The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2009 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTY!

Having enjoyed the movie derived from this graphic novel series, I was curious to see what the actual novel looked like (the movie bore little resemblance to the novels), and the library happened to have three volumes: 1910, 1969, and 2009, so I picked all of those up. The original series, began in 1999, had twelve issues, so I'm not sure how these relate to that. Wikipedia was unusually vague about how the issues were published and named, and how they related to one another.

In the end this one turned out to be worse than the 1969 edition was! There was no story here other than some oddball guy covered in eyes and one of the league members being in hospital for forty years treated as mentally incompetent, and another dropping out and becoming little more than a street beggar. Story? We don’t need no stinkin’ story, we got pretty graphics. Well no, you don't even have pretty graphics, and if you did, you'd still need an actual story. I cannot recommend this. I've decided that Moore is less after reading these three volumes.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1969 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTY!

Having enjoyed the movie derived from the first in this graphic novel series, I was curious to see what the actual novel looked like (the movie bore little resemblance to the novels), and the library happened to have three volumes: 1910, 1969, and 2009, so I picked all of those up. The original series, began in 1999, had twelve issues, so I'm not sure how these relate to that. Wikipedia was unusually vague about how the issues were published and named, and how they related to one another.

This particular volume, 1969, was presented as a slightly psychedelic 'summer of love' edition, but it really wasn't very good in terms of telling a strong and coherent story. The basic plot was that there's this dude who has found a way to transfer his essence (however you want to picture that) from his old body into a different, younger body. The younger body's essence is swapped into the old body, and in the example we're shown, the old body quickly dies because it has been poisoned for the very purpose for preventing the transferred younger essence from making itself known. This struck me as gobbledy-gook, but let's just take that and run with it.

The problem with this scheme is that the original transfer was from a very aged man into a younger man, but later this younger man, who is now older, but still looks hale and hearty, is planning on transferring his essence again into a rock star. That didn't strike me as a wise choice! And why he's so desperate to transfer at that point into this person isn't made clear. The worst problem, however, is that there is nothing to indicate what kind of a threat this guy posed. His entire story consisted of his desire to transfer his essence! So what? Who cares? He;s doing nothing - other than the criminal theft of a person's body! It's horrible for the person concerned of course, but it's hardly a world-shattering event!

Many of the characters I knew from the movie were alive and well in the 1969 edition, and working independently of the British government now. They had a rather amateurish 'secret hide-away' not very well hidden behind an electrical utility door down a dark alley. The problem with that was that the space inside was huge and really brightly lit, so anyone passing as they entered would have seen this and known something was seriously wrong with this picture. Alan Moore's story-telling was limp, and Kevin O'Neill's artwork was tame, so I wasn't impressed there either.

There was a lot of reference to British pop culture (from the era) and to Monty Python, such as Doug Piranha, and The Rutles (which was an Eric Idle spin-off). There were also references to the early Doctor Who long-running sci-fi show, in the form of a very fleeting cameo by Patrick Troughton, who played the second Doctor. I saw no other incarnations of the Doctor (at least none that were readily detectable to me!), but there was a Dalek which showed up in one psychedelic double page spread.

Whether the US audience will get the rest of the references that I caught, I can't say. They were peculiarly British. There was one frame featuring Simon Templar's Volvo 1800, from the TV show The Saint starring Roger Moore, which US audiences might get, but that's about it. There was a main character modeled on Michael Caine from his appearance in the original Get Carter movie, which was tame, but better than the Stallone remake. There was an appearance by Lonely, a character from the Edward Woodward TV spy show Callan.

There was Parker, the butler from the TV puppet show Thunderbirds, which to me was amusing, because the characters portrayed in the graphic novel seemed to me to be often posed unnaturally, as though they were marionettes from one or other of the Gerry Anderson shows. There was also a couple of frames featuring the venerable British tabloid cartoon icon Andy Capp. These were fun to spot, but contributed nothing to the value of the story, and that was the problem. Overall, I have to say that this was not a worthy read, because there really was no story there.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1910 by Alan Moore

Rating: WARTHY!

Having enjoyed the movie derived from the first in this graphic novel series, I was curious to see what the actual novel looked like (the movie bore little resemblance to the novels), and the library happened to have three volumes: 1910, 1969, and 2009, so I picked all of those up. The original series, began in 1999, had twelve issues, so I'm not sure how these relate to that. Wikipedia was unusually vague about how the issues were published and named, and how they related to one another.

The beginning of this story is a direct rip-off of a song from the Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill opera Die Dreigroschenoper produced first in 1928 and based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera first produced exactly 200 years earlier. The song was Mackie Messer, translated into English as the better known name of Mack the Knife. The music was by Kurt Weill and lyrics by none other than Bertolt Brecht. The song became very popular after Bobby Darin released a version of it in 1959.

The song (and the opera itself) is in many ways a precursor to gangsta rap and was radical, especially for its time. It satirized the British government, depicting them as no better than the thieves and con-artists they sought to apprehend and jail. John Gay's original was rooted in real life 18th century people. Jack Sheppard was somewhat of a Robin Hood character in his time and a celebrity amongst poor folk, but he was hung at Tyburn, at the age of twenty-two. Jonathan Wild was a wolf in sheep's clothing, adopting a two-faced approach to law-enforcement, chasing down criminals whilst availing himself of the criminal lifestyle. He joined Sheppard at the same gallows only a year later.

Kurt Weill's original song (Mackie Messer) mentioned only one woman, Jenny Towler, but the Darin version (Mack the Knife) listed a host of female names, some of whom were real life celebrities. For example, Lotte Lenya was the wife of Kurt Weill, and a celebrity in her own right as an actress, singer, and raconteur. Lucy Brown, however, is not to be confused with the modern actress of that name. Other characters were Louie Miller, Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver, and Polly Peachum (a name used in place of Lotte Lenya in some versions). The song was Darin's biggest hit, spending over two months at the top of the charts. It's funny to me, because the two month run was briefly interrupted by The Fleetwoods, with their release of Mr Blue. The Fleetwoods have nothing to do with band Fleetwood Mac, but the indirect connection between Mack the Knife and Fleetwood Mac wasn't lost on my warped brain.

In this graphic novel, those names pop up, sometimes quite amusingly. Jenny Diver, for example, is the name assumed by a run-away Indian woman named Janni, whose name is misinterpreted (typically for the time) as Jenny. She adds the 'Diver' portion to it because she loved to dive into the sea near her home in India. How she would know the English word 'diver' is left unexplained. She speaks English evidently, but didn't have much chance to use it in her native home. The Hindi word for diver is gotakhora, so why she didn't make her name up from something akin to that was quietly glossed over.

One problem with detailing Janni's life was that many panels contained text which was entirely in Hindi. The point of this, if there was one, was lost on me. The Hindi text was not translated, so I had no idea what was going on in those frames, except that her father was dying and she didn't want to take over this business - the business of running Captain Nemo's ship, not even after she learns later that her father has died. After this, she completely disappears from the story until an inexplicable and brief appearance towards the end. It made no sense after her flat refusal to become involved. The rest of the story is completely divorced from this and consists largely of some tedious dipshit dame singing the same nonsensical songs throughout, and no real story whatsoever. I can't recommend this drivel - and I've decided on a lot less Moore.

www:Wonder by Robert J Sawyer

Rating: WARTY!

I negatively reviewed WWW: Watch by this author back in November 2014. At the time, when I had just started reading it, it sounded good, and I found another in the series at very low cost and bought it. After the first book went south, I kept putting off even attempting the second one, but I recently decided to give it a try just to get it off my shelf - literally in this case since it was a print book. I found it was just as obnoxious as the previous volume had turned out to be, so I quit reading it after only a few pages and moved onto something else that has turned out to be quite engrossing. Life is way the hell< too short to keep gamely plowing through a novel which simply isn't doing it for you. Drop and find something better. It's never a mistake to move on.

My problem with this volume was in the way the Internet intelligence speaks. It's first person PoV, which is too often worst person, but it's worse even than that because, as the previous volume made clear, the intelligence reads Shakespeare and unaccountably adopts a Shakespearean tone which is antique at best and laughable at worst. The fact that this AI uses it is such a joke as to be unreadable. The first encounter with this was at the start of chapter three, just fifteen pages in, where I read, "I remember having been alone - but for how long, I know not...eventually another presence did impinge upon my realm." Tell me that's not the height of ridiculousness! I'm sorry but I can't take this seriously and neither should you. I cannot recommend this.

Vampire Academy graphic novel by Richelle Mead

Rating: WORTHY!

I favorably reviewed Vampire Academy (the original novel) back in May of 2014, and I favorably reviewed the movie, too. This is a third strike and you're in review since I liked this graphic novel, too.

I had no interest in the original print book version of this until I learned that some school (or schools) had taken the unprecedented and rather bizarre step of banning this entire series: not this novel per se, but the entire series, including unwritten future volumes! I thought this was so absurd as to be a joke, but then this is what organized religion does to people - it forces them to behave like morons. As for me, I was curious as to what it was that was in this series which had provoked such an extremist reaction. There was nothing to account for it other than religiously inspired stupidity. The first thing kids are going to do when they discover a novel is banned from school is to seek it out and read it!

This graphic novel, adapted by Leigh Dragoon and illustrated by Emma Vieceli, followed the original print book quite closely, but with a few necessary abbreviations, so I'm going to refer you to that review for details. With regard to this one, I enjoyed it. It was a fast read, well illustrated (if a little flatly) and it moved at a cracking pace. I recommend it, especially if you haven't read the novel.

Life Sucks by Jennifer Abel

Rating: WORTHY!

This graphic novel about vampires is hilarious. It deftly removes all the sickly sparkle from the modern genre (a sparkle which was never there in the early vampire stories save for the one written by John Polidori (The Vampyre), inspired on that famous night when Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein). In this story, there wasn't a glimmer of glamour. This one is more like a cross between Dracula and Clerks. The art work by the unlikely named Warren Pleece, and by Gabriel Soria was functional but nothing spectacular by any means. I wonder if this style was chosen precisely because it complemented the dressed-down" text? Who knows?!

The story is of a young man, Dave, who applied for a night shift job at a convenience store. He didn't know the store owner was a vampire, so went happily into the stock room where he was "turned" and became enslaved to his maker. I don't know who first invented that trope, but it is popular in the genre. Now the sort owner can get his employee to do anything he wants him to do for minimum wage and he can't be denied! Great business plan, huh? The sad thing is that from the employee's perspective, nothing has improved - it's all deteriorated. Dave doesn't get women fawning over him as vampires are popularly supposed to do. He still has to work for a living (so-called), and he used to be a vegetarian, so now his diet is appalling to him. He drinks plasma and substitutes, shrinking nauseously from the idea of actually biting someone. Un-life seems hardly worth living until he encounters a charming Goth girl, Rosa, a Latina.

Here's where the novel took a bit of a slide for me, because the only thing he (and his friends) have to say about the girl is that she's beautiful, so here we are once again objectifying women. Rosa is given no other credit. Admittedly the guy is lusting for her from afar and doesn't know her when the novel begins, and admittedly he's not the sharpest tack in the box, but this business of rating women solely on their looks is as primitive as it is obnoxious when you get right down to it. Graphic novels in particular need to get over this. In this case it was bad because Rosa is shown to be rather dumb and precipitous, so maybe they were right, and beauty is all she actually had going for her.

The funny thing here is that Rosa has a rather Twilight take on vampires and sees them as suave, sophisticated, wealthy dilettantes. She's unconvinced when Dave tries to educate her about how un-life actually is. Rosa starts falling for surfer vampire (now there's a concept) Wes, and Dave rails against it, pissing Rosa off, until she finds out for herself how Wes really is. Later, she learns of Dave's true nature. She wants him to turn her, but he won't, because he doesn't want to condemn her to his un-life style.

The ending is crappy, but it's worth putting up with that for the rest of the story. I recommend this as a worthy read.

The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia C DeFelice

Rating: WORTHY!
read by?

Read very competently by Christina Moore, this audio book is book one of the 'Ghost Mysteries' series. I'm not a fan of series mostly because they tend to be filled with fluff, repetitive, and un-inventive, but some are worthy or reading. This one isn't. I didn't even realize this was the start of a series until I read some other reviews for it, but at least it wasn't in first person PoV! The reviews were a bit odd; even one and two star reviews said this was a good read. I don't understand how you can rate a novel two stars and say it's good in any way. This is why I don't subscribe to the five stars review system. It's really meaningless. A novel is either worth the time or it isn't, period. For me, and acknowledging that I am not its intended audience, this one wasn't.

It started out great. It was age appropriate (it's middle grade) and had a gripping beginning: Allie the fossil-hunting explorer is stuck about a hundred feet up a crumbling shale cliff face and thinks she's going to fall when a voice comes out of nowhere and talks her down safely with no more than cuts and abrasions for her troubles. Allie starts to hear the voice more often, and finds herself the beneficiary of a nice old blank diary - in which words start appearing slowly, rather like the diary in Harry Potter #2.

The problem with ghost and horror stories like this is that it makes no sense that the mystery is slowly unveiled. I see this all the time in this kind of tale - the horrors or the ghostly visitations begin slowly with random bits and pieces building to a crescendo. Why? The authors never explain that. Obviously it's to draw the reader in and build tension, but within the story it makes no sense. The Exorcist was a classic example of this kind of build-up, although that did contain some rationale for the slow burn - it was to draw in the priests and keep people confused, but in the case of this story, where Lucy Styles was evidently murdered, why did the ghost simply not tell Allie "I was murdered by X" right from the off? Nothing is offered to account for this!

If the ghost can talk Allie down a cliff face, clearly it has no problem with communication. Why not say "I'm Lucy, I have some 'splainin' to do! My body is buried at location X, and I was murdered by person Y, you can find evidence for this hidden in spot Z"? Clearly it's so the author can spin this out into a short story, but when nothing is given to account for the lethargy, it makes the story sound amateurish and fake.

That wasn't even the worst problem. Obviously in a children's story, the children have to be the center of the action. You can't have them failing to solve a mystery and encounter no danger or delight of sudden discovery because they handed-off the evidence to the police or to their parents, but there are ways of writing those scenarios which make them bear at least a veneer of realism. This author didn't even offer a mocking obeisance to realism. Even though a lot of her information comes from the ghost, Allie has Lucy's diary which at the very least offers motive for murder. Any police officer worth their salt would see that this was worth a look.

Allie could have gone to her parents (although her dad was a bit of a dick) or to the police with a reasonable expectation of seeing justice done, but she didn't. Her best friend, "Dub", proved to be a dick because he made only one really lame attempt to suggest going to the police and never suggested going to her parents at all. Maybe he was wise not to do so: Allie's father could see she was plainly scared one night, yet it flew right over his head like he was a moron. This bad dad never even noticed how scared she was. Worse even than this was that in writing the story this way, all that's revealed is that we have yet another female author who apparently delights in showing her main female character to be clueless. This is particularly evident in the dénouement where she completely fails to call for help even though help is within hailing distance, and she knows it. The ending is entirely predictable given the beginning. It reads like fanfic or amateur fiction.

I can't get with stories like that, especially not when they are young children's stories, which exemplify kids - and for no intelligent reason - acting like imbeciles or airheads. Why not just make Allie a blonde to complete the ridiculous cliché? I'm sure that there are children in the intended age range who will enjoy this story, but I don't think it's a good idea to write stories like this and I won't recommend this one or the series if it's anything like this first volume.

Scenes from and Impending Marriage by Adrian Tomine

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a little square book - almost like a children's picture book outwardly, but containing a series of graphic novel sketches of the author's approach to marriage. From the last panel, it looked like his wife talked him into creating a graphic record of the planning leading up to the wedding which could then be given as a gift to attendees. Afterwards, I guess he decided to publish the story (with a name redacted here and there), so we have Adrian's little blue book!

After I skimmed a couple of pages in the library, I decided this looked like it might be a worthy read and it was. It was funny and not over the top. I'm not a big fan of births, deaths, and marriages, and I think too many couples put too much work and money into the wedding that could be better used post-nuptials on other things, but it is a special day, and if people want to go overboard on marking it, then obviously, it's up to them.

I just think that the more importance you heap onto this one short event, the more risk there is that you're setting yourself up for failure because of the immense expectations, not just over the event itself, but over the life which follows it. What makes marriage special to me has nothing to do with overt celebration. It's about the commitment you make when you say the words, whether they're in a registrar's office, or a cathedral, or on a beach, or a mountaintop. Without that commitment, it's all just a circus, isn't it?

The wedding preparations here might strike some as over the top or too rich, so this short graphic novel may have limited appeal, but it's always fun to learn about the lifestyles of others, and how they cope when going through the same thing you went through - or are planning on going through. it's also a great source of ideas for writing fiction, so to me this was fun and entertaining.

The artwork is relatively simple - black and white line drawings - but it's very good and also amusing, and the humor was enjoyable, particularly the single frame cartoon images which were interspersed with the more regular panel stories. I rate this a worthy read.

Lillian's Right to Vote by Jonah Winter, Shane W Evans

Rating: WORTHY!

Yes, it's definitely Jonah month on my blog. I've not only reviewed two novels with characters named Jonah, I now have a young children's picture book penned by a Jonah! This one is about exercising your right to vote. I remember some time ago someone coming to my door trying to 'get out the vote', and I expressed my refusal to do so, and she tried to lecture me that it was my duty to vote. No, it's my right to vote. It's my duty to exercise that vote or withhold it according to my conscience, and that year I was not going to hypocritically vote for person A simply to deny person B, when I couldn't stand A or B!

Lillian is a black female senior citizen - based on real life Lillian Allen (no, not that Lillian Allen, the other one) - and even though it means climbing this huge hill at her age, she is going to vote. When she looks up that hill into the blue sky, Lillian sees more than an opportunity to share in governance; she sees her great-great grandparents being sold in front of that same courthouse, where only white men were allowed to vote.

As Jonah Winter's writing is stirring, Shane Evans's artwork is rich, and intriguing, carrying an illusion of texture, just as the voting system carried an illusion of equality. It doesn't matter how impressive it is that a law was passed way back in 1870 denying exclusion based on race, color or previous condition of servitude, if the right people make the wrong decisions, the vote is lost.

This was the fifteenth amendment to the US constitution - the constitution which the founding fathers supposedly did such a brilliant job on! If the white folks in power could find a way to prevent the colored folks from voting, they found it and used it. They still do. Poll taxes may no longer be valid, but other methods are used now. Because the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, women didn't get the vote until the nineteenth amendment, half a century later!

Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, this book makes for a really good read. It's an important piece of history and well-worth reading to your children. I recommend it, but what I would like to see is a book like this about true empowerment, because despite bullshit web sites which claim to show that one vote is important, it really isn't. Lots of one votes pulling together are very important, but one, by itself, in an election where there are thousands of votes, makes no difference, not when your only voting options are limited to those with money, and essentially to an unchanging binary "choice" between A or B, since few who don't kow-tow to those two major parties ever get elected. It makes no difference even if your vote does count if it's really a vote for those who kiss the asses of lobbyists for big business - monkey business which can and does derail pristine legislation.

What I'd like to see is a story about how a child can grow up and become an honest, independent representative, voting for what's best for the nation regardless of what vested interests try to rationalize.

The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a brilliant novel and well-worth reading, but it was seriously larded with spelling and grammatical issues, which is actually quite shameful given that the author is, however admirably, a librarian! It does, however, prove my point that you can give me a novel that's less than exemplary, but if it's written well-enough in terms of characterization and plot, I'll rate it worthy despite technical issues. Note that this was an advance review copy, so troubles are always possible, but a lot of these were issues which ought to have been caught during the writing and editing process. We're no longer in the era of real galleys laboriously put together with little lead characters wedged into metal trays. In the ebook era, it's less and less easy to excuse this kind of writing, but I'm placing my faith in the assumption that these issues will be cleared up long before this ever hits the stores.

I list, on my blog and in my review to the publisher, the examples I noticed, but I'm not listing them elsewhere, because they detract from what was, in the final analysis, and viewed as a whole, a really, really good story that I warmed to exceedingly quickly, and stayed with throughout. There was never a time when I felt it was slipping, or becoming repetitive or boring. This was also a first person PoV novel which I normally rail against, but even so, I do always say that some writers can carry it, and this author evidently is one such writer - at least in this case! Next time he may piss me off to no end, but it actually makes me marvel that here, he has done a better job at writing a female main character than far too many young adult authors do in far too many YA series. I mean, seriously? Why can this guy write a better girl than some female authors can?

Of course, I'm not a female (nor do I play one on TV), so I'm willing to grant that my perceptions and expectations may be rather at variance with those of readers who have a hundred percent mark-up on the number of X chromosomes I have at my disposal, but having said that, we men do have fifty percent female in our sex chromosomes, whereas females don't have any male in theirs! Actually some do - we're no more binary in our sex chromosomes than we are in our genders, but that aside, maybe guys do have an edge when writing across gender? Maybe not! I'll leave you all to argue that out amongst yourselves, while I carry on with the review over here, quietly in the corner...!

It's not that Dahlia Moss is like a kick-ass character in the comic book sense - busting into places, taking down villains, making smart remarks, zeroing in on clues. Far from it: she's really a bit on the weak and retiring side, and she's not exactly the sharpest knife in the box, yet she wins through in the end, and looks good doing it. And by looks good, I don't mean she's a beauty queen. She isn't. But she's still fine; she still manages to have appeal to spare, leaving in shadow far too many female 'heroines' of YA literature. She even has to be rescued at the end - after a fashion - yet she is still, in my estimation, a kick-ass character. Note that while I keep referencing YA literature, this is more of a YA-to-adult book in terms of the age of the characters. They're all grown-ups here; young but adult.

Dahlia is hired by rich boy Jonah to find out who stole the "Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing." which is a virtual object in an online computer role-playing game. He puts Dahlia onto a member of his 'guild' in the game - a guy named Kurt, who seems completely uninterested in Dahlia or in talk of spears. By turns invested and dis-empowered, Dahlia starts investigating every member of the guild and slowly zeroes in on the thief, but what she doesn't expect is that almost immediately she begins this real life quest, Jonah is killed irl with a replica of the very spear he lost online.

Relationships which were rather complex to begin with, start to become ever more complex and obtuse now. I keep saying I'm not a fan of worst person PoV, but I keep saying once in a while there's a writer and a story which can carry it off, but it's rare that I get to say that such an exception is a great example of that incongruous confluence of possibility. This one is. I still don't like the voice, because it's so full of self-importance and limitations to your story-telling, but here it works and works well. Besides, how can you not at least start out liking a story that begins, "The only time I ever met Jonah Long he was wearing a fake beard, a blue pin-striped captain's outfit, and a toy pipe that blew soap bubbles."

And now a word - or several - about the errors. There were errors of bad grammar, spelling, and punctuation. A simple final spell-check would have caught the most egregious of the spelling issues, but actually, the bulk of these problems were subtle enough that only a good editor or beta reader would catch them. A lot of the 'misspellings' were homophones, where the word was spelled correctly, but it was the wrong word for the context. No spell-check will catch these. There were examples of a homophone and misspelling in the same sentence. As for the grammar problems, it was a mixed bag, with some bad grammar, some words missing, text oddities, and words out of order(!) or other issues which obscured the sense. There was also a slight continuity problem with the sharpness of the spear!

This things aside, I rate this a very worthy read and recommend it.

There were times when I thought maybe the author had written a given sentence that way intentionally for subtle humor or because it was some geek thing of which I was unaware, but the sheer number of these mitigated against writing them all off with those excuses. There were also times when it looked like the author had dictated the text and it had been misheard during transcription. So here they are.

Bad grammar/punctuation
"I can state these rule" (wrong number: 'these rules' or 'this rule', not a mix!)
"something ,then" (comma in wrong place)

Misspellings that a spell-checker would catch
"Ddriver"
"Gunpiont"

Spelled correctly, but wrong word(s)
"the king of thing that pisses me" (kind of thing)
"wedge the sticky T-shirt down her hallow" ('hallow' should be 'hollow')
"They'll be food, at least." (there'llbe food - might have been funny if the story had been about cannibals or zombies!)
"task now is more difficult that simply taking a boy out" (than simply taking a boy out)
"crossed-referenced a list" ('cross-referenced')
"And Nathan was back to his usual amiable self. Whatever had troubled them there had been just a momentary blip." (whatever had troubled him there...)
"it's not big deal" ('it's no big deal' or 'it's not a big deal')
"had an unreasonably head start" (unreasonable head start)
"Sylvia, it had to be said, looked remarkably like her sun." (like her son)
"probably the result of a guilty conscious crumbling at Jonah's posthumous largesse." (guilty conscience)

Misspelling and wrong word in same sentence
"given that I had planted my phone in a knoll on the murderesss." (knoll is a small hill. This word was used many times wrongly in place of hollow. Also, murderess has one 's' too many, and I have issues with the 'ess' part irrespective of spelling. Why must we specify a 'murderess rather than simply murderer? It's a form of genderism to me, but I see it frequently: actress, murderess, hostess, mattress (that last one might not be real...)

Missing word
"Why would do that?" (should have read something like "Why would she do that")
"At the risk of coming as completely callous" (coming off as....)

Obscure English
"I felt like a combination having an earworm and heartburn. My best option was to chance the subject." ("combination of an earworm..." and 'change' instead of 'chance')
"The certainty that she had put on a bug me hit all at once" (seems like words were unintentionally transposed here)
"as though it were pitched outside of the normal of range of human hearing." (too many 'of's!)
"'Ndiyo,' said Francis, which I assumed was yes for Swahili." (Swahili for 'yes'?)

Text oddities
"or for tanking aggro off a raid boss" (I have no idea what this means - maybe draining off, leaching off? Taking aggro off? )
"sort of muddled about in folding chairs" (muddled about amongst the folding chairs?)

At one point Hindi is spoken, but the text appears as minuscule black characters on a white background in a Kindle app on my phone. Note that I have the screen background black, and the text white as a battery saving measure, so the text looked like it was in the negative to me. No matter how much I enlarged the text in this kindle app on the phone, the Hindi text was never large enough to see it clearly.

"queen of England" - Elizabeth 2nd is the queen of the United Kingdom (inter alia), which includes England, but given that this was a character's speech, you can get away with it because people do speak in ignorance like that.

"dominated my life a little bit" - contradiction in terms! Again this is something you can get away with in a 1PoV novel since it's the character speaking, but it's worth keeping in mind that it makes no sense!

"...I have been out cashing favors."
For Charice to say that was ominous. Almost everyone seemed to owe her, somehow, and who knows what strange circumstances would occur from a cached favor?

This was an example of "Was the author trying to be clever, or was it merely inattention?" Caching, in computer geek speak, means holding something in memory ready for immediate use, so I liked the wordplay between cashing and caching, even though it didn't make a lot of sense. When I ran into so many other such issues, I decided this was a mistake, and not a play on words.

Problems with continuity with the spear point
"The blade itself was sharp and shining,"
[It was] "Sharp enough to do the job"
"He shouldn't have made the thing so sharp in the first place"
"the spear wasn’t actually all that sharp"

Note that there was more than one copy of the spear, but the problem here was that it was not made clear until almost the end of the novel that all but the first copy - the murder weapon - were purposefully blunted, but this didn't rob me of my point, because Dahlia never had access to the murder weapon. She only ever saw copies, so from her PoV, she was talking about the same spear in effect. This was the root of the continuity problem. That said, I liked this book and would read a sequel. I'd even beta read a sequel if it would help!

Size 12 and Ready to Rock by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

This is evidently volume 4 in a series, which I once again jumped into not realizing. There was nothing on the audio case to indicate it was mid series. I'm not a fan of series unless they're well done. I liked the title of this one. The problem was in the writing. The audio CD started out with music, which I have encountered frequently on audio CDs, and which I have never understood. The author's original typescript typically contains no music in my experience so whence the impetus to lard up the CD version with it - because CDs first were produced as a vehicle for music distribution? Seriously, that's your 'irrationale'? The reading by Sandy Rustin wasn't very good either.

That was the first problem, but fortunately it was brief, since I skipped the track entirely and landed, amazingly, at chapter one. Unfortunately, then I had what I took to be poetry, but later learned were songs Meg Cabot had 'composed' larding up the start of each chapter. I skipped these. No diva in 2012 is going anywhere up the charts with lyrics like those. The story is of a size twelve young woman who is in charge of one of the residence halls at a university. It's the summer, but there are people in residence for one reason or another, and the story opens with the main character being shot - by a paintball. The author milks this for all it's worth trying to make it sound like it was a real bullet, but failing to make it convincing. No one who is shot could continue to narrate in the smart-assed and sassy fashion this narrator does, so my good will was lost right there.

The entire story quickly devolved into university administrative procedures and meetings, and I asked myself what I was doing even pretending to listen to this tedious nonsense. Maybe if you're invested in the series, you can swallow this better than I did, I who came into it in progress, and didn't even miss the previous volumes. I couldn't get into it, and I had no interest in pursuing this story. According to other reviewers, the murder mystery doesn't even begin until half the book is taken-up with filler, and having jumped to the last disk to listen to that as I was driving to return this to the library that same day I started listening to it, I realized that this was written like a bad movie horror B picture - the killer miraculously escaping, only to pop-up later and threaten the main character. The final showdown was a tour-de-force in awful and I won't recommend this kind of writing. I'm done with Meg Cabot now.

Slade House by David Mitchell

Rating: WORTHY!

I’ve not been having much luck with advance review copies of late so it was a joy to get this one. At first it felt like reading a book of short stories, but as soon as I began on the second one, I realized this related back to the first in interesting ways. I confess I had skimmed the first, not finding it very engrossing, but I went right back re-read it properly, and then proceeded without a problem. The first part still struck me as less than thrilling, but it did help to read it properly.

The stories are set exactly nine years apart (no matter what your watch or our calendar might be telling you…) and there’s a disturbing reason for this. The snapshots all center around Slade House, which was destroyed during a World War Two bombing attack on London, but still manages, somehow, to appear every nine years. The only entrance is through a tiny door set in a wall in the claustrophobic confines of Slade Alley. That’s how you get in. You don’t get out.

Norah and Jonah Grayer are twins who discovered that they had a psychic link. When one of their acquaintances discovered this, he took them under his wing and traveled with them around the world, overseeing their training, and the perfection of their skills until they no longer had use for him. The only other problem they had was their mortality, and they discovered they could offset this by sucking the souls from certain people who had a compatible soul type. They need to do this every nine years….

The story was generally well written, and although it bogged down in a little too much detail in some parts, and the beginning was a bit off-putting, it had genuinely creepy and scary parts to offset this. It was also technically well-written with few errors that I noticed. One of them was the use of a quote instead of an apostrophe in two phrases/words: 'that’s what religion does, doesn” t it' and 'can”t'? Also this is another author who doesn't know that we stanch a blood flow, not staunch it, although by dint of usage, the wrong word is being slowly shanghaied into use.

Aside from that my biggest issue was that each story, thought told by different people, is in first person PoV, which I hate. it’s a very weak and limiting voice and it generally makes for a poor if not downright irritating story. In this case it wasn’t told too badly, but it made no sense, because if these people were dead then they couldn’t very well be relating their stories in first person, right up to their moment of death, could they? So were they really dead? In this instance, it made for an interesting question and an interesting use of voice.

I understand that in many ways, this is a companion to David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks which I haven’t read, but which some reviewers have indicated offers a nod and a wink to the earlier story, in much the same way, I imagine, my own novels do. As I said, I haven’t read the earlier work, so I can’t comment on what kind of links or connections may or may not exist between the two.

Overall I recommend this as a very worthy read.

Urchin of the Riding Stars - The Mistmantle Chronicles by MI McAllister

Rating: WORTHY!

Normally I avoid like the plague novels with the word 'chronicles' (or 'cycle' or 'saga', etc.) in the title, but in children's stories, these words are more often not indicative of a pretentious and overblown story. This one sounded like it might be fun when I saw it in the library, and I was enamored of the first few tracks on the disk, listening as I drove in to work the next morning. It was well-written, and beautifully read, and was reminiscent of Phillip Pullman's writing. This is the start of a series of novels in this world.

I normally don't think actors are particularly good at reading stories, but in this case, the reader was Andrew Sachs, who I really like. He learned English as a second language and you may remember him from John Cleese's Fawlty Towers TV show. He was the hapless general dogsbody known as Manuel (he's from Barcelona). His voice in this novel is amazing, and he did an awesome job of reading. This story is advertised as being the squirrel version of "Watership Down" relating a tale of squirrels, moles, otters, and hedgehogs who live on the fog-shrouded island of Mistmantle, which no one but a rare and lucky ship can find. No word yet on whether King Kong is in residence there. Frankly, It didn't sound very much like Watership Down to me, but it is from a similar mold. It seemed to me to bear more relation to Lord of the Rings than ever it did to Watership Down which I've also reviewed

Urchin is a bit of a double-, if not a triple-, foundling. His mother snuck aboard one of the rare ships to find Mistmantle, knowing if she could reach it, it would be a safe haven for her newborn. She was wrong as it happened. She died after she had given birth to him, and by a strange series of events, Urchin (so-named because he was found near the ocean), was adopted by this community despite him being a very pale color for a red squirrel (no, he's not pink, but then red squirrels aren't really red!). His adoption may have been aided somewhat by the fact that he arrived on the night of the riding stars - a meteor shower, which is seen as an auspicious festival time amongst the Mistmantle community. It appeared to them that the squirrel had arrived on one of those 'stars', but until he matured and became ready to start work in the community, unloading ships, he wasn't told of his origin.

Urchin's idol is Captain Crispin, who unexpectedly appoints Urchin as his number two, saving him from every-day drudgery, but just as life seems to be looking up for our bushy-tailed bushido, it quickly becomes clear that things are not right in the Mistmantle world. The beneficent rule of King Brushen and Queen Spindle is no longer the carefree one it used to be. There is evil abroad - well actually not abroad, but right there in the court! The newborn prince is murdered, the loyal Crispin is accused and exiled, yet it seems it was at the hands of Lord Husk and Lady Aspen, in a plan to take over the kingdom, that this evil was unleashed. Are these villains blind to the strength of this community, and to ancient prophecies? Urchin discovers he must tread carefully and watch his own back as he tries to unravel what happened and tries to help the last remaining loyal captain to restore the kingdom.

This was a great story, full of inventiveness and strong character portrayals. I wasn't sure about the wine being introduced into a children's story, even though there was a reason for it, but then we have sword-fighting otters and talking squirrels, so why not? Minor quibbles like that aside, this was a very worthy, well-told and well-read tale and I recommend it.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Rating: WARTY!

This is book one in a series titled 'The Themis Files'. I am not a fan of series unless they're exceptional, and few are. I am certainly not interested in pursuing this one, because I couldn't even get started on this novel. It's written in an interview format which is lazy at best, and downright irritating at worst. The book has officious chapter titles of the form that self-importantly give time and place, and this format irritates the heck out of me. If the story felt important, I would have more tolerance for this farce, but this one did not. It felt childish and amateur.

Despite the author's rather exotic sounding name, this novel is set squarely in the USA, because, as you know, nothing can possibly be found anywhere else in the world that might be of the slightest interest. That, in and of itself, isn't a huge indictment, but it does show a certain lack of daring and imagination which are not qualities which recommend a novel boasting inexplicable artifacts at its core.

All of that aside, the story wasn't interesting, which sounds like a really odd thing to say when it centers around the discovery of a 22 foot metal hand and some panels that appear to have an unknown and untranslatable language, all made of exotic metals, and all of which glow with a light from a seemingly non-existent power source. The twist is that these artifacts are evidently several thousand years old - and so, of course, should not have existed. How can you take an interesting premise like that and render it boring? Well, by writing in the laziest way possible - creating an interview-style story, where there is absolutely no descriptive prose whatsoever other than the aforementioned chapter 'titles'. The interviews, larded with unimportant details, were unrealistic and weren't even remotely interesting. The story therefore had no personality whatsoever. It felt cold and clinical, and it read like a transcript from some totally tedious Congressional Committee on the Proliferation of Mind Numbing. None of the characters had any life or personality to them.

The book began with a prologue which I skipped, because I flatly refuse to read prologues. If it's important enough to include, then put it in chapter one or later. In this case the prologue quite evidently related the pointless story of main character Rose Franklin literally falling on the hand whether she talked the the hand is unstated.... This same story is related with commendable brevity in the interviews, rendering the entire prologue redundant. Rose becomes a physicist who then gets to investigate the artifacts, although why a physicist (as opposed to, say, archaeologists, anthropologists, metallurgists, linguists, and so on) would be doing this was unexplained in the portion I read.

I requested this as an advance review copy because it sounded really interesting, but I managed only about twenty pages into this before total nausea overcame me. I honestly could not bring myself to read more and had to give up before my brain shut down completely. Maybe it changes format and becomes brilliant on page twenty one, but skimming forwards page after page showed no end in sight, and so extreme skepticism forbade further investigation. Some reviews I read indicated that it gets worse in the second half, so I was glad I didn't waste my time reading on when there are so many other richly-written and personality-filled novels out there waiting to be discovered. I can't recommend this based on what little I read.

Fishin' a Bowl by Laura Yirak

Rating: WORTHY!

This features the same girl as in the My Silly Kitty which I negatively reviewed for the unimaginative imagery. The images in this one are at least full screen on the iPad, but the odd thing is, whereas the images in the other book were too small and not amenable to enlargement, the ones int his book are full screen - and you can enlarge them further! Go figure! In this story, the strangely mature-looking little girl is almost completely absent, and when the brat's away the fish will play - unless the kitten gets 'em. In this case the cat and the goldfish make peace. I recommend this one for the generous art work, the amusing rhyme, the punning title, and the friendship motif.

My Silly Kitty by Laura Yirak

Rating: WARTY!

The girl in these stories is four years old, but looks way older. Today is her birthday and she gets a kitten. Told in poetry, it's the story of the kid chasing the kitten all over. It's harmless, but I don't recommend getting this in ebook form. The images on the iPad were no bigger than they were on my phone and they would not enlarge. I see no reason for this stinginess of imagery at all. I can't recommend this in this form and I can't speak for the print version.

Find the Cutes by Celestial Noot and Vincent Noot

Rating: WARTY!

This is a Where's Waldo style book. No story, just a bunch of really complex pictures where you have to find the Cute family: Mr & Mrs and their five children. I get very little out of these, especially trying to find these things on an iPad. The image is far too small. I don't get the point of an ebook version of this. Yes, you can enlarge the image, but then you're stuck with trying to keep track of where you are are on the page. The problem is that when it's enlarged, the image and text are blurry. It's nothing but a pain. I mean if you're really insane about these things, then you'll probably like this, but as it is, in this format, I can't recommend this at all. It's really poor quality.

Fierce Winds and Fiery Dragons by Nan Sweet

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a great little novel (part of the Dusky Hollows Series, which runs to something like eight volumes as of this review, and only $3 each in ebook form as of this writing, so definitely buy-able!) which I enjoyed immensely even though I'm not remotely its intended age group - or gender, for that matter. It had a lot of writing issues, mostly towards the beginning of the book, but in the end it proved a point I've made several times in this blog: that I'm willing to put up with a novel that's significantly less than brilliantly written if the author gives me a good story! The odd thing about this author is that she appears to have no website, and there are other authors that might be easily confused with her. There's a Nanora Sweet, for example, and a Nancy Sweetland, so there's a delightful bit of a mystery here!

This is a good story. It's different and inventive, and has some cool writing and plotting in it, and when Ivy and Carrie end-up dragged into the alternate world, the story takes hilarious and gripping turns. This is why I loved this book and was willing to put up with a significant number of writing issues. It was completely adorable. This other world, the world of King Glome and Princess Minerva was thoroughly captivating, and the way Carrie won over the snotty princess was brilliant. Ivy's story was equally enthralling, and when she came out with lines like, "Change of plans. I'm going to hurt you." It made my day. I read that part on my lunch break and despite being interrupted several times, I came out of that lunch break completely refreshed and smiling. I owe Nan Sweet for that, so I am volunteering right here and now to be a beta reader for any book she writes! I don't make that offer often, and it's not like any author ever takes me up on it, but there it is. I don't care!

But I digress. As ever. Anyway, the story is about ten-year-olds Carrie and Ivy, who are asked, as a class project, to take care of an egg. Anyone who takes good care of it gets to skip some class work, and if you take care of it over a weekend, you get to skip two periods of class work. Ivy isn't the slightest bit interested, and Carrie is so upset by her parents breaking-up that she's not even there that day, but both of these girls end up sharing an amazing discovery about the egg, and finding their narrow world expand beyond their wildest imaginings because of it.

As a public service announcement, I have to inject a note of warning here. At one point, I read, "They lived in a small town and never locked the house up" to which I have to say, b>these people are morons! I don't care where you live, it's never safe to leave your property unprotected, especially if you're sleeping in said property. But this is a story, not a documentary or an advisory brochure, so this is as valid a thing to write as anything, I guess!

The story is beautifully written for the most part, but there were, as I said, issues. For example, Nan, Sweet as she may be, has a serious problem differentiating 'its' from' it's':
"...without it's fleece-blanketed box..."
"...had brown tufts of fur around it's face..."
"... sitting on it's haunches..."
The rule of thumb is if you cannot substitute 'it is' and have the sentence make sense, then it's 'its'!

Not many people know this, evidently, but ancient animals such as pterodactyls and pteranodons were not dinosaurs. they were pterosaurs. And the past tense of 'tread' is 'trod'. And speaking of birds, or of flying creatures at least, " blue top-not" really needs to be " blue top-knot". "...when Carrie and Ivy pet her head..." should be 'petted', and so on.

There were many other issues, including ones where a spell-checker won't help, such as this sentence: "... few holes were starting to show at the seems..." which should have read, 'seams'. There's also an issue with the creature named a 'gollivant' - this is rendered as 'gallivant' in one or two places. This is a case where a spell-checker will actively work against you! Another problem was an issue of confused verb tenses as in, "...few young ones pointed and grunting as if she were in some kind of zoo..." where 'grunting' ought to have been 'grunted'.

Other issues were more general in nature, such as where one character's mom, who is a nurse, is described as wearing a hat. Nurses tend not to wear hats these days - not in the US, unless it's some oddball religious order hospital perhaps. Indeed, when I worked in a hospital and drew a cartoon for some event the nurses were putting on, I was told that nurses are trying to get away from that image, which I fully supported and understood, but this was a cartoon, not a life-like depiction. There are conventions in cartoons which these people evidently simply didn't get. needless to say I was quite obviously working in the wrong place!

Since this blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, I have to raise another interesting writing issue which wasn't so much out-and-out wrong, as a case of "how could this be written better?" In order to keep her egg warm, Ivy is described as, "Pulling an afghan throw that her great Aunt had knitted out of the closet." Most people knit these things from wool or some sort of synthetic yarn, but more power to this aunt if she can knit something from a closet! Better wording might have been: "From the closet, she pulled an Afghan throw which her aunt had knitted." But you can write that off as being too picky if you like.

But these, for me, were pretty minor and picky. They may irritate others more than they did me. For me, it was the quality of the story that matters. I'd rather read one where there are some issues, but the story is great, than read a really technically well-written novel which is boring or stupid. It all comes down to whether it's a worthy read, and this one is, beyond question. Despite not being the target audience, I'm honestly interested in reading more of these adventures. I loved the way each main character, Carrie and Ivy, had their own story, and in the alternate land, one was rather scary while the other was really funny. it made for a refreshing read as we switched back and forth to follow the progress each made in this new world.

I fully recommend this book.

The Search for the Sheriff's Star a Lost Bookshop Adventure by Adam Maxwell

Rating: WORTHY!

I wanted to read this because it was about time travel - my favorite sci-fi subject. That was a mistake. Not reading it, but thinking of it as sci-fi. It's better to think of this not as science fiction, but as fairy-tale fantasy, so when these three children time-travel back to the Old West, it's actually better to think of them visiting 'cowboyland', wherein exists talking horses and goofy villains (including some genuine Old West lily-livered varmints!). Viewed in that light, and one major issue aside, I considered this a worthy read for the age range at which it's aimed, which is young children.

This is volume two in a series, but you don't have to have read volume one to enjoy this, although it would help to fill in some background. Nina, Ivy, and Oswald are friends who help out in an old bookstore called "Lost Books". It's a dusty, rambling old place, with twisty passages and multiple small rooms. I actually knew a bookstore like this one once, but in the place I knew, there was no miraculous key to a secretive door wherein lay magic books which could transport you to wonderful places, I'm sorry to report. At least not one that I was aware of....

In this adventure, the three kids go to Dakota's Bluff, but there's no indication as to where exactly it's supposed to be. We're told that it's hot, but the Dakotas (North and South) do not get particularly hot, even in July. However, the mid-eighties would feel hot to a British visitor. Maybe Dakota's Bluff was in another state, but Wachiwi, the name of an important character, native American girl, in this story, is a Sioux name, and the Dakota/Lakota Sioux were resident in this region. The girl's name means 'dancer', so maybe her full name was Wachiwi with Wolves? LOL!

The problem in this town is Rude Robbie and his gang, who want to raze the town to build a gun factory. Rude Robbie's idea of a gun is a more like a Nerf gun - but which spits out gooey custard-like "bullets". Nina becomes the new sheriff, and her two pals become deputies. Also deputized is Wachiwi . The four to them plan to track down the jewel-encrusted gold sheriff's star, which is of such value that the town people would be able to buy the entire town outright and scotch Robbie's villainous scheme. In order to do this, they must follow a map, overcome snake-oil salesmen, bandits, and traps, and deliver the star back to the mayor of the town.

I had a few issues, but overall I liked the story. I liked that Wachiwi educated the trio that not all native Americans lived in tipis (although actually, the Sioux did! They were the earliest example of mobile homes in the USA!). The explanation here was much simplified, but depending on the tribe, they also lived in houses - although the houses were not quite like those you might imagine from the towns depicted in your standard western movie; they were longhouses and wigwams, and so on, of many designs and construction materials.

Here's an interesting writing issue. When you make up a word, do you feel a need to follow established rules or do you simply make up what you want and damn the torpedoes? I bring this up because there's a non-word used in this story: correctamundo. Since it isn't really a word, although it's often used, does the spelling matter? Should it be 'correctimundo' or 'correctamondo'? I think If I'd written it, the way I would have done it would be to use the same spelling as the one in the book, but substitute an 'i' for the 'a' in the middle there. I have no valid reason for spelling it that way. I think maybe I'm thinking of Connecticut, and using the 'i' because of that, which is a nonsensical reason for it, but it just seems to fit better to me. In the end, does it matter? I think it's worth thinking about. For an odd word here and there, I don't think it does matter, but if you're making up some sort of foreign language for use in your story, then it really ought to matter about spelling and verbs, and rules for forming words. Just a thought from the writing perspective!

My biggest beef was that native Americans were not treated well during this era, and any young "Indian" girl running into a store would be unlikely to be shielded from a white man chasing her. She'd likely be denounced as a potential thief. Any native American taking horses would likely be summarily shot, yet Wachiwi takes four and no one says a word. Maybe these horses belonged to her tribe, but no mention is made of this. It would have been nice to have had some word in this story about how poorly these people (along with Asians and African Americans) were treated, but there is none here. Everyone is friends and buddies. That's not to say there were not such relationships, but those were not the norm, and I felt it was glossed over here too easily.

That aside the story was written well for its intended age group, the only error I recall seeing was one in which 'where' was misused in place of 'were' as in "What where they up to?" No spell-checker is going to catch that one! I'm recommending this though, as a worthy read with the above caveats and the hope that future stories will educate as well as entertain.

Girl's Guide to Witchcraft by Mindy Klasky

Rating: WARTY!

The main character in this novel is a woman who works in a specialty library (curiously, the author is - or was - also a librarian. Take that, Bembridge scholars!). Due to a sad lack of foot traffic in this library (people are likely to visit only if they're researching something historical), the idiotic library management decide that some changes are in order. Staff are now going to be required to wear authentic historical costumes, and one of the cost-saving measures is that the main character, Jane, has to take a 25% pay cut. In return, however, management will allow her to live rent-free in a small cottage on the property.

She and he best friend clean the place and discover a locked door to the basement, to which she has no key. She decides that she doesn't want to go down into a vermin-infested and dusty basement anyway, but since we know from the blurb that she finds some books on witchcraft and starts practicing the art, It's pretty obvious at this point that she will discover those books in the basement, and that these will confer upon her those witching powers, and this is indeed what happens. Not only does she discover that she instinctively knows how to cast a spell, she also resurrects a familiar named Neko.

The story started out rather interesting and engrossing, apart from Jane's creepy stalker-attitude towards a writer who is researching a new book in the library. She watches his every move and fantasizes that he's her boyfriend. When she finally went down to the basement after discovering the key, the story started going somewhat off the rails for me, but then it veered back on track and I started liking it again, then it went finally off the rails and I gave up on it.

A man by the name of Montrose shows up after she casts her first spell, telling her she can't go around casting spells like that unless she joins a coven or gets special training. Double, double, toil and trouble might result if she fails to heed the warnings, so she starts training with this guy, and there's this attraction between them even though they supposedly detest each other. The spells are nonsensical, and so was the story. I quit reading it because it was too silly and other novels are always calling seductively. I can't recommend it.

And on a personal note, this marks a personal record of 75 reviews posted on my blog in one month! Yeay me!

Moving Pictures by Kathryn Immonen and Stuart Immonen

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an odd little graphic novel that caught my eye at the local library. It's drawn in what I like to think of as film noir style - white with heavy black inks, appropriate to the subject matter. We're in France at the outbreak of World War 2, and the Germans are assaying the French art collections. Two Canadian women have been working to package and catalogue the collections, but now one of them has gone, and only Ila Gardner remains. It would appear that a small work of art has gone missing and the German interrogator is questioning her about its absence. This creates the frame which houses the landscape of this tale - an exploration of art, of displacement, of people going missing along with the art, of ownership, loss, and regret.

I'm not sure I understood the ending, but the journey there was worth it regardless. I really liked this story and I recommend it.

Good Night Sleep Tight What a Wonderful Flight by Louise Lintvelt

Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated in colorful detail by Do Thai Thanh, this is a very short book for young children about air transport and busy, crowded skies and what to do at the end of a full and busy day. Written poetically and very much in the mode of Goodnight Moon, the story is ideal for bedtime reading as it tells tales of different aircraft settling down for the night, and dreaming of flights gone by or flights to come. There are military jets, passenger airplanes, crop dusters, fire-fighting planes, and rescue helicopters, of all colors and shapes and sizes. Each plays an important part and each needs its rest to take up the baton the very next day.

I recommend this one because it seemed like a great way to get kids to sleep, and sometimes that's more important than educating them from a children's book! LOL! note that the text is too small to comfortably read on a phone, so you really need the print version or to read this on a pad for best results.

Diggy by Calee M Lee

Rating: WARTY!

Diggy is a short and simple young children’s book illustrated simply and competently by Amy Mullen, about a guy controlling a digging machine. It’s all right as far as it goes – it shows the guy getting into his excavator and digging a hole, loading a truck with what he pulls out of the ground, and as soon as the truck leaves, the guy starts digging another hole – but that’s the problem – it doesn’t really go anywhere.

For me the problem with the book is that it misses a golden opportunity for teaching. It never explains why these holes are being dug, and while obviously you don’t want to be getting into blueprints and engineering diagrams, would it have hurt to explain, perhaps, that drainage pipes will be buried here to prevent flooding, for example – and give the kid a bit of a story? To show someone mindlessly digging holes doesn’t strike me as the best use of your child’s time – and it’s a bad example to set. I can’t recommend this book, not when it would have been so easy – and the right thing to do - to have gone the extra mile.

One of the things I fear with the explosion of self-publishing isn’t that we will get a flood of badly written books – we already had that when Big Publishing™ was in charge! No change there! No, the problem is that it’s now so easy, especially in the world of children’s books, to put something quick and easy out there for no other purpose than to make a fast buck without sparing a thought about what you’re delivering to the reader – in this case the young children at the other end. I’m not saying this is what this creative team has done by any means, just that generally speaking, it’s definitely possible for - and it’s also a big temptation to - those whose minds already lean in that direction, to take advantage. I’m glad that Big Publishing™ is no longer in charge, believe me, but now that the flood gates are open, we each of us need to be our own gatekeeper, which is the way it should have been all along.

Origami Magic by Boyz Hutch

Rating: WARTY!

This is a great idea for a book - a boy who finds an old origami book which has magic in its paper, but the execution of it was lacking a heck of lot in a wide variety of areas. There were numerous mistakes in it, in both spelling and grammar. There were also problems with the plot. This is a pity, because it's a good idea for a story. I'm sorry it wasn't executed better.

'There was a wide variety of writing problems. One was common - missed apostrophes, such as in "the books pages" and in "I pictured the spider on David skin," which was missing a possessive suffix, and " with the help of David embarrassed parents escorted him from the seats." There was a number of misspellings of the kind that a spellchecker won't catch such as "...where I planed to put the other one" (the author meant 'planned'), and "It made me grown in despair" (the author meant 'groan'), and "David might hit hard, but deepening on how much he wanted to hit me..." (the author meant 'depending').

There were poorly written sentences such as " He snatched out his hand and made a grab for", and poor grammar: bunch of people had gathered around David and some other girl" which amusingly suggests that David is a girl. There were sentences where the negative was clearly intended, but what was written was a positive statement such as "Even if they did move," in place of "Even if they didn't move."

There were inexplicable actions, such as Joseph at one point developing a crush on Toni out of nowhere. He signs up for school play stage crew just to be close to her. The sign-up sheet has just been posted, yet the play is only a few days away - where's the planning and rehearsal time? The problem with this relationship with Toni is that not only is it completely out of the blue, but also that she's described as the prettiest girl - like this is her only value and it's the only reason he likes her. This is an insult to girls and it's not acceptable.

My biggest problem was that of the unrelenting and very public bullying going on here, yet not a single teacher steps up to prevent it or to bring it up in class to denigrate it and warn those who would do it. This is the case even when the bullying happens in the classroom! No one speak sup about it. not even any of the other kids - and these are the same kids Joseph is suppose dot end up friends with at the end of the book!

The bullying is never reported even by Joseph, even when he's punched and kicked right at the school gate by fellow students. This is not a good example to set for kids. The only policy with regard to bullying is one of absolutely no tolerance. Along with this, Joseph has his origami book stolen out of his locker and no one, not Joseph nor anyone else who learns of the theft, ever reports it. This is nonsensical.

The sloppy writing became increasingly prevalent as the story went on. Here are some examples:

• There I grabbed some normal paper large origami paper
• And any student in the production could be excused right not to get ready
• "I'm sorry children, but the play would have to be canceled."
• "I'm sorry children, but the play would have to be canceled." (they were wet - maybe she did wad them up!)
• causing a short blunder of confusion.
• dipped out of the behind the curtain ready to throw myself on his smug nasty face for the evil thing he did to all of us.

On top of that, the book's ending was just too speedy and perfect. I can't give a bye to young writers when they write so badly, so I can't recommend this with it getting a serious overhaul first. it's good for a first draft, but nowhere near good enough for a published novel.

The Secret No-Girls Club by Rachel Elizabeth

Rating: WORTHY!

So this is a novel by a writer with two first names, and it was hilarious. I don’t know if the kids will get the subtle humor in play here, but the way this was written was – apologies for the gendered term – masterful. It was illustrated by Kathrina Iris – also two first names. What’s going on here? Girls are taking over!

So Caleb and Logan are intent upon starting a secret club with no girls allowed (or even a loud as they write in their charter). Everything goes spiffingly well until they need to elect a president. The problem is that the voting always seems to end up evenly divided between the two candidates - even if they aren’t allowed to vote for themselves! Bringing in Caleb’s little brother Jonah doesn’t help. Finally they have to recruit Logan’s twin sister Isabella as an honorary junior member of the no-girls club, and vote again. Isabella wins. Wait, what?

See what I mean? This story is choice and priceless. I recommend it completely, for the illustrations and for the beautifully-written text. Robbie Burns, in the penultimate stanza of his poem Tae a Moose, had this to say: “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley” (this is the poem which delightfully begins, “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie”) and I think it works just as well if you substitute ‘boys’ for ‘men’. This one is a winner! I haven’t read any others in the ‘secret tree house club’ series, but if they’re anything like this, they’re a must-read!

My Robot Farts by Dingleberry Small

Rating: WARTY!

I can see why an author wants to hide their real name when it’s associated with a book like this. I’m not a fan of gross-out books, but this one sounded like it might be funny. It wasn’t. It actually did begin that way, but in the end, it was merely an excuse to fit as much gross-out into the space as the writer possibly could manage, and I quit reading it long before it was over, which is unusual for me in a children’s book. I cannot recommend this at all, and I think this brings me to the end of my exploration of gross-out books!

Farticus Stinkamus by Kate Clary

Rating: WARTY!

Here’s another in a long and windy line of gross-out books. This one is written by a female, which is a bit of a novelty. It also sounded amusing because it was set in Roman times, but in the end it was just a gross-out book with nothing really to recommend it. Believe it or not, the author was so pleased with herself that she wrote a sequel. I can’t recommend this.

On the positive side, it did show that effort counts, and didn’t rely totally on flatulence to make a story, but that said, it still did rely heavily on the gross, and the personal effort was essentially lost in the miasma. I think authors can do better and I look forward to the day when the bad smell of authors going for the lowest hanging fruit is wafted away.

Where Does Panda Fit In by Scott Gordon

Rating: WARTY!

I've had a lot of success with Scott Gordon books. They're wild and crazy and sometimes fall flat, but for the most part they're very entertaining and offer oodles of positive reinforcement for kids. This one is an alphabet learning book, featuring animals. Sophie the squirrel needs help. You know how it is with those squirrels; they're all nut-jobs. Anyway, she seeks out the Power of Panda.

Sophie has 25 flashcards - one for each letter of the alphabet, and if you read that carefully, you'll know what her problem is, and how Panda can help. One problem I did have with this is that the flashcards are heavily biased towards mammals, as is the case in pretty much every young children's book that features animals. I know that children love cuddly toys and we relate better to our own kind - mammals - than we do to things we see as 'other', but I think it's important, even at that age, to show children that the world is wonderfully, amazingly diverse, and that mammals are not the only (and indeed not even remotely the most populous) class on the planet.

Mammals were fashionably late to the party of life on Earth. It's only in the last 225 million years or so that mammals slowly emerged, and we wouldn't recognize those early ones if we met one, because they were very different in appearance and rather different in physiology to what we see as mammals today. It's only since the dinosaurs went extinct that modern mammals truly began to flourish.

In this case we have to wait until the ninth letter of the alphabet to meet an animal that isn't a mammal, and commendably, it's a very different beast - an inchworm. This is actually the larval form of a moth, so it's a bit of a cheat, but it is an inch long as it inches along! Next we get a jellyfish, but then it's back to mammals again. It's not until 'O' that we get a bird, followed by an insect, and not until 'T' that we get a reptile. We have to wait until 'X' to get a fish and then we're done with non-mammals. Amphibians don't get a look-in! That's pretty sad, and it's the reason, unfortunately, that I'm not going to recommend this one. I want authors to spread their wings, and I think flashcards like this would be immensely more memorable if they had unusual creatures on them rather than contemptibly familiar ones. I really do.