Billy and the Devil by Dean Lilleyman

Rating: WARTY!

Set in England and making absolutely no concessions to mid-Atlanticism (be warned!), this novel begins in early April 1967 as judged by the references to Sandie Shaw winning the Eurovision Song Contest, which was held on April 8th that year, and is about a human disaster zone. The structure of the novel is rather experimental, and is odd because it has a prologue, which I skipped. I don't do prologues. To me, if it's important enough to include, it's important enough to include in chapter one (or later), and this is why it's odd, because the novel has another prologue in chapter one! I read this one; it's where teenage post-partum Jean decides she's keeping baby Billy but wants nothing to do with his father. Chapter two jumps to first person PoV which I don't like. In this case it wasn't obnoxious to begin with, but became so as the story regressed. This shifting structure of the novel served only to remind me that this was indeed a novel I was reading. It kept me from becoming truly immersed in it and that, amongst other things, became a problem for me in enjoying it.

On the positive side, chapter two is set in Chesterfield, city of the crooked spire and home of a League One soccer team. Chesterfield is only ten miles from my home town and I know it well, so this story began to resonate with me. It reminded me of my own youth and some experiences I'd had. I never was an addict, unless you count movies and books, but I knew dead-end people like this, and dead-end places like these. It's in this town where we meet the baby which Jean decided not to give up. Now he's a young boy, and the saddest thing is that he's already on a downhill ride, walled-in on one side by his past, and on the other by a largely incapable and/or uncaring present, so that when he reached his early teens, even though life had improved immeasurably, the rot had already gone too far to be remedied.

The problem was that this was the last time I felt bad for him, because the story then dropped into a numbingly repetitive rut, of which I became both increasingly aware and deadened by, as I reached the mid-point. Some of it was highly entertaining, whereas other parts - too many other parts - were truly tedious to read - so much so that I began skipping sections because it was not only boring, but consisted of whole paragraphs of poorly punctuated, block caps infested, run-on text that was hard to read and make sense of. It felt as though not only had Billy given up caring, the author had, too. The structure changed often, sometimes reading like a regular novel, other times like hastily jotted notes for a chapter which were then never followed-up on, and left as is. Some parts read like a play, such the Punch and Judy chapter, which I found cruel but funny, and very much in the vein of the real Punch and Judy puppet shows that used to be popular but are now largely forgotten, but there were far too few chapters like that.

For me, though, the biggest problem was that it felt more and more like the author was saying, "Hey, look at me! How clever and inventive, and crazy am I?" It felt less and less like there had been a real motivation to tell a coherent and engrossing story about Billy, and it was more like a leering gross-out story about Billy, and not even told, but rambled almost incoherently. One or two times reading about how drunk he got and how much he vomited and urinated and so on were fine, but when we get detailed descriptions every time, it became uninteresting - and uninventive. It was the same with his interactions with various women who seemed to be unaccountably attracted to him no matter how unappealing he was. The bottom line is that we really never got any closer to him than they did. He was all about antagonism, acting out, and obsessive self-importance, and the vaguely likable character we met at the start was drowned in alcohol. I understand that this is how it can be with addiction, but it felt to me that there are better ways of relating a tragedy like this than deliberately pushing the reader away. And there are ways to make it seem realistic. This method failed for me.

On that note, I found myself thinking, if this guy came up to me somewhere, and started telling me this story, just like it's written here, would I be interested? Would I care? Would I listen? And the answer was "No!" I'd be making excuses and leaving because there's no human interest there to hold me, and it's largely incoherent anyway! It's just a litany of villainy, so why read a book that's exactly like that? In the end, Billy is just a spoiled brat, a veneer of a human who has no redeeming, educational, or appealing value, and who offers us no access to him whatsoever. While I agree there are people like this in real life, whose stories, told less tediously in a documentary, can be compelling, to find such a character in a novel and to be forced to spend time listening to his mindless, drunken ranting, and his selfish acting-out, and to see the countless people, including family, he trashed and left in his wake like so much jetsam, was neither an endearing nor an engaging proposition.

I was actually much more interested in those other people - his family, his children, his friends, the women he felt-up and discarded - than ever I was in Billy himself! What were their lives like? How did they view him? What was their aftermath? Did the fiancée ever get back in her fiancé's good graces? We were offered no chance to learn anything of them, so not only was Billy a selfish, boorish oaf, the novel itself felt equally selfish and boorish, focusing far too much on him and the damage he did to himself, and not at all on the "collateral" damage. It was as though none of that was remotely important, and this grated on me and made me resentful towards Billy rather than try to find some way to empathize or uncover some level of understanding, and it made me cruelly wish that his story was over in one way or another.

Overall, it was like watching a really slow-motion train-wreck, and while the wreck at regular speed is dramatic and gripping, and holds a deep human interest, when you slow it way down to snail speed, so that it hardly moves, it becomes emotionally unmoving, too. No one wants to follow that because there's nothing to follow! No matter how tragic it actually is, it's meaningless at a microscopic level and pointless to try to view it through such a lens. I can't recommend this novel. based on the sixty percent or so that I managed to get through. I should advise, too, that this novel was so English - and midlands English, too - that you really have to have been there to get it, otherwise the jargon and slang will be as much over your head as a beer bottle tossed callously from a football train.

Ape House by Sara Gruen

Rating: WARTY!

Read a bit tediously by Paul Boehmer, this novel focuses on bonobos, a great ape species which is very similar to chimpanzees in many ways, very different in others. All of the major great ape species have been taught to communicate in American Sign Language, from Koko the gorilla, to Kanzi the Bonobo, to Chantek the Orangutan. Apes are not the only species with which we’ve communicated. These studies cross a wide range. There are not only chimpanzees, but also elephants, dolphins, and parrots, and dolphins. Although there is controversy around these studies, and even around the study directors, it’s definitely fair to say that animals are way more complex than most humans have typically been willing to credit, and some of them have very advanced intelligence, experiencing emotions as humans do.

In the novel, fictional character Isabel Duncan works with Bonobos and language. She becomes the subject of a newspaper story researched by John Thigpen and two other people from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who visit her one New Year's Day to discuss the Bonobos she works with: Bonzi, Jelani, Lola, Makena, Mbongo , and Sam. Boehmer reads these oddly, and I can’t be sure if this is how the author told him they were pronounced, or if he's making it up and getting it wrong. He pronounces Bonzi as Bon-Zee rather than as Bonsy, and Mbongo as Muh-bongo rather than Um-bongo.

It would be nice to know how they’re supposed to be pronounced and an audio book is the perfect way to do this. Print books and ebooks fail in this regard unless they have a pronunciation guide. It would have also been nice to know what the more obscure names meant, too. All names used to actually mean something, and we’ve lost that. Now people pick names for how they sound, or to honor a relative or a celebrity rather than for how they apply to the child and what they mean. When I come up with character names, I really give some thought to how they should portray the character, and in some books, the names are clues to the characters character or fate - if you can only figure them out! I had particular fun with this in Saurus, one of my favorites.

This story really takes off when there's an explosion at the lab, and the apes end up in a reality TV show. Isabel discovers that in order to fix this, she has to find a way to connect better with humans - something she's not very skilled at. This fictional character seems to be based loosely on the real life, controversial ape language researcher, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. One of the interesting things about these studies, and about great ape research in the wild, is that the big names associated with it always seem to be female. The three best-known names in great ape studies in the wild were women tasked by Louis Leakey to study these apes in the hope that it would throw light on early hominid development, and it has, but these women were also controversial. The best known of them is probably Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees, but almost equally well known was Dian Fossey who studied gorillas and was murdered by gorilla poachers. Much less well known is Birute Galdikas who studied orangutans. The books these three wrote are well-worth reading, as is Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal if you want to learn more.

The author, Sara Gruen, studied American Sign language and the symbolic lexigram language the apes use so that she could better understand the bonobos she visited at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa. This is where Kanzi lives. Clearly the author may be writing fiction, even fanciful fiction, but it is grounded in her own personal experiences with real apes. My problem with her writing, however, had to do with how the university responded to the bombing of the lab. It was like they couldn't wash their hands of the apes and of Isabel fast enough, and this seemed completely unrealistic to me. They were, in effect, siding with the terrorists. Never once did they try to correct the insane mis-perception of the purpose of the "lab" - which was language studies, not animal experimentation.

You would think they would be very much concerned about putting their best face before the public, and they didn’t even have to lie about it, yet they failed on an epic level. Never once did they consult with Isabel about the apes' future. I get that the university effectively owned the apes and it was their decision, but I find it hard to believe that any university worth its name would behave so callously and precipitously. I also get that this is a dramatic fiction, but it seemed to me that there were better ways to set this up than to make the university leadership look like spineless jerks. Maybe the author hates universities!

The lot was plodding and predictable, but the worst fail for me, however, was the fact that The main story - about the apes - was repeatedly sidelined by a boring domestic trivia story going on between the other main character, John Thigpen, and his wife Amanda. I could see the author desperately wanted to get John and Isabel together, but why? Why not just make John single? Why include John at all, and thereby make Isabel merely another maiden-in-distress, needing to be rescued by Saint John, a knight in shining armor? It made no sense to me to take the drama away from the apes, and it was yet another insult by a female writer to a female main character.

From a purely narrative PoV, it was really annoying to have to abandon the main story to go off into this boring drama over whether this couple would stay together or over Amanda's and John's spinelessness when confronted with Amanda's domineering and interfering mother. It didn’t even instill any confidence in me that an invertebrate like John could be a heroic man of action when he was such a wallflower, or that he was even heroic at all if he was going to abandon his wife at he drop of an ape. Maybe I got his wrong - as I said, I didn't finish this novel, so maybe it panned out differently; however, it felt like the road most traveled and that's the road least interesting to me, but it was this negation of both Isabel and the apes which was what truly killed this story. I could not finish it, and I cannot recommend it based on what I heard. I haven'tread anything else by this author and now I have no intention of doing so.

Monstrovia by Mark H Newhouse

Rating: WORTHY!

"I’m so cared! Really scared!” I don't think the author meant the first one to be 'cared', but you never know!

Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Do beans talk? Well if you eat enough they will find a way of expressing themselves. But do you know the real story? What if Jack wasn't a hero. What if he was a murderer, hacking down the beanstalk knowing that the innocent giant would plummet to his certain death? That's the premise presented to the courtroom here, and Brodie's uncle is the only person standing in the way of Jackson Bordenschlocker and doom!

I read the advance review ebook version of this story. I understand the print version will have illustrations by Dan Traynor, but there were none in the e-version. This marks the third of an odd trilogy I am going through right now, featuring Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, Camp Midnight, an advance review graphic novel by Steven Seagle, and this one. While Bradbury's novel turned out to be merely wicked gnarly, the two ARCs are curiously parallel in some ways in that they both feature a child packed-off for the summer by their primary parent, and the child finds him/herself stick amongst monsters. I'm not a fan of first person PoV novels, and I had some difficulty getting comfortable with this story to begin with, but it grew on me as I read and in the end it was a truly worthy read.

Brodie Adkins's mom is going to China, and for reasons unknown she doesn’t want him along, so he's sent to stay with his crazy uncle, who’s a lawyer. What Brodie doesn't know is that his uncle works in Monstrovia - a parallel monster and fairytale world and there, he's considered a hero, and known as Doofinch the Defender, who stands up for downtrodden monsters. All Brodie wants to do is go back home, but he finds himself drawn into this world against his wishes and better instincts when Emily Beanstalk, aka Bordenschlocker shows up worried about her brother Jack, who's accused of murdering this giant, Eugene Bulk.

After having climbed the beanstalk with Emily to find Jack and bring him down to earth - so to speak - the latter two disappear, and when they're found, Jack's mom and key witness Annabelle Goose go missing! Jasper Doofinch feels they’ve been had - that Emily used them for the sake of rescuing her brother, but Emily turns out to have more going for her than you might think at first. She's strong and feisty, self-determined and self-possessed. She didn't seem like the kind of person who would require a boy to help her with anything.

Emily is evidently smarter than Brodie, too. At least she knows that while spiders may be poisonous, the correct word to refer to their ability to inflict painful and potentially dangerous bites, is 'venomous':

“Are the spiders poisonous?” I am reaching into the back of my shirt for a good scratch. I’m all itchy.
Emily looks serious. “Oh, Monstrovian spiders are very venomous. One bite and they turn you into a scratching post!”

Quite clearly Emily knows that poisonous refers to what might happen if you ingest an animal that's not good for you. Venomous refers to that thing's ability to inflict damage if it bites or stings you. Mushrooms can be poisonous for example, but they're never venomous. Snakes are venomous, but not poisonous judged by how many get eaten, even by humans....

The beanstalk is also an interesting character. Despite being cut down, presumably by Jack, it can regrow - and does well on lawyer jokes. It evidently has feelings. I started wondering if it would end up as a character witness for Jack! Jasper is more interested in taking a gander at the goose, but when she gets on the stand, she lays an egg - and not in a golden way. Can Jasper, his nephew Brodie, and Brodie's new friend Emile save Jack from the juggernaut jaws of giant justice?

This novel was hilarious, and an easy, fast read. I highly recommend it.

The Big Witch's Big Night by Sally Huss

Rating: WORTHY!

I have a mixed relationship with Sally Huss books. I dislike about as many as I like, so at least I know that if I hated the last one, there's a really good chance that I'll love the next. That's what happened here. This one was thoughtful and funny and educational. The premise is Halloween (yes, I know this is one of several I'll be reviewing late! Sorry! At least I'm getting them out of the way before Xmas reviews, which I'll no doubt post in January!)

The poetic meter is that of Clement Clarke Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas, but here it's all about Halloween so instead of "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse" we get "'Twas the night of Halloween and all through the house every creature was stirring, even the grouse."

The witch is greeting trick or treat-ers by offering them dead fish or worms, and she seems to be having little luck until one particular kid finds a way through her thorny exterior - and that;s the end, but not the end of being kind! It's a fun story; it's well told, and I recommend it.

Camp Midnight by Steven T Seagle

Rating: WORTHY!

Having enjoyed Seagle's American Virgin series which I reviewed in August 2015, I was interested to see what he'd do with a children's story, and I wasn't disappointed.

Illustrated very nicely and appropriately by Jason Katzenstein, in really eye-catching bright and shifting colors, this children's novel tells a really good story about a feisty girl, Skye, who accidentally gets sent to a summer camp for monsters instead of one for children. I fell in love with Skye from the off. She's self-possessed, willful, motivated, thoughtful, and doesn't take crap from anyone. Why is it that so few female YA authors are able to create main characters like this?!

Maybe I had Halloween on the brain, but I swear I didn't plan on having three scare stories in my lap at the same time: not only an audiobook version of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes about two kids, but also two advance review copies of stories where a kid is bundled off for the summer away from a primary parent who is going to be wa-ay out of town, and the kid ends up surrounded by monsters! It will make for an interesting comparison of the latter two, though one is a graphic novel. and the other a chapter book.

In this graphic novel, Skye's mom is off to Rwanda for the summer, and isn't about to take Skye along (I'm guessing she doesn't want Skye coming down with Ebola or being recruited into a children's army, but heaven help any Ebola virus or psycho military commander who tries to mess with Skye!). The young daughter is sent to stay with her dad and step mom - a non-mom she despises. Evidently the feeling is mutual, since stepmom has convinced real dad to bundle Skye off to summer camp. Naturally Skye not only feels like crap about this, but is acting out over it, and doing a professional job.

Intentionally or not, Skye ends up on the bus to Camp Midnight, and if the bus trip isn't creepy enough, the camp itself is creepier. The only friend Skye makes is Mia, a spirited but wilting violet of a girl she meets on the back seat of the bus. Their relationship is amusingly thorny to begin with, but broadens and deepens as the story progresses. Skye is surprised to discover that life in the camp seems to start at midnight instead of daybreak, and she eventually discovers that all the other kids (even the hottie boy she encounters) are monsters of one hue or another, and the camp counsellor is a witch.

Skye is in a bit of a panic as to what to declare herself as, when her friend Mia declares she will reveal what she is at a time and place of her choosing, and not before. Skye likes this idea, and adopts this same posture herself. Contrary to expectations that this might make her into the very a pariah she's starting o feel she already is, it lends her a mystique, and people grow interested in her, including the hottie boy, who has a hair-raising story of his own.

But what exactly, is Mia, and why do some of the other campers seem to despise her? And what will Skye do when Mia comes out and everyone finds out? The joy of this story was in finding out exactly how Skye navigates her way through this morass of monstrous, this quagmire of queer (in the olde fashion'd sense). needless to say - but I;;l say it - she does a fine job and ends up deciding she wants to return to this camp next year - and the start of a series, presumably. But not everything pans out the way you might think it might. I recommend this as a truly worthy read.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Rating: WARTY!

I can't tell you what this is about, not really, because I gave up on the audio book after two disks. Nothing really interesting had happened at that point. It started out great, with the mysterious man purveying lightning rods, who arrives just ahead of a thunderstorm and a carnival, and gives James Nightshade and William Halloway a rod to attached to one of their homes. That sounded great, but then I got the impression that Ray Bradbury is a guy who loved to hear himself talk. I never got that impression from his short stories, but let him run to a lengthier piece, and I guess he does love the sound of his voice! Anyway I couldn't stand to listen to any more and I can't recommend this based on what I heard.

Lydia's Enchanted Toffee by Neale Osborne

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an abridged version of the 2009 novel Lydia's Tin Lid Drum, which I have not read. This portion of it, at least, grabbed my attention and imagination. I have confess a certain level of doubt over the merits of a story which is based entirely around children eating candy, but that said, this novel is very playful and a lot of fun. You can tell that the author had a lot of fun writing it, which is a good sign, although I wonder if even this abridged version might be too long for some people. For me it has a decent plot and reasonable pace, although I confess even I wanted to get finished, but that was because I have other things I need to read, not because this wasn't entertaining. Some people might grow tired of the endless word play, but for me, it's very much my style.

Note that this is a British novel which makes no concessions to the US (and "Well played, sir," says I!), so some of the writing may be rather obscure to non-Brits who are not anglophiles.

Lydia Rhodium lives on planet that looks (from the illustrations included) like a climate-changed version of Earth, where much of what we recognize as our planet has been submerged under water, leaving smaller, more isolated continents. She lives in Tinport, in the nation of Likrishka, although she's not actually from there. The entire story plays on the names of varieties of candy and sweets (some of them very British, such as Dolly Mixture), turning them into towns and nations and islands. I enjoyed the word-play but for others it might be overdone or obscure.

The maps distributed through the text will help depict the geography better than I can describe it. The world she inhabits is, on the surface, every child's delight and every dentist's nightmare: it's a candy world, where jellies and toffee (taffy) abound, literally growing on trees, or swimming in the sea. The problem here is that the nation in which she lives has been taken over by Stannic, and evil overlord who is obsessed with creating confectionary, and subjugating everyone by threat and with his metal robots which come in human, dog, bird, and other forms. All children are separated from their parents and raised by despotic 'Maters' - house-mothers cum-slave-drivers. The kids are required to study, and perhaps the best of them might get to work in Stannic's kitchens, as Lydia's much older step sister does. The rest get to work the mines and factories.

The advantage which Lydia has is that she can work magic when she eats a certain type of toffee. Her problem is that she's been denied this particular variety because it's imported and Likrisha no longer has access to it, but unexpectedly, Lydia's cold and uncommunicative sister visits her and leaves her some of this toffee as a gift. Now Lydia has power. She's already been shown to be a rebel, smuggling a cat into her lodging. Now she's on the run, and using her magical power to fend off the robots and stay out of Stannic's clutches. This came to pass along with another unexpected diversion in the story: Lydia meets up with a team of young girls with adorably oddball names and dress sense. This is where they really embark upon a fun and inventive adventure across the continent in search of the magical candies which will bring down Stannic's evil despotism.

The story did seem very long, but overall I enjoyed it and I recommend it was a worthy read.

Succubus by Richelle Mead

Rating: WORTHY!

Not to be confused with Succubus Blues by Jim Behrle.

Georgina Kincaid is a succubus living amongst humans in a world where paranormal creatures exist side-by-side, but hidden - your standard paranovel. Though she is an immortal, Kincaid prefers to live amongst humans, dressing and behaving like them. It makes it all very convenient for the author, who clearly has to do no supernatural world building!

Kincaid is also a shapeshifter, and can appear however she wants. She can even emulate clothes, although she prefers to dress in real clothes rather than sport the appearance of them. I guess I don't know how that works exactly, because at one point when she's running late for work, she shifts into clothes in preference to actually getting dressed, yet later, a guy with whom she has casual sex is unbuttoning her shirt and fondling her breasts through her bra. How is he unbuttoning something that's technically a part of her? That would be like unbuttoning your skin! It made no sense, but I don't think this novel is intended to make any sense. It's seems like it's really just Urban Sexual Fantasy (USF). The F can also stand for 'frustration' or other things.

Moving right along, and in keeping with the 'she's really a human' theme, Kincaid works as an assistant manager at a book store in Seattle, known as Emerald City Books. She lives in an apartment, and she carries on a perfectly ordinary life , so other than being a succubus (and there are even issues with that as I shall discuss), she is in actual fact exactly like a human in every way, except that she acts like a teenager rather than her own apparent age.

Given that this is an introductory novel - the prologue to the 'chapters' which will form the volumes of the series if you will - it offered very little information (other than an annoying flash-back-story) about why she is the way she is, why she chooses to live like this, and what, exactly is expected of her by the forces of evil, so all we're left is to conclude that the author did this purely out of laziness, giving her a character - who is completely human in all regards, and whose only paranormal facet is that she can (indeed must) have endless unprotected sex with no consequences. It's not like it wasn't well thought-through, it's like it wasn't thought at all. That said, and for as exceedingly light and fluffy a read as it was, it ended up being enjoyable despite numerous plot holes and issues. It's as if Nora Ephron wrote an urban fantasy movie. Read it on that level and you'll be fine.

One problem is the same one we see in endless paranormal - particularly vampire - stories. Kincaid is a couple of thousand years old, but absurdly acts as though she's a teenager, and she's unaccountably ignorant, after two millennia, about the paranormal world in which she lives. It makes no sense. Clearly Mead had to explain her world as she went along, but to have her main character do it in a way which makes her look like a complete ditz does this story no favors at all.

I know Mead can write adult characters, so I don't know what was going on here. Maybe a paranormal rom-com is what she was aiming for. Kincaid's paranormal "job" - although she never seems to do it or get paid for it in any way, is capturing souls for Jerome, her demon boss, who's barely demonic at all. None of this is explained - it just is. Why there has to be a balance, and that the forces for good tolerate - and even pal around with - the forces for evil makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, nor does it make sense that the evil side is perfectly ordinary - there's no evil going on here at all. The closest we come to evil is the actions of this novel's villain, and his behavior makes so much sense that he's not actually a villain from what I saw. He's actually doing the work the bone-idle angel ought to be doing - in this novel's framework. The fact is, however, that angels aren't actually fighters-against-evil at all, they're merely messengers - mythological email - stolen by Bible writers from the Greek Hermes (and copied in the Roman Mercury). I liked the bad guy!

Kincaid doesn't exude any sort of evil. In theory, she has sex with people and their soul goes to hell presumably, but she also has sex with people where nothing happens to her lover. How does she differentiate? I have no idea, and Mead offers no help whatsoever. When the story begins, its framework seems to indicate that sex out of wedlock is sinful; but then that's religion for you! This is contradicted later in the text however, where Kincaid ruminates that while sex out of wedlock was sinful in the past, the world has moved on, and it's no longer considered a sin because everyone is having sex outside of marriage. This made little sense and implies that if everyone began murdering and raping, then this would no longer be considered sinful either!

From the way this novel is written, I was left with the consolation that I'm fine with the idea of going to hell - if there is such a place and I'm condemned there. Can you imagine spending eternity in heaven with the same partner? I'm not talking about a paltry sixty years of marriage. I'm not even talking about a mere lifetime. I'm talking about ETERNITY wedded to one person, and you can't even experiment sexually with that one person?! I'd rather be in hell with the raunchy crowd any day, especially if it's for eternity. But maybe that's just me!

The writing is technically fine - a minor issue or two here and there but eminently readable, despite being first person PoV, which I normally hate, but which in this case was engaging as opposed to nauseating. There are plot holes galore, but this is routine for a paranormal novel, and there were some quirks which caught my attention, such as when Kincaid remarks to us in chapter ten that some guys she introduced shook hands "guy style" and then the very next chapter she shakes hands herself. What is that? Girl style? I don't get how her shaking o' the hand was any different from the way the guys did earlier. If there is one, Mead failed to clarify exactly what it was and made her character come off as being hypocritical or clueless - and this isn't the only time that Kincaid is portrayed this way, I'm sorry to report.

Because she's a YA writer at heart, Mead had to have a love triangle. On the one breast is Roman and on the other, Kincaid's favorite writer, Seth Mortensen. Kincaid bounces between these two (not literally) and also between them and her casual (and oft frustrated) sex partner who works at the bookstore. Some negative critics have called Kincaid out on this, intimating - if not outright declaring - that she's a slut, but hello: SUCCUBUS! I think they clean forgot that this was a paranormal novel and Kincaid relies on sex for sustenance, being a vampire of the venereal. That's understandable however, because despite the novel being replete with angels, demons, vampires, imps, hybrid human-angels, and so on, there really was no paranormal stuff going on at all in this novel! I mean almost literally none at all.

The big deal here is that there's supposedly a slayer in town who's slaughtering immortals, and is apparently a threat to Kincaid herself, although neither she nor we are ever told why. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, but given that Seth is new in town and Roman is new in her life, it immediately struck me that either one of these could be the villain, and the remaining non-villainous one would become her love interest as the series progressed. And as it progressed, the relationship with Roman became about as clichéd and trope as you can get, so my money was on him being the new immortal villain in town. He was Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way! He was tall (Kincaid is evidently very short despite her shape-shifting ability), chiseled, commanding, dominating, irresistible, and a perfect lover. My question here was: how is this possible given that she's a succubus?! This loaned more support to my feeling that he was the troublemaker.

It also made me wonder what the heck the point was of making Kincaid a succubus at all if she was completely overpowered by people like Seth and Roman. At one point she is "terrified and thrilled" by how close he is, and we're constantly reminded that she's like a lovesick teenager around him. Is she not the dominant succubus she's supposed to be? How is a mere mortal able to make her feel that way? This was yet another reason to believe that Roman and/or Seth were more than human. By this point we'd learned that immortals of a certain level can mask their immortality so other immortals cannot sense them. Was Roman doing this to hide his true nature? This begs the question as to how effective a succubus can be when potentially anyone can overpower her in this way!

When they went bowling together, Mead sadly resorted to the boring trope of having Roman (who sports the boring trope of gold flecked eyes) get behind Kincaid and show her how to hold the balls, leading to an intimate level of physical proximity. It was as sickening as it was pathetic to read, precisely because this trope has been done to death. In fact I didn't read it - as soon as I saw where it was going, I skipped several paragraphs. This could have been a cheap Harlequin romance novel at this point. I would have thought someone as inventive as Mead could have come up with something original, but she struck out in the lanes.

In an amusing section where Kincaid is bantering with a couple of vamp friends, we learn that she has to use far more energy to change gender than she does to merely 'remodel' herself. We don't learn why. We also learn that she requires even more energy than that to emulate a different species. None of this is explained in any way at all. We don't know why she literally assumes the physical form of the thing she's emulating as opposed, for example, to merely mimicking the outward appearance of it. If she quite literally becomes the subject, then what happens to her own self? Does she literally lose her mind? If so, how does she get it back? If she doesn't (as she clearly doesn't) lose herself, then how is she assuming the exact form of her subject in any meaningful way? We're left in the dark. Maybe future volumes flesh this out - as it were!

The novel was very predictable and will disappointment many people from its lack of paranormal activity. Kincaid makes no sense as a succubus, and it's sad that we have to be told how funny and smart she is without seeing any evidence of either, and it's disappointing that she's so juvenile - not even acting her apparent age, much less her succubus age, but despite all of this, I actually liked the novel, and I can't tell you why. I think maybe it was because I read this as a YA novel even though it ostensibly isn't. it works better if you pretend it is. It was, as I indicated, a light, fluffy read, and maybe that's why - you can close off the analytical part of your brain, and just go with it for the light, brainless fun. Some parts were really engaging, and fun, others not so much. In short I felt the same way about his as I did about Vampire Academy - but after reading two or three volumes of that series, I gave up on it because it became too stupid, so while I'm willing to go on to volume two here, I'm not offering any guarantees about staying with the series beyond that.

Lazy Eye by Donna Daley-Clarke

Rating: WARTY!

Set in London, this audio book started out great, and then went downhill fast so I gave up on it. The first portion, narrated by Razaaq Adoti, tells of Geoffhurst, a black kid named after a star of England's one and only world cup win a half century ago - is taking after his father, not as a soccer player, but as a violent person. His father - who actually was a soccer player is evidently serving time for violence on the soccer field. The story was really going nowhere special but was interesting to hear this guy's take on, and justification of, his shallow life, especially in an authentic black London voice (Adoti was born in London and although he is considerably older than the guy whose story he's telling, his voice has a young and edgy sound to it).

Unfortunately, it was then rudely broken into by the other half of this story, which is narrated most musically by Robin Miles. I say unfortunately, because although Miles's Carribean lilt is beautiful to listen to, the story she's telling goes even less where than Geoffhurst's does. The downtrodden black experience story has been done to death, so if you don't have anything original or insightful to add to it, please steer clear of it. It turns people off rather than engenders sympathy these days.

This story tells of two black sisters (in the literal sense) growing up in London after having moved there from the West Indies. I found nothing in it worth listening to, although Mile's voice was worth hearing, but I could take only so much of that when it was really saying nothing.

I skipped two whole disks in this seven CD pack from my excellent local library, and reconnected with Geoffhurst, but now his story has lost whatever luster it had enjoyed before. I found myself wondering if I would have felt the same had not the sisters interrupted? Is it like the mythological frog in the slowly-heated water? If I had not been interrupted, would I have continued listening to the male side of the story? Or would I - like the frog - have been smarter than the people who purvey those asinine urban legends, and hopped it? I'll never know, but life is too short to keep hanging on begging the author for a truly engaging story, when scores of other authors already have one just waiting around the corner of the next book cover. I can't recommend this based on what I heard.

I Text Dead People by Rose Cooper

Rating: WORTHY!

The very title of this novel strongly suggests that it's worth reading, but I've gone down that path before and been disappointed. I'm happy to report that in this case, it worked out exactly as the title promised - brilliantly!

This is a middle-grade novel about Annabel Craven. It's larded with trope, but at least it's not first person PoV, and the author makes the story work. Anna is the new girl in school, who comes with issues, such as the fact that she lives in Mad Manor - really Maddsen Manor (the sign has some letters missing) which came to her mom Valerie, via a deceased uncle, who evidently could see dead people, and was consequently deemed crazy. Anna's mom is a cosmetologist and hairdresser

On a rebellious impulse one day, Anna befriends school 'freak' Lucy, and shortly after this, Lucy dies. That's when Anna starts getting texts from Lucy. And other ghosts. The texts come in on this phone she found in the cemetery which borders Mad manor - the same cemetery where Lucy met her demise. Now Lucy is asking for help from Anna in getting a message to John, the school hot boy.

Meanwhile Anna is trying to fit in and get along with the clique of wealthy kids, including oddball twins Olivia and Eden, both of whom seem to have a dark side, as well as Spencer - the school photographer, and Millie, who seems also to have a secret life. How this all pans out is the meat of this story which is beautifully written, darkly humorous, and very entertaining. I recommend this for a really good read. It's a pity we don't see more adult books written in this vein.

Frozen by Jennifer Lee

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a very short (two disk CD) version of the Disney animated movie Frozen, and I recommend it. It's really well done. it's credited to "Disney Press" but I'm crediting Jennifer Lee since she wrote the screenplay and finally dug Disney out from under the sugary morass of movie-making in which they've been embroiled for a half century. I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of this movie, and I reviewed it favorably back in 2013.

The novelization is awesome, and carries the joy of the movie ( minus the songs) perfectly. I enjoyed listening to it and was sorry it was so short. I recommend this. The narrator has the rather contradictory name of Andi Arndt, but reads beautifully. You can't go wrong with this.

The Scavengers by Michael Perry

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book I got from the library. It was just sitting there on the shelf looking like it could use some attention (we've all been there, don't try to deny it!), so I decided to pick it up and see if we got along okay, but it turned out this one was way too young for me and annoying as all helicopter.

The basic premise is a dystopian future Earth where climate change has got out of control (it's already heading there, so this is a good topic for a kids novel, but it wasn't handled well here). The problem with this is that the end result of climate change in what was obviously the US wasn't anything like you might imagine. (Apparently dystopia only affects the US, so if you live elsewhere, you need not worry at all!) This is a miserable world where people either live in bubble cities (domed domains, presumably), or they lived outside and scavenged whatever they can off the land. The problem is that there was no information available about why it had ended up this way, and why there were people on the in, and others on the out, or why those on the in had no time for those on the out. Maybe young readers won't wonder, but my kids would.

Nor does it explain why and how Maggie's family got a heads-up, and deliberately chose the great outdoors instead of going into a bubble city. The world building sucked and was highly improbable where it wasn't absurd, but the two biggest problems were the extremely annoying character named Toad who spoke gibberish and was nothing but a pain in the neck, and Maggie. After standing atop a Ford Falcon station wagon, and declaring her name is going to be Ford Falcon at the start of the story, she does nothing - not in the portion I listened to, to either earn or merit the name change. I got bored by just under the half-way mark, and quit listening. I can'r recommend it based on what I heard. On the contrary - I recommend you avoid it unless you're out of sleeping pills, then it might work a treat if it doesn't keep you awake through sheer irritation.

Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman

Rating: WARTY!

This is probably a rule of thumb: never read a book about drugs or prison written by an author whose name starts with 'Piper'. I had a negative impression of this author right from the off. The story is about her stupidity and blindness to reality when she was a spoiled-rotten college grad. She had no clue what to do with her life and evidently had no intention whatsoever of contributing anything to society, so she started living off an older woman named 'Norah'.

Norah is evidently a lesbian, but we learn virtually nothing of her, or of the nature of the author's relationship with her. Some reviewers have assumed this was a failing of the author in not fully fleshing-out the people she interacts with, but my own impression was that Kerman was so shallow that she never actually got to know these people sufficiently-well, beyond a flimsy façade of friendship that is, so she actually was incapable of fleshing them out.

One thing which does come off clear as crystal is how self-centered and callous this older woman is, yet Kerman never learns this, not even when she flies to Paris, expecting to find a ticket to Bali which was supposed to have been left for her by Norah. Kerman doesn't wise up and return to the US. Instead, she calls an acquaintance of Norah's and freeloads off him to continue on the Bali, not even thinking for a minute that Norah might not even be there. That's where I got my impression of clueless from.

So she led this highly privileged life, knowing it was financed by drug money, and never once had qualms about it or about the company she was keeping. She graduates into running drug money around herself, and then ten years pass and her past catches up with her - Norah sold her out. Even so, she gets off lightly - or whitely, might be more appropriate. She gets a mere fifteen months. This is what her life of luxury cost her - and what a bargain it was! She becomes inmate #11187-424 and apparently has a blast. Then she writes a novel about it and gets rich from it. Meanwhile all those people who didn't go the criminal route get nothing but their good name.

The blurb describes the novel as "...at times enraging..." and I can see why it would be. It also says, "Kerman's story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison" but that's a lie. All it offers is a narrow blinkered view into the selfish life of a privileged upper class woman in a holiday camp of a prison, and that's it! I can't recommend this audio book based on what I listened to, which was more than enough.

Corr Syl The Warrior by Garry Rogers

Rating: WARTY!

I wanted to read this advance review copy because I thought it would be a story very much in the mold of Watership Down which, though it had some issues, I enjoyed and reviewed favorably back in September 2014. This children's novel is nothing like Watership Down. The book is heavy going - there are endless chapters and a foreword, which I skipped. I don't do introductions and forewords - if it's worth saying, it's worth putting in chapter one or later. Once I got into the main story, it was less than thrilling. Maybe young children will like this, but it was hard to tell at which age group this was aimed, and from my own perspective it was not well done.

The ebook version of this novel struck me as in need to some work before it was ready for prime time. I suspect that it failed to weather the transition from original typescript to ebook version, because the formatting was way off. In literally the first four screens, on three occasions, I found text plunked down in the middle of other text where it clearly did not belong. This was the same on the iPad Kindle app as it was on my phone Kindle app, but it was not apparent in Bluefire Reader on the iPad.

On the very first screen, for example, there was a sentence which was evidently intended to read, "...began an imaginary combat exercise." There was also the italicized description of the beginning of the exercise, which started, "The Human assassin ran across the smooth stone with quick, light steps...". In the Kindle app version, these two were interleaved thus: "...and began an imaginary combat The Human assassin ran across the smooth stone with exercise. quick, light steps..." This same problem was extant on almost every screen where italics appeared with regular font text. On the very next screen, the sentence "...reached a conclusion For an instant..." was interspersed with the italicized "Rhya is intentionally avoiding me - does she actually like me?" to become, "...reached a conclusion For Rhya is intentionally avoiding me - does she actually like me?an instant..."

This same thing happened in the intro to part one (the novel is in five parts) giving us this: " dangerous inHistory of the Tsaebdividuals and species appear from time to time, and civilization needs its defenders. Morgan Silverleaf, Librarian of Wycliff". This screwing-up-o'-the-text seems to be quite a common problem with Kindle app versions for some reason. Rather than try to decipher it, I took to skipping those sections. There were other, unrelated issues, such as one part which read, "Addressed to , the letter was an invitation..." and which is obviously missing the addressee's name. This is not a fault with the Kindle app and is something a writer or an editor should have caught. There were also parts where lines of text ended early on one line and resumed on the next. Hopefully all of that will be fixed before this is ever released as a finished work.

The big question with writing a novel like this, where you're humanizing the animals, is how far should you go? If you fail to go far enough, you risk having the animals become unintelligible (in a broad sense), but if you go too far, they're too human and pointless. If all you're doing is putting humans in rabbit clothing, then why bother? You need to have some rabbit in there, otherwise all you have is humans dressed as rabbits, which is sad and boring, if not unintentionally hilarious. The same kind of problem exists when you create aliens for a sci-fi novel. In this case the author has the rabbits indistinguishable from humans except for their whiskers and fur, and this felt like huge fail to me.

Maybe children will go for this, but I doubt mine would. For me personally, it really began to bother me that the animals - not just rabbits, but all animals, were exactly like humans except for the fact that they had an animal shape and animal skin. They behaved, and thought, and spoke, and organized themselves exactly like humans, so I had to wonder what was the point of making them animals? What is it that's new here exactly, if all we essentially have here is weird or mutated-looking humans?

The rabbits evidently live in caves high on a cliff, which made no sense, since this has nothing to do with how rabbits live in real life, so why put them there? If you're going to put your characters there, then why make them rabbits as opposed to mountain goats or sheep, or something?! None of the animals wore clothes, but they seemed obsessed with wearing outrageous hats. I had no idea what was going on there.

These rabbits have some odd and unexplained skills - at least unexplained in the part I read. They have six streams of consciousness, yet nowhere is this apparent in their thinking, at least as far as being conveyed in the text. We're just told this fact and then it's apparently irrelevant after that. Worse than this is that despite being covered in fur, the rabbits blush! Have no idea where that thinking came from - what's the point of a blush response if you have fur? There seems to have been no thought whatsoever given to how these animals evolved in the way they supposedly did. And once again humans are the paragon to which they all have to aspire. Why? Why aim to take the road less traveled if all you're going to do on it is let yourself become mired in tired old ways and habits?

Their thought processes mirrored ours precisely, as I mentioned, even to the point of Corr seeing Rhya as "painfully beautiful" at one point early in the story. So not only do we get humanized animals, we also get them relegating women to pigeon-holes, one labeled 'beautiful' and the other labeled, presumably, 'beastly', because these are the only two categories females can be placed into even if they're rabbits, it would seem. How shallow is that?

I think it's wrong to focus on beauty and treat it like it's all that matters, and it's particularly wrong in a children's book where we need to avoid setting these absurd 'standards' most of all. Rhya was dancing at the time, so could we not have described her as skilled, or graceful, or daring, or something other than beautiful? Or at least qualified it by saying that she moved beautifully if that was what was meant? I think it's entirely the wrong message to send to children, and it was at this point that I decided I could better spend my time pursuing other stories. I can't recommend this one based on what I read.

Seaside by Wylde Scot

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"the site of his mate" should be " the sight of his mate"
"in the octopus' grasp" should be " in the octopus's grasp" (octopus is singular, but using apostrophe with no following 's' wrongly indicates that it's plural. What is the plural of octopus? It's octopuses. 'Octopi' is not even a word, so avoid that one!
"filled with people form Seaside." should be 'from Seaside"
“Anchor’s away,” should be "Anchors aweigh"

This children's story is set around the town of Seaside, where ten year old Bobby lives on land, and young Walter lives in the ocean. He's an octopus which, contrary to the ideas suggested here, cannot live out of water for any significant length of time, although it can survive and even move around hunting on land for short periods of time. It cannot support itself on its "legs" unless it's in water, however. On land, it slithers and slides rather like a mutated snake.

There are all kinds of octopus videos on You Tube showing escapes. They can move quite well on land for a short time, even though they look improbably flat as they do so do so. Octopuses are the most intelligent non-vertebrate species, and they show excellent problem-solving skills. Also, all octopuses are venomous, although only the blue-ringed octopus is dangerous - even deadly - to humans.

I was amused when I read, "...great white shark hanging upside down." which technically would mean that it was suspended with its dorsal fin underneath, pointed at the ground, and its white belly facing the sky. I think the author meant that it was hanging by its tale, but who knows?! Hanging upside down is funnier. Perhaps the intended children's audience will not notice this.

Despite some textual errors, the overall story was well-written and engrossing, and I don’t doubt that children of the appropriate age will love it. It shows how three very different people (there's also a feisty pelican) can learn to live and work together and overcome oppression and wrong-doing, as well as have some exciting adventures together. Both Walter and Bobby step up where adults fail, and they refuse to give up until they achieve justice. I think the "school bully" motif is rather overdone in children's stories, so I wasn't thrilled to see it represented here, although no school was involved, but that aside, I liked the story and I recommend it.

Princess Callie and the Totally Amazing Talking Tiara by Daisy Piper

Rating: WARTY!

Another book by someone named Piper, but at least she has the name in the right place! This is book one, by a debut author, in a series. I am not a fan of series unless they are exceptional, especially not 'personality cult' series where the main character's name is in every title, and this series isn't aimed at me, so I don't plan on pursuing this one, but it did sound interesting for its intended audience, so I thought I'd take a look at volume one, and see what it had to offer. I have to say I was rather disappointed in it. If you find you like it however, the series is, as of this writing: Princess Callie and the Total Amazing Talking Tiara, Princess Callie and the Fantastic Fire Breathing Dragon, and Princess Callie and the Race for the Ruby Cup.

Callie, whose full name is Calandria Arabella Philomena Teresita Anastasia Richards (CAPTAR) has just turned twelve, but is immature and/or selfish enough to be thoroughly pissed-off that her father has a new love wants to remarry, two years after his wife died. In addition to his, she also discovered that she is the princess of a magical land hidden down a tunnel in her back yard, and the land is in desperate trouble and she's the only one who can save it - of course. So off she goes, with Lewis, and Wanda, the school bully, adventuring, without a word to her parent as to where she's going or when she'll be back. See what I mean about selfishness?

We're told that Lewis Farnsworth is her best friend, but what we're shown is that he's not a very good friend. For her twelfth birthday, he gets her something completely inappropriate, and despite the fact that she's desperately and obviously trying to tell him something important, he simply doesn't listen. He didn't strike me as much of a friend, and this is reinforced by his later behavior. Why Callie values him so highly is a mystery. I guess she's desperate, given everything else in her life.

There's trope and clichéd school bullying here which goes unpunished - another failing in this type of school-oriented novel. I have no idea what school this style of writer went to as a kid, but I feel sorry for such authors if they experienced anything like the caricatured brutality they depict, even when it's 'limited' to extortion and blackmail like it is here.

One of the things which annoyed me about his novel was the genderism displayed in it, not by the characters, but by the author. At one point she has two guys (her dad and Lewis) dismissed and told to go off and discuss baseball - like sports is all guys ever have on their minds, while the two girls (Callie and her stepmom-to-be) go off and discuss 'girl-power' - like person-power is inadequate. Here's another example: "She wanted to have normal dreams about normal things, like cute boys and shoe shopping and hair accessories." Seriously? I guess that's what passes fro girl power in this world.

I don't get why a female author would demean her own gender like this - as though women even at that age, have nothing on their mind but prettying themselves up like so many magpies decorating their nests. Yes, many girls are like that, but that doesn't mean we have to slavishly depict all girls that way all the time, like there is no other hope for them, than to be objects and dolls for the entertainment of men, and to feel that this is their sole purpose in life. This approach irritated me and that was it for this book. I can't recommend it.

Stuck in the Middle With You by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Rating: WARTY!

“enormous and beautiful wife”
“…after ten years of marriage she was a beautiful as when we married…”

Wrong in assumption that all parents want to talk endlessly about children. I know I didn’t.

This is a book written by a man who married a woman, had two sons with her, then felt the need to become a woman himself, which she did, and the family maintained their coherence throughout this. That's a remarkable, joyous thing. My question when reading this was, "How can you make a story like that trite and boring?" I have no answer to that except that somehow, this author managed it. She has written at least one other book on this topic, and has also branched into fiction, but having read about a third of this and given up on it, I don’t feel any kind of compulsion towards reading more by this author.

The problem with this book was that despite how remarkable the experience was, not unique, but darned close to it, all we got here was a family drama which could have been related by anyone. The author talks about her family life like it's unique and engrossing, but it isn't. It may have become interesting after she changed, but I couldn’t stand to read that far because the early part of the book was so awful. I don't know how you can make a book like this sound monotonous and tedious, but she did.

The one thing which really stood out to me was how genderist she was - and for someone who has been both genders, this really made an impression. For example, she rambles on about “rites of passage” categorizing her sons in a way she cannot, nor probably would want to, be categorized. The first example was when her oldest son started shaving. She had this bizarre idea that this was some sort of ritualistic father-son bonding thing. No, it’s not. Maybe for some people it is, but it’s a really blinkered view to imagine that every other father-son is just like you are with your son.

Her bland, and frankly arrogant, assumption that no fathers have beards and that no women have any experience with shaving is so far off base as to be in a different ballpark. On page twenty she talks about women liking the fact that when she was a man, she had a feminine streak, “…that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn’t know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto.” I’m sorry but I don’t see any of these traits as being un-masculine. I found it incredible that this author who had broken so much ground was categorizing and pigeon-holing people in a way she herself presumably would not wish to be categorized, pigeon-holed or classified. It was both clueless and arrogant as well as hypocritical.

As a man, the author met her wife Deedie at one funeral and a wedding, rather like the movie, but she applies genderist and patronizing descriptions to her. I read (when Deedie was pregnant) that she was an “enormous and beautiful wife” and later I read, “…after ten years of marriage she was a beautiful as when we married…”. I found this obnoxious, dismissing not only women, but the woman she supposedly loves, as a skin-deep fleshpot, whose only important trait was how pretty she looks. Forget any other traits she might have because who cares - we don't need to go beneath the skin! Again, it’s insulting. On which topic, her younger son is referred to and addressed as " Seannie ". How belittling can you get? The infantile name doesn't even sound cute. And yet later she's expressing concern about what kind of an effect her personal transition has had on her two boys?! Lady you got bigger problems than that if you're branding your son a "Seannie"!

She dismisses all parents with an insulting assertion that all that parents want to talk endlessly about is their children. I know I don’t and didn’t even when they were infants. Most people I know do not do this. I have no idea who she hung out with, but they were evidently very shallow, or she had a very biased view of them. But at least she had the pleasure of becoming one of those people later, so I'm sure she was very happy. The annoying thing about this was that it spent so much time talking about ordinary everyday life - the same kind of life every adult, and every parent leads. It wasn't interesting and had little bearing on what became of her later. Maybe the latter part of the book is different. I didn’t read that far because I'd read all I could stand of bland.

The book consisted of a first person PoV of her life, but there were breaks in the story for interviews with people I had never heard of and had no interest in. I skipped all of these to get back to the story for which I'd got hold of the book in the first place - the story I wanted to read, but was denied evidently in more than one way! There were really odd parts, too. for example, at one point, she's out cycling with her boys, and one of them cycles ahead and somehow manages to come flying off his bike. The story tells us he goes to the hospital, but then we get a bunch more of those annoying interviews. I quickly skipped past those to find out what happened to her son, but the next section where she's telling us her story makes no mention whatsoever of the incident. I'm like, "What?" Is your son that unimportant? Did you forget what you had previously written before collating and interleaving these irritating interviews? Had the previous borrower of this book torn pages out? Who knows? It was at this point that I quit reading this and returned this to the library so it could piss off someone else instead of me.

I learned essentially nothing of how she went through this, what she felt, how she coped. Maybe later in this book some of that was addressed, and there is another book on the topic by this same author, which is probably the one I should have read instead of this, but as for this one, I cannot recommend it. I should have realized that anything with "memoir" on the front cover ought to be avoided like the plague!

The level of naïveté demonstrated by this author is really quite stunning. She writes things like, "...it also occurred to us that physical intimacy may not be the most important kind" May not be?!! One thing which really disturbed me, and this goes right back to gender roles and stereotyping, was where she wrote, "What kind of men would my children become...having been raised by a father who became a woman?" This is a problem how exactly? I guess if your view of life is that a man must be a man and a woman a woman and never the twain shall meet is your starting point, as evidently it was hers, then this is your unavoidable destination. Given that this particular author literally transitioned from male to female, the level of hypocrisy here is truly giddying. Quite obviously she learned nothing from this transition, and this is apparently why she can teach us nothing.

Zen Ghosts by Jon J Muth

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the third of my children's Halloween book reviews for today. This one is a fine-looking work of art illustrated by the author. When Karl says there's a ghost outside, Michael hardly believes it, and he;s smart not to because this is Stillwater, the giant panda who wears a tiny wolf mask on his head. Karl explains to Still water that he's going to be a monster for Halloween, while Michael is still trying to choose between an owl and a pirate. Perhaps he could be both if Karl didn't object to that so strenuously.

When Addy joins them, Stillwater tells them of a ghost story they could hear after they're done trick-or-treating, and if they meet him by the big stone wall. The giant panda leads them back to his house and illustrates a story for them with some fine brush strokes. It's the story of Senjo and Ochu, two youngsters who were destined to be married until Senjo's father became so ill that he could not work. Senjo would have to be married off to Henryo instead. Ochu: Ouch!

Ochu decides to leave the village, but Senjo discovers his plan and abandons her father and leaves with him. I guess she was that kind of girl. On the other hand, he was going to sell her off to the highest bidet. It wasn't until the had married and had children that Senjo started to feel bad about deserting her sick parent. What will they find when they return? Well, I'm not even going to tell you, but it's awesome. I thoroughly recommend this one.

We're Going on a Ghost Hunt by Susan Pearson

Rating: WORTHY!

Continuing today's Halloween theme, we're going on a ghost hunt with a really stirring and adventurous text by Susan Pearson, and some cool illustrative work by SD Schindler. Four young kids (where are their parents?!) are rampaging across the countryside searching for ghosts, and nothing, not swamps, not windy woods, not rivers, no, not even cornfields are going to stop them, but when they find the ghost in a cemetery? Well, maybe they will stop then and beat a hasty retreat the way they came to hide under the covers. I loved this book for its feisty, adventurous spirit, and the crazy kids.

Only a Witch Can Fly by Alison McGhee

Rating: WORTHY!

It's the right time of year for some Halloween books, so I'm posting three children's book reviews on my blog today. The first is this one, written poetically by Alison McGhee, and illustrated gorgeously in suitably earthy tones by Taeeun Yoo. I love the way the poetic meter trips along from page to page irreverently as the young wannabe witch dreams of flying, and tries to fly but falls, yet she doesn't give up. She's aiming high and she's confident she'll get there. A nice easy listening book to read to your kids. I think they might have chosen a better font to write in - the 'f' looks like an 'i' and caught me out a couple of times, as I tried to figure out what the heck word it was in, but aside from that, I recommend this completely.

The Festering Season by Kevin Tinsley

Rating: WORTHY!

This graphic novel commendably takes on the tragedy of police shootings of African Americans in New York City, but to me it cheapened the real tragedy by ascribing it to a weird vudu cult. I'm not sure why the author went this way because there's drama aplenty in the reality without having to tart it up with whack religious cults, but this is what we have here, so let's go with it on that basis.

While Tim Smith 3's art work was wonderful (using a Norman Rockwell style two-color printing process), Deborah Creighton, the editor, is apparently somewhat less than fully illiterate. I found errors of spelling and grammar which any editor worth his or her salt ought to have caught. There were errors such as "...if you have too" on page five, where 'too' should have been 'to', or on page eleven, where the grammar is totally screwed up: "And it is not like I have ever had any real choice in these matters is there?"

The reason I pulled this off the library shelf is that it appeared to have a strong black female main character, which is far too rare in books, and she intrigued me. She was well-worth the read. Her name is Rene DuBoise, and she's going up against Gangleos, a powerful vudu practitioner. Note that vudu is nothing more than a religious death cult like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, and I have no time for meaningless mythology, but sometimes these religions, with their stories of the eternal battle between good and evil, can make for entertaining reading. This one did.

The story begins with two police officers shooting what they claim was a man trying to break into a store, whereas it was a woman, Rene's mom August, who was closing up her vudu paraphernalia shop for the night. I think we're supposed to perceive from this that the police officers were under some sort of vudu spell and were hallucinating so that perhaps the bad guy could take out a rival or someone who opposes his evil, but this isn't exactly crystal clear from the opening panels. Note that all of the incidents portrayed here have their roots (if not their detailed accuracy) in real life events in NYC.

Anyway, with this woman's death, her daughter Rene is brought back to NYC, and she moves into the shop which has been trashed by the police in a desperate search to find something incriminating to try and ameliorate what they're referring to as an 'accident'. I loved the way they're brought back to reality by the woman's sister highlighting the fact that seventeen shots fired into an unarmed victim cannot be dismissed as a mere accident.

The story touches on several religions such a Santeria, which originates from Yoruba in west Africa, and Palo Mayombe, which originates in the Congo, as well as Vodun, which originates in Ghana. Rene is a practitioner herself, and is forced to put wards upon her mother's grave to prevent agents of Gangleos from disinterring her body. This is all stuff and nonsense, but there are people who believe in it. In NYC itself, as this novel reports in the notes, there was an elderly woman who claimed to be a vudu witch. Her powers evidently didn't prevent her from being struck by a vehicle and killed when she was walking close by her apartment, but when cops went in there after the accident, they found masses of vudu paraphernalia and a newborn child preserved in formaldehyde in a large jar in her closet. I don't know if they ever did determine who the child was or how she died.

But the story takes real events and adapts them to make them fit this vudu plot, and it does it quite well. Within its framework, the worry makes sense and is entertaining. I enjoyed it and I recommend it.

If Wishes Were Husbands by Lucy Shea

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not one for romance novels, but this one appealed to me because of the whimsy of a fantasy coming true. I didn't even know it was set in Britain, which was a bonus to me, but which I think was a mistake to omit from the blurb. This book is written by a Brit author, and non-British readers are likely to find themselves rather lost in the lingo (and not lost in the lino as I initially typed! LOL!).

Rachel Gosling is forty and a dreaded 'spinster' - but here, spinster can mean two things - the other meaning being one who spins stories. The fantasy husband she makes up one day at the hair-dressers and elaborates upon that night when out for drinks with some acquaintances, becomes disturbingly real when she arrives home later, and finds her fantasy husband in residence. He's everything she desired, and she panics. After realizing he's not some burglar or home-invader, she decides her best friend Sheila is having her on, but Sheila denies all knowledge of Darren.

She orders the guy out of the house and then goes to bed, only to wake up the next morning, naked and lying next to naked Darren, her wished-up husband! By lunch time, she's accepted him completely and whole-heartedly bought into her own fiction. Or has she? With her whole heart? Darren has memories of their life before her wish: real memories of courting and proposing and marrying. Those are memories which Rachel doesn't share.

As this 'marriage' continues, Rachel starts to fully appreciate the relevance of admonition: "Be careful what you wish for." Clearly her wish needed to have been defined to a much finer degree than she'd ever thought it did. To be fair, though, when she made it, she didn't realize it was going to come true. Now it seems that she's stuck with it. Or is she? Can she wish it away as readily as she wished it to be? Or is something else going on here?

There are some choice comments by the author in the voice of her main character, such as this one: "I didn’t want to be the one who enabled her to open the brown cardboard box of iniquity" which struck me as hilarious, but maybe you had to be there. On the other hand, there were multiple screw-ups in the text, which would have turned me off this novel had it not been so entertaining. Examples of these are: "pair of dogs on heat" which seems to me that it ought to read in heat, but maybe they do say that in Britain. Worse examples were:
"/like déjà vu" the slash mark appears to need erasure, and the period at the end of the previous word removing
"terra firmer" should obviously be 'terra firma', although I liked the other version
"begge the receptionist" should be 'begged the receptionist'
"I maybe claiming" which should be 'may be claiming'
"two feather boars" should be 'two feather boas
"I wouldn’t need to think about." should be 'I wouldn't need to think', or 'I wouldn't need to think about it'.
"selotape" should be 'Selotape' - it's a trademark.
"The conservation was turning into the beginning of a scientific essay" should have been 'conversation'
"my brain had been effected" should be 'my brain had been affected'
The author is also a bit repetitive using "chef’s hats on toothpicks" both in chapter 8 and in chapter 17, although this is a minor issue.

Overall, though, I loved the way this went and especially the way it ended. It was an entertaining story and kept me interested and provided a satisfying read. I recommend it.

Just Fall by Nina Sadowsky

Rating: WARTY!

I had problems with this advance review copy right from the start. It felt more like experimental fiction - even though it technically wasn't - than it did a regular novel. There are 74 chapters, but the chapter numbers have been removed and all the odd chapters have been titled 'Now' and all but the last of the even ones titled 'Then'. The very last is titled 'Next'. I saw no practical utility in listing seventy four chapters in the contents with every other title the same and then linking them to the respective chapter.

As for the novel itself, it was irritating and pedantic. It felt like a bad rendition of Christopher Nolan's Memento movie. The repetitive flashbacks became quickly annoying because they frustratingly and dedicatedly interrupted the far more interesting 'Now' chapters which told a real story of a woman in serious trouble. In the end, it felt like this was a short story which the author had then extensively padded by inventing fluff to make a disordered back story which was interleaved with the current story. I found myself skimming and then skipping the 'Then' chapters in short order. The backstory was boring, and largely irrelevant at least as far as I read, which was about 65%.

Ellie, the main character, appears in the first Now, and she's in a hotel room with a male body which has been stabbed while laying on the bed. Ellie wipes the room down for prints and leaves, changing her appearance from time to time in minor ways such as by wearing scarves and sunglasses, dying her hair, putting on fake nails, and so on. She seems at a loose end, until she decides to leave the Caribbean island she's on, whereupon she's picked up by someone working for the guy who evidently wanted the man in her room dead.

The first 'Then' introduces her husband, Rob, on their wedding day. Right after they're married, he reveals a devastating secret to her, but we're not told what that secret is until later. Subsequent chapters introduce Lucien, the harried cop who is assigned to investigate the hotel murder, and told to resolve it quickly for the sake of the tourist industry. So far so good. The problem is that the 'Then' chapters are used increasingly, and from early on, to give this huge backstory for Ellie and Rob, and it wasn't interesting to me. It was actually very annoying because I wanted the 'Now' and could not care less about the 'Then'.

Another issue was with the obsession with beauty. I read about it more than once. On one occasion it appeared in the form of "A smile crossed her face, and suddenly she was warm, and therefore even more beautiful." It was like this female author, who is listed as "entertainment lawyer, executive, producer, director, writer, author, and beloved USC professor" was insisting that the only important thing about this female was skin-deep, otherwise forget her, and I didn't get it at all. Ellie quite evidently had other qualities as I read later, so why focus on the beauty instead of on her much more practical and interesting qualities? Are we that shallow? Are women that devalued? Are they that one-dimensional?

As I said, I reached a point about 65% of the way in when I really could sustain interest no longer. The endless flashbacks were mind-numbing and even the 'Now' the story was losing my interest. It was so broken up by the interleaved 'Then' that it was just obnoxious and I skipped screen after screen to get back to the 'Now' where nothing much was happening anyway. I decided I needed to move on to a more engrossing read. I can't recommend this.