when Judy Blume writes "Good-by" instead of "Goodbye", but maybe departure wishes were different in the seventies....

Margaret is conflicted about all sorts of things, one of which is her religion or lack of one. Sadly she feels she ought to have one, but one her parents hails from a Judaic background and the other from Christian, so they don't attend organized worship services, which is the smartest thing they can do. There's nothing in either religion which demands its adherents attend any kind of church.

If there were a god (and I don't buy it because there's never been any useful evidence for any gods), then what would he care (it's nearly always a he, isn't it?) if you worship in church or out? Wouldn't he prefer it if you spoke directly to him rather than let some guy do the job for you? In fact, the New Testament has its Messiah (who was a Judaist, not a Christian!) specifically ordering people to worship in private, not in public. So much for that advice! LOL! I don't get this intermediary nonsense where a rabbi or a priest or a mullah takes charge of your worship for you.

But Margaret goes to a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish new year just to comparison shop. The author gets the new year greeting wrong, although she gets Rosh Hashanah in the right part of the year (the fall in the northern hemisphere). The Judaists don't wish each other a happy new year, but a good year. The author has the Rabbi saying "Good Yom Tov" to Margaret, which means "Good day good" which is nonsensical! The actual greeting is far more likely to be "Shanah Tovah" - a good year, or something along those lines. It's not like our western greeting at all and has a different meaning.

Margaret takes to praying from whence the novel's title, but her prayers are never answered. Like most believers, this neither disillusions nor deters her. I promise you that there are far more excuses made up by theists for why prayers are not answered than ever there are prayers answered. For the Christians this is awkward because their Messiah did not equivocate. He promised every prayer wish made in his name would be granted. So much for his credibility! LOL! Instead of answers, we get excuses. If your prayer isn't going to be answered - at least in the way you expect - there ought to be an official communiqué from your god explaining why, so you at least you would know that it had at least been considered!

Margaret also has to face a new teacher - not that she knew the old one, but the new one is male, and he seems wise to the mischievous ways of his students. He assigns them a year-long project, and no one has any idea how to handle this or what to choose, but Margaret, perhaps propelled by a brief chat with her wily new teacher, takes it upon herself to evaluate her parents' religions in an effort to try and decide which one she should adopt. Her father is Jewish, but Margaret is not, since her mother is not. Her mother was raised Presbyterian, but due to the hostility from her and her husband's respective parents, they neither of them pursue any active religious worship.

One thing which bothered me about Margaret was how self-centered she was. All but one of those unanswered prayers was about herself and her needs. The exception was when her dad was clueless in dealing with a lawn mower and cut his finger. She prayed for him then. Other than that, she never did ask for anything for anyone else.

I was intrigued to read about the times when the girls began getting their periods and it became such a awful competitive thing. Being a boy in school (and still am, as it happens!) I was never part of that, so it's a curious thing to me and I wondered how much of this was Judy Blume's own life story, and how much she was making up or filling in from other women's shared recollections. She definitely made a huge fuss about it.

Boys go through their own thing, of course, but it's nothing like girls go through. It's hard to imagine what it's like to endure these things, especially if it's anything like Margaret's adventures in this novel. It's hard to imagine what it does to the psyche to enter such a dangerous, er, period of your life when one false step can spell pregnancy and all it entails. Scary times, bleeding every month! To quote Isidor Isaac Rabi on his hearing of the properties of the newly discovered muon: Who ordered that?!

Margaret's parents were pretty bland parents throughout this novel until there came a point - inevitably it would seem - where her mom's estranged parents came back into her life. This, I felt, was pure evil on her mom's part. She had randomly sent her parents, to whom she had not spoken in fourteen years, a Christmas card, and suddenly they wrote back announcing that they were coming to visit - they wanted to reconnect with their only daughter and granddaughter. They said not a word about their daughter's evidently despised husband.

Of course, they happened to choose to come at the same time as Margaret was scheduled to fly out to visit her paternal grandmother in Florida - the grandmother who had stuck by the family and whom Margaret adored. The ticket was already bought, but Instead of telling her parents that they would have to either miss their granddaughter or reschedule, she chose instead to screw over her husband's mother, and she told Margaret that she could not go. That was unforgivable. If it had been some emergency, or something complete unavoidable, I could have understood it, but it was not. Her mother was just plain selfish and mean over this and that's not appreciated at all. It makes her mom look so awfully bad and there was no reason to write it this way.

This would have actually made a far more interesting story had Margaret run away at that precise time her grandparents show up, or if her dad had taken her to Florida, but instead both Margaret and her dad completely knuckle under and mom's evil plan holds sway even as it goes awry.

Overall, I liked this book. I liked Margaret despite her short-comings because she was actually the only real grown-up amongst the adults in her family. She was interesting and fun, and although some of this book was oddly contrived and no doubt far-fetched, in general it was a fun fictional read even for me, and I think those for whom it was primarily written will like it.

Living Mindfully by Deborah Schoeberlain David

Title: Living Mindfully
Author: Deborah Schoeberlain David (no website found)
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Rating: WARTY!

I'm always very wary of books where the author insists upon putting some academic string of letters after their name. Take a look at real books written by such people, and they never do this. Look at books by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Greene, Steven Hawking, Steve Jones, and so on, and not a one of them does this. Not to comment upon this particular author, but just note in general, to beware of authors who do this.

This is the second in a pair of books I'm reviewing from Wisdom publications. The first tried to teach Buddhism in the light of the Star wars movie franchise and failed dismally. The second seemed initially much more practical in that the author is passing on what worked for her, but the questions I had as to whether what she's doing actually achieves anything, and even if it works for her will also work for you and me, remained woefully unanswered at the end.

She certainly seemed to have the right idea about how to dip your toes in the water and work up to full immersion from there. Her advice begins with taking a single breath, which seems innocuous and easy enough. She referred to this as a Mindful Breath and in what seemed to be a pattern here, offered three steps to heaven: breathe in, breathe out, pay attention to taking the breath. This technique is nothing new, and is definitely the approach taken by promoters of meditative breathing techniques, where paying attention to breathing and being focused on the breath as we take it in and exhale it, is always the rule.

Building on this, she added a new step or technique with each new chapter, which rather begged the question as to why we need such a large book for so simple a thing - if indeed it is that simple. The next step we were offered was called the Pause, whereby we focus attention on taking a single full breath, actually take the breath, and then return our focus to the task at hand, which in this case was reading this book. This is supposed to make us realize that out mind has a tendency to wander (as if we didn't know this!), and by consciously being attentive to the wandering, we can return our focus to the task at hand.

Frankly, this has never been a problem for me when I'm reading a book. I am all there all the time, and while my mind does go off at tangents on occasion, it's pretty much always as to how bad the book is or how good it is, or how can I leverage that idea into a story of my own and so on, so my mind is pretty much 100% on the novel 100% of the time. A non-fiction book is a different experience, and maintaining this focus when performing other pastimes, tasks, and chores is not always so easy.

Of course this isn't a guide on how to read books (there's already one out there, believe it or not!). It's about focusing our attention rather than letting our mind run riot as it usually does. This is an odd topic, because our brain is a multi-tasker. Were it not, we would certainly not be able to breathe, keep our heart pumping, drive to work, and keep an eye on the clock so we don't arrive late, as well as remember we have that package to drop into the first mailbox we see on our way.

So the real question here for most people, is not whether or not our mind is all over the place (it is, that's a given if you didn't know it already!), but what exactly the problem is with that, and what's to be gained by disciplining it in the way advocated by adherents of meditation and mindfulness. In this regard, this book fails dismally, because while the author repeatedly advises us as to what she had to gain in her particular circumstances, she failed for the rest of us to tell us anything that this would do except in the most vague and inutile terms imaginable.

One thing I can promise you is of value is good posture. There is an all-too-brief section on this which is related only to meditating, but good posture is vitally (and I use that word advisedly) important in all walks (and sits) of life. This doesn't mean you should start practicing walking around with a book on your head, but you should be aware of what evolution has done to us. The spine never was designed. Had it been, it would have been made from carbon fiber or something, instead of a salt of a brittle metal called calcium, stacked in donuts of rough bone around a delicate and tender central nervous system and padded only by flimsy cartilage!

Worse than that, it evolved for animals moving horizontally, and humans, who typically think they are better than any other living thing, decided to go vertical, which puts stresses on the spine for which it has never evolved. It's no wonder that back pain is such a pain. Your spine has your back, but only as long as you realize that it's operating out of its comfort zone and needs some pampering, especially when we sit and even more especially when we lift something heavy.

The progression towards meditation continues as we're advised that we can count mindfully. Mindful Counting means that we focus attention on counting full breaths as we take seven of them in and out. We observe what our attention is on, and refocus as necessary. After this we pretty much get mindful everything - feeling (parts one and two, no less!), listening, static sensation, stand with attention(!), dynamic sensation, sharing kindness, movement, and on and on. There was a veritable grocery list of mindful things, so much so that trying to keep track of all of them became a distraction from actually doing the thing!

I was intrigued by this author's anecdote about her teacher laughed at her and made an "astounding" point when she complained that her mind seemed to be on its way to greater chaos, not less, as she began practicing these techniques. He advised her that her mind wasn't becoming more chaotic, but that she was now noticing the chaos which already existed. I thought it poor teaching that her yogin or yogini had never thought to address this point during class!

I also felt it showed a marked lack of self-awareness that this student had never before realized how easily distracted and busy her mind actually was. Bad teacher, bad student! Has she never begun a conversation which has meandered through half-a-dozen topics in a very short time and then marveled at how adrift she and her fellow conversational participants were from where they started? It felt to me like the author had been so closed off to herself that what was astounding, startling, and revelatory to her would be nothing of the sort to most people with a modicum of self-awareness.

One thing to bear in mind is that this is a writer who is coming from a background of boredom and depression, and who therefore has a very different perspective than most people who fortunately are not clinically depressed and who hopefully have sufficient stimulation in their lives that they are not readily bored or lacking for something of value to do with their time. I found myself wondering frequently if such an author was indeed the best teacher of this topic, or if perhaps her message might have found more apt and fertile ground had it been sown on a more targeted audience.

When she went to a lama to discuss her depression instead of going to medical professional, I was disappointed. Fortunately this lama wasn't stupid and re-directed her to a qualified medical doctor. If you are depressed more than seems reasonable from everyday living, and especially if you're post-partum or have had a loss, do not seek out a lama! Find a medically qualified doctor who has time for you. If your doctor is doing you no good, find a new one.

Depression is something I am fortunate enough to never have suffered (not in a clinical sense anyway!). Boredom is something with which I am never afflicted because there is always something to do, something to think of, something to find wonder in, especially if you have children, or pets, or if you can get interested in a hobby, in art, in reading, in sports, in TV or movies, theater, or whatever. Boredom is never anything with which I have to contend, and mediation may not fix this problem for you, if this is something you find in your life. When you're engaged in something you love or with someone you love, your mind doesn't wander into the depths, and you don't get bored or depressed easily.

On this topic I had to take issue with this assertion by the author:

If you say "I am bored," you are literally defining your identity as boredom.

That's a horrible thing to tell a person. It's also a lie. You are neither literally defining nor metaphorically defining yourself as boredom, you're merely giving voice to a mental state which you're experiencing. While your entire collection of mental states is definitely you, one isolated mental state is not you and it's an awful thing to suggest otherwise.

I was a bit disturbed to read the section detailing where the author flew off to India to attend a conference on the role of contemplation in K-12 education (that's kindergarten to grade twelve - or primary school to graduation and hopefully heading off to college). It sure must be nice to be able to jet around the world to attend conferences! What I didn't get was why this author was all over the place on education instead of consulting more local - and/or more expert sources!

I mean, for example, there are lots of sources for how to best educate children. Why fly off the handle to India? Why not, if you want to find out how to direct attention, simply ask a magician or an illusionist, who are experts at this?! But more to the point, why ask about directing attention in the first place? Is it because we want them to learn to meditate, or we want them to simply learn? If the latter is the case, then why not seek examples from the best education systems such as Finland or South Korea? India is a very overcrowded and impoverished system which isn't known for being the best - far from it.

There is a chapter on mindful sex, which struck me as completely redundant! I know there are distractions during sex - if you're married and you have children, there's an obvious potential one! - and there can be other forms of distraction, like if you're not convinced that this was a good idea (in which case the answer should have been no, and still can be), or if your relationship is on the rocks (ditto), but aside from those obvious exceptions, I sincerely doubt that anyone isn't in the moment when it's happening. If you're not, then you probably have some sort of medical or relationship issue which ought to be addressed.

That was amusing but expected. What I was truly disappointed with was that even in the conclusion, we get no idea offered of what we've purportedly achieved or in what way this is supposed to change our lives, or at least deliver some sort of benefit! All we get is a recap of what we already read, and some advice about getting a real teacher to teach this because you can't really learn it from a book. What?!

When I began reading this, I felt like this one might actually have something to impart, but very quickly I came to see that it doesn't deliver any more than the other volume did. I thought that at least we might get some idea of what this is - ultimately - supposed to do for us that nothing else can do, and this was nowhere to be found.

In the final analysis, there was nothing on offer here that I cannot see a person getting from doing something else, such as taking up a martial art, or some sort of sport, or running a marathon, or pursuing some form of art, or writing a journal, or pursuing a hobby, taking your dog for a nice long walk, or for that matter, simply sitting out in the garden with a nice cup of tea and enjoying nature. Or even just falling in love! I can see if your mind is particularly troubled, then maybe there is something here for you, but I'd recommend seeking competent medical help first. As it is, I can't recommend this.

My Sister's Voice by Mary Carter

Title: My Sister's Voice
Author: Mary Carter
Publisher: Kensington
Rating: WARTY!

This book about a deaf woman was not written by a deaf woman and in my opinion, it shows. She definitely has a better understanding of the problems which deaf people face (and it's not being deaf that's the problem) than most people do, but it seemed to me that she had garnered her knowledge from one or two sources and thereby gained a peculiar perspective on it which she might have modified somewhat had she interviewed or read more widely.

My Sister's Voice features the old trope of twins who were separated at an early age, in this case, at three. One of them is named Lacey, and she's deaf. She rages more than once that she's not 'hearing impaired'. Her argument is that she is not impaired at all, but that phrase doesn't say that she's impaired, merely that her hearing is, which is true, so her rage seems disturbingly psychotic. This also betrays the book's stance on deaf culture and language. Why go into so much detail about the semantics of deaf communication, and then fail so miserably here to grasp the real meaning of that particular phrase?

As you will learn if you read this however, Lacey is indeed psychotic, or at best, in need of serious anger management. She's so warped that she hopes to have a deaf child. That's truly sick to wish on your child a world of silence when there is so much beauty and wonder in sound. In some ways Lacey's anger is understandable, because the level of lies promulgated by her family is horrendous (as horrendous, in fact, as it is inexplicable).

Lacey was the one given up to an orphanage, where she grew up wild and hostile. Now she rides a motorbike and is a paint artist, but she has the life she wants. She's doing what she wants, she's her own boss, she has a devoted boyfriend who she doesn't appreciate, she's financially independent, and she keeps her own hours. She observes, "I’m happy to be a Deaf woman. I love my life. I love my culture, my language, my people. I’m happy," so whence all this rage and anger? The author did a really poor job in giving it credibility, especially given how ridiculously over the top it is.

Her twin Monica grew up with parents in a wealthy setting, and has become a motivational speaker, holding workshops and promoting her book about self-actualization. Deep down, however, she's no better-off than is Lacey. Neither of them knows the other exists until one day, Lacey gets an anonymous note left in her mailbox which tells her "You have a twin sister. Her name is Monica. Go to Benjamin Books. Look at the poster in the window."

Lacey goes there thinking one of her friends, of whom she has many, is pranking her, but she sees the book cover on a poster, and starts raging that someone stole her identity! Her behavior is immature at best and psychotic at worst. It's certainly not at all realistic. I really didn't like Lacey, and Monica was frankly hardly any better. The latter comes off as a character with whom it's very easy to empathize initially, but later we realize that she's just as creepy in her own way as is Lacey. Like two peas in a pod, you might say.

The impression I had here was that each of these two girls was incomplete without the other, which was frankly pathetic given how much effort the author had put into trying to establish how fiercely independent Lacey was, and how proud she was of her deafness and the culture which she had adopted and which she viewed as her real family. It just didn't ring true to me, and this assertion that she could only be whole with her twin was a complete betrayal of the purported independence which had been assigned to her via the deaf culture motif.

One problem I had with this book apart from the unlikeable main characters, is that it roams around with the PoV. It's not in first person thank goodness, so at least it has that going for it, but we move from Lacey's PoV to Monica's, and then we have a weird flashback to their mom's PoV, which was really jarring, and this gave away a huge spoiler for how this novel would end.

I had mixed feelings about how the author presented the situation of the deaf community, too. On the one hand, she got so much of it right, but the perspective she presented was rather narrow, as though all deaf people feel the exactly same way about their circumstances and life, which I found insulting. Yes, they may all be deaf to some extent or another, but this doesn't mean they're all the same or all view their lives and circumstances in the same way. I think they deserved better than they got here. This novel made the community seem completely homogeneous, like clones, rather than a community of individuals who happened to have a physical trait in common. I don't think that approach serves anyone, no matter which kind of community they're in.

The author could also use a tutorial on metal sculpture. At one point she talks about soldering steel, but that's a recipe for disaster. You weld steel. You solder chips on a circuit board.

Lacey was too much of an extremist to either make sense or to be endearing. As I said, she despises the term 'hearing impaired' because she's part of a group whose adherents reject hearing. Her problem, though, is that she is far too hostile and partisan. I get that someone in her position might harbor a lot of anger, especially when she discovers that she's 'the rejected sister', but her behavior borders on being psychopathic and certainly isn't true to how her character was established at the beginning of this story.

One thing which concerned me about Lacey's behavior - aside from how hostile and combative she was - is related to the parts of this book where Lacey reads lips. She isn't very good at it as she freely confesses (it's not an exact art!), but it seems strange to me that she would confuse some of the phrases which she does confuse. This happens a couple of times and on each occasion, we're offered three options as to what the person might have said to her. I know this was intended by the author to be amusing, but to me it was stupid and condescending, and it made Lacey look even more stupid than she'd already proven herself to be. At one point early in the novel, I read this:

The guessing game began. He either said: “You have a small bass.” Or: “You have a nice ass.” Or: “You’ve stained the glass.”

What the guy said was obviously (given the context) the third one, which has 'the' in it, which makes a very distinctive use of the lips and tongue, and which doesn't appear in either of the other two phrases. There is no way Lacey could confuse these, and especially not confuse 'bass', 'ass' and 'glass'. I'm not a lip-reader (I don't even pay lip service to it!), but even to me, looking in a mirror and saying these three words, they are not confusable. 'Glass' and 'ass' are, admittedly, similar, but not 'bass'. Unless the person whose lips are being read is curiously immobile about the mouth, I don't see that someone who can read lips, even inexpertly, would confuse these three, especially not in a given context.

Naturally, the twins actually meet, and this is written in such a weird way that it really spoiled the story for me. Lacey initially plans on angrily confronting this 'identity thief', never once considering that she might actually have a look-alike out there. In a world of seven billion people, most of us do have a look-alike somewhere, and that person has no dishonest intent towards us. It's because of things like this that Lacey repeatedly comes across as juvenile, and not very smart.

After they meet, Monica begins emulating Lacey just as she did as a young child, and not in a very nice or complimentary way. She's downright creepy and scary, and the 'reason' for this, which was revealed in a flashback, doesn't excuse her stalker-ish behavior. It's like she hasn't grown up at all. Plus, the premise that each would have forgotten the other, given their close three year history together, is frankly just not credible. In the end, this pervasive lack of credibility was the biggest problem with the whole story.

After her inexplicable initial knee-jerk rage, Lacey suddenly decides she doesn't want to meet this woman until she's ready. Then she decides she does, and when the two meet they're best friends with so much in common despite their entirely different backgrounds, but immediate after this idyllic day, Lacey rejects Monica, demanding that her twin reject her parents before Lacey will have anything more to do with her, and even after Monica does this, Lacey still rejects her. Lacey is just a jerk, and her ridiculous behavior becomes more and more incredible with each turned page.

Monica is just as bad, lusting after Lacey's friend Mike even as she puts up with her deadbeat boyfriend Joe, from whom she cannot seem to self-actualize her freedom. Her emotions are all over the place lending them little credibility, so intelligent characterization and realistic motivation are largely non-existent here - or at any rate, inconsistent at best. Monica's behavior at times make no sense, and suggests schizophrenia.

One of the major inconsistencies was in Lacey's PoV, which seemed to swing like a pendulum according to authorial whim. I mean she's so completely at home in her skin, so we're told, that I expected her to be sporting a 'proud to be deaf' bumper sticker on her motorbike, but she's insanely angry at her orphan circumstances and vacillates nonsensically between adoring Monica and wanting nothing to do with her. I didn't get how these extreme personalities can co-exist in one person. Maybe that's why Lacey was psychotic! LOL!

Another problem was in how the author seems like she's intent upon building Lacey up as this kick-ass character, and then suddenly turns her into Jell-O. For example, on one occasion, when Lacey sneaks a visit to her parents' country cabin to spy in them, she's afeared of fainting because she hasn't eaten in a while? Honestly? Way to undermine the kick-ass part of her! Not all girls are wilting violets! In fact, very few of them are.

The ending let down the rest of the story, which by this point wasn't much of a let-down as it happened, but it was poor and predictable. The 'revelation' about Aunt Grace was not a revelation to me, and I'm the kind of reader who doesn't usually figure these things out. The ending was too sugary and the reason for mom giving up one of the kids was also absurd. "It was very shameful in those days"? Seriously? The kids are under thirty years old. Single moms have been around for decades longer than that and have long been accepted by everyone except the church. This was one more thing in a long line of things which didn't ring true in this story and which taken together, constitute the reason why I am rating this negatively. It was far too unrealistic to be taken seriously.

Smart Blondes by Sonia Koso

Title: Smart Blondes
Author: Sonia Koso
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller (which I have not read), this is fiction and set partly in Austin, Texas. I like to read novels set in places I know or have known. That said, it actually didn't seem like my kind of novel except that the blurb did its job and lured me in. I was intrigued by the idea of main character Carrie Pryce coming home unexpectedly from her spa weekend, finding her husband going at it with a youthful French girl, and shooting him in the ass (accidentally, of course). These things happen.

After that it went downhill for me, with Carrie retreating to her home town where she hangs with a wildly varied bunch of older women, including one who is ninety and a "pair of twins". I found that description hilarious. Do twins come in any other issue than a pair? I know one twin can die and thereby leave the other on their own, but he or she is still a twin right, even though the other isn't extant? Or is it possible to get twins in numbers higher than two?!

The author also made a faux pas with the French term joie de vivre, rendering it inaccurately as joie de vie. The line would have been funnier if, instead of reading "...his joie de vivre turned green" it had read, "...his joie de vivre became joie de vert" or something along those lines (or those airlines! LOL!).

Some critics have viewed this novel as 'strong Texas women' taking care of their own, but I don't buy into this strong /INSERT STATE NAME HERE/ women nonsense. Women in general are strong, it doesn't matter what state or even nation they hail from. Not all of them are strong, of course but probably a lot more of them than you might guess, so I didn't see anything unusual, noteworthy or surprising about their behavior.

That said, this was not a novel about strong women, but about rich, idle women with little to do but gossip and get into each other's business. Included with these women was gay guy who was so stereotypical he wasn't even remotely real, and a couple of husbands who were so thinly-painted that they were nothing more than screen-printed T-shirts sported by two of the women. Other than fashion and home décor, the descriptive portion of the book was non-existent, and so all that we were left with was smart-mouth and smart-ass, which quickly became tedious.

What I did notice was that all of these women were very well-off, so they had the time, freedom, and resources to help, something which far too few women have even today. It would have made for a more interesting story had they been impoverished and faced this same domestic problem in Carrie's life. I don't know this author, but I got the strong feeling that this novel was very much autobiographical - not necessarily down to the fine details, or to shooting of anyone, but in terms of the characters and how they interact - but it made me wonder what she would write next, having blown all of this in her first novel.

The problem, of course, with having these purportedly strong women take over Carrie's life is that it did nothing more strongly than it did highlight how thoroughly weak, helpless, and needy Carrie was. There's nothing wrong with having friends of course, and especially supportive friends who rally round at a time like this, but this still leaves an impression that Carrie is somehow inept, or handicapped in some way. That's not a good way to portray her. There's no doubt that someone going through what she did would feel betrayed, hurt, lost, and adrift, but The fact that she takes no steps to move out of that, and towards a towards a divorce (in the fifty percent or so of this novel that that I read) isn't constructive or interesting. What it shows is how utterly shows how paralyzed and inactive she is and that's not remotely flattering or endearing. The fact that none of the other women even broached divorce (in the part I read) shows how lacking in pro-active measures these supposedly strong women truly were.

Thus the 'strong women' aspect of the story was undermined to a disturbing degree, Indeed, it seemed to suggest that Carrie's real 'handicap' was that she's female! This impression was further exacerbated by the fact that Carrie's problem is evidently completely solved by her falling for the most stereotypical studly male imaginable. This isn't something you want to do in the novel that this was supposed to be, but it's what we got, unfortunately, and it's one of the reasons why I'm rating this negatively. The other I'll discuss shortly. Admittedly I didn't finish this, so I may have read this wrong, but by the half-way mark I had read enough to have serious déjà vu (or perhaps in this case déjà lu) and not want to read any more.

The author jumps around a lot in her story-telling and she puts in a lot of back story, which to me was annoying because it bogged the whole story down. I found myself skipping the large swathes of info-dump simply to get back to the action. Unfortunately, there was far too little that might be termed action. Although it was nice and a bit unexpected to get Jake's PoV, this really contributed nothing to the story, which I viewed as Carrie's, yet even she appeared to be merely along for the ride instead of moving and shaking.

Jake is Carrie's husband, and although he has a PoV, he doesn't have a leg to stand on, being the stereotypical philanderer. Indeed, there were too many stereotypes. With a name like Carrie it would have been hilarious had she gone all Carrie White on Jake's juvenile, mid-life-crisis, unfaithful ass instead of ricocheting a 32 caliber bullet into it, but this isn't that kind of story unfortunately.

Here is Jake's problem (aside from being a moron): "Jake momentarily thought about how beautiful Carrie had been" He didn't think what a good friend she was, what a great companion, how strong, how intelligent, how easy to be with, how wonderful, how pro-active, how independent, what a good mother, what a fine person. None of the above. It was all about beauty. But the truth is that this wasn't really Jake's problem, it was the author's problem. I'll get back to this.

We're told in the blurb that "Carrie meets Rhett Richards. He's an attractive oil field worker who can make women think un-Christian thoughts by the mere act of wearing a pair of tight wranglers." Once again this made Carrie look like a weak women in need of a manly man to give her some spine. It was insulting and clichéd in the extreme. Rhett, seriously? Pathetic.

The blurb said that these women are known as the "Presbyterian Mafia". We're told that they "have a book club that never reads, a garden club that doesn't garden, and a bible study class that gossips about the Methodists." They're also evidently "known around town for antics including cat-fights, car chases and Voodoo rituals." None of this suggests strong women, and it isn't even evident in the fifty percent or so of the novel I read before I quit in disgust. What that felt like to me was a cheap bait and switch and I didn't appreciate it.

The problem for me by that point is that there was no evidence whatsoever that Carrie was ever actually going to do anything. She's completely passive and the only things which happen are those which happen to her, not because of anything she initiated. She doesn't make things happen, and frankly she became totally boring after her initial shooting to stardom, as it were. The way her character was written was insulting to women, dishonest to the blurb (which wasn't at all a surprise let's face it) and boring to read. I know she was going through a lot, but she didn't remotely look like she would ever take the reins, not even when she got to ride the horse!

What really made me quit this book though, was reading the word "beautiful" one time too many. This author is obsessed with describing every main female character as beautiful, and even some who were not really main characters. Consequently, these were not remotely real women, and I cannot abide reading about female characters who are rendered patently false by poor writing. Yes there are beautiful women even if you define beautiful by popular, skin-deep acclaim as this author does, but they do not usually make for interesting stories. You need people who are beautiful inside for that. Here's the shallow litany:
"Deane was still beautiful"
"with beautiful young Gloria"
"Carrie was still beautiful"
"her parents were still beautiful as could be"
"Katie Dell was still a beautiful woman"
"Serving the most beautiful and popular girl"
"but you are just so beautiful" (this from "Rhett" not because she's beautiful, trust me, but because Carrie's putting out for him. To some men, that's all beauty really is.)
"beautiful she was. Rhett’s callused hands met tender skin" (I told you!)
"with their beautiful baby girl"
Even hair didn't escape this metronomic appellation (or should I describe it as an appall-ation?): "their natural hair color was a beautiful auburn"

It was just sickening to read this time after time after time. The blurb should have said this was about rich beautiful women, not strong women. In the world we've created for women, strength isn't beauty, It's making a go of things when there is no beauty, and this author either just doesn't get it, or doesn't care for it. Why female authors consistently do this to other women is a mystery to me.

Male authors do it too, let's not forget, and this blind obsession with shallow meaningless "beauty" as opposed to just writing about real, regular people, warts and all as it were, is what was truly sickening. Regular everyday women need not apply - only beautiful ones. I reject that and invite you to do so too.

In the end this book wasn't about strong women, and it betrayed the title by making those women who were featured nothing more than stereotypical blondes, not smart blondes at all. Never was there a novel more mis-titled than this one. I cannot recommend it.

Dragons and Dreams Bedtime Stories by Becca Price

Title: Dragons and Dreams Bedtime Stories
Author: Becca Price
Publisher: Wyrm Tale Press
Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of the most charming little books I've read in a while. Becca Price is talented. I favorably reviewed her children's story The Snarls back in April 2015, and although some of the six short stories, for me, faded somewhat the more I read through this, they reminded me a bit of Kipling's Just So stories, or of simple morality tales from yesteryear. They have a sweet gentle air of bygone times and are told beautifully. They were short, too, and so are perfect for bedtime stories - finally, a book cover that's honest! Who knew!

The stories are very short. Here are the intriguing titles:

• A Princess for Tea
• The Grumpy Dragon
• Sunflower
• The Third Precious Thing
• The Dark
• Child of Promise

The first two stories about dragons were excellent, as were the next two, about a fairy and about three brothers who would be king. The last two, however, were a bit flat for me, but will probably prove quite appealing to young children. The first four make this book worth the price of admission in my opinion, even if you don't like the others.

A Princess for Tea explores a misunderstanding between a dragon and the princess sent to appease it. The Grumpy Dragon is about just that, and you can probably guess what his problem is - but can your children? Sunflower is a weird and wonderful tale about a fairy's wish gone wrong which still turns out right. The third precious thing is about three brothers who want to succeed their father, and how he decides who will be the one. The Dark is about exactly that, and Child of Promise tells the tale of a village stricken with a hard winter and how the villagers seek to fix the problem.

The stories are perfect for very young children. There's no violence here, and while some stories are a tiny, teensy bit scary, but not really, they all have wonderful solutions and resolutions designed to assuage fear and promote a comfortable night! I recommend this book, as indeed I do for keeping an eye on this author for future output.

The Dharma of Star Wars by Matthew Bortolin

Title: The Dharma of Star Wars
Author: Matthew Bortolin (no website found)
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
Line gap between 'of' and 'misunderstanding' (p15)
"regiment" used where "regimen" was intended (p15)

After I'd done reading chapter two, I was done reading this book because it failed for me - and failed miserably. The last straw was the attempt to link Luke Skywalker's experience in the cave on Dagobah with our experience in everyday life on Earth. Yoda tells Luke that the only thing which is in the cave is what Luke takes with him, clearly implying that the only thing on Earth is what we all carry with us, and that just as Luke was responsible for his experience in seeing Vader (and contrary to what this book suggests, actually failing to realize that the dark side was in him too), so too are we all responsible for the suffering on Earth.

Now I concede that as a society overall, we all share responsibility for what that society does, good and bad, but there is no way in hell you are going to tell me that anything I could have personally done in my own life would have either caused or stopped that psycho from killing those people in the church this week.

That's not on me. It's not on any one person, and nothing any one person can do was going to stop that from happening - unless that one person had a gun and shot the guy before he could kill other people. That is one thing which would have prevented this (short of going back to that guy's childhood and taking charge of his upbringing), but this one thing is the very thing for which Luke is chided in this book: that taking his light saber (how is it even a saber? Lol!) with him somehow precipitated the appearance of the Vader/Luke hybrid! Or that while not intending to start trouble, being prepared for trouble was a mistake?! No. Being prepared is never a mistake.

Luke's experience had nothing to do with the weapon, and everything to do with Luke's own mindset, but changing his mindset would not have magically made Vader disappear from the galaxy and undone all his evil. That's what this author seems to fail to grasp. First and foremost, he is applying Buddhism to a purely fictional world, not to the real one. I haven't read all of this book, but nothing that I have read has demonstrated to me how applying the principles of Buddhism in your own life is going to change anything any more materially than simply doing what most of us do anyway - living a good, considerate, and decent life - is changing anything.

Yes, if all of us ran wild and had no respect for others, then the world would be a truly horrible place, but just because some of us choose to live a decent life - even if the majority of us did so, this will not cause the recalcitrant minority to quite hurting people or blowing up people, or shooting people, or driving like idiots, or being boorish, thoughtless, inconsiderate, and stupid. All we can do is deal with our own lives, and while what we do can indeed help keep a bad situation from escalating, what we do is not going to magically make the world a paradise. Even if everyone whole-heartedly embraced Buddhism, this would not stop volcanoes and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes from taking lives and bringing suffering into lives. The only preventative for that is for all of us to commit suicide, and the Jonestown "solution" is utterly unacceptable to me!

This is an attempt to popularize an aspect of Buddhism by linking it with a very successful movie franchise. Dharma or Dhamma has no simple or direct translation into English, but can be thought of as the natural order of things. This isn't to be thought of in any pejorative way or as some idiotic Victorian idea of superiority or one class or race over another. It's focused on the way nature works and how humans can try to live their lives in harmony with this natural system just as we used to when we were apes. If you think of all of nature as a team, then Dharma is about how we can become the best team player we can be.

In that light, the problems with approaching this topic by linking it to Star Wars are manifold. Star Wars wasn't about the natural order of things. It was about might makes right and about how the underdogs could destroy that might. You can argue that this was really more about the Jedi way of life, but the Jedi were not really a part of the natural order of things. They were a gifted and superior 'race' who far from fitting in with the natural order sought to dominate and control that order for their own ends, no matter how benign some of those ends might have been.

In this way, the Jedi vis-à-vis the galaxy were no different than humans have been vis-à-vis planet Earth. As the Jedi sought to put in place a certain order of things, so humans have done the same on Earth. Given what we 'superior' humans have done with our power, I'm far from convinced that this is really the best way we have to look at how we live our lives!

I should probably say at this point that I do not believe in any gods. There is no good or useful evidence for any, nor is there any evidence that we live more than one life or are reincarnated or are in some sort of endless loop through which we will continue moving, like a pet rat on a treadmill, until we break the cycle and move on to the next level. None of it makes any sense, and for those who believe it does, I invite then to consider how all of this works given what we now know of the appearance of life on Earth and its evolution.

Humans have no always been here. At one point, and for massively overwhelming majority of the time that life has been extant upon Earth, there was nothing human here, but about six million years ago, a species started moving towards what we have now become. For all those who believe in reincarnation, I invite them to consider what the real evidence for this is, and to explain to themselves when this all began. Was it with the first cell that arose out of the chemistry of Earth? Was it when mammals evolved? Was it when primates evolved? Was it when Australopithecus evolved? If so, which species? Was it when Homo neanderthalensis evolved? When and why did this system come into being? No one has even tried to explain this, much less explained it with supportive evidence and made sense of it! That's why I don't buy into this juvenile concept of a cycle of death and rebirth.

In short, the Buddhist claims are nonsensical and have no evidence. That doesn't mean that living decent life, or that practices like meditation and yoga are of no value. It means that we shouldn't blindly invest them with meaning and value to which they have no right, and it especially means that eastern religions do not get a bye simply because they're new-agey, and exotic, and perhaps don't even posit any gods, like the three big monotheistic ones do, or like Hinduism does.

This book begins by recalling the beginning of the Star Wars saga (episode one, The Phantom Menace), where Qui-Gon Jinn reminds Obi-Wan Kenobi to keep his mind focused on the here and now, and not some speculative future course of events. In their circumstances, this was appropriate, but in life in general, it's important to both keep your mind on the here and now, and to plan for the future. Anyone with Jedi skills ought to be able to do both! Any human who fails to do this is inevitably going to run into trouble.

We jump from this to episode 4 A New Hope and are reminded that Luke only succeeded in destroying the Death Star when he abandoned the technology at his disposal and relied purely on instinct. In real life this is nonsensical. It's like disabling the brakes on your car and relying on your natural instinct to start slowing down in good time. We know how well that works by counting the skid marks on the highway, and the bumper scrapes on the concrete walls of on and off ramps! We have brakes and air-bags for a very good reason. Technology works. Humans often don't. Anyone who disagrees is invited to compare death and injury rates from accidents prior to seat belts and air bags with the same thing now.

Yes, you can argue that if we were more mindful when driving we would have far fewer scrapes and close calls, and this is true, but to make a blanket claim that we can all rely on instinct and our inner pilot to get through life is to assume that everyone has already achieved enlightenment, and no that one is mentally ill, not in any way at all. This is nonsensical and dangerous.

The Nazis were following their inner guide when they determined that all handicapped people, homosexuals, Jews, Roma, and other 'undesirables' should be exterminated or at least neutered. They were following their inner pilot when they pursued their belief that the "Aryan" race was superior. In the same way, organized religious groups have followed their instinct when they have tried to exterminate members of competing religions, such as when the Catholics tried to purge everyone they deemed to be a witch, and later those who were Protestant, or when they tried to force "heathens" to submit. Islam is all about submission. Judaism is only for the house of Israel.

Everyone today who isn't blind knows that these people were delusional, no matter how much they acted on their instincts and inner pilot. Your inner pilot isn't always reliable, no matter how much we may fantasize that it is. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't need laws to protect people from those who act on instinct and who give no thought for the future or for others.

We're reminded of Luke on Dagobah, where Yoda loses patience with him because his mind is all over the place and we're expected to believe that Luke was a poor student when the truth is that Yoda was a really poor teacher, as was Obi-Wan Kenobi. They had years in which they could have trained Luke yet neither lifted a finger. This was precisely because they were focused on the here and now - on their own survival - instead of planning for the future! Their incompetence nearly cost them everything. A little planning for the future would have made a huge difference, but each of them was so obsessed with the here and now that they took no thought for tomorrow. The founder of Christianity advised the same short-sighted tack.

Qui-Gon Jinn wanted to train Anakin and he was refused because despite the extreme youth of the boy and despite his qualifications (as judged by his midi-chlorian levels), it was already deemed too late in his life to teach him. The fact that he was taught so late was the reason he was so easily won over to the dark side, we're given to believe. Yet not a one of them questions the teaching of Luke who is considerably older than Anakin when he starts and far less qualified midi-chlorian-wise. yet no one questions this wisdom of this move!

Yes, Luke could have applied himself better, but so could Ben and Yoda - they could also have begun his teaching a hell of a lot earlier. Yes, this is fiction, but it wasn't me who decided to use Star Wars as a teaching tool for the Dao of Buddhism!

When Qui-Gon fights with Darth Maul, we're told that he is smart enough to center himself when the doors close between them, so he's ready to fight when they open, but this is a classic example of his failing to properly plan for the future. If he'd waited just a minute or two for Ben to catch up with him, there would have been two of them to take on Maul, and Qui-Gon might well not have been killed. By taking no thought for tomorrow, and getting himself killed Qui-Gon failed Anakin. Planning for the future is important. Focusing on the now is good, but it's not all there is, as Qui-Gon himself actually realized. He was planning for the future in an unfortunately limited way when he took the time to center himself.

An example is made of Anakin's anger over his mother's death, and his slaughter of the Tusken people, but this doesn't work either, because the root of this anger is that he was taken from his mom at an early age. No attempt was made to allow him to reconnect or to bring his mom to join him, or at least bring her to safety. that would have been planning for the future, so it's forbidden, You must focus on the here and now! Immediate gratification is demanded again Obviously this preyed on Anakin's mind, and his behavior was perfectly understandable. Some thought and planning here would have made a huge difference. Clearly neither Yoda nor Qui-Gon, nor Obi-Wan meditated on this!

What this book doesn't tell us, when it discusses suffering, is how selfish and callous the Buddha himself, Siddharta Gautama, truly was. He was a married man with a child. His wife was Yaśodharā, and his son was Rāhula. He was also a wealthy ruler of a people, yet he abandoned all of that and took off on his own selfish path. He never invited his wife and child to join him and share his journey, much less the people for whom he was responsible. He purportedly rejected wealth yet there is nothing to indicate that he redistributed what he had amongst his people. How much suffering did he put them through? His actions were not admirable. They were very selfish. Abandoning a wife and child is inexcusable. Women and particularly men are rightly pilloried in this day and age for this, yet we're expected to admire and emulate a man who did exactly that when there was no reason whatsoever for him to act as he did?

We're told that before we can improve a situation we must accept it for what it is, but this is wrong. We are forced to live with it, but acceptance of it means we're not likely to be looking at how it came to be or how it can be remedied. Women would never be able to vote now if they had accepted that they were unjustly excluded from voting and took no thought for the future. It's understanding, not acceptance, that we need, because only understanding will convey to us the power to change injustice, and to prevent it happening again. I think this book represents blinkered advice - or very poorly written guidance at best.

We're told that being mindful of our daily life allows us to see suffering as it manifests, but being mindful of what is likely to happen in the future means we can take steps to avoid that suffering manifesting in the first place. This is yet another example of how focusing on the current and the state we're in to the exclusion of all else isn't the best plan at all. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging the state we're in and understanding it, because this may offer ways out or at least insights into avoiding getting into this mess again, but to sit around wallowing in it, or meditating on it isn't going to get anything done in and of itself. Ultimately it's action which changes things, even if that action must be preceded by thought.

I think the dharma of Laurel and Hardy might have been a better comparison than this one with Star Wars. They never had a problem acknowledging that this is another fine mess you've gotten me into. Their intentions were always the best, and they had no problem working diligently to fix troubles rather than simply of sitting around meditating on them. I can't recommend this book. I see little real point in it and no value to it.

The short conclusion is that this book offered me nothing that any other decent religion offers - or that abandoning religions altogether and simply being a society of good and thoughtful people would deliver. I didn't see what this had to offer and I thought it was a poor approach to teaching this topic.

Lettuce! by Diana Kizlauskas

Title: Lettuce!
Author: Diana Kizlauskas
Publisher: Diana Kizlauskas Illustration
Rating: WORTHY!

As I mentioned for the other review I posted today, some children's authors unfortunately feel that young children are an easy mark and not worth much time, and the path to success is via a series of cheap illustrations and a silly rhyme, and you're in business. This author/illustrator isn't one of those, I'm thrilled to report!

I've been lucky with the children's books I've reviewed, and I've found very few of them to be sub-standard, but I get to chose which ones I review, so I have an advantage! I try to review these books positively if I can because while children don't deserve less than adults, they are, bless their little cotton socks, far less critical and are willing (as I am in fact), to forgo excellence and finery if they can get a great story and/or some engrossing art work, and especially so if it's educational. This is one reason why I was so thrilled with the two books I'm reviewing today, because both of them are really, really excellent. On the other hand, it is Friday, so maybe I'm just in a thoroughly good mood. Naw, these books are great any day of the week!

This particular one has remarkable art work by the author, to which the sample images on my blog certainly do not do justice. It's the story of rabbit and his lettuce farm. He plants his seeds as usual, but the lettuce gets out of control. These things are humongous. They've lagomorphed to giant size. Rabbit doesn't have a clue what to do.

The author tells us what he does do in delightfully well-written rhymes. All of his friends come over and each of them has a suggestion, all of which advocate maximizing rabbit's fun and/or profitability. None of these weird and wacky ideas helps rabbit make up his mind at all. And yes, I'm giving him the male gender, but so is the author. Why this female author went haring off after a male farmer instead of a female, I don't know! It's enough to make you stamp your hind limbs!

Rabbit veg's out thinking hard, but he can't decide and calls up his sick friend owl, who does nothing but rabbit on about how sick he is, so while it was nice not to have the clichéd wise old owl here, this does give rabbit a brilliant idea of how to maximize value in a lettuce faire economy! I recommend this for the rhymes, the story, the good feeling this book delivers, and the beautiful art work. Buy it and burrow into it! You can't Pika better book!

Picture of Grace by Josh Armstrong

Title: Picture of Grace
Author: Josh Armstrong
Publisher: Joshua E. Armstrong
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Taylor Bills.

Some children's authors unfortunately feel that young children are an easy mark and not worth much time, and the path to success is via a series of cheap illustrations and a silly rhyme, and you're in business. This author isn't one of those, and neither is this illustrator, Taylor Bills, I am so happy to report!

I've been lucky with the children's books I've reviewed, and I've found very few of them to be sub-standard, but I get to chose which ones I review, so I have an advantage! I try to review these books positively if I can because while children don't deserve less than adults, they are, bless their little cotton socks, far less critical and are willing (as I am in fact), to forgo excellence and finery if they can get a great story and/or some engrossing art work, and especially so if it's educational. This is one reason why I was so thrilled with the two books I'm reviewing today, because both of them are really, really excellent. On the other hand, it is Friday, so maybe I'm just in a thoroughly good mood. Naw, these books are great any day of the week!

This particular book is a truly remarkable story about a young girl and her grandfather, who is an artist. The gallery owner, Delilah, is obnoxious and is demanding this one last painting, insisting he have it done in only two weeks. She doesn't care about his protests. She may know a lot about art but she's doesn't know what it's like! When grandpa dies, no doubt due to stress, Delilah sees this as a good thing because his last painting, even if unfinished, will appreciate in value immensely.

Grace doesn't see art that way. She sees the last picture her grandfather began, but never finished, and she decides to help him out. As relatives and friends stop by to see the painting, they encounter a gallery owner whose face is bluer than grace's mom's clothes, but what they notice isn't that - it's the painting. There is a special meaning with which grandpa imbued it, and Grace's contribution can be seen only as the icing on the cake, notwithstanding Delilah's frosty demeanor. Crumbs! I loved this book and recommend it.

I wouldn't try reading it on a Smart-phone; the illustrations are discernible, but the text is not. On an iPad, which permitted, thankfully, the expanding of the pictures, it's eminently readable. I can't speak for the print version which I have no seen.

Quaint and Quizzical Cosmos: Planets by Natalie J Del Favero

Title: Quaint and Quizzical Cosmos: Planets
Author: Natalie J Del Favero (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Orsolya Orbán.

This is another in a charming and educational series (the first one I reviewed was in may 2015) rendered suitably poetic for young children. This one introduces them to the concept of planets and to the possibility of life elsewhere. We meet planet Earth as a spaceship, which is precisely what it is when you get right down to it – a self-contained life support system moving through space and incredible speed – especially for something so big!

While we are all fortunate to be travelers on this spaceship, we learn also that Earth isn’t the only spaceship – the only planet. There are many more, only a few of which are in our solar system. There are also many planets out there which - in some regards at least - are similar to Earth. Is there life on those planets? Right now we do not know, but scientists are some of the smartest and most inventive people on this planet, and if there is a way to find out, they will sooner or later figure it out!

I read this on my smart-phone and had no problem enjoying the images and reading the text, so kudos to the author and artist for that. Often these things are tough to read on a small screen, so it was a pleasure to imagine how this one would look on an iPad or in a printed edition. The imagery is gorgeous and will fascinate any child, and the poetry is far from tired; it’s lively and entertaining. I recommend this as a fun introduction to the idea of planets for young children.

ODY-C Volume 1 By Matt Fraction

Title: ODY-C Volume 1
Author: Matt Fraction
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Christian Ward.

I had some mixed feelings about this and in the end didn't feel like it was something I wanted to pursue as a series (I'm not much of a series kind of person!), but I was very glad to have read this one volume just for the experience and for the art work. It was the art work, in the end, which made me consider this a worthy 'read'.

This graphic novel takes Homer's Odyssey, and renders all the characters as female (or as something part way between male and female), and sets the action in space, but otherwise follows Homer's text quite closely. Therein, I think, lay one of the problems, because the text is very obscure and clearly had to be edited for a graphic novel, which tended to make it even more obscure, unfortunately. The story was bent to fit the original Odyssey - regardless of whether it scanned as a story - in this new context. It was hard to follow because there really was no flow to follow.

The ship's captain is Odyssia, and she and her crew of female warriors are embarking upon the journey back to Ithicaa after taking down Troiia. The problem is that the 'gods' (or whatever their replacements are supposed to be here) decide to mess with these people. There is no motivation given for this in this story, and so we have Odyssia and her people slamming up against one obstacle after another just on whims.

So the story not so great, but the psychedelic art work was amazing. The colors were brilliant, the imagery stunning, and every page a bath of brilliant hue and strong line. It's worth seeing just for that. The story did serve to explicate and conjoin the images, so it had its purpose, even though it often made little sense to me. Perhaps if you've read the original, which I haven't, you will get more from this.

Overall, though, I rate this a worthy view more than a read, but you might want to try just one, as I did, and make up your mind after that. I read this on the iPad, so I can't speak to the quality of the coloring in print form. I hope it's as good as the electronic version, because if it isn't, you'll be missing a lot.

Drifter Volume 1: Out of the Night by Ivan Brandon

Title: Drifter Volume 1: Out of the Night
Author: Ivan Brandon
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!

This is another space cowboy opera, and my first impression was Firefly rip-off, but it's so easy to see everything as a rip-off of that amazing series, that we need to be careful we don't leap to conclusions. That said, it would be nice to find something new in space stories that doesn't rely for its story-telling on lone mysterious cowboy anti-hero figures or on insanely hostile aliens. The story reminded me very much of the graphic novel Copperhead in this regard, which I reviewed in March 2015, although that one had saving graces which this one lacks.

Set in a space-borne future, we're told that humanity has spread among the stars, "colonizing and strip-mining countless planets". Why? No one ever explains this, and if you really think about it, it makes zero sense.

Our friendly neighborhood anti-hero here has a suitably dramatic name: Abram Pollux, who literally crashes into the story and immediately sets about slaughtering aliens. After scaring off those, he is rendered unconscious by another human, it seems, and soon finds himself waking up in 'hospital'. Although he thinks it's been only a few days, it turns out to have been a year since he crashed his ship, so what's been going on in the meantime? You won't find that out here.

The venue for this story is a largely lawless mining town on the unoriginal planet of Ouro. The locals are threatened by bizarre alien beings who look like anemic versions of the Red Skull. The town is exactly like a frontier town from a western movie. Why? No explanation save for cliché and trope. The law is a tough female black sheriff with a Mohawk, so nothing new there. In order to earn money to pay for repairs to something or other, Abram has to get a job mining the feces of a rock eating flobber worm for its gold excretions. The fact that he saved the town by fixing the town dome shield counts for zip, evidently.

Once again we have an advanced society that can build interstellar rockets, but has no clue how to build robots or mining machines, and so of course has to use human slave labor. I have seen this so many times it's sickening, and never once when I've seen this have I ever seen an explanation accompanying it which explains why it's like this. Robots are ubiquitous in our society today, so if you're going to posit a future where they're 'extinct', there needs to be a reason. A failure to provide one is a failure of your writing and story-telling, especially when you do include things like Star Wars hover bikes!

Why is this town an exact replica of your bog-standard western cowboy town? No explanation. Why is life cheap? No explanation. You would think life would be valuable since there are so few people and no machinery. If life is cheap, why are we colonizing countless planets? No explanation. Why are we strip-mining countless planets? No explanation.

For me, while the art work was good, the itself story was too disjointed and had too many characters too quickly introduced with little actual introduction. Half the time I had no clue what was going on or why things were happening the way they were, and that was simply irritating. At one point we get a trope smart-ass little girl with a pet caterpillar. I had no idea what she was about. She was as annoying as you would expect.

We had aliens with lights shining out of their eyes, which is so pathetic as to be a joke. The more I read of this, the more it felt like I was watching a children's show on the cartoon network. Naturally, I quickly grew tired of it. My how tough these hombres are! My how gritty this is! My how authentically western it is! Give me a break! I quit reading this about ten or twenty pages from the end because it was progressively becoming more and more awful, believe it or not. I cannot recommend this graphic cliché.

Behind Story Volume 1 by Narae Ahn

Title: Behind Story Volume 1
Author: Narae Ahn (no website found)
Publisher: NETCOMICS
Rating: WARTY!

This story with a bizarre title, is told in three parts, each one from the perspective of one of the three main characters: Jinsuk, Taehee, and Yohan. The story is evidently Korean, and the problems for me were manifold. First of all none of the characters look Korean, so we have the odd depiction of very western looking characters with exotic Korean names. I know this is a common trope in Asian manga and anime, but to me it's insulting. If you're going to tell a story about your own people, make them look like and behave like your own people. I have no time for this selling-out of local ethnicity just so it might appeal to we stubbornly mono-cultural westerners. That's insulting.

Secondly, since this is rooted in Korean culture, it's hard to know what's really an honest reflection of that culture and what is instead merely a quirk of this particular story or this story teller. For example, in this story, there seems to be a motorcycle culture which is both obnoxious and deeply frowned upon. Whether this is true or not in real life, I have no idea, but as presented, it seemed quite bizarre to my western brain, especially since it has no real part in the story - at least not in this first volume of the story.

Yohan is supposedly part of this motorcycle culture, although other than the accident he has, we see none of that culture or of that life. The part of the blurb which mentions the accident is written badly and can make it appear that these two boys are both in a motorcycle accident - perhaps crashing into each other. The truth is that only Yohan is riding a motorcycle - Taehee is on foot. Yohan simply skids and comes off his bike. No one else is involved.

Taehee happens to witness this and physically carries Yohan to the hospital because he can't remember the emergency number to dial! In Korea, FYI, it's the USA number backwards! Whereas the US is 911, South Korea is 119. The fact that Taehee doesn't even know his own emergency number tells me that he's a really a dumb schmuck. The fact that the doesn't know not to move someone in these circumstances without medical advice confirms this. He could have crippled Yohan if he'd had a spinal injury.

This is how these two meet. Jinsuk is Yohan's teacher, who is having a highly inappropriate homosexual relationship with his student. No one seems to find any problem with this - although admittedly the two are conducting this in secret, they have having sex in the classroom with Yohan bent over the teacher's desk! It's really hard to tell whether Yohan is even consenting, not that - legally - he could be, but they are both idiots if they think their liaisons will not be discovered.

Taehee, who evidently has no idea of his own sexuality, finds himself drawn more and more to Yohan, although through the course of this entire volume, nothing actually happens in terms of their making any progress towards any kind of relationship, let alone a loving one.

The art work is fine - very clean and sparse line drawings but the dialog is awful, with frequent speech balloons containing nothing but an ellipsis. I understand that this is supposed to represent awkwardness between these two boys, but it really just looked stupid and was simply annoying to me. I also understand that this is a different culture and we cannot, nor should we expect to this culture to be western in any way, but if you're going to try to market a story (not that there really was much of a story) like this to a western culture, you really need to find ways to make it accessible, and I think the author and publisher failed to do this here.

Whatever it was, I simply could not appreciate the story. In some parts it was hard to follow, in other parts it was dumb. Motivations were foggy at best, and downright obscure at other times, and the characters were neither likable nor relatable. I can't recommend it.

The Story of My Tits Volume 2 by Jennifer Hayden

Title: The Story of My Tits volume 2
Author: Jennifer Hayden
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!

Note that there are two authors named Jennifer Hayden, so please don't confuse them! One, this one, is the graphic novelist and artist. The other isn't! It pains me to review negatively a novel about an important topic like this, but I cannot in good faith recommend this. The title, as it did with volume one, suggests this is about breasts, and as metaphorical as it might be, it really wasn't about breasts as much as it was about the author's life, which was plagued with family issues and with health issues not only for herself, but also for her mom.

I'm not sure how much more I can say about this pair of graphic novels that I haven't already said for volume one, so this review may be unusually short for me! Please read the review for volume one to get the bulk of my views and insights, such as they are. I think my main problem, apart from not liking the art work or the insanely crowded images, was that the topics discussed here were really rather mundane - as sad and tragic as they may well have been for those persons involved, so there was nothing here for me to learn, and nothing to entertain or engross me. Volume one was better than two, but both were largely the same - a simple biography about the every day life of a rather dysfunctional family, but these "revelations" were neither unique nor particularly unusual in the big picture.

This volume covers the author's later life, post marriage, and it's really a comedy of irritations - using comedy in the Shakespearean sense. I really had little interest in these stories because there was very very little here which I have not experienced in one way or another, even if only vicariously by reading about it. In addition to his, I am not into hippie or new age stuff, and cannot take seriously books laid at the feet of a goddess or dedicated to a husband who is evidently superior not only to all husbands, but to all possible husbands. That just seemed unnecessarily unkind to me - as though everyone else's husband is second-rate at best.

This volume covers later events in the author's life, and the deaths of some family members. This is fine and I am sure it has import for family and friends, but it's nothing that other families do not go through, including my own so there is, sad and tragic as these events are, nothing to move me about these events. Death is a part of life, and it's coming for all of us sooner or later, so while we need to acknowledge that, and be prepared for it, we don't need to dwell on it or take pains to write paeans to it.

As I mentioned, the art work wasn't very good, and the images were way too crowded, and dark and insanely detailed to get the best out of them. In addition to that, there was often way too much text, which meant it was too small and hard to read at times, so I found myself skipping a lot of it because it was rambling or because I didn't want to go to the trouble of straining to read all that tiny text. That said, the writing itself, apart form being too wordy, was decently done. There were no spelling or grammatical errors that I saw, so this author can write, but perhaps needs a better topic.

I didn't appreciate the bad language in this case. I don't have a problem with it in a novel where it fits, but in something like this, it felt out of place. It could have been avoided and thereby perhaps made the message accessible to a wider audience. For me, it contributed nothing to the story, and it may keep some potential readers away. That said, this novel is explicitly about female function and organs, so maybe the language would make no difference! Some people are just too squeamish no matter what.

In short, I cannot recommend this volume because I didn't feel it was the best the author could do, or that it offered anything really new and engaging. I feel bad about this because I know there are important messages to relay about such events, and I also know that these things are important parts of the author's life, but I also think authors need to grasp that not everything that carries weight with them has the same gravity for anyone, let alone everyone else out there. I think we need to pick and choose what to relate and how to relate it, and I don't think this was the best approach.