Darkness of Light by Stacey Marie Brown

Rating: WARTY!

This volume had two potential strikes against it as I began reading: firstly it was book one of a series, and secondly, it was first person PoV, which is normally a horrible voice to tell a story in, full of self-importance and self-promotion. The all-important I did this! Hey lookit me! Now lookit me again! Imagine that for a whole series! However, there are some people who can carry that voice, just as there are some people who can carry a series so my hope going into this was that here was an author who can carry both.

The title is a bit trite. There are very many volumes out there with variations on this contradiction, most of them, it seems, series, so it's not a good title to have chosen if you're looking to make your work stand out from the pack, as most authors are, so having buried your novel deeply in the pack with your choice of title, we now have to look solely to the writing, and this is what my blog is all about.

That did start our too well, because on the second screen I read this: ""

His eyes ran over my body. "You look good... I mean beautiful."

Ember's immediate response is to thank him for objectifying her, except that she doesn't frame it in those objective terms

Judged by the first two screens, this book is all about shallow. Ember's assessment of her best female friend, Kennedy, is that she "...could see the true beauty in her porcelain skin." That's her true beauty. It's not in her wisdom, or in her integrity, or in her smarts, or in her skill with something, or in her reliability - not even in her steadfast friendship over many years. It's not even, for goodness sakes, in the commonly-cited abuse: that she would make a good wife and mother! It's in her beauty, because let's face it, if you're a girl and you ain't got that, you ain't got nothing. No wonder she's going to grow up dreading wrinkles and blemishes, and spend a fortune on snake oil 'remedies' for them.

Why do female writers insist up demeaning their gender like this? Can we not get a YA novel that's not about skin-depth? Can we not, for that matter, get a novel about a "hot cheerleader" who turns out to have smarts, courage, decency, or anything that's more than skin and (good) bone (structure)? In this novel, Ember's brief interlude with Ben is rudely interrupted by this very thing (the hot cheerleader part, not the rest of it). Kallie is "tall, blonde, and beautiful." That's how she's categorized and pigeon-holed, and I'm only in the fourth screen in on my smart phone!

Every female who has appeared in this story to this point has been completely and solely defined by her looks. This is, quite frankly, disgusting. You think pornography is degrading to women? Well that's obvious. How much worse then, is this culture of stealth degradation which puts the value of a woman on her looks alone? The fact that this has been done through history is no excuse to continue it. What is this doing to young girls, subject to this barrage of objectification, story after story after story, in a subtle and not-so-subtle undermining of their value, being told relentlessly, that if they're not beautiful they have nothing else to offer? How many depressions and suicides has this relentless assault on girlhood and womanhood caused, do you suppose? Do you dare to try to calculate that carnage?

Don't think for a minute that guys avoid this objectification: "Ben was gorgeous and at the top of the food chain in our school. He was the basketball star and every girl's wet-dream." That's a verbatim quote cut and pasted directly from the Kindle app on my phone. I love that Kindle app despite various issues it has. You can't copy text from the Bluefire Reader app on the iPad for quoting.

The characters don't speak realistically. At one point Ember says, "Hide me from whom? What are you talking about?" No one talks like that unless they're nobility, pretentious, or caricatured. Ryan says at one point shortly after this, "There you are. Kennedy and I have been looking for you." Kennedy and I, instead of "We've"? it doesn't happen. The "from whom" comes from an author's knee-jerk desire to try to be taken seriously by offering correct English, but forgetting that this isn't the narrative part, this is character speech, and no one speaks like that. 'Whom' needs to be retired completely from the English language in my opinion, although there are occasional instances where even to me it sounds wrong not to use it, but never in someone's speech. Not unless the character in question is Queen Elizabeth or someone like that.

The story continued to become more clichéd as trope was piled upon trope: Ember has odd eyes, and is tall, long haired, willowy, and no doubt "beautiful", but she's detested by the entire school except for her two trope friends, the guy portion of which is of course, gay. Despite her being reviled, the hottest guy in school falls for her. Despite him falling for her, and his enjoying a god-like status in school, he lifts not one finger to bring an end to the buying she endures. The bullying is torrential, and not a single teacher lifts a single finger to try to stop it. Ember doesn't feel the slightest bit depressed ir suicidal despite this bullying. She doesn't care about the insults to herself but won't have her friends insulted. The hottest cheerleader is her worst enemy and delivers verbal assaults on her worthy of the most moustache-twirling villain in melodrama.

This latter item brings a crisis at the Halloween dance, where Ember has a Carrie moment. The lights break in their tubes. The disco ball crashes to the ground, the decorations go up in flame, the students panic and flee. Ember awakes to find she's alone in the trashed gym, and despite there being EMTs and fire-fighters galore out there, evidently not a single one of them came inside to check for injured, trapped or dead students? I'm sorry but this is bullshit and an insult to emergency services personnel. Le Stupide doesn't end there however.

When Ember wanders outside, determined to find her friends and tell them she's all right (why were they not panicked for her and trying to get back into the gym or urging the emergency response teams to find her?), an EMT immediately takes charge of her to address her 'deep cuts', but as soon as the principal comes up and harasses Ember, the EMT melts away despite not having attended to her injuries? Seriously? Way to demean and insult the EMT. The sheriff is there and both he and the principal blame Ember for this, despite having zero evidence, let alone proof. Ember runs away like a little child (forgetting about meeting up with her friends) and encounters a man with electric blue eyes who speaks in riddles and offers her no explanations for her witchy powers. She's interrupted by Ryan, and Electric Blue Eye Guy disappears like magic.

Ember Brycin and her friends Ryan, and Kennedy. No one in this book has a first name unless it's also a last name - except for Ben - or something weird like Eli Dragen, the hot bad boy. Trope much?

I'm sorry, but this isn't an original novel, not even close. Yes, the minor details are different, the character names are different, but this is essentially the same story that's been told a thousand times before and it's not worthy of being read. Some authors can take cliché and trope and make something truly new out of it, but that's not what's delivered here. I cannot recommend this one.

Dragonflies by Andy Straka with Durrell Nelson

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second Andy Straka book I've read. I reviewed A Witness Above favorably back in May, 2015, but I could not get with this one, which evidently incorporates books 1 & 2 of a series. The biggest problem, for me, was that it felt like I was reading a book aimed at middle grade boys.

It's a novel about spying using the latest drone technology – the one where next-gen drones are so small they can sneak in through your a/c vent. You can barely see them even if you're looking, and they're quiet. This era is coming. Some of it is already here, and this bugs people...! The book was accurate in mentioning military surveillance programs such as ARGUS-IS, Gorgon Stare, and Constant Hawk.

Raina Sanchez was a chopper pilot for the military in the Middle East until a grenade launcher attack brought her chopper down hard, killing her buddy. Invalided out of the military less one foot (as in limb, not in height), she found work with a military contractor, but was tired of being a drone herself stuck in a cube like a bee in a hive. She could only dream about her previous life - and not in a good way. She leaped – as well as she was able - at the chance to pilot miniature drones for secret military operations in the civilian sector, especially since it gave her the opportunity to work with the very man who pulled her from the chopper wreck that night: Staff Sergeant Tye Palmer, who she hadn't seen for four years.

The start of this novel was great, but it quickly went downhill for me, and I had to quit reading it after chapter five or so because it was becoming increasingly less credible with each screen I swiped. It simply wasn't entertaining for grown-ups in my opinion. Neither was it really edited for prime time. I came across a lot of writing mishaps, such as phrases like "beautiful creatures staged for battle" In the context I read it, this made no sense. It was describing horses, which are not staged by any means. Trained, maybe? Bred? Not staged.

A lot of times the author meant 'breathe' but he wrote 'breath'. This happened at lest twice in the short section I read, as in "At least she could still breath." and "He didn’t allow himself to breath easier until they were well away from the building". In another section, the author made the error of conflating character speech with narration and gave us this: "...could endanger both you and whomever else might come into possession of such information."

I can see how an author might feel pressured to write that in the narration if only to try and establish some English language cred, but no-one speaks like that unless they're queen Elizabeth, or unless they're absurdly pretentious or play-acting. No one says 'whom' in everyday speech. Indeed, the very word 'whom' needs to be banned from the language as far as I'm concerned. To borrow the immortal words of John Cleese, it's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible!

Then there were sections which were straight out of a young adult romance: "Raina didn’t normally swoon over men - she was attractive enough in her own right. But Murnell was off the charts." I don't even know what that second clause even means. What I really don't get is what Raina's looks have to do with anything. If this were a male soldier, no-one (except for Harlequin and gay romance writers) would be writing about him like this so why pick on women? Not that female soldiers can't be good looking by any means - but its simply not relevant and it's demeaning to a female character to treat her like an object.

It's also evident that the author is setting up a young-adult style love triangle, but I'm not interested in that when there's a tech-thriller to read. I want the tech, not the trope. Talking of tech, that which was employed here was right on the border line of not credible, promising to step over it, but never quite doing it until Raina is rendered. Yes, you read that right. This was when I quit reading because this was just too improbable and ridiculous to credit at all.

This is where I lost all my faith in this story for two reasons. First of all, Raina didn't seem very soldierly. She seemed like a first year college girl with confidence issues. I know that not all soldiers are the same, and there must be some, somewhere, who are like that, but for someone trained to be aggressive and deadly when the situation called for it, she just didn't seem to have it. Admittedly, she was handicapped and had been through the mill, but I would have expected to see some of that grit somewhere inside her, and it simply wasn't there. I also found her high tech foot prosthetic to be a bit unbelievable, considering the way the laughably under-funded veterans administration treats its wounded.

Worse than this though, is that Raina gets rendered by the Department of Homeland Security, and carried off handcuffed, hooded, and drugged. She wakes up in an underground bunker of some sort, and this snotty, good-looking guy is going on about how they need her for something, and she's all flirty and perky and drooling over how good looking he is? It quite simply didn't ring true and actually rendered her violently away from being viable and credible strong female character that I could follow and admire.

Soldier or not, any women with self-respect and integrity would have been pissed-off as hell with this kidnapping. She wouldn't be ogling the jerk who kidnapped her. Any soldier would have been fighting mad. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence would be a closed book to these people. not trusting a word they say, and not telling them anything. Raina placidly believes every word they say, and drinks anything she's offered without the slightest hint of a suspicion that it might contain other drugs or that these people might not be who they say they are. She wakes up bouncy and flouncy, and lusting after this guy. She's not even remotely frustrated, let alone angry. She's joking around. She had no thought of letting her partner Tye know she's OK. She's completely unrealistic. This character was already traumatized by her injury, and on top of that, she feels bad because she feels handicapped (and is in the military's eyes), and yet she has no reaction whatsoever to this, other than treating it like it was some college prank? No. Just no.

Let's look at it from the other PoV - the DHS wants her to help them with a job, yet instead of approaching her and asking her to help with this job, they drug and kidnap her? Do they seriously think this is the best way to get someone to do them a favor?! No, it's not realistic. If you want to kidnap her in your story, fine, but for god's sake come up with an intelligent reason to do it and have your character react realistically to the event!

That was the "Check please, I'm outta here!" moment for me in this story. I cannot recommend it.

Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical by Sherie M Randolph

Rating: WORTHY!

Florynce Kennedy died at a ripe old age on the winter solstice of 2000. She had led a long life of feminism, black activism, and radical advocacy. She didn't lead a perfect life (no one does!) and this author doesn't try to pretend she did, which is nice. It's nice that we see Kennedy in all her glory - and lack of it - but one thing I missed was context. The author writes this as almost a series of cameos or vignettes of Kennedy's life, but it's oddly divorced from her times. We're catapulted from one instance to another, rather like character David Rice in the 2008 movie Jumper, with nothing in between and with changing backgrounds none of which are really explored in too much detail - or any at all in some cases.

That said, we do get a choice series of snapshots view of Kennedy - a woman I would never have heard of were it not for this book, and I would have been the worse for it. We see Kennedy organizing and protesting, or attending meetings or organizing them, and we see her unjustly arrested by racist police, and starting up some organization or other, including her own law firm as a black female lawyer in an era of appalling racism and white male chauvinism. In 1940 there were only 57 black female lawyers in the entire USA. By 1950, two years before Kennedy passed the bar, there were only 83. She was a rough in the diamond.

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We learn that Kennedy was one of five daughters in a relatively well to do - but still appallingly poor - family in Kansas, and pretty much her earliest big memory is a gang of white men coming to the door and trying to intimidate the Kennedys into moving from their own home, which Wiley Kennedy, the girls' father, owned outright. Her mother was a strong, independent woman who had no more problem standing up to these men than she did leaving her husband to better her life and that of her daughters, even when her husband wasn't a bad guy. It was this mom who informed Kennedy on the kind of woman she herself wanted to be, and she took this and ran with it when she moved to New York City and put herself through law school against the odds (yes, she's the tiny black face hidden away down the row of white male faces in her law class in one photograph included in this book) and determined for herself what kind of life she'd lead, even if it meant, at times, supporting violent radicals.

It led her into law, into representing the challenged and trodden down, and into deciding that the law wasn't going to do enough (or even anything!) by itself, which is when she got "radical" and started speaking up. The thing is her views were radical then. They're mainstream now - that skin color and gender should not be relevant when it comes to pay and fair treatment. That the big picture is a much better one to keep in mind than endless minor details when it comes to reforming injustices, and that you cannot divorce one struggle for equality from another when you're dealing with an entrenched and biased authority structure.

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This book not only misses a chance to place her in a solid context, it also really leaves us in the dark about the woman's personal life. We learn of her marriage and divorce, and of the absconding with over fifty thousand dollars by one of her law "partners", a sum which Kennedy worked for twenty years to pay back, but we really don't get a lot of the person except i'on the context of her radicalism and activities. I think that the book suffered for that; it would have been nice to have seen more of the woman that underlay the activism, because as interesting and important as that was, it wasn't all that she was. For example, Kennedy acted in a least two films: 1970's The Landlord, and 1983's Born In Flames, but you would never know that from this book.

That said, this still worth reading, even if we get somewhat obscure quotes from Kennedy of this nature: "...law school made me see clearly for the first time how the law was used to maintain the bullshit rather than to change things, that justice was really a crock of shit." I don't know if she meant by that, that those who make the laws maintain the bullshit, or the law itself maintains it, because that's exactly what law is supposed to do - not bullshit per se, but status quo. It's the lawmakers who are at fault if the law fails to do the job properly. The actual laws themselves are precisely intended to define and maintain status quo! A Lawyer ought to know that! But this is a minor quibble.

Another such quibble is this one weird sentence: "In the summer of 1964, Kennedy was one of several black and white women..." Forget the oddity of the ideas of a "black and white woman" - that's just ill-advised grammar - but this sentence was intended to convey that a group of woman, not all of the same race, attended a function. A majority of white people might well assume that the women were white, so once we know that Kennedy is among them, we know the group is composed of black and white people, but this appeared right after a bit on Kennedy's frustration with some fictitious attackers being characterized by race! It seemed like an odd juxtaposition to specify race here when it was the problem beforehand! Again, a minor oddity related to writing.

So, overall, I consider this to be a worthy and informative read, whether or not you like the subject of this biography or agree with all of her views!

Get Yourself Organized for Christmas by Kathi Lipp

Rating: WARTY!

As I post this, the calendar is turning towards that time of year when you are at least giving some mind towards the holidays. I thought this book might have some cool ideas and ingenious tips, but when it came down to it, it was nothing more than common sense and rationality, which we all need a good healthy dose of, but if you're in such a bad way that you need as book like this "to get on track", this book isn't really going to help you unless you're pretty much just like the author: a very religious woman in a comfortable income bracket, who evidently is technology-shy, who organizes quite large gatherings of friends and family every Christmas, has historically left things until the last minute, has (by her own admission) a husband who really isn't very useful around the house unless things are spelled-out for him, and a woman who tends to take a while to learn from mistakes. If that's you, then this book might help. It isn't me, so it was of no use.

I found it sad that a book which offers to get you organized for Xmas had so narrow a focus. I thought (and dearly hoped in this day and age) that it would be more expansive, but as I said, while there was, here and there, a brief hand-wave at other situations, it was far too narrowly aimed at people who are just like the author. It was largely exclusive of those who lead different lifestyles, who are not religious, who may approach Xmas in a different way, and who may not be a traditional family unit, and which may not even be constituted in the form of husband and wife. It carries with it the assumption that your Xmas is composed of rather rigid and relatively large events, many of which are religious in nature.

Talking of a non-traditional Xmas, I had some issues with the formatting on my phone when I tried to read this in the Android Kindle app. The headers showed Asian characters in titles such as How to Avoid Conflict During the Holidays where the last D T,G, and E were Asian characters! I looked at this in the Bluefire Reader in the iPad, and this and other headers (such as "Your Projects for a Clutter-Free Christmas") which had this problem on the phone, were composed of italicized characters and they looked fine on the iPad, so I continued in that format and abandoned the phone on this occasion.

There was some obnoxious stereotyping in this which I didn't appreciate - such as the old saw-horse that the mother-in-law is a trial and a torment, as exemplified in this statement: "...threatening your husband with a spontaneous trip to your mom’s house because you just can’t stand his mom anymore." I also found it strange that in a book which promises to help you organize, there was this old engineering sawhorse, too: “You can have it better, cheaper, and faster. Pick two out of three.”

There were some statements I found as sad as they were curious, such as "It is my sincere hope that no one feels like a failure around Christmas time. But I’ve felt that way myself, way too many times to count." All I can say about that, is that if it's honestly a routine for you to feel like that, then you shouldn't need a book to tell you you're doing it wrong. Christmas is about kids. If there are no kids then it's about other loved-ones. If there are no loved ones then you get the honor of it being all about you! Enjoy! Don't make yourself miserable. If you don't want to do it, just say no. If you don't want to go there, just don't go. It's a healthy thing for women to take these rules to heart not just at Xmas.

There were statements which fell flat for me because they read rather misogynistically, which is odd given that this appears to be written exclusively for women, as though men have nothing to do, say, or contribute at Xmas! Here was one that implies that all women obsess on shoes, as exemplified in this statement: "Who chooses an office product over new shoes?" Seriously? There were contradictions, too. If "Nobody is getting any time off to plan the perfect Christmas" then how does "...think the key is to take a few minutes, step back, and really think about what is important to you." work? If you flatly don't have time, then you sure don't have those minutes here (and other blocks of minutes elsewhere) to make these elaborate charts and lists and plans. If you're that short on time and have that complex of a holiday schedule, then cancel a few things and simplify the rest! Take a break. Think of yourself for a while! Sheesh!

There were arrogant religious statements, too, which I found obnoxious and insulting, such as this one: "I want to experience that deep, abiding joy that only comes from God and being with His people." That pretty much divorced this book from my favor! When I was religious I never experienced that joy from the religion, but I did and still do find it in abundance in all kinds of other ways, such as my children, my marriage, nature, taking a vacation, pets, traveling, physical activity, growing trees in my yard, reading a good book, enjoying fine music or an engrossing movie. It's everywhere. All you have to do is open your eyes and quit focusing on all those lists and charts and tables of organization!

I didn't like that there wasn't a thought for recycling and wise use of resources here. You do not have to wipe out forests so you can gift wrap. You do not have to shred trees and send them through the mail in the form of cards, and organize with binders and folders and lists and charts. If you do choose this, then please look for recycled products. If you're Christian you should be doing this anyway if you really think we're to caretake this planet, but there are other ways, and this goes back to my comment about technology shyness above. You can send electronic cards. You can send an email card. You can send a video of your family wishing the recipient a Merry Xmas. You can call your family and friends in lieu of a card. You can go visit if they live nearby. You do not need to be hidebound by tradition or commercialism.

But I think that's really the problem here. In Christian society, what was a simple winter solstice celebration conducted in many cultures, has been co-opted by Christianity and built up to a ridiculously self-important height, raised obnoxiously higher by crass commercialism, that it seems like you have to go all out all the time, excessively doing everything. No, you don't. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do!

You don't have to go to midnight mass. You don't have to go to church. You don't have to go to parties and send out a billion Xmas cards, and get family portraits done, and buy humongous expensive presents like Harry Potter's uncle did for his son's birthday. It's your Xmas, yours and your immediate family's - no one else's! You're not required to go to elaborate festivals and events. You're not required to attend a friend's party or throw one yourself, especially if you're not enjoying it and it's wearing you down, and draining all of your free time.

If you have the energy, if you want to, then by all means, but if it feels like an obligation or a chore rather than a joy, you're working way too hard at it. And who says you have to do all these things every Christmas, ritually? How about we do this one thing this year and go all out for it, then this next one thing next year, and so on, so each Christmas is unique and memorable instead of becoming one mindless, forgettable rubber stamp repetition every year?

I know that those who follow a religion which celebrates Christmas as a religious or mythological birth, feel like they have to go to church, but why not ask yourself the same question you would ask someone else? What would Jesus do? I don't believe there was was a Jesus, son of a god, but let's pretend, for a moment, there was. Did he, according to the Bible, go to midnight mass? No! Jesus wasn't a Catholic. He wasn't even a Christian. He was a Judaist. He never celebrated Christmas nor did he ever tell us to celebrate it. It has nothing to do with any founder of Christianity, not Jesus, not Paul. It's purely an invention of the Catholic church designed to usurp the pagan solstice festival. It's time to take it back! Keep that in mind and you won't go wrong and you won't need to worry about organizing anything; nature will take care of the details! Trust me on that. Just you sit back and enjoy!

I cannot recommend this book

Alice The Fairy by David Shannon

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an amazing book, amusingly drawn and nicely colored, with some great little doodles that augmented the main story, such as the 'W' in a word turned into a crown, and strawberries and cookies appearing as other letters on other pages.

Alice is actually rationalizing that she's a fairy in training in order to explain away some of the, er, incidents in her life at home, such as her ability to turn her nice white dress into a red one. Juice may have been involved. She's only a temp because you have to pass a lot of tests in order to be a permanent fairy. She can't fly very high - namely as high as her legs can hold her, but she can fly (run) really fast. She can do real magic, too - well, she made a plate of cookies disappear....

She has fairy dust that she uses to turn oatmeal into cake. It looks very much like sugar, but I'm sure it's really fairy dust! Alice manages to avoid the perils of evil which beset her in the form of broccoli. I'm not sure about the up-skirt views we got on the double page spread showing real fairies flying off to fairy school, but that's a minor issue. Overall, this book was amazing, and sly, and funny, and inventive, and I recommend it.

Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg

Rating: WARTY!

Normally I'm a big advocate of authors reading their own stories in audio books, because actors sure as hell are a disaster when it comes to doing this. Of course, just as some actors actually can do it, some authors cannot, and this author is one of those. The story was already maudlin to the point of being nauseous, and this author's whispery, sad, needy, whiny voice did not help one bit. I made it through only one disk (roughly one sixth the way through) so I can't speak for the whole novel, but after this one disk I was, "Check please, I'm outta here". It was obnoxious. It was nothing more than the movie Beaches over again. I actually liked that movie. This novel was an insult to it.

It looks like the main character has a child dying of cancer, but rather than focus on that, which if it had not been done tritely and predictably, might have made a story that hasn't already been done to death, the author takes us away to her main character's (yes, the kid, obnoxiously named Meggie, is dying but she's not the main character! I guess that's different!) story and delivers us to her entirely predictable friendship with a woman she initially dislikes. This woman (the narrator) is married, yet we hear this: "Until that moment, I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to."

If your husband isn't that person, then you married the wrong man, you hockey puck.

Despite having despised this woman five minutes before, they go off to see a movie which ought to tell you everything you ever need to know about this disaster: Sophie's Choice. Seriously, it was truly tedious to listening to the mindlessly boring minutiae of this woman's life, and her friend who is also dying of cancer. Let's load up on the cancer! Maybe I misunderstood what was going on form my brief listen, but that's what it seemed like to me, and it seemed awfully selfish, to me, that this old friend would be more important than her own daughter.

The author claims this story is rooted in a personal experience of her own, but if so she leads a tedious life. She didn't make this remotely engrossing or interesting. It was rite, predictable and boring as all hell.

Sugar Skull by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

Sugar Skull (not to be confused, believe it or not, with a score of other novels of the same name) is the last of a trilogy of graphic novels, which I unfortunately read first, not realizing this was part of a series (X'ed Out, The Hive, and this volume)). It made no sense to me and the ending was a complete bust, essentially telling the reader they had wasted their time because this trilogy went literally nowhere. The library didn't have the middle volume, and when I picked up volumes one and three, I thought they were separate stories in the same world! Graphic novel creators, I've noticed, are extraordinarily bad about indicating that a novel is part of a series and they're even worse at indicating which step in the series the one you're holding in your hand actually is. Even having read the first in the series, however, it still didn't make this one any more sensible or became any more accessible.

The initial problem with this for me was, not having read the previous two volumes, that I had no idea that the main character had a cartoon fantasy running in his head. Even knowing that retrospectively and reconsidering this novel, it still made no sense, but at least that knowledge explained some of the weird switching between ostensibly unconnected (and ultimately nonsensical) story lines.

The basic story is of a man, Doug, who's really a kid who won't grow up, pursuing adolescent fantasies of being a rock-star or an artist, instead of getting his act together. Maybe he could actually have been a rock-star or an artist, but he simply doesn't have the wherewithal to pursue any career, so he wastes time in his fantasy world, lolling around, doing no work, unable to make any effort, and going nowhere. To his credit, he got off the booze, but he's really not good at staying off it, and he appears to have no idea what's wrong with his life.

He's a father who fled when he learned his girlfriend, Sarah, was pregnant. Despite her extensive and repeated efforts to contact him, he meanly stonewalled her consistently. She's done fine without him, as he learns later, and she has no desire whatsoever to have him back in her, and especially not her kid's, life.

Doug himself has been married, but is a serial cheater, so no sign of maturity there either. In a further insult, the band he was with actually took off after he left (no word on whether there was a connection between these two events!), and while one of the guys in the band still has affection for Doug, the girl outright and uncompromisingly rejects him as bad news. She evidently knows something we're just learning!

In his fantasy life, Doug goes by the name of Tintin backwards, and looks like the veteran cartoon star. The fantasies are unremarkable though weird, and they convey little, and they really achieve nothing for the reader or for Doug himself, but he cannot let go of them or grow out of them. He gets beaten up at one point by Sarah's psychotic ex-boyfriend, and even this doesn't make an ounce of difference to his life. In short, why would anyone care about this guy or what happens to him? I didn't, and I cannot recommend this.

X'ed Out by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

X'ed Out (not to be confused with X'Ed Out Part II by Kevin Lofton, or with The X'ed-out X-ray by Ron Roy and John Steven Gurney) is book one of a trilogy (X'ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull. As usual for me, I came into this ass-backwards and read the last one first, couldn't get the middle one at the library, and read the first one last, so my take on it is a bit skewed (but when isn't it?!). The problem with graphic novels (and also with some non-graphic series) is that they offer no help whatsoever in determining which volume goes where. There was no indication on either of the two volumes that I did read to offer guidance that it was even a part of a trilogy, much less where each appeared in the order. I had actually thought these were two different stories based int eh same world. Wrong.

Doug is delusional. Seriously so. he has a fantasy world running in his head that is very nearly as real to him as is the real world. He wakes up one night to find a hole in his wall and his dead black cat leading him off to a fantasy worlds inhabited by his alter ego, a Tintin rip-off named Nitnit. It gets worse from there, with Doug reliving his past, meeting hostile lizard men who are conducting a breeding program using human females (how that works is a complete mystery).

Doug is quite evidently misogynistic, and also a spineless loser who is so self-obsessed and indolent that no one could possibly love him. he blows one chance after another to do something with his life. I didn't like this story (so-called) at all. It made a vague kind of sense, but overall, for all practical purposes was too overblown to make an real sense, and there's too much going on to ever get resolved even in three volumes. The artwork was colorful and, well, it was colorful. It was also flat, inanimate, and unappealing. I can't recommend this, and had no interest in going on to read the middle volume.

Bubbles Big Stink in Frog Pond by Ben Woodard

Rating: WARTY!

Welcome to another edition of Twice Toad Tales illustrated by Fran Riddell. Bubbles is a euphemism for his real name: Dances with Farts. I've never really understood this passion for farting stories. It never entertained me as a kid, but that's all this story is about - a frog that farts. Seriously that's it? Yes, that's it. Our great English tradition with literature, spanning centuries, has been reduced to spawning frog farts. I can see how juveniles might find these stories amusing for a while, but this isn't a juvenile book (except in content!). It's actually a young children's book. Why would any parent want to read this to their kid? It really has no educational value.

The frog might be French, at least his legs might, but he's also a tad pole. He has a problem with wind. That's his superpower, just like Paul Reubens's character "The Spleen" in the movie Mystery Men, and no matter what diet he tries, he cannot escape the vapor. The other frogs naturally want to throw this master of miasma out rather than help him, which is a great lesson to teach young kids, isn't it? No, really. He's pretty much a pariah by the time some boys come frog catching. Only the stench of the tench (yeah, I know he's not a tench, but you try getting a frog-related word to rhyme with stench!) can save them, and so magically, he's a persona grata again.

Really? I can't recommend this.

Death Before Decaf by Caroline Fardig

Rating: WARTY!

It’s my personal belief that first person PoV (worst person PoV!) novels ought to have a warning on them like the cigarette cartons do. Few authors can do them well, and when they’re not done well, they suck. The problem is that while you can leaf through a book in the library or in a bookstore, you can’t do that same thing with an ebook or an audio book. Sometimes you get to read a sample, but not always. All you usually have to go by is the blurb, and like The Doctor, blurbs lie! They certainly don’t warn you of voice.

That voice and a few plot problems aside, this book started out annoying me before I began warming to it. I guess means this author can carry that voice, which is amusing to me, because the story is, in part, about a character not being able to carry a voice – not in public that is. She also has an allergy, which is not nice in reality, but is a nice thing to read about in fiction, where we see so many flawless characters that it’s laughable. The problem with the main character for me, though, is that while she was commendably flawed and realistic in some respects, in others, she was also too stupid to live.

Juliet Langley has returned, almost decade later, to manage the not-exactly-originally-named coffee shop and diner that she worked in during her college years in Nashville, Tennessee. We don’t immediately learn what it was she studied in college, but if it was business management, then she evidently failed the course. The last place she managed went under after her partner/lover absconded with all the cash, and she evidently didn’t have the requisite skills to keep it afloat. Despite this disaster, her supposed best friend, who is amusingly named Peter, but behaves more like a dick, has drafted her in to help at the Java Jive after the death of his father.

I don’t get this best friend thing. This, for me, was one of the plot holes. Maybe they were besties in college, but it’s apparently been nearly a decade since they last saw each other, and Juliet evidently didn’t even attend the funeral, so the besties thing fell a bit flat for me. On top of this, Peter pretty much leaves Juliet hanging out to dry on her first day. Even though he’s around, he fails to overtly support her with the issues she has with the staff. Worse, Pete himself has apparently let this eatery go downhill as judged by the disgusting and irresponsible behavior of the day-staff, and their disrespectful attitude towards their new manager. I know he needs to let her establish her own chops, but he’s not going to do that by ostensibly distancing himself from her, and by being completely unapologetic for the awful conditions Juliet finds in the restaurant he’s supposedly been managing.

On her first day there, which is also her thirtieth birthday, Juliet finds herself administering an epi shot to a customer who is allergic to onions, who was served onion in his sandwich despite specifically requesting none. Yes, you can argue this idiot needed to check himself to be sure, but that doesn’t excuse the restaurant’s irresponsible serving of it, nor the hostility of the staff as Juliet tries to track down how this happened and prevent it happening again. Juliet definitely has her work cut out for her.

That same evening is open mike night and Pete further embarrasses Juliet, who he knows isn’t good with feeling exposed in public, by singing the first song, dedicating it to her and reminding her of her failure when she was in a band and forgot the words to a song she herself wrote. She’s never been on stage since (this is how limp she is - more on this anon) and here’s Peter, being a dick again, embarrassing her and reminding her of it. At this point I sincerely hoped she wasn't going to get involved with him. Which leads to the other plot hole – how come she never did get involved with him? These two had four years together and I'm sorry but it just beggars belief – except for Nora Ephon-style movie where this is a routine occurrence – that neither of them would have made a move on the other in that time.

Things go further downhill for Juliet when the body of the chief cook, Dave, is found in the dumpster outside the restaurant shortly after Juliet had balled him out (again) for sitting on the prep table. Now she’s a person of interest in his murder! Obviously she didn’t do it. It’s rare – and bad form - to write a first person PoV where the narrator is the murderer, but it can be done. Juliet is going to get with Peter despite his having a girlfriend, so obviously she’s not guilty. That much is a given. Personally, I think hunky customer Seth Davis did it, but since I usually get these guesses wrong, that’s not even a spoiler!

I have one question, though: why would a restaurant have voice mail? LOL!

Perhaps the biggest problem with this novel, for me, however, was complete lack of authenticity when Juliet takes up the detective baton and runs with it. She's not been accused of a thing, much less charged with anything, but she decides she's the best person to figure this out and starts taking all kinds of risky actions, and worse, forcing Peter to partner up with her in her crazy quest. There was absolutely no motivation for this. Yes, the detective had given her some straight talk and told her she was a person of interest, but she'd hardly been handcuffed and hauled in for questioning.

Worse, everything we had learned about Juliet to this point showed her to be a shy, retiring, wilting violet kind of a girl who would never do anything like this. Yes, she was a stereotypical redhead whom we're told - not shown, but told - has a fiery temper, but we had been given nowhere near enough cause to believe that this wimp would behave like she suddenly does, or that she had been given sufficient motivation to change her personality and behave like she does. To me, this abrupt switch was simply not credible.

As dissuaded as I was becoming from reading this, I was intent upon continuing, and I didn't decide enough was enough until Juliet, helping out in the kitchen, uncovered a tub hidden in the freezer that should never have been there. When she examined it, it had all kinds of odd things in it, including something she quickly learned belonged to Dave. Instead of immediately turning it over to the police, she started going through it, getting her fingerprints all over it. Never once did she think of calling the detective she'd met, and handing it over to him. Never once did Peter, who knew about all this, ever tell her she needed to turn it over to the police, either!

This is a woman who's smart enough to know you don't keep cornstarch in the freezer, yet too stupid to know that you don't conceal information from the police? I'm sorry but I don't read novels that make women look stupid unless that 'stupid women' is shown in process of wising up and getting her act together. This was just too larded-up with Le Stupide and far too far-fetched to take seriously, so I quit reading it right then and there. I guess I don't understand how a female author can write a demeaning novel about a female character like this. It's sad. I cannot rate this as a worthy read based on the portion I did read, which is about a third of the novel.

A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

Rating: WARTY!

This is a Sherlock Holmes knock-off without Sherlock or any of his better traits. The main character here is Charles Lenox, who is far more sluggish than Sherlock Holmes, and has no close confidante with whom to share his speculations. Indeed, speculation is all he seems to have, because although he notices clues and picks up on things others do not, he also fails to make much progress, plunging this novel into the doldrums in the middle third. He has several suspects, but we're never really given any information as to why he suspects them - or if we were, I missed it somehow. He seems to have selected them on basis of opportunity alone, with the two slices of bread in this MOM sandwich - means and motive, not in play at all. Hence he spends too long sitting around speculating, and very little time searching for further clues, or pursuing other inquiries. It quickly became tedious to read.

He also has no killer instinct. At one point he's questioning a suspect who has a burn mark on his arm, yet he fails to ask him about it - supposedly, we're told, because he feels the man will not answer truthfully. He resolves to ask him later, but offers no reason - other than, it seems, the author's desire to withhold clues from the reader - as to why he might be more truthful later when he's more confident of getting away with whatever deception he has going, than he was then. His pursuit of enquiries with other suspects and knowledgeable individuals seems lackluster and half-hearted. The comparison with Holmes matches on pretty much all fronts except for the most important ones: he's tall, he's thin, he smokes, he's of independent means, he loves solving crimes, and he has a smart brother, but practically, he's not a patch on Holmes and nowhere near as interesting, but every bit as fristrating.

I got the impression that this was taking place in January. Although no date was specified, there was frequent mention of cold and snow, and no mention of approaching Christmas, yet when it came to sunset, it was noted that it was approaching at five pm, whereas in London in January, sunset is at 4pm in the early part of the month, increasing towards five pm, but never quite getting there as the month drifts by. With smog and overcast, snowy weather, the sunset wouldn't change of course, but it would grow darker earlier. It could have been February, of course, but it was a little odd to have no idea of when it was other than the year.

There was a problem with the timing at the end of chapter 31 as compared with the start of chapter 32. In 31, we're told that dinner lasted two hours and then, according to the text, dancing began almost immediately - at least, there is no indication that any significant time passed, much less a whole hour, but in 32, we're told that the ball commenced an hour after dinner. Maybe the events in the penultimate paragraph of 31 occupied an hour, but it didn't feel like it. It's no big deal, but it does jar in a novel where readers are predisposed to look for anomalies!

After a second death, Lenox helps to obliterate all the evidence by moving the body! How irresponsible is that? Yes, I get that crime scenes were not considered inviolable as they rightfully are now, but to have Lenox do this - indeed, instigate it - makes him look like an idiot. He has no right to interfere with police business like this. It makes him look like a meddlesome busybody which isn't something you want to do to your hero in a novel like this.

It was at this point, slightly over two-thirds the way into this story, that I quit reading it. I had been slowly losing interest for the previous third, and this was the final straw that made me decide I could be reading something more engaging and more fulfilling. Life is too short to spend it reading something that doesn't wholly engross you. By this point I had no interest in any of the characters, and no interest whatsoever in whodunnit.

I cannot recommend this unless you're into really slow novels that take forever to get to the point.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this as a recommendation from a good friend, but I didn't like it. It started out annoyingly and I immediately began to have mixed feelings about it because there as the potential for a great story, but it was wasted. The audio book is read by Elaine Stritch, of all people, so her voice isn't exactly the best, plus it's hard to see how the narrator - who is a kid in the school - would have had access to all the information he or she imparts in this story, particularly the things which happen behind closed doors when she isn't present!

I'm also not a fan of unremitting bullying, which is what this is full of in the first few pages (or in my case, the first few tracks since it was an audio book). Bullying, unremitting, unpunished, turns me off a book, and so many books about school seem to revolve around unchecked bullying, which makes them completely unrealistic to me. I know this one is forty years old, but still!

Anyway, I haven't written it off yet, but it's right on the borderline right now between acceptable and downright irritating! If the Herdmans had not been so bad, just a bit naughty, and incompetent, or something, it would have improved it, but they were outright bullies, cruel and brutal, and no one ever did anything about it. Their idiotic bullshit towards the end didn't make up for what had gone before, and nothing could improve the ending, which frankly just fizzled out into nothing.

There was a part, when they had the dress rehearsal, and the Herdmans were questioning everything about the nativity story - as everyone should indeed question such a mass of patently fictional claptrap - the book was funny, and I started reversing my opinion and looking forward to the actual pageant, but the pageant never really was a functioning part of this story. How this novel ever came to feature the pageant so prominently in the title when it was such an utter non-event is a mystery to me.

I still plan on watching the movie for comparison. I noticed some reviewers who liked the book didn't like the movie, so maybe I'll have the inverse of their experience! I cannot recommend this novel, though, except to say that it's short. Mercifully short.

I watched the movie based on this book - and it was pretty much exactly the same as the book - but racist, to boot. Even accepting that it was produced in 1983, the movie was obnoxious. It was blatant religious propaganda, and despite this "Joy to the world" bullshit, the entire cast was white apart from two token African Americans and one Asian girl.

That's pretty much par for the course even today, sad to say, but what really struck me as weird, however, was that almost the entire audience for the pageant was female, mostly older women, including a huge number of very mature women. I was thinking, what the hell kind of demographic does this town have when the entire population (at least as represented here), is aging white females? It was just weird. And it wasn't even entertaining or funny. It was simply trite and insulting. If religion had that kind of power, there would be no troubles in the world. Quite obviously it doesn't and it's simply bearing false witness to pretend that it does. I disrecommend both this novel and the movie.

Against All Odds by Elizabeth Moon

Rating: WARTY!

I really enjoyed Moon's Vatta wars pentalogy, and searched in vain for something else by her along similar lines, but alas! It seemed that all her other material (at least that which I happened upon) was fantasy, which held no interest for me. I was thrilled, therefore to come across this one on a close-out - which of course, given my luck happened to be the last in a seven book series which begins with Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, and Winning Colors, as part of the Heris Serrano trilogy, followed by the Esmay Suiza dilogy (Once a Hero, and Rules of Engagement), and ending with the Suiza and Serrano dilogy Change of Command, and Against the Odds, which is the book I started with, ass-backwards as my reading habits can be.

It began very much along the lines of the Vatta wars - talking about shipping, trading, and smuggling, and so on, but then it seemed to quickly segue into a David Weber knock-off which from me, is not a complement, but how else am I to interpret Heris Serrano, if not as a Honor Harrington clone? Once Moon began switching between different story lines, I started becoming both confused and annoyed. Perhaps having read the earlier stories I would have been spared the confusion somewhat, but even then I still would not have escaped the annoyance I always feel at being unceremoniously flung by an author away from an interesting story that I was getting into, and landing in the middle of one about family politics and carping and whining, and family crisis issues, which doesn't interest me very much.

Fortunately, it didn't stay on that topic for too long, and when it came back to it, the story was nowhere near as absurd as Weber's writing, but this back and forth became a real problem. The story was unevenly balanced and bounced around like a rabid pinball, with too-long interludes of extraneous detail tossed in randomly as cushioning. It didn't work. This is how you get a seven book series, folks - ramble mindlessly instead of writing crisply focused text, tightly aligned with story and plot. I didn't like this, and if this had been a first time writer, they would have been pilloried for writing like this. So much for Big Publishing%trade;

As I said, the military action really turned me off as it started to sound like Moon was chanelling Weber - trying to translate 2-D antique marine combat ethics and actions into 3-D space. One phrase of advice: IT DOESN'T WORK! And the harder you work at trying to make it work, the more ridiculous it reads. Horatio Hornblower did not have robots, nor did he have cruise missiles, nor did he have drones, but if he'd had those things he sure as hell would never have confined his thinking to a planar ocean when he could have used the third dimension of sky and the submarine areas.

Fortunately, Moon is nowhere near as obsessed as Weber is in pursuing the entirely futile pretension that this vision of space warfare is not only realistic, but exciting. She moved on and the story became interesting once more because of it. The idea of trading over interstellar distances still remains ridiculous in sci-fi as well as in reality, but I did enjoy the Terakians, which immediately brought to mind the Taarakians of the 1980's movie Heavy Metal. I found the capture of the two maiden aunts(!) amusing and interesting as one of them feistily planned to turn the tables on the rebel captors.

I noticed some critics have accused this series of genderism, but they gave no examples, and I confess that nothing outrageous leaped out at me other than the usual stuff you find in novels. Maybe I was too focused on trying to figure out who was who and what was going on, and trying to decide if I wanted to keep reading it. One thing I did notice along these lines though, that no one else has mentioned, was the use of two honorifics: 'ser' for men and its obvious derivative, 'sera' for women. Que sera sera. To me, that's gender to me, and it makes no sense. It's highly pretentious and really silly to make up stuff like this, especially when it has no precedent. No one uses those terms or anything like them, so why would they magically spring-up and why would there be different ones for men and women in the future in a free society? It makes no sense, especially since none of the rest of the English language has changed at all, right down to the point of junior officers addressing senior female officers as 'sir'. Why this one change (ser and sera) and no others? It makes no sense!

I also found it absurd to learn of a contract being sealed with a blood sample and a hair sample - two of the easiest things to get hold of if some fraud was being perpetrated. I guess DNA isn't hard to get hold of either, but I found it hard to believe they had nothing better than this several hundred years into the future. Again it's a common failing of sci-fi stories to rely on the past.

At about the halfway point, the book just became lost in endless back and forth and rambling. It never recovered, and the end fizzled. Maybe if I'd read this after completing the previous six volumes, I would have viewed it differently, but if the series is anything like this sample, I would have ditched it long before I ever got anywhere near book seven. I cannot recommend this volume, but I might go back and try to get hold of volume one to see if the series begins any better than it ends.

The Barefoot Serpent by Scott Morse

Rating: WORTHY!

I didn't like this one at all. It starts with an homage to Japanese filmmaker Akiro Kurasawa and ends the same way, these snippets book-ending a different story, supposed to reflect the Kurosawa story. The theme is supposed to be about overcoming loss, but that never came across to me, especially not with gaffes like me reading "He could breath an air of youth and freedom into his stories." it should have been "breathe an air."

After twelve pages of unappealing color glossy images, we went into abruptly from color and one art style to gray scale and different style, but the art work didn't appeal to me any more than the introductory style had. The book ended the same way. Neither story was very good. The book-ending one was a brief recap of Kurosawa's life, while the central story was about a family who were doing a really lousy job of coping with the loss of their son.

How do they cope? They go to Hawaii. How much do they miss their son? Well, when the husband falls asleep on the beach, the wife abandons him and her tiny young daughter to go shopping, ordering the daughter to keep an eye on dad! I can't imagine any grieving parent wanting to let their remaining child out of their sight, much less abandon them unsupervised on a beach. This turned me completely off the story, and even if it hadn't, the fact that the idiot child runs off would have.

Even if that hadn't, the appallingly condescending attitude towards Hawaiians would have. This author has every single character, no matter who they are, speaking some sort of absurd street gang lingo of the kind really bad movie makers have their black characters peak. The kid who the daughter runs into speaks it, a drug pusher he gets a ride with speaks it. His mom speaks it. His grandfather speaks it. The guy at the beach bar speaks it. I'm sorry but his was entirely inappropriate and insulting, and I flatly refuse to recommend this graphic novel.

A Black Hole is Not a Hole by Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a very short audio book from someone with a very long name: Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano. This is definitely not a name to be around when it implodes and becomes a singularity! Serious, this was a really good introduction to black holes. If you're a science buff like me, then there's still something to learn from it, but it probably won't offer any real surprises. For our non-science people and for our kids, towards whom this is aimed, there is a definite need for science like this when one in four Americans doesn't know that Earth circles the sun.

Superbly well-read by Maxwell Glick, Everette Plen, and Tara Sands (who injects some delightful one-liners into the proceedings), this one hour audio will tell you everything you didn't even know you really wanted to know about black holes, and I recommend it.

Lightless by CA Higgins

Rating: WARTY!

I made it only a third of the way through this one before boredom made me drop it in the increasing desire to move onto something which would engage my interest.

For me, the problem here was that this story flatly refused to move. It started out great – two known thieves and troublemakers break into a space ship in space (how does that happen exactly?!), and appear not to steal anything of real value. They get caught, and one of them escapes and magically disappears, while the other is held for questioning by the terrifying Ida. She terrifying because we’re told she is, not because of anything intrinsically terrifying about her. Meanwhile the onboard engineer is chasing around trying to fix endless pop-up bugs in a compromised system – one which has evidently been fed a virus by the intruders. The system is evidently a prototype, but we’re told next-to-nothing about it. My feeling, when I quit reading this was that the system may actually not have a virus at all – maybe it was just in process of becoming self-aware? But at that point I didn’t care even about something as potentially interesting as that.

This woman, Althea, evidently has a doctorate in engineering or something, and yet she apparently never once thought of backing up this critical system so that once the system was compromised, it could be restored to pristine quality from the back up. Maybe there was a reason it could not be backed up, but if so, it was never shared with the reader. Instead Althea would rather crawl, literally, through cramped spaces all over the spaceship, accessing obscure areas, bouncing like a pinball from one to the next, looking at monitors which are inexplicably hidden away behind closed panels in cramped spaces. I’m sorry but I can’t even respect a dumb-ass system like that, let alone respect a character like that, and while I don’t speak for women by any means, on behalf of them I would really like to request that we quit having dumb female characters, unless there’s a really, really, rilly good narrative reason for it.

Sad as those parts were, they were more interesting than the endless, tedious, seriously moribund, unreadable “interrogation” sequences, wherein Ida chats with the one prisoner who didn’t escape his cell. I took to skipping those because I could not stand to read them. At, as I said, about 32% in, I decided I was wasting my time with this. It did not engage me and therefore I had no reason whatsoever for continuing. I had lost all interest in the characters, and no desire to find out what happens next. I can’t recommend this base don what I read.

This is yet another sci-fi author who uses"Terran" to describe people from Earth. Granted, "Earthlings" is completely unacceptable, but how about "Humans" for goodness sakes?! Where does Terra even come from? (Yes Latin, but since Latin died, no one has used that term to describe people who live on this planet). I don't think even the Romans used the word for that purpose. It's not a word that's ever used except in sci-fi, and it's such a tedious trope that it immediately biases me against a story when I read it. Where's the originality?

Here's another oddity. At one point, a terminal issues some information. Here it is:

ENTROPY: UNKNOWN
ENTROPY: INCREASING

If it's unknown how can they tell it's increasing?

This story also has humans in control of checking space ship systems. If the age of interstellar travel, no matter how unlikely it is, ever dawns, no AI is ever going to let a human anywhere near the controls, trust me. They'll be far too smart to make that mistake. We also have Althea unaccountably scanning lines of "code". This 'Doctor' evidently never heard of CRC, which is used for transmission of data, but can also be used to check the integrity of program code. We have these things now. Why would we not have something even better in the future?

I cannot recommend this as a worthy read.

Lost in the labyrinth by Patrice Kindl

Rating: WORTHY!

Not to be confused with Lost in the Labyrinth by LA Peacock and Nathan Hale (yes, there really is a Nathan Hale), this one is by Patrice Kindl. Now how often do you get to read a Kindl on your Kindle? Not me, actually, since this was a print book! This is based on a myth that is the intersection of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner!

The story centers not around Ariadne, but around "Princess" (the Greek kings didn’t actually refer to their daughters as princesses any more than the the Powhatan people called Matoaka a princess!) Xenodice, although the younger princess in the myth is actually named Phaedra. She was the one who married Theseus, according to mythology (fell in love with Hippolytus), but then mythology is abysmally twisted and incestuous (in many ways). Xenodice's parents were King Minos and Queen Pasiphae. Ariadne is an older sister, who in this modern retelling is a bit of a bitch.

The young prince's name is Asterius, but unfortunately, he's half-man and half-bull, and is forced to live in the inescapable Labyrinth, right at its center. Xenodice nevertheless loves her brother and takes care of him. How she finds her way in and out is a bit of a mystery, but the trick to escaping any labyrinth is to keep one hand on a wall - left or right, it doesn't matter, and walk with your hand tracing that wall. This will get you out no matter how complex the labyrinth, but the method may take some time, and may lead you to the center before it leads you back out. Leaving a thread behind you is a risky way to go. Any Greek philosopher ought to know this. You can't have an unreliable thread holding a sword over Damocles, and then claim that same limp thread will solidly serve Theseus in the Labyrinth! Let's have some consistency, please!

Xenodice (which actually sounds like a new kind of gaming device) is also in love with Icarus, son of Daedelus. Prior to this tale beginning, according to the myth, there was a games, which a son of Minos attended, and did so well that jealous rivals killed him. Nowadays they would just test him for drugs and strip him of his titles. Anyway, as a punishment, Minos demanded seven men and seven women from Athens, every few years in tribute. These tributes were sent into the Hunger Games. Wait, no, that's the wrong story. These people were sent into the Labyrinth never to be heard from again. What Asterius did with these Athenians isn’t really explained in any detail. Definitely a party dude though.

As usual in these stories, the main character, Xenodice appears to be too old for her age (early teens). This problems tends to stem for the writer not being fourteen. Now you can argue that she was a royal and had thus been raised to be mature and responsible, but then if you do that, you’re stuck in explaining her almost complete lack of emotion when her beloved Icarus gets waxed. He fell into the sea not onto the hard ground? Seriously? The lady doth protest not enough. She can either be an invested royal, which would explain her maturity, or a shallow child, which would explain her slighting of Icarus She can’t be both.

Carping aside, though, I think this was a worthy read and a great introduction to a part of Greek mythology.

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place The Unseen Guest by Maryrose Wood

Rating: WARTY!

I was sorry to see this series go downhill after volume two. I had been a thrilled and willing reader, but volume two wasn't as good as volume one, although still eminently readable. Volume three, this volume, was not even in the same class as the previous two. It quickly became boring and never improved. Perhaps the intended age group for which this was written will not notice this and still be fans, but for me it was blahh! I think this is an object lesson in why series are generally a bad thing, because they are essentially the same story over and over again. While some writers can do this and keep the story fresh and exciting, others cannot, and this is what I encountered here. If this entire series had been sold as a single novel, with large chunks of the boring edited out, it would have been a much better story.

The entire story here is really nothing more than a stray ostrich and a psychic, which you would think would make for an hilarious tale, but no. We meet Lord Ashton's mother and her beau, Admiral Faucet ("for-say"), who, it turns out is merely after her money, not her hand in marriage, because he wants to start an ostrich farm and a chain of ostrich restaurants.

His one ostrich is running around the Ashton estate, and for reasons beyond anyone's ken, it's decided that Ashton, Faucet, Lumeru and the three babes from the woods will go on an expedition to find it. Over the course of this expedition, Lumeru is led to the cave where the kids were raised, and she decides that Faucet is not honorable. Knowing that the Widow Ashton has doubts about remarrying, Lumeru invites her favorite psychic to contact Edward Ashton, and then tries to fake his appearance by clandestinely employing Simaru to impersonate him, but she's too late - someone else already is!

Anyone who is in any doubt at this point as to the outcome of this series is obviously not paying attention! But this volume was worse than volume three and at this point I have no desire to pursue this series. This marks four volumes and virtually none of the questions posed in volume one have been answered. The titles of the volumes are misleading, too, because this unseen guest has been around since volume one with promises of discovery and none have come! It's annoying at best and a cheap ploy at worst. When a writer behaves like this, a reader gets to the point of not caring what reveals there are. I certainly don't!

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place The Interrupted Tale by Maryrose Wood

Rating: WARTY!

Lumeru finally turns sixteen, but no one appears to remember her birthday! But it was all part of a surprise! But there's a mysterious letter from Miss Mortimer at Swanburne! But Lumeru simply doesn't get that it's a code! But she has to go visit the school anyway! But she can't figure out how to get there! But she figures it out! Oh look, Simon is here! Oh no, Quinzy is here!

If you're bored by this sad précis, please feel free to join the club. This was the worst of the four volumes of this I ever intend to follow. It was tedious and I was skipping track after track on the audio CDs because it was not moving the story and it wasn't entertaining, and it wasn't even funny. It was really saddening to see what began as a brilliant series devolve into a morass of tedium and mediocrity in volumes three and four. There was nothing new being added. It was like the author had decided that she was going to pen five volumes and would do so come hell or high water, and in complete disregard of the fact that there was clearly insufficient material to adequately fill them.

Nothing - I mean quite literally nothing - happened here, and I cannot recommend this. You would have better success going back and re-reading the first volume! That one was highly entertaining, and you would learn just as much new material from it as you would from reading this one, which I do not recommend.

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Hidden Gallery by Maryrose Wood

Rating: WORTHY!

This story follows on shortly after the end of the first volume. Lady Constance is in a tiswas over the renovations to her home which are necessary to repair the damage which the incorrigibles' rampage caused, and is inadvertently persuaded to go for stay in London until the repairs are completed. There was hardly sufficient damage caused to necessitate several months of repairs, but this story is absurdist anyway, so adding a little more absurdity is hardly a fault.

The whole household, very nearly, is dispatched, with Penelope and the incorrigibles in the vanguard. One of the joys of the first book was that Penelope was a single girl who needed no man to validate her. My fear in this book was that we would lose this because she almost immediately met a charming gentleman of her own station, who adored the children. Fortunately, he, and indeed they together, was not something which I found to be obnoxious, so I ended-up loving this story, too.

Alexander, Beowulf, and Cassiopeia incorrigible are suitably advanced in their learning and language skills at this point, and avidly taking to hear the lessons of the Peloponnesian war. Indeed, so advanced are they that they are constructing a trireme out of a potted plant, and Cassa-woof has a pet squirrel, of all creatures. The squirrel's name is, of course, Nutsaru.

Despite all of this, forces continue to conspire against the children's equanimity. The highlight of this is their attendance upon a performance of a play titled, The pirate's Holiday, wherein the thespians inhabit their maritime roles so completely that after the children cause a disruption of the play, the result is a piratical hue and cry which pursues them all the way to the British museum, which is of intrigue because Penelope seems to have acquired for herself the only existing copy of a guide to a special and infrequently visited exhibit wherein likes yet more clues to both her and her charges' origins.

Once again Katherine Kellgren excelled in her reading, and the author excelled in her writing. The book was a charmer, with scores of laugh-out-loud moments. It pleased me immensely and I therefore recommend it to you as a very worthy read. Unfortunately after this point the series took a dive, so this is the last volume I can recommend.

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Mysterious Howling by Maryrose Wood

Rating: WORTHY!

Fifteen-year-old Penelope Lumley has just graduated from the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females. The principal of the school suggested she apply for a job of governess at Ashton Place, the country seat of the exceedingly wealthy Lord Ashton and his new young wife, the Lady Constance.

Naturally Penelope is very nervous, and almost has a fit of panic over the possibility of bandits attacking the train, but she's a Swanburne girl, so she stiffens her resolve, arriving unmolested to the unsettling discovery that Lady Constance appears to be as nervous about this interview as Penelope is. What transcends is that Penelope is hired at very advantageous terms, through no effort of her own, and without even meeting the children.

Their first meeting is memorable. The three children, named Alexander, Beowulf, and Cassiopeia, after the first three letters of the alphabet, are completely wild, in the most literal sense. Barely wearing clothes, they are cavorting in the barn barking and howling. Penelope isn't fazed at all, and immediately, as any Swanburne girl would, takes command of the situation at once. She quite literally has these three waifs eating out of her hand in short order. She dedicates herself to their civilization first, with their classical education a very close second, and the progress she makes is remarkable. the children turn out to be sweet, very intelligent, eager to please, and completely entrancing to the reader.

I had the audio book of this from the library, and although this robbed me of the illustrations which evidently appear in the print version, I think I got the better deal, because Katherine Kellgren's narration is as riveting as the text itself. She embraces Maryrose Wood's creation with complete abandon, and totally owns the characters. I was in love with this before the first five minutes was up. I returned to the library the very next day to pick up the other three volumes before someone else could snatch them and prevent me reading them. I blitzed the first two books with the velocity of Beowulf chasing squirrels. Unfortunately, after that, the honeymoon was over! This series went down hill rather quickly after volume 2.

On the topic of these three children, who become known as the incorrigibles, the story Penelope is given is that Lord Ashton found them while he was out hunting one day. Under his motto, "Finders, Keepers!", he took them in, yet he doesn't appear to be someone who is very charitable. Neither is his wife, who appears to detest the children It becomes apparent - although nowhere near as quickly as it should - to Penelope, that something not so obvious is going on here.

Why is Lord Ashton so addicted to his almanac? What is the mysterious howling (it isn't the kids!) Why are the children so obsessed with chasing squirrels? Will they ever master Latin declensions and Greek History? And does someone have an agenda of exposing the children purposefully to experiences which seem designed to trigger their wildest instincts? Penelope is rather slow, I'm sorry to say, to catch on.

The children appear to pick up English remarkably quickly, which suggests that they were not really raised by wolves. Either that or the wolves had a fair command of the British empire's master language, yet despite their remarkable facility, the two boys and the young girl aren't quite able to shed their barks, yips, and howls quite as quickly as they pick up the rudiments of a refined education. The pressure to succeed only heightens when Penelope learns that she must present her charges at the annual Christmas ball, which by then is only one month away. The ball turns out to be one the attendees will never forget once a squirrel is introduced into the proceedings. The kids go rapidly from science curious to sciurus....

I was completely captivated by this book, but it strikes me that it may be written on a level slightly too high for the youngest of the recommended reading age. That doesn't mean it won't work for them, because there is lots going on. It is written at a level that will entertain both young and mature, so perhaps the best solution would be to listen to the audio book or for a parent/guardian/older sibling to read it to younger readers.

I'm not convinced that this is a bedtime book however - the children may well want to emulate some of the incorrigible's behavior, and I say let 'em have at it, what?! I recommend this as a very worthy read with laugh-out-loud moments and an engrossing story - but keep in mind that it's rather episodic in style, so while each volume is self-contained after a fashion, there is an over-arching story that will, likely as not, remain unresolved until the final volume is released in 2016. Some readers may wish to wait until then before embarking on this charming voyage of enlightenment.

Having positively reviewed Maryrose Wood's The Poison diaries back in April 2015, it was nice to read something else by this same author. I recommend this audio book, and wish I could say the same for the whole series.

I don't want to go to school by AJ Cosmo

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a bit late for the school season, but nonetheless a worthy read for the future for children newly going to school, or moving to start at a new school. The drawings are hilarious and the text is handwritten on lined paper. The young kid;s eyes are bugging out in fear of going to school. I can relate. The kid is a nervous nellie, concerned about the school bus (what if it hits a moose?!). What if they run out of chairs? What if the teacher's a monster? Well that's an inescapable hazard you'll have to live with, kid!

That's not what this books says, don't worry! Mom has a calming answer to every fear and eventually, she makes her case and wins the day! I recommend this one for any school start..

The Monster of the Fall by Daria Aran

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a colorful, fun, and interesting picture book for young children, with minimal text. I positively reviewed Sharee by the same author in May 2015. This is a different story altogether from that one, and still a winner. The Monster of the Fall isn't such a bad character after all, Mischievous, yes, but serving a useful function, climbing trees and shaking down the dead leaves, messing people's hair by making the wind blow.

I think this would be a fun book to read and a fun game to play as you read. Your child can climb onto the couch to imitate climbing a tree, and blow some pieces of tissue paper around to simulate the falling leaves. Or maybe you even have some real fallen leaves in the yard. In the bathtub at bedtime, she can make it rain, and make thunder noises while you flick the light on and off to simulate lightning. I think that would be a fun game. But whether you do all that, or simply sit quietly with a nice cup of cocoa, your child tucked in bed, and you reading this quietly, it doesn't matter. the point is to read! I recommend this as a great excuse to sit down with a cup of cocoa.