D-Day by Stephen E Ambrose

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second of Ambrose’s books I’m reviewing. The first was called Crazy Horse and Custer wherein he attempted to show that the two leaders at the Battle of the little big Horn led parallel lives and he failed in doing so in my opinion. He does a better job, fortunately confined to a single chapter in this volume, in showing the parallel lives of Erwin Rommel and Dwight Eisenhower.

This book describes events leading up to, and the execution of the D-Day landings on June 6th, 1944 in the effort to retake Europe from Hitler’s entrenched Wehrmacht. The Nazis had swept through Europe with their Blitzkrieg tactics almost effortlessly, but now they faced the combined might of many nations and instead of attacking, they were defending.

Ambrose describes the state of affairs amongst the allies, focusing mostly, if rather arrogantly, on the USA. Out of thirty-two chapters, the rest of the allies (the British, the Canadians, the French) get a handful and are rather cursorily and derogatorily dealt with. He has some rather scathing remarks about the British, as though this was all their fault. At one point he writes: “The poison of pacifism had eaten into the souls of British youth…” (p50) which I found objectionable. Yes, pacifism is a complete failure in the face of aggression, especially such as that mounted by the Nazis and in more modern times by terrorists. If everyone adopted pacifism, none of this would have begun, but of course, humanity is not a pacifistic species. That said, to call pacifism a poison is overdoing it by a long shot.

It was without doubt interesting - although there is a mite too much detail for my taste! I was disturbed not only by the bravery of the men and how badly abused they were by the lethal German defenses, but by how poorly served they were by the people who were sending stuff into the beach behind them. The battle plan called for a sequence of unloading which was adhered to despite the fact that the beach battle was not going according to their plan. They seemed incapable of adjusting to what was really happening. This was poor leadership.

For example, most of the radios the men took ashore in the early waves were lost or damaged severely hampering communications, yet no one thought to send in more radios, evidently. Despite the fact that they did not competently hold the beach until later in the day, the ships were sending in matériel to a rigid plan rather than adapting to what was happening. Trucks, for example, were being sent in instead of tanks and heavy guns which would have been far more useful at that point.

Instead of splitting supplies between landing craft so that some of everything got through despite heavy losses, they loaded up the craft with large amounts of one thing, so that when that particular craft was destroyed, the one thing was lost in huge quantities. This happened to two craft carrying plasma - both were destroyed, hampering the efforts of the medics. There was a similar problem with ammunition.

Worse than this, those who did make it to the top of the bluff continued on inland as best they could trying to follow rigid orders instead of fanning out across the top of the bluff and wiping out the Germans who were firing down on the beach. If they had worked to eliminate that threat immediately, they would have freed up the guys on the beach who could then have come up the bluff and made their way inland to carry out the original plan.

One problem as leadership - or lack of it. The officers were typically the first people off the landing craft and so were shot down with startling efficiency, and the rest of their men were often stuck, not only held down by heavy defensive fire, but also through lack of someone to tell them what to do. It was only through individual initiative rather than cohesive leadership that anything got done, and the major leadership - people like the revered Eisenhower and Montgomery were AWOL.

The fact that the higher-ups didn't know what was happening on the beach or up on the bluffs didn't help, of course. Direct line of sight was obscured by heavy smoke, and there was virtually no radio communication.

So this makes for a sad and irritating read, but it does describe in great detail the hell that these people went through and for that, it's a worthy read.

What's Pete's Secret? by Sally Huss

Rating: WARTY!

I've had mixed results with books by Sally Huss, and with regard to this particular one, I have to say that the answer to "What's Pete's Secret?" is that Pete is a frigging moron. He's so unreactive as to be catatonic and therefore is the very last person children should seek to emulate. I can see that her intention here was to have children behave in a more zen-like and less frantic manner, which is all well and good, but the extent she shows it here is not only stupid, it's dangerous. I cannot recommend this children's book.

A Curious Beginning by Deanna Raybourn

Rating: WARTY!

This was an advance review copy, so I don't expect it to be perfect. Nevertheless I have to point out issues with it in case they've been missed. These turned out to be numerous as it happens, and caused for the most part, I suspect, by a failure in the process of translating the author's original typescript into Kindle format. I read this in the Kindle app on an Android smart phone, and I find that I'm seeing this kind of thing a lot in Kindle app ebooks. The first one of these issues was on one of the front pages where other works by this author are listed. Something had run the titles together on one line instead of listing them one under another. I also found several examples of unclear text or conflated text such as "cagedlion" and "tryme". Presumably these were not in the author's original either.

Once I began reading, one of the first phrases I read was "...the warmth of our affection had been tepid at best" and it sounded really odd to me. Had it read, "the temperature of our affection...", or simply "our affection had been tepid at best" it would have made better sense, but this is just personal preference.

Maybe it's just me being dumb and everyone else had no problem with this, but here's one example of the unclear text for you to judge for yourself: " I am persuaded you could travel quite easily with a single bag. I mean to." Initially, I thought she was correcting her allusion to a single bag, and suggesting two instead, and the word had been misspelled, but immediately I realized this was wrong. She was simply saying that she planned on traveling with a single bag, as she advised him to do.

If she had used 'intend' in place of 'mean', or had said, "I mean to do so" or, "I mean to do exactly that," then it would have been more clear. I know this sounds like I'm being amazingly anal, and for one or two instances in a novel, this is fine - everyone writes a muddled sentence now and then, but what's clear to the writer may or may not be clear to any given reader. The problem isn't one or two instances, it's a series of instances of various issues such as I've described here that really lets the novel down and makes for a trying reading experience.

kindle issues were the worst problem however. In chapter eight, for example, the first few words of the opening sentence were in a much large font than the rest of the novel, breaking in the middle of the word 'journey' before resuming normal size! Weird! Another Kindle issue was that the lines did not go to the full width of screen on some pages - as though there are hard carriage returns in the text. There were issues with words being run together, too. When Badger, a boy who delivers mail shows up, we read of him that "...his eyes shone with intelligence and- whentheylightedonme- curiosity." Clearly some spaces are missing! Again, I assume this occurred during the transfer to Kindle format rather than being in the original.

There are several examples of a handful of sentences being run together in this manner, requiring careful reading and re-reading to make sense of it. Here's one example:

"Do not tell me I disappoint you?" he challenged.
"Oh, indeed you do," I said evenly. "But probably not in the ways you
expect."
"I already know you find me a boor. Rude and ill-mannered." I shrugged. "That we have already established . Your frightful manners do not surprise me. The fact that you are a liar does."
He started.."

The first sentence made no sense - not with a question mark after it. This was not a problem caused by transferring text to Kindle format! The rest of it, run together as it was, and with odd line breaks, was indeed a Kindle transfer problem and it rendered the text uncertain at first glance as to who was saying what. There were other minor issues such as one where Veronica observes, "He seemed to have forgot his tea." That felt wrong to me. Someone as educated as Veronica, and living in Victorian times would surely have said, "He seemed to have forgotten his tea." In another instance, "affright" was missing an 'f' in the text.

The story was written in first person which I typically detest. Why authors routinely seek to write detective stories and YA stories (I don't know if this was intended as a YA story but it sure read like one!) in the unnecessarily limiting first person is a mystery to me. Some authors can manage it, and while this author didn't do too badly in the technical writing of it, her main female character really made this voice obnoxious to read.

The story is historical detective fiction set in 1887, and it gets off to a good start, but then it goes downhill rather quickly. The problem with this voice with this character is Veronica's rather strident tone, which is arrogant and supercilious. She comes off as a...how did Professor Snape put it, of Hermione Granger? Oh yes, "an insufferable know-it-all" and a self-promoter, and this does nothing to endear the reader to her - or at least in my case it did not; quite the opposite in fact.

It would have been far better had this information come from a third party rather than directly from the protagonist herself. Having trapped his- or herself into first person, all an author can do from that point onwards is to try and mitigate this life-sucking limitation by having the character presented in a much less vociferous and self-promoting manner, and endow to them with more endearing traits. Neither of these ready palliatives was in evidence here.

While we can ascribe many matters to problems with the translation to Kindle format, and others to personal preference, there are yet more issues which are down to how this novel was written, as opposed to technical problems. It took only four chapters before we met Stoker, a shirtless man with corded muscles, which pretty much caused me to choke on trope. Seriously, if you've come up with a feisty female character, the very last thing you should do is mire her in trope and cliché, unless the very purpose of this is to show how she vigorously and determinedly eschews such stock story-telling.

'Chiseled' and 'corded' are two words which, in my opinion, are way-the-heck over-used in young adult literature where there's any romance involved. They really ought to be banned, and are especially tedious when coupled with this ostensible ruffian having a soft mouth, and delicate or skilled hands, both of which we encounter here. I found myself dearly hoping that Veronica would be self-possessed enough to avoid going the wilting violet route, and speed well beyond it, but at that point it seemed unlikely.

It was also sad, given Veronica's unusual nature, that we were so readily plumbing the deep well of teen trope: the corded-muscle, brooding ruffian with poor manners, shirtless, in front of the young and rather gentile girl. Gag! Can you say Lady Chatterley? Or is it Beauty and the Beast? But it got worse. This guy has a beard, an eye patch and a gold ring in his ear - in short, he's practically a pirate. At this point I could no longer take him seriously as a character, much less as a leading male. I'm always seeking something dramatically more original than this lowest common denominator YA stock male can ever offer. It was not delivered here.

Veronica notes that Stoker puts an ungodly amount of sugar in his tea, yet he's supposed to be a pauper - or near enough. Sugar was an expensive luxury back then. It's hardly likely he would have access to so much and be so profligate with it. Honey might have been a better choice here, but who knows? Stoker is working on a project for a lord - maybe he's paid in sugar! That said, I must offer kudos to this author for mentioning explorer/traveler Isabella Bird and Marianne North. It's nice to see real female icons properly championed in fiction. Veronica comes off very poorly in comparison with these women, however, so it rather backfired here.

After the baron dies, Veronica is at the mercy of Stoker, whom she hardly knows. He insists that she accompany him - that they must leave immediately, and he's practically hauling her bodily out of his accommodations. Never once does she ask him to define exactly what this danger is or why it applies to her, a deficit which given her dire circumstances was truly pathetic at this point, but it got worse.

Despite his swearing, sometimes literally, that she was in grave danger, he allowed her to wander off by herself at Paddington station where another man accosts her. Edmund de Clare not only knows who she is, but he evidently knew also where to find her, yet none of this raises any suspicion or desire for information in Veronica. He insists that she's in peril, but never once does she demand that he explain what this peril is. At this point I was completely convinced that Veronica was misnamed. Mary Sue would have been a much better choice for her. it was also at this point that I lost all interest in her story. I have no desire to read yet another story about a woman who evidences no propensity towards pro-action and literally allows herself to become a drag-along toy of a guy. There are far too many tired stories of that nature, written by far too many female authors.

It was also at this point that I realized that Veronica Speedwell was not the sharpest tack in the box. The more the story went on, the more she alienated me with her attitude and her appallingly clueless and endless prattling. After her escape from de Clare, and despite the obvious fact that Stoker is grappling with grief over the baron's death and evident fear for Veronica's safety, she rattles blithely and selfishly on, and she evangelizes annoyingly about every insignificant little thing as though no one should have a thing to do in the world except to hang on her every utterance.

It became so annoying that I seriously wanted to see Stoker throw her off the moving train in short order. If he had done so, I have absolutely no doubt that she would have pontificated in tedious detail on the most efficient way to eject someone from a moving train. This was less than a quarter of the way through this novel and I couldn't stand to read any more of it. I cannot recommend it unless you go for stories featuring intensely self-centered female characters who adhere themselves to tediously trope male characters. It was indeed a curious beginning, and one which I was glad to bring to an expeditious end.

Fields of Mars Episode 1 by David Rollins

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this should not be confused with The Field of Mars by Kari Ellis or with The Field of Mars by Stephen Miller, neither of which I've read.

The title of this story makes it sound like some Star Wars style sci-fi story, but it isn't. Mars here is used in its original sense - as the Roman god of war. This is a story about Roman legionnaires or legionaries as they're called here, and it begins at the real life Battle of Carrhae fought in 53 BC.

When I first began reading this, I read "The enemy tactics were starting to affect the entire century. More and more legionaries were coming to the aid of their fellow infantrymen." This sounded a bit odd to me, but when I looked into it, the description is correct. Centurions were actually the officers, legionaries the NCOs as it were, so this author evidently knows his stuff.

The problem with knowing one's stuff is also in knowing when and how to employ it. I am not a fan of authors like Tom Clancy and David Weber who insist upon larding-up their stories with excessive technical detail regardless as to whether it's factual (in the case of Clancy), or fictional (in the case of Weber) or even especially relevant to the story being told. For me you can invent detail for all I care, as long as it at least sounds realistic, but I'm far more interested in the story and the characters. Give me dearth or give me freedom to read something else!

My hope here was that this author wouldn't over-do it, and I have to say that my hope seemed to be forlorn when I first began reading. There were so many Roman names, all of which were given in their full three parts, and there was quite an info dump, with foreign words being given for ranks or equipment, each then immediately post-ceded by an English translation.

I'm not a fan of this style of writing either. Maybe other readers truly go for this, but for me, I'd rather just get the English word and not have the text cluttered with the historical term. For me, I don't even need to be told that the soldier drew his gladius. Simply saying he drew his sword is fine as far as I'm concerned. Fortunately, this section passed quickly and I was soon able to focus much better on the story rather than upon these frequent reminders that I was reading a story!

There were pleasingly few errors in this novel - proving that it's entirely possible, as I've long maintained, to put out a good Kindle ebook copy! The only problems I noted were ones of word use, such as "...this portents a victory." This should have read, "this portends a victory." Another was one I see often these days: "...staunch the worst of the bleeding" which should have read "...stanch the worst of the bleeding". You can stanch blood staunchly, but you can't staunch blood stanchly!

Another minor issue I had was with the mix of "authentic" Roman with modern idiom, so we’d end up with a Roman name followed by something completely out of modern street talk, such as: Dentiatus said, "We don’t got no baggage train." Which really stood out like a sore thumb to me. I don’t expect an ancient novel to necessarily have ancient language or emulation of it. Indeed to the Romans living then, the things they said were contemporary idiom to them just as much as the things we say are to us, but to mix in a phrase like that really made me stop believing I was in the moment and brought me right out of it.

One thing which irritated me in this novel was nothing to do with the novel per se, it had to do with the endless names ending in an "uss" sound. In short order, this became tedi-uss! This is the problem in writing about ancient Rome. Nearly all the men's names actually did end with that sound. You had to go to the females to get something different and somewhat less boring, but even so, the female names largely ended with 'a', so it wasn't that much better.

So how do we get around this? Well, one way is to quit it with the unnecessary repetition of three-barreled names. One use of the name to establish it should be the limit! After that, use only the first or the last name - or better yet, toss in a few nicknames to get away from the triple 'us' routine. Remember that not every Roman actually had a three part name and not every Roman had a name ending is 'us'. There were names like Ballista, Buteo, Casca, Cato, Cinna, Civilis, Macer, Niger, Saxa, and Valerian which were male names.

So I think on balance, although I enjoyed reading parts of this, and overall, the novel isn’t a disaster, the ending rather fizzled (and yes, I realize it’s just part one, not really the end) and in the final analysis, it’s just not for me. I found that I have no interest in reading this again or in going on to find out what happens next, so I can’t recommend this.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Rating: WARTY!

Set during the great depression (which actually wasn't so great for most of those who lived through it), this novella is about George and Lennie, migrant workers who arrive at a farm to pick up some work. For no apparent reason at all, George deliberately delays their arrival, which means the boss is pissed off at them for being a day late. The boss's belligerent son, Curly, immediately takes a dislike to Lennie, who is a big, imposing guy, but who is mentally deficient and retiring. He also has a poor memory and impulse control. George looks after Lennie, but abuses him as much as he takes care of him and in the end proves to be a horrific and useless caretaker.

George and Lennie are hoping to make some money to buy their own farm, and a couple of the hands on the farm where they're now working see this as a great idea and want to buy into it. Curly recently married a woman who in many ways is Lennie's twin. Like Lennie she's abused and lonely, and only wants some soft company, and it's this is what leads to the trouble that you could see coming from a dust bowl away.

Lennie has a real affection for soft things which is why he wants to raise rabbits on George's farm, and when Curly's wife, an enigma who goes unnamed in the story, allows him to stroke her soft hair, he accidentally starts messing it up and this annoys her. Lennie feels compelled to mute her noisy reaction and ends up breaking her neck. This isn't the first time he's killed that day. Instead of trying to get justice for his friend, George simply shoots Lennie in the back of the head like a old dog that needs to be put down, and walks away, not even bothering to bury him. Some friend, huh? But at least Lennie bought the farm....

Steinbeck (whose name in German means stone creek) blunders through this in a rather ham-fisted and pedantic manner, setting-up what's going to happen, and telegraphing events long before they transpire. How this became a classic is a mystery. It would never have gone anywhere had it been published afresh today. There's nothing on offer here, except that this perhaps served to inspire Sam Peckinpah's 1971 movie Straw Dogs, so it wasn't a complete waste! I listened to the audio book read by Gary Sinise who played George in the 2011 movie, and was once again really impressed by how badly actors do at reading audio books - and I like Gary Sinise! I cannot recommend this.

Disaster Capitalism by Antony Loewenstein

Rating: WORTHY!

The cronyism and good old boy networking that arose under the Bush administration when it cavalierly kicked-off the two longest-running wars in US history – and significantly privatized them – was a shocking disgrace. The problem is that when such things are let loose, it becomes a lot harder to eradicate them than it would have been to prevent them in the first place.

That the US military is ridiculously profligate in how it spends your tax dollars is so well-known that it has become a cliché, but this does nothing to alleviate how much the mind boggles at the discovery by the GAO (Government Accountability Office) when it looked into 95 defense projects last year that there was $295 billion in wasteful spending!

This amazing book starts by covering Middle East war, specifically Afghanistan and the contingent and subsequent profiteering. Chapter two looks at the state of Greece, which is dire, and their human rights abuses even more so. Chapter three moves on to post-earthquake Haiti which is even more dire than is Greece, having been a pawn in the capitalist-communist cold war, and which therefore had two brutal dictators in a row, using US-supplied arms and money to simultaneously shore-up their power base and beat down the locals.

The fourth chapter covers Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the copper and gold mining at the Paguna mine in Bougainville. The fifth takes a look at the US prison population which is the highest in the world despite the USA being one of the most fundamentally religious nations on Earth. I guess organized religion does nothing to keep people honest, huh?!

The sixth chapter is hardly better - it covers private company G4S (formerly Group 4 Securicor, the largest security corporation in the world measured by revenue) in Britain in maintaining (supposedly) housing for asylum seekers in Britain. It covers other such corporations too. The author mentioned Sheffield which I have visited, although not the area he discusses.

People there are living in appalling conditions with no idea of when their case will be reviewed (or even if it is being reviewed). This is in a nation where the top five richest families control more wealth than the poorest twenty percent of the British population - in a world where the wealthiest one percent of people are richer than the other 99 percent.

There were many writing issues with the advance review copy which really never ought to have made it that far in this age of ebooks and spell-checkers. Errors that running a spell-checker would catch included: Portau-Prince, and twentiethcentury. I found many examples of words run together, such as “warlordcontrolled” where it should be “warlord controlled”. There were also instances where an apostrophe ‘s’ after a word was separated from the word by a space, such as in “state ‘s” instead of “state’s”. I don’t know if these were in the original text or if they were simply created as part of the process of moving that text into Kindle format. Hopefully they will be eradicated before this actually gets published.

There were other instances which did not arise as a result of any transformative process, such as where I read, “myriad of ways” which should have simply been “myriad ways”. There were three other instances where this was written in the same way. Myriad can be used as a noun or an adjective, but I’ve never seen a case where trailing it with “of” has made sense. In this same vein, I noted an inappropriate use of 'entitled': "released a report in 2012 entitled The Shadow State". I see this a lot - entitled used where it should be simply 'titled'. I think this word is going the same way as inflammable and irregardless! Sad but true.

One more complaint: the text has references in-line, but the references are not clickable, and unless they’re offered in that format, it’s a lot harder to skim screens back and forth and look up a reference in an ebook, than it is in a regular print book to turn a few pages to the end of a chapter or to the reference section at the end of the book. It's worth a thought!

At one point the author describes a certain political mentality as "Debtocracies, not democracies," which strikes me as a writing issue. How do we use made-up words? Strictly speaking, since we’re dealing with Greek roots here, it ought to have been something like ofeilí̱ocracy, but since no one would know what that meant, and since 'debtocracy' isn't actually a word (I guess it is now! LOL!), it should have been written as 'debt-ocracy' in my opinion. But you pays your drachmas and you takes your choice, I guess. And let's not get started on 'thugocracy'...!

All that aside, I recommend this book as a worthy read because it's as awesome as it is depressing. For example, at one point the author says "The average age of Papua New Guineans was twenty-one, and 30 percent of the population was under thirty". Now math is far from my strong point, and this seemed weird to me, but when I looked into it, it turned out to be true. How disturbing is that? There's a massive population in PNG of kids aged below fifteen years, and it's disturbing given what big business wants to do there.

The US prison population scandal is as upsetting as anything else. The author quotes from a book, The New Jim Crow (which I haven't read) by Michelle Alexander who tells us that the US imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than did South Africa under apartheid, believe it or not. She also tells us that three out of four Washington DC young black males will serve some time in jail, and The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelve-fold since 1980.

And how angering is this:

CCA sent letters to forty-eight states in 2012 offering to buy their prisons— on the condition that the states guaranteed 90 percent occupancy and a twenty-year management contract. Some states did deals with the GEO Group to ensure contractually that 100 percent of prison beds would be filled every night.

Talking of doing well out of it, the author clues us in: "In 2013 CAA’s revenue reached nearly $ 1.7 billion, with a profit of $ 300 million. All of this money had come from government contracts." And this while there are ten times as many mentally disturbed people in jail as there are in psychiatric institutions. Is this the definition of insanity?!

I was more than willing to overlook the technical issues I encountered in view of the wealth of information which even to someone who is aware of what can go on and go wrong with these things, is still staggering. It becomes quite horrifying when we realize that we have to do something about this once we get over our paralysis from the sheer magnitude of these issues and of how shameless and brazen government and big business are. I recommend this book completely.

Water 4.0 by David Sedlak

Rating: WARTY!

I was thoroughly unimpressed by this book. If you're really into the tediously detailed history of water, then this one is for you, but if you want to read how these problems can be solved, then turn to the last chapter because that's all there is devoted to this topic, and even so, this chapter has nothing to offer but what's already out there. There is nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing magical.

Words of Silk by Sandra Brown

Rating: WARTY!

This novel creeped me out. It was bad enough that the story was unbelievably stupid and amateurish, but the sleazy voice of the male narrator (Richard Ferrone) - while it definitely fit the low-life main male character Deke (pronounced "Dick") - was completely inappropriate to the story. This was originally published in 1984 (that ought to tell you something!) and was re-published on April 1st, 2005 (that ought to tell you something, too!).

Wilting violet wet-rag Laney McLeod gets stuck briefly in an elevator with stalker, control-freak, sleaze-bag Deke Sargent. He should have been named Drill Sergeant because all he wants to do is own and punish her privates, and she lets him! The author sees not a single thing wrong with this. When the lights go briefly out, Dick moves in on Laney and starts talking off her coat and she has no problem with this jerk manhandling her without warning or permission, in a confined space where she can't escape, and in the dark.

Afterwards, and evidently overcome with a severe bout of Stockholm syndrome, Laney goes back to his place as soon as the elevator starts working and they spend the night together going at it like bunnies. She gets pregnant and runs like a chicken instead of telling him. He tracks her down and claims he's her husband and moves in on her and in with her, controlling her every thought and deed. And this is a romance? HORSE SHIT!

This dreck would be shame-worthy had it been written by a male author or as fan fiction, but for a female author to publish appalling trash like this, call it Words of Silk and do this not only once, but to republish it and dishonestly pretend it's romance is disgusting. Sandra Brown should be thoroughly ashamed of herself. I'm boycotting her.

Black Earth by Timothy Snyder

Rating: WARTY!

I have to say that I hoped for a lot more from this book than I got. The blurb advises us that her we have "a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century", but I saw nothing that has not been revealed before. It also suggests that "The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth" but I do not see this at all, especially not from what's presented here.

Some of the suggestions here are downright inaccurate. One of the tenets of this work is that people need food security, which is fair enough. It's suggested that if a nation cannot derive this from its own resources, then a nations leadership will look, as Hitler did, to expand territory into areas which will guarantee food security. One example give here is Israel, and the potential for its suffering a water shortage which in turn leads to food problems, but this is simply untrue. Israel over the last decade has expanded desalination and water recycling until it is, as a nation, second-to none. Indeed, Israel is experting its expertise.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was presented here as the same kind of struggle - a wiping out of people because others wanted their land for food, but the Rwandan issue had nothing to do with food (although Rwanda was and is the most densely populated nation in Africa) and everything to do with inter-tribal hatred.

Even had those issues not been in the book, I would still have had a problem with it because despite the high-flying promise of the blurb, the book spends very nearly all of its space in excruciatingly detailing the shamefully aggressive history of Europe, especially focusing on Germany, Poland, and the Jewish population. This leaves only the last chapter for the warning that it could happen again, and I found that chapter completely unconvincing as well as lacking a solid foundation. The author seemingly has tried to simplify everything down to the lowest common denominator of bread on the table, and life isn't actually quite that simple. I can't recommend this book unless you really like detailed histories which deliver weak conclusions.

Garden Princess by Kristin Kladstrup

Rating: WARTY!

This book seems like it's written for middle-graders (9-12 years) but the main character is seventeen. I'm not sure how well that will go down, but the protagonist, Adela, is one who made me feel, at least at first blush, was well-worth reading about - or in this case, listening to - but although there were amusing and interesting moments, overall, I can't rate this as a worthy read.

Her mom, Queen Cecile, was a commoner who caught the king's eye, but who has evidently learned her 'royal' to a T and has become rather condescending, elite, and arrogant - character flaws of which Adela is well aware. Adela doesn't take after her mom; she's a princess, but it appeared, originally that she was not your usual Disney version. Later this version was revised. Adela at first appeared to be somewhat overweight, but later this was clarified to mean she was tall. She was supposedly not considered to be that great looking, but in the end all of this was practically retracted, and she turned out to be very much a Disney princess.

She had little time for fluff and fancy, but that was all she really had to set her apart, but that's all been done before. She's self-possessed, self-motivated, a bit of a rebel, and her interest is not in attracting a handsome prince in the bloom of youth to her bed, but in the flowers in her own royal garden beds. Sadly though, she ends up being your standard maiden in distress who has to be rescued by a man, and I rather lost interest in it at that point.

Given her horticultural interests - which are actually not that special in the end, it's no surprise that when she learns of a garden party being thrown by the Lady Hortensia, who is rumored to have the most beautiful plants in the kingdom, Adela is determined to go even though she has had no invitation. Garth, the son of the palace gardener, did receive an invitation even though he's never met Hortensia. Curiouser and curiouser! Adela invites herself, and is accompanied by her aunt Marguerite and by Garth.

Lady Hortensia, it turns out, is a witch who is still practicing in a kingdom where magic was supposedly either stamped out or simply died out, if it ever existed. Maybe it was just myth and legend? Adela is about to find out the truth, and it's really rather disconcerting to say the least. All of Hortensia's flowers are bloom though fall is well advanced. More curiously, there is a talking magpie named Krazo, which has an irresistible bird's eye view of the guests' jewels.

If the secret of the magpie is disturbing, then the secret of the flowers is horrifying, but in this world of secrets, maybe Krazo knows one of which Adela an avail herself, because there is no other help for her. If she's to resolve what's gone wrong here, she must do it on her own initiative so we;re told, but in the end she doesn't, and it's this failing - this starting out like this will be a different and female-empowering story and then ending up just another sappy love story that turned me off . I can't recommend this one.

The Middle of Somewhere by Sonja Yoerg

Rating: WORTHY!

Liz is twenty-nine and feels that her life is somehow becoming derailed. She has long wanted to hike the two-hundred and twenty mile JMT (John Muir Trail) in California, and has never done it. After the first seven miles, the trail runs above 7,000 feet for its entire length. Now she has the chance to do this, and is looking forward to a wilderness experience to help get her mind right, but live-in boyfriend Dante, about whom Liz has mixed feelings, has talked her into bringing him along. I was interested in reading this novel having recently been in Yosemite (all too briefly!) myself.

There were some formatting issues with this book as I read it - on a smart phone in a Kindle app. For example, this sentence, at 2% in, had a line break right before the last word, which would have been fine except that the line break didn’t occur at the end of the line but in the middle of a line where it dropped to the next line and the sentence finished with the last word. It looked like this:
How could she be psyched when this wasn’t the trip she’d
planned?

There were other such issues. Some screens had the text finish about two thirds the way across the screen, like the text had been indented from the right. I suspect this was caused by hard carriage returns which didn't translate into Kindle format. In other instances, there were words run together such as 'performanceenhancing'. Any spell-checker would catch that. In at least one instances a hyphen was missed such as: 'selfrecrimination' and “Or thenot-confess-your-most-shameful-moments..." A spell-checker would catch that, too.

There were other cases where speech from two different people was run together such as: He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d do this to me.”“I’m sorry.” (the last speech was from Dante's girlfriend Liz, and should have appeared on a separate line). Another instance was: “It’s freezing. I’m hiking in my leggings until it warms up.”“I’m hiking in everything.” Again a line break was missing. Spell-checkers won't catch these problems, and maybe they were caused by the translation to kindle format rather than anything the author did. I don't know.

This was an advance review copy, so I am hopeful that the formatting issues will be resolved before it gets into its final form, but this wasn't the only such issue. This one is on the author: she wrote "wracking her brain" when it ought to be "racking her brain" There were problems with the chapter starting points, too. For example, both chapters one and two begin with a capital letter T, although this has nothing to do with the text. The first one begins "T Liz..." and the second chapter begins "T At...". I found myself wondering if this was the result of a drop-cap not being translated into the Kindle format properly. The second chapter also had a problem with the word "Chapter" rendering it as "Ch apte r Two".

Meanwhile, back at the story, Liz has issues with Dante of which he's unaware. These are not helped by his delaying her trip. She had to wait two weeks past her planned date so that Dante could also get a permit to hike, and then on the day they arrived at their starting point, she had to wait on his chatting with some people in the visitor's center before they actually began it. Having hiked up really steep and demanding slopes for half a day or so at the start of the trail, they encountered two guys, evidently brothers, who were evidently to be the bad guys here, and I found myself hoping this would not turn into a bad teen B movie!

By day two, Liz is so tired of Dante antics that she's all-but ready to ditch him and strike out on her own. This could have gone either of two ways here: she does ditch him and finds herself ready for a new life, or the trip will bond them. At that point, I was leaning towards the second even though the story looked like it was heading towards the first, but there was a third option, where he decides to turn back leaving Liz alone as she had originally wanted.

At one point in the novel, we're told that the next leg of the journey is a rise of three thousand feet over a instance of twelve miles which sounds amusing on the face of it, since it's only a one in 21 gradient, but of course, the gradient isn't that gradual. Some parts are evidently flat, or nearly so, whereas other parts are extremely steep. It just seemed to me less impressive than perhaps the author thought it was when she wrote it!

Liz, it turns out is rather like a Chinese nesting doll set, in that as we read through this, we find that what was on the outside concealed something different underneath. In some ways, it was annoying to me that I kept on thinking I knew what was going on, only to find that being undermined by another layer underneath. I don't know why it annoyed me. Clearly this was the way to do it, rather than front-load the novel with all her baggage in the same way she was loaded with baggage as she began her hike. Or worse, put a prologue in. God forbid that crappy method of writing, and kudos to the author for avoiding it.

In the end, as irritating as it was in some ways to lift the ragged jute rug of Liz's personality and find dirt swept underneath it, it was quite realistic - not so much in how she was revealing herself to us, but in how she was keeping the ragged edges of her life hidden, where she wouldn't see them for what they were. Liz is carrying far more weight on this trip than she needs to, but most of it isn't in her backpack.

My blog is about writing, and I found an example of the word 'entitled' being misused. I know this is becoming more common but that doesn't make it right - not until it's totally common! It's sad to see words being misused and losing their meaning. It's reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984 where words can mean two different things - like flammable and inflammable! In this case we're told that a Georgia O'Keeffe painting was entitled "Above the Clouds I" when it was really simply titled "Above the Clouds I". It's a pretty picture and you can argue that it was entitled to be admired, but that's as far as that goes!

Without wanting to give too much away, there is one section of the book where Liz confesses something to Dante and his reaction is to hike alone the next day, leaving her behind. This behavior, to me seemed no better than Gabriel's behavior - the very thing which Liz is so obsessing over, yet she never once thinks there's anything wrong with Dante's abandoning her (on three occasions no less!) when she most needed support. For me his behavior was unforgivable.

The portion which deals with the suspension bridge over Woods Creek misled me. The story indicates that the bridge is a lot higher than it appears from images on the web, which makes the events there rather suspect! Note that Woods Creek isn't named after me even though I've reached the point where I have actually started creaking...! From the text I imagined the bridge higher and with rocky terrain on either side, whereas it is actually in a rather forested area. Note that I've never seen it, so I'm judging from images on the web, and I guess it's possible there's more than one suspension bridge over it, but it's no big deal.

What bothered me most of all was that Liz, who started out strong an independent, was disappointingly slowly morphed into a rather more childlike version of herself in the last fifteen percent of the novel, and reduced to irritating internal monologue about how sorry she was (I'm not telling what for!), and how certain she was she had lost Dante. This was way overdone. I got the message. I didn't need to be hit over the head with it every few pages! Liz is also an experienced hiker, so when I read, "...and he and Joe assisted Dante in helping Liz down tricky sections" it made her seem inept or like a maiden in distress, and I reacted badly to it. Liz deserved a lot better than that.

It was at that point that I wondered if my rating for this novel was going to end-up in the toilet, but it regrouped at the end and made for a decent ending and overall, a very worthy read, whic was a welcome and pleasant surprise for me! I recommend this one.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Rating: WARTY!

This was an awful dramatization by the BBC, which was so melodramatic and pretentious, with screeching skin-crawling violin randomly inserted, and they were, for the most part so absurdly overblown that it was really a parody. There were twelve episodes which are listed in order below with my comments appended:

• A Scandal in Bohemia

Reviews to follow.

• The Red-headed League
• A Case of Identity
• The Boscombe Valley Mystery
• The Five Orange Pips
• The Man with the Twisted Lip
• The Blue Carbuncle
• The Speckled Band
• The Engineer's Thumb
• The Noble Bachelor
• The Beryl Coronet
• The Copper Beeches

Third Grade Angels by Jerry Spinelli

Rating: WARTY!

I listened to the very short Audio Library Edition (two disks) of this, and once again I was not impressed by Johnny Heller's voice. This was a first person PoV story - nearly always a disastrous voice to use, but to have a mature man reading this when the kid is a third grader (seven or so years old) just was wrong! The text was a mite too mature for a kid that age, and Heller's reading voice isn't that great either.

The story features George, who has just moved up to third grade along with his classmates and is looking to exploit the third grade angles. This story is a prequel to Spinelli's Fourth Grade Rats - a title based on a rhyme: "First grade babies, second grade cats, third grade angels, fourth grade rats." What the heck that's supposed to mean, I have no idea, and I haven't read the fourth grade book, being unaware of its existence until now. I picked this up in the library because the blurb once again fooled me into thinking it might be worth reading (or in this case, worth a listen).

For reasons unexplained, George has been really looking forward to third grade. When he arrives in Mrs Simms class, he learns she has a program of doing good for which she will award a halo each week. Let's not get into the inappropriateness of bringing religion into public schools here, but I'll touch on this again shortly!

There are twenty-four kids in the class, so every one of them has a chance to win, and George wants to be the first winner. He throws himself whole-heartedly into being good and doing good, and can't understand why so many other kids seem not to care. George, rather misled by his mom, realizes that Mrs Simms might have friends who will tell on him if he's bad, even when he's out of school, so his goody-two-shoes program has to be extended to twenty-four-seven, and it's tough, but he sticks with it.

My problem with this story is that aside from the wrong voice and the wrong narrator and the questionable age-appropriateness of the language and thought processes of the main character, it was so wrong-headed as to be laughable. The tactic Simms employed here was the same as organized religion has employed for millennia!

The incentive to do good doesn't get any impetus from the fact that being considerate and taking care of others is the sensible, logical, and right thing to do, but solely from the fact that you will get a reward if you do good. This is entirely wrong-thinking and it doesn't surprise me that it fails so miserably, especially when the "reward" in this case, is a cheap halo and in the case of organized religion is an eternity of suck-up slavery to a megalomaniac god.

So in short I can't recommend this because not only is it a poorly written (and narrated) story, but also because the very premise is a joke.

Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen E Ambrose

Rating: WORTHY!

When the story first began, I did not realize that Curly was actually Crazy Horse. I thought it was some contemporary about whom the author was talking to give an idea as to how the Sioux lived back then because so little was known about Crazy Horse himself. We don't even have any authenticated photos of Crazy Horse since he was so suspicious of the technology.

Curly's father was known as Crazy Horse, so I was a bit confused. Later, after an impressive exploit against the Arapaho, Curly's father gave up his name to his son. His father became known as Worm, and Curly became Crazy Horse. Yeah, it's that kind of culture!

Custer is often imaged with long, golden curly hair, but he wasn't known as Curly! However, in the same confusing vein, Custer was nicknamed Autie and Ambrose uses this name throughout the early part of the book, but switches to Custer later, and uses Autie to describe one of Custer's relatives. Custer changed that curly look quite often, beginning when he arrived at West Point, so this account relates. When his classmates started calling him Fanny because of his long hair, he cut it really short, but then became embarrassed by the shortness and took to wearing a toupee for a year until it grew again! Once it was a little longer, he took to styling it with cinnamon oil, whence he got the nickname Cinnamon! This volatility and capriciousness was to be a hallmark of Custer's

This book is some 480 pages and has extensive notes. It's rather poor quality, printed on cheap paper, the photographs printed on the paper rather than on special photo pages. The images are almost sepia, and the text by each is so badly printed that it runs off the page and is unreadable. The book takes seemingly forever to arrive at the stories of Crazy Horse and George Custer, but it does go into immense detail about the everyday lives of the Sioux Indians, and that was a lot more interesting than anything written about Custer.

When people think of native Americans, they tend to think of the best known names, of which Sioux is one, but they seldom realize that this tribal name described a very broad and loosely cohesive society which was in fact composed of smaller units identified through language, culture and locale. The three major divisions were Lakota, itself divided into Northern, central, and Southern, Santee divided into Santee and Sisseton, and Yankton-Yanktonai, which name gives its own sub-divisions. This overall umbrella (or tipi!) includes further sub-units, some of which are better known than others, such as Hunkpapa, Minniconjou, and Oglala.

Long before "the white man" came onto the scene, the native Americans were feuding amongst themselves in endless inter-tribal 'warfare', but what whites failed to grasp was the nature of this 'warfare' - it wasn't anything like warfare as we think of it. It was more typically a show of strength and bravado with a few individuals testing themselves against a few from the opposing side, and then the combatant parties would go their separate ways, their pride and honor satisfied. There was very little bloodshed in the way we see bloodshed in war today - or even as Europeans saw it back then.

The Sioux became the dominant plains peoples through sheer force of numbers and pressure of their people naturally spreading out, rather than through vast pitched battles and as long as they had what they needed, the 'warriors' didn't have much interest in pursuing the kinds of stressful and time-intensive activities we consider normal today. As a people, they very much lived with nature, not as animals, but in the same way in which animals co-exist with each other.

Lions do not, for example, feel any compulsion to charge around dominating every beast in their purview. They eat when they're hungry and the rest of the time they don't care if a gazelle passes close by. In the same way, the native Americans hunted twice a year and laid up supplies, and occasionally went on horse-stealing expeditions or put on 'war party' shows of strength, but in general, they didn't feel any compulsion to run around like idiots and do any more than was necessary for a comfortable existence. They had no manufacturing 'industry' because they had no need for one. White folks, used to a rigid working week and endless industry simply couldn't grasp this kind if life and it made trading - seeking endless pelts to sell back to the east - something of a nightmare.

Another thing white people didn't get was the native American system of 'government'. They led a very laissez-faire existence, feeling no need to control others or put restraints on them or censure them unless things started looking like they would really get out of hand. The tribal chief wasn't a monarch as we would conceive of one, unless it's a monarch such as exists in Britain now - a ceremonial 'leader' who has very little to do with the real day-to-day governing of affairs.

Tribal leadership was a very diverse and dispersed concept, which was not understood by the east, and which thwarted eastern ideas and attempts at signing agreements. It felt like herding cats because it pretty much was. The Sioux were a very individualistic people, and while this worked perfectly before the easterners came, it robbed them of a cohesive resistance afterwards and eventually brought about their downfall - aided and abetted, of course by the terrible plague outbreaks which befell the natives, chief among them being the cholera pandemic of 1849, and the smallpox onslaught which followed a year later.

The big parlay of 1851 supposedly agreed that the natives would not make any kind of war, not only on the whites, but on each other, and each tribe appointed (or had appointed for them, believe it or not) a chief through which negotiations would be made. In return for free un-harassed passage along the Oregon trail, the natives were supposed to get $50,000 of goods which would be distributed via the various chiefs, which made the unnatural chief a highly important man.

The agreement immediately failed with the Sioux (largely the feisty youthful ones, looking to make a name for themselves) continuing to rob the emigrants on the trail, making for angered whites, and the natives dying from disease and lamenting the loss of the massive local buffalo herds, making for angered natives. Friction arose easily and justice was ill-served since the whites didn't have a clue which offending Indian belonged to which tribe. Consequently, revenge was exacted on the wrong party did nothing to improve relations. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Some of the writing here seemed inconsistent to me. For example, after spending the first four chapters with the Sioux, we start spending time with Custer and get his life history. The author's intent is to show how parallel these two lives were, Crazy Horse and Custer, but they really weren't - other than each had a nickname and they both grew up to become leaders of warriors! With regard to Custer, The author goes into excessive detail in some areas, but none at all in others. At one point we learn that Custer's childhood nick-name was Autie, but the author says not a word about how this came to be. Perhaps he didn't know, in which case it would have been nice to hear him say so!

In another example, the author mentions an intense love affair which Custer supposedly had, but nowhere does he offer any details about this. All it gets is a mention. Contrast this with the endless details of births, deaths and marriages, complete with dates down to the day, and it leads to a rather oddly off-kilter account in many regards.

The most interesting parts for me were the parts describing Sioux customs, beliefs, and behaviors, although the stint Custer put in at West Point was interesting. He was a well-liked cut-up and trouble-maker, who did the bare minimum necessary to get through, graduating bottom of his class, but graduating nonetheless. His class graduated a year early because Lincoln had just won the election and civil war was seen as inevitable as he tried to set the South straight. Custer was a unionist and while he saw many of his friends from the South quit West point to take up appointments in the Confederate army, he stayed and graduated and was commissioned into the union army - although at a lower rank than many of his friends had managed for themselves in the South.

There's a really interesting bit about Sioux marriage customs and divorce customs. Apparently the Sioux women were in some ways treated as property in that there was an exchange of gifts (but note that it was an exchange, not a one-way dowry), including things like horses and buffalo hides, but there really was no ceremony. After the two spent the night together, they were married and that was it. The woman owned the tipi, however, and could divorce the guy by simply throwing his things out of it if she felt she had cause. If a woman was unfaithful with another brave, the marriage was considered dissolved. There rarely were consequences since the Sioux considered it unmanly to pine after a woman.

Virginity was a different matter, however. The genders were quite segregated so it was hard for a guy to get to know a girl, and virginity was highly prized. A woman who lost it was considered a poor marriage prospect, while for the guys, it was considered a bit of a coup if he could sneak into a girl's tent and steal her virginity. The girls were rather strictly chaperoned though, day and night and kept away from the boys, so offenses were very limited and outright punishment of the girl if this did happen was rarely pursued.

So a curiously unbalanced book, but fascinating in many regards. The ending - the actual battle, is disappointingly short, but the details of Sioux life were wonderful, and the story continues after Custer's death with a brief summary of how Crazy Horse met his end. so overall, I recommend this as a worthy read.

Supreme Blue Rose by Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay

Rating: WORTHY!

In this beautifully illustrated futuristic time-travel graphic novel, Diana Dane, an investigative journalist who is out of work at present and not able to afford all the meds she believes she needs, has a weird dream in which she's informed that she should not trust Darius Dax. Curiously enough that's the name of the man she meets during her appointment the next day. Dax hires her for a considerable sum - with even more on offer should she succeed in locating what it is that Dax seeks.

It's not an object he wants as much as it is a time and place, but in ignorance of this, Diana is driven away in a stretch limo by an enigmatic chauffeur to investigate what as reported as an airplane crash. Dax doesn't believe the press. Diana, who looks strangely like talented artist Tula Lotay (who incidentally illustrated this novel!), is expected to unearth the truth. Her problem is that her dreams seem to be bleeding into her reality. Or vice-versa. Wait, is that Diana's dreams or Tula's? I honestly can't day! But maybe that's just a result of time being periodically revised?

This novel penned by Warren Ellis was entrancing and haunting with a bit too much mystery, but definitely an alluring lead-in to what is at least a seven volume series.

They're Not Like Us by Eric Stephenson, Simon Gane, Jordie Bellaire, Fonografiks

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume one of a new series. "Syd" is hearing voices; she has done so for a long time, and can't stand it any more. She tries to kill herself, but she survives and is sprung from the hospital by a guy who whisks her away to a charming old house hidden behind iron railings and deep foliage, where she meets others who, like her, have some sort of telepathic ability. The house is so representative of what these people have done to themselves, it's almost like it was planned that way....

In a tableau of introduction we meet: Fagen (pyrokinetic), Wire (invulnerable), Runt (strength and agility), Blurgirl (super speed), Moon (Illusions), Misery Kid (delusions), Maisie (clairvoyant), and Gruff (telepath). The guy who rescues Syd (her super-hero name) is named The Voice. He can communicate telepathically, too. What Syd doesn't expect is the lifestyle these people lead: violence and robbery. If they see something they want, they take it and woe betide whoever gets in their way. This sanctuary is so important to them, that even parents aren't allowed to trip it up.

Starting on page forty-nine, it felt like I might be reading an excerpt from the graphic novel version of the movie Fight club which I haven't seen and have no interest in seeing. It was bloody and violent as Syd and Gruff fight each other - presumably as training. But after punching each other in the face several times they're suddenly kissing. This felt not only inappropriate, but also entirely predictable, and it marked the point where I started losing interest in this comic.

It got worse when we went through a bunch of adolescent posing, angst, and machismo, to say nothing of the soul-searching and he dramatic plans which fell through. All the tedious back stories flooding-out really brought the main story to a screeching halt. After that, it picked up again and turned out, by the end, to be a merit-worthy read. It's not often I can say that, so this makes a pleasant change.

Since this blog is about writing, here's a writing issue. On page one hundred, Maisie is talking to Syd, and she's saying that The Voice isn't perfect, and she follows it with "none of us are". Should she have said, instead, "none of us is"? It can be used either way, but the number has to agree, I think. Strictly speaking, in this case, Maisie meant that no individual is. If she had said, "This group isn't perfect, no groups are" this would have worked, but it seems to me that this isn't the case.

She's talking in the same frame as when she said "The Voice isn't perfect," so it seems to me that since she's talking about an individual, in which case, correct use should be "none of us is", as in "He isn't perfect; none of us is." However, this is not a narrative, it's a person speaking, and people in general use poor grammar, so while it might sound odd, I think it works here. But you're welcome to disagree, since I am far from a grammar expert. The important thing to keep in mind is that what works in your narration may not work for a given individual's speech, and vice-versa.

So overall, I rate this graphic novel as a worthy read, which surprised me given the way I thought it was going - downhill! It turned around and so did my opinion. I'd be interested in reading volume two, which is also a nice change from the position I've been in vis-à-vis some of the graphic novels I've reviewed recently. The dialog - apart from a sorry bit just after the middle, was good, and the art work was superb. I recommend this.

Tortured Life by D Watters, C Wijngaard, N Gibson, J Wijngaard

Rating: WARTY!

This graphic novel tells the story of a guy named Richard Carter who lives in the infamous Whitechapel region of London, and who is undergoing Hikikomori - a Japanese word describing someone who has withdrawn from society for six months or longer - sometimes years.

Because of this reference to a Japanese cultural phenomenon, I mistakenly began to think this was set in Japan, but as evidenced by the fact that character is Caucasian, as is his ex-girlfriend and all of his friends and colleagues, and even a passing priest, I was forced to conclude that this was merely a reference, and nothing to do with the story. It wasn't until later that his name and place of residence was conformed.

Richard has undergone this withdrawal because of something awful which has overwhelmed him, and today he decides he's going to kill himself. He had a Schrödinger experience one day which precipitated all this and in it, he saw a cat lying in the street, at first dead, then alive, then dead. After a while he let the horror of it go, but then he has the same experience with a bird, and the visions become worse and start showing up with people that he sees. He's predictably saved by a young woman who dresses, shall I say, less than conservatively, and who is named Alice McNelly.

Shortly after Alice's arrival, Richard finds himself pursued by a beast from hell which only looks, vaguely, like it was once human. The beast's speech was awfully hard to read. Too small and blurry, red on black so I pretty much skipped reading those parts, especially when I realized what a juvenile mentality this chraracter had. He's also amused by bathroom humor. There's a weird part around page 65 and 66, where the image frames seem out of order. First the bad guy is in the toilets kicking open the doors one by one, then he's heading for the toilets, then he's back in there again kicking open the doors.

Richard's a slim guy, but he curiously appears to put on weight at the bottom of page 70. Maybe the bottom of page seventy just makes characters appear overweight?! Does this panel make me look fat?! I got to about page 140 of this 160-some page novel and could stand to read it no longer. It made some kind of sense to begin with, but then it took the road to weirdsville and never looked back.

It ceased making any sense, it became disjointed and unintelligible (this doesn't even include the illegible ramblings of the red skeleton man), and it persisted in endless gore, which never appeals to me. If you like all of that, then this is for you, but I cannot in good faith recommend this as a worthy read.

Sweet Dreams Little Pup by Mary Lee

Rating: WORTHY!

This story struck me as wonderful. Maybe I was in a really good mood when I read it, but I honestly believe if I had been in a bad mood I would still have enjoyed it because it's so sweet. The illustrations by the author, Mary Lee, are perfect for the age range this is aimed at - colorful, simple, very well done, and charming. The story is simple, but very entertaining and relaxing. How can you not love a story which has a character named Little Pup in it?!

Little Pup lives with Grey Bear, and loves to go to bed early for the dreams, which he enjoys greatly. The problem is that on this particular night, he can't fall softly down into noddy-land. He's not sleepy! He tries counting butterflies (see what I mean about being sweet?) He's not thirsty, and he's tried some stretches and exercises, and that didn't work. What's a pup to do?

I'm feeling sleepy just thinking about this now as I write the review, but maybe that's because it was a long and busy day! Or maybe not! This book is designed well enough, with large enough text, that you can even read it from your cell phone, which is an added plus if it turns out to be your child's favorite book - it's always to hand! I recommend this little book.

Oceans Of The World In Color

Rating: WORTHY!
>p>
I loved the title of this children's book - like Oceans of the World in gray scale would be considered a possibility? I don't think so! But the thing is that it's not just a book full of really pretty pictures; it also contains factual text that puts the pictures in perspective. In short, it's a book about the ocean that has depth, a few salty remarks about species diversity and so on, that are plentiful enough to make then worthwhile, but concise enough that some of them at least will stick with the child and maybe have some lasting effect. Without our oceans we're screwed and the sooner children appreciate and embrace this fact the better in my opinion. I recommend this book.

Vampirella Feary Tales by Nancy A Collins and Gail Simone

Rating: WARTY!

Given that this was a graphic novel with standard 'okay' art work, written and illustrated by two female artists/writers, I expected better and didn't get it. It was still women as meat, romping around in their underwear with poor dialogue and unimaginative adventures. Vampirella gets dragged magically into a fairy tale book, except that these fairy tales are horrifically twisted - hence feary tales.<./p>

There are five stories in this first volume and the series runs to at least four more volumes after this, but my interest ended with this one. I can't recommend it. I know it was supposedly a celebration of forty-five years of Vampirella, but this is 2015, and we deserve a lot better than Vampirella as vapid meat. And so does she.

Ashes: A Firefighter's Tale by Mario Candelaria and Karl Slominski

Rating: WARTY!

This black and white line-drawing graphic novel with text that is far too small to be read in an ebook, was about a fire-fighter named Terwilliger, who suffers an injury and has to figure out how to continue his life when he can't do what he loves, and what he was professionally trained for. I had some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I was impressed that this was a kind of real-world story, but on the other, it was so full of cliché and stereotype that it seriously made me cringe. The idea behind it is a really good one, but the title alone is far too overdone to be used here.

The fire-fighters were universally presented as though they were rejects from the movie Backdraft - rejected because their behavior was too over-the-top, crazy, machismo-infested, and un-pc and genderism-soaked to get into the movie. I didn't appreciate this. I didn't like that all the fire-fighters were essentially the same person in this story, with the same attitudes and points-of-view. I didn't like the trope "we take care of our own" undercurrent, especially not when it was seasoned with the over-done "we're underpaid and starved of finances, yet we battle on gamely being heroic."

For me that spoiled the message the story was trying to transmit about Terwilliger, and it's for that reason that I can't recommend this novel. How nice it would have been instead to have had the machismo guy screw up and someone dies and he's rejected because of that, as well as his resultant injury? Why not get off the beaten hose and put your ax through a door that hasn't been opened yet?

First Love by Ivan Turgenev

Rating: WARTY!

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian author who was born 18 years into the nineteenth century (two years after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus and died almost exactly the same number of years from its end. This novella, Первая любовь (Pervaia Liubov - First Love) was written in 1860. And this is yet another of my forlorn attempts at reading classics, I'm sorry to report.

The novel features three men who agree to tell each other of their first love. We get only one of these stories - one which was evidently rooted in Turgenev's own experience with his first love Catherine Shakovskoy which was, according to Wikipedia, "...an infatuation that lasted until his discovery that Catherine was in fact his own father's mistress."

The man who tells this story, Vladimir Petrovich, who is only sixteen when he meets twenty-one-year old Zinaïda Alexandrovna Zasyekina, an impoverished princess who is staying in rather lowly circumstances with her mother. The poor circumstances of the princess, and the quite well-to-do circumstances of Petrovich put them on something of a par with each other, but the arrogant, self-obsessed, narcissistic young princess sees him merely as one more moth drawn to her flame. Petrovich is too dumb in his youth to see through her games.

As in Turgenev's own life, Petrovich eventually learns Zinaïda 's interest is only in his own dad, Pyotr. The story was tedious and pointless. It wasn't even very well written, but to be fair, with a translation, it's hard to say how much of this is the original author's and how much the translator's. Here’s a writing issue to consider, however: the following struck me as an oddly-written sentence. I don’t know if this was in the original, or if it arose out of the translation from the Russian, but this is what I read: “I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.” I can see how the second clause follows from the "I could" of the first, but adding "and" might have made it less of a jarring read. It took me a second to figure out what the author was trying to do. Isn’t "I could have stayed in that room for ever and have never left that place." A bit more clear?!

Some sentences ran on and on and on to paragraph length, such as this one: "Upon this my father informed my mother that he remembered now who this lady was; that he had in his youth known the deceased Prince Zasyekin, a very well-bred, but frivolous and absurd person; that he had been nicknamed in society ‘le Parisien,’ from having lived a long while in Paris; that he had been very rich, but had gambled away all his property; and for some unknown reason, probably for money, though indeed he might have chosen better, if so, my father added with a cold smile, he had married the daughter of an agent, and after his marriage had entered upon speculations and ruined himself utterly.". I cannot recommend this novel./p>

Twillyweed: A Claire Breslinsky Mystery by Mary Anne Kelly

Rating: WARTY!

This novel highlights the serious problem of choosing to write in first person PoV. The author is confined to reporting only what their primary character sees and hears. They cannot move from that perspective, which severely restricts and limits the story. It's also an appallingly arrogant PoV: everything is "I" - what I did, what I saw, what I felt - who cares about anyone else?! It's the most obnoxious form of writing and few writers can carry it without inflicting pain upon their readers. This novel makes it worse by bouncing back and forth between PoVs so much that the reader risks whiplash.

The author of Twillyweed acknowledges that this is a real problem by beginning this novel in third person before making an uncomfortably clunky shift to first person: primary antagonist Claire Breslinksy's PoV. It did not make for good reading. The novel also has a prologue which turned me off. Prologues are antique and I always skip them. I have never read a novel yet where skipping the prologue put me at a disadvantage, which is testimony to how pointless prologues (and introductions, prefaces, etc., etc.) truly are.

The story here is that in seeking her birth mother, an Irish girl travels to Long Island and "stumbles upon a terrible secret"! Jenny Rose Cashin is Claire Breslinsky's niece - the illegitimate offspring of Claire's sister Carmela and Claire's ex-husband Johnny. Jenny says, "Oh Gee, I'm sorry"? I haven't lived in Ireland - visited only briefly once, but I felt this was more of an Americanism - Oh gee! - than something which the Irish person would say, but maybe I'm wrong on that score. I would think they'd be more likely to say, "Oh Jeese!", but it's no big deal.

I've read none of the Claire Breslinsky stories to this point (assuming there are others), so I'm meeting her afresh, and I wasn't impressed. She first appeared as a truly whiny woman bemoaning her fate. She had gotten rid of her husband Johnny, who she now whined was failing to support their sons who are in college. Yes he's morally at fault, but not legally since both boys are now over eighteen and an insurance payout paid for the boys' college tuition anyway. Claire has gotten herself involved with a fireman now, sporting the unlikely name of Enoch, who seems at first blush to be rather condescending towards Claire who seems at second blush to invite condescension.

Jenny is consistently referred to as Jenny Rose which I found annoying in short order. There were also some odd words used in the text. Once example used to indicate, presumably, that she opened a package is: "She kipped it open..." which makes no sense unless there's an alternate meaning (in Irish usage) of a word which means taking a nap! (p15). The author ought to be aware that not everyone will get colloquialisms.

At the end of a section on page 16, right before the story returns to Claire's first person PoV, there's a weird section that's italicized and appears to be told from the PoV of an acquaintance of Jenny's (always referred to as Jenny Rose!) named Wendell. It comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. Then we're back to Claire's 1PoV. I think this section might have been intended to represent thoughts of the killer, but it came after an italicized sentence which was Jenny's thought, and there was only a line break between the two, so initially and confusingly, it appeared to be a continuation of the thoughts she had begun. It was not well done, and this seemed to be a pattern in this novel.

It was at this point that I really started to feel like I didn't honestly want to read any more of this. Jenny was completely boring to me. There was nothing going on with her except her own idle thoughts and the random impressions she had of her surroundings as she arrived at the house where she would be staying and started to get settled in. It wasn't interesting at all.

Claire's next section was simply more whining. She gets a call from Carmela, but rather than let us in on what this evidently important call was all about, she breaks the fourth wall and talks to the reader about some incident from the past, which really tripped up any momentum the story might have garnered for itself with this evidently urgent phone call. I was not thrilled by yet another digression.

I made it through ten percent of this book, but I couldn't stand to keep going. I mean who says, "...sit down and attend to your brunch"? Seriously? Maybe a hundred years ago people spoke like that. Maybe that's what Enoch will turn out to be - a time-traveler from the past. He has the name for it. Actually he turns out to be something Claire didn't expect: it looks like he misled her and now there's yet another thing in her sorry life to bemoan.

For a book which includes as part of its blurb: "Jenny Rose Cashin arrives from Ireland to take a job as an au pair in a fading Long Island resort town, hoping to reconnect with her long-lost mother. But something evil lurks in the quiet beachside residences of Sea Cliff. There is a killer on the grounds of this strange art colony, and Jenny Rose will need all the help she can get from her aunt Claire to uncover the truth--and to stay alive." there was nothing happening. Nothing at all. No dead bodies or even hints of them. No hint of a killer except for the afore-mentioned misplaced and obscure italicized segment consisting of three paragraphs or so, and even that was so obscure that it was hard to tell what the heck it meant. Certainly Claire and Jenny are going to have to save the day because as you know, this is a private dick story, so the police are, of course, utterly useless.

The book came off more as a pretentious and artsy memoir than ever it did a thriller or a mystery. It was simply depressing to read, and offered nothing to interest me. None of the characters garnered my support or empathy. I didn't like any of them, and I cannot recommend this based on what I read. I know I didn't read much of this, but life is far too short to continue to plow on through a book that has failed you in every way when there are so many other books out there, taunting me with their siren calls.

Mammals

Rating: WORTHY!

I recommend this Scholastic Voyages of Discovery book about mammals. It's yet another in a series which offers engaging and colorful images, and introduces our closest cousins in evolution's majestic and historic portrait of life on Earth. Ideal for young children. it has gorgeous images depicting the diversity of life and the inventiveness of evolution in equipping that life to survive, something which I am wondering will apply to the poor tiny male spider which is even now in my back yard playing a silent melody on the huge female's web, no doubt desperately hoping, in his spiderly way, that he will be lover and not lunch. This book is really well done and even has a page that I thought was really neat where the footprint tracks of several different animals, including giraffe, deer, cheetah, rabbit, and kangaroo, and impressed in the page so you can not only see them, but run your fingers over the page and feel them. Wonderful, I would have loved this as a kid, and I recommend it.

Musical Instruments

Rating: WORTHY!

I recommend this one from Scholastic, which aims to teach the instruments of the orchestra and elsewhere - facilitated with a map showing different kinds of music on different continents. As other books in this series, it is full of attractive and illustrative images, and it offers a really good and useful basic grounding in musical instruments for young children.

There's a page showing how music is annotated, so you know the score, a page showing how an orchestra is arrayed radially and radiantly, and a page of stickers for children to apply in applicable locations throughout the book, so you'll stick with it. A wealth of information suitable for the child's mind so they can see sharp and not be flat. Not to harp on it, but recommend this one to stave off boredom and cause the scales to fall from your kid's eyes! Make a note. This could be key to your child's education!

Eumundi and Friends Hot Air Ballooning by Stuart and Kristen Anner

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a short text book, the first of a projected series, with some illustrations by Cristina Birtea, and written by Stuart Anner, aided and abetted by his daughter Kristen. The stories are rooted in a plush toy mouse that they found at Eumundi Markets in Queensland Australia.

Eumundi is a rather reckless female mouse - as those wee mousettes are prone to be, I'm sure you understand. She drives a sporty convertible, and on this day is scheduled for a hot air balloon ride. The balloon takes off unexpectedly, without the pilot on board, and Eumundi, her new friend, the rather prim and proper Julia, and their surprise acquaintance Hammy the hungry hamster, have to deal with the consequences and learn not only to fly the balloon but also to land it safely.

This was a fun romp, and I am sure children will enjoy it, which is why I'm rating it as a worthy read. I do have to add a note of caution though in that Eumundi is definitely too reckless for her own good. I would have appreciated a note of caution here given some of the things she did. It would have been nice to see, for example, Julia as the voice of common sense, and have her reprimand Eumundi for some of the stunts she pulled so that children don't get the idea they can defy gravity with impunity! With that advisory, I recommend this book!