Whistling Women by Kelly Romo

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Four shiny black Buick’s" doesn’t need the apostrophe
"...at least FDR. is trying..." FDR isn’t an abbreviation like Dr. or Ms., it's initials, so either it should be simply FDR, which rightly or wrongly is my minimalist preference, or it should be F.D.R.
"nauseas" misspelling of nauseous
"...in his stripped vest..." should be 'striped vest'
"Beat’s me" should be "Beats me"

This novel (of which I got an advance review copy) is set in 1935, the year when Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California, and Harlem had race riots, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater was completed, and the Dust Bowl hit, Jews lost citizenship in Germany, and the FBI wiped out the Barker gang, the first canned beer was sold and alcoholics anonymous was founded, Lawrence of Arabia died and parking meters were brought into use by Oklahoma city. 1935 - and already there were too many cars!

It’s also set in San Diego, the birthplace of California, home of the largest naval fleet in the world, and takes place during the California Pacific International Exposition. The exposition really took place in 1935, and it did precisely what instigator Frank Drugan hoped it would - it attracted over seven million visitors and brought almost thirty eight million dollars into San Diego's economy at a time when the entire USA was still in a sluggish recovery from 1929. No one knew at the time that the economy would get its biggest boost from the second world war and the USA would become a superpower.

Yes, there was a nudist colony located in the sunken Zoro garden, but it was populated with performers, not actual nudists, and both men and women wore a covering on the lower half of their body, but yes, there was a macaw! Fittingly, this place which housed "pretties", and which brought in more money than any other exhibit at the exposition, is now a butterfly garden, still housing pretties, but much more honest and innocent. In the fictional version, the fenced in nudist colony is populated by real nudists who benefit from the admission price which funds their colony. You could also say they benefit from the exposure - in attracting new members, so to speak.

Author Kelly Romo has taken the real events and woven them with a fictional tale to produce a truly well-written and engaging story about alienated sisters, once close but now torn apart by awful events with which we’re teased until we slowly learn the truth by the half-way point in the novel. Although it’s clear long before then what happened, we never learn all the twisted and intriguing details, which are doled out throughout the second half of the novel. The novel is gorgeously written with all of the important characters sketched sharply, even if briefly. The relationship between Wavey and Addie is complex and beautifully sculpted. It's mirrored in the relationship between Wavey's daughters Rumor and Mary, two girls who are counterparts to their elders, Rumor matching Addie, and Mary matching Wavey, their names, one fairly common and one rare, being switched between the generations and the personalities.

This is very much a woman's story, and is the better for it. Although it isn't first person (and is the better for it!), it's told very much from Addie's PoV, and to a lesser extent, Rumor's. Neither Wavey nor Mary really get their own story, appearing only in relationship - and often very much as a foil - to their respective sister. Indeed Wavey is painted more in hues chosen by her sister and her daughter than ever she is from her own palette. Men appearing in the story are almost universally bad influences or downright bad people. With only two exceptions (and one of those is highly iffy), they are not men to be around, especially not if you're young, female, and defenseless. Even when one appears to be a decent and positive influence, we find his foundation to be as unreliable as the sand on the beach.

Both Wavey and Addie are different women, but strong in their own way. Rumor is a force to be reckoned with, and although younger than Mary, is significantly more mature and self-possessed, very much a catalyst. This story would still have been worth reading without all the secrets and intrigue, but of course without that, the estrangement, which is the spine of this body of work, would have been lacking.

While I loved the novel overall, there was one slight annoyance: Wavey's " fractured blue eyes". It felt like if I read that phrase once, I read it a gazillion times, although it only appeared on maybe eight or ten occasions in one form or another: fractured, splintered, prisms, and so on. Once was more than enough when it isn’t really explained that well. From a reference to cracked ice and to prisms, I took it to mean that they were two or more shades of blue, colored like a kaleidoscope, but pale like ice. The problem as that this wasn't exactly clear to me. I found myself wondering if it was a metaphor. Did it mean that they were sad? Does it mean they fracture light like waves in the ocean, which is where her name came from? Or did her name come from a wave hat? We never learn. Does it mean the eyes were as broken as their owner? That they were cold and impenetrable like glass, and unforgiving? The fact that the sharp description of Wavey's eyes was so vague in meaning made the repeated use of this term all the more irritating, but this was a minor point when compared with the engrossing sweep of the overall story.

Wavey isn't forgiving of Addie's behavior, even though she claims she is, but it’s fine because Addie isn’t forgiving herself either. Wavey doesn’t trust Addie around her kids, believing that her sister was corrupted by her stint in the orphanage, and then more so by her time at the nudist colony. This rejection crushes Addie. Wavey's kids think they have a reasonable handle on things, but they really don’t. Only Wavey knows the whole story, and the question running like a snagged thread through this tale is whether or not these four girls can handle what really happened, bring it all together, and make a new life which includes all of them.

In the end things come together in a pleasant and satisfying way, although not necessarily in a way you might predict for a story like this. I absolutely adored it. Both Addie and Wavey are outstanding characters, but they are not the only ones who leave a mark on you. Addie's friends at the nudist colony are a story in themselves, especially Daisy, who is Addie's roommate, and Daisy's son Sal. There's one other person, who seems to play only a minor role, but whose character is sketched ever more sharply as the story rolls on to a breath catching ending. I was thrilled to read this and recommend it highly. Like one of Wavey's neighbors, who is abruptly turfed out of her bungalow because she can’t make the rent, or like one of the older women who is dismissed from the colony because she's no longer the youthful, healthy crowd-pleasing specimen of femininity she once was, I'll miss the people I'm leaving behind as I move on to the next novel on my list! This is my first Kelly Romo. It will not be my last!

The Monster That Ate My Socks by AJ Cosmo

Rating: WORTHY!

I’ve had some success with AJ Cosmo’s children’s books and this was another one. Weird, but original and fun, and which took a Doctor Who approach to conflict resolution by showing that the brain is mightier than the sword. A nameless child is having a problem in that his stinky socks seem to be showing up in tatters the next morning – not clean ones, only the stinky ones. He doesn’t seem to grasp that if he washed them, or at least secured them, they might be safe from whatever it is that’s eating them, but he does have the smarts to lie in wait one night to find out that a green, three-eyed little creature is attacking and devouring his socks, and he makes a plan with his friend Ryan to trap the critter, which they do. He didn’t realize, though, that even monsters have families, and this one is only wanting to be able to take care of three kids.

Further investigation reveals that the monsters also love to eat bad homework and test results (now there’s an idea!), so the kids come up with a nice solution to the problem. In some ways I was a little bit disappointed that there was no opportunity seized here to discuss personal hygiene or the important of doing well in school. There doesn’t need to be a lecture, just a word or two here and there to get the idea into kids’ heads. That curmudgeonly comment aside, I did like the story and the monsters, and they message that you can help people even when, at first blush, they appear to be scary or beyond help.

And here I thought lost socks were orbiting Saturn alongside all the lost luggage! Shows what I know. I liked the overall story and the originality, and I consider this a worthy read. Besides, it has socks appeal!

Tovi the Penguin Goes Away for Christmas by Janina Rossiter

Rating: WORTHY!

I've had a mixed relationship with Tovi, but who can resist a good Christmas story? This one was a good one - and had a nice message - that friends are more important than presents, although presents are good too! Tovi and his two friends are evidently quite well-off, because they have a winter retreat they can visit for Xmas. I guess they have a nice income from licensing their image to the Linux people and the Batman franchise...!

The penguins discover on Xmas morning that Santa hasn't delivered any presents! Rather than dissolve into blubbering and inertia, they press on and make a joyous dinner, and play games and have a good old time. When they arrive home, they discover that Santa has indeed paid them a visit - he just didn't know they were away from home. Not only did they have a great time, now they get to open presents. I found this to be a fun story, and with an important message, which is why I'm rating this one a worthy read.

The Awkward Owl by Shawnda Blake

Rating: WORTHY!

Awkward is itself an awkward word with the 'wkw' - I mean how weird is that? The owl was really a turkey vulture (it was all a misunderstanding), but this story isn't awkward at all; it's charming, and it is about an owl - a young one who-who hasn't yet got full control of his faculties. He flies backwards and upside down and bumps into trees while other owls swoop and flutter on silent but deadly wings.

Fortunately there's a little girl who is understanding (and sadly nameless), not critical or fun-poking, and she helps the owl until he can grow a little more and not be the Jar Jar Binks of the owl world. I found the drawings in this story to be a hoot! The tale was amusingly sweet, ruffled no feathers, and was gentle and easy, and full of promise. I recommend this one because it dared to be inventive and different.

What's For Thanksgiving Dinner? by Sally Huss

Rating: WORTHY!

Being a foreigner, I've lived in the US with three strikes against me at Thanksgiving. It never was a tradition in England, where I grew up, so it never was a tradition for me. I was three thousand miles from my family (who didn't celebrate it anyway!), so it was hardly possibly to drive over and spend the day, and I am a vegetarian, so the idea of eating Turkey was as disgusting as having to sit with other people who were eating it. No one got this. While none of the palaver surrounding Thanksgiving impinged on me at all, there were those who sought to force it upon my against my will. It was annoying when friends rather rudely insisted that I must participate on this family occasion, and overbearingly insisted that I join them. I felt annoyed, even angry at times, when I would rather be doing something else. Rather than hurt their feelings or make them think I was anti-social I would join them, but soon learned to make excuses - lying that I had other plans, just so I could be alone with my pets and my movies and my books. England has a harvest festival, as I am sure many northern nations do, but it's nothing like Thanksgiving.

Now, of course I have my own family, who are all Americans, so I'm outnumbered and it would be churlish to fight it, so Thanksgiving has become a part of my life now. My family is liberal enough that it's no big deal (which is why they're my family and I love them!) so it's a fun occasion which does not suffer the stiff confines of stodgy and inhibiting tradition. Friendship and cooperation! That's why I wanted to read yet another Sally Huss book, which definitely set itself free from tradition in many ways while still holding to it in others. I'm not sure there's much educational value in this book, but there is a strong story of acceptance - and a vegetarian message! I'm not convinced that was the author's intention, but who knows?

The three main characters are a duck, called Duck, a goose named Goose, and a turkey named Beauregarde (I may have made that last name up). Duck traditionally eats goose for Thanksgiving (let's not get too naturally correct here), and Goose traditionally eats duck, so these two are definitely intent upon capturing each other, but as their doomed quest becomes evident, they make a pact to go after Turkey. Once again they fail, and all three becomes friends and decide on pumpkin pie. A great little story and a sweet (literally!) ending. It's a story of friendship and cooperation (so maybe I was wrong about the educational value!), and I recommend this one.

Schools on Trial by Nikhil Goyal

Rating: WARTY!

Nikhil Goyal WAS a 17-year-old senior at Syosset High School when he first began haranguing the world about poor schooling, but after reading his book on school reformation, I was left with the feeling that his education was lacking - at least in terms of making intelligent constructive arguments and supporting them with solid data. I found this book (of which I read an advance review copy) to be shallow and inutile, and I cannot recommend it.

The system is culpable. However, what happens in nearly every instance is that instead of castigating the perpetrator of this crime, we - society - chide the victims. We blame the students for "refusing to be educated." We blame the millions of dropouts. We blame the misfits who weren't able to or refused to conform to the standards of conventional schooling. We blame the kids who goof off during class, the kids who don't shut up and sit down, the kids who don't pay attention, the kids who don't study enough, the kids who don't perform well on tests, the kids who don't finish their homework, and the kids who cut class or school altogether.

Like many of his assertions, this author fails to back up his frequent wild claims evidence or references. Maybe it's all true, but I'm certainly not going to take the unsupported word of a stranger for this. Why should I believe it from a book any more than I would had some random traveler pinned my ear back with these claims on the subway? And I don't believe it is true. Yes, some children are blamed, as are some teachers and some schools, and even some cities or states, but to put this out there, as though everyone blames the children and only the children and no one is trying to do anything about it, is misleading at best, and downright dishonest at worst.

School drop-out rate has been declining recently and graduation rates are at an historic high. A USA Today report indicates the drop-out rate is only half a million, not a million or more. That's obviously still unacceptable, but misrepresenting it isn't helping.

We're told that over a million students drop out of school each year! This would mean that means that our drop-out rate is around fifty percent, which isn't even remotely true when graduation rates, which have been increasing over the last few years, are in the 80% range. Even that rate is far too low, and lower than other nations, but it certainly doesn't support a claim of a million a year. We don't even get to hear what the reason for the drop out is, so while a portion of it is undoubtedly because the student isn't happy at - or simply doesn't like - the school, to pretend the whole one million, even if it were not an exaggeration, is for this sole reason is dishonest.

This book is one anecdote after another, and none of these anecdotes are supported with references, yet they are substituted for data in making claims for how bad students supposedly think schools are - and the anecdotes in the beginning of the book came from 1909. HOW IS THAT EVEN REMOTELY RELEVANT?! We're told of a 2003 study which essentially tested whether kids were happier playing or going to school - well duhh! Why wasn't the result a surprise? If you conducted the same study on adults who are working, the result would undoubtedly be the same. Does this mean that all work environments are terrorist institutions at heart and we should reform them en masse? We're told, in another bold claim, that "Much of the hell children go through in school would not be tolerated by any adult," yet we have twenty million college students in the US. Hm! It seems "the hell" - whatever the undefined "hell" is - is widely tolerated by adults.

In an interview, the author has said, "One common irritant was all the testing." He also says that students should "not be broken up by age group. Instead, students should be grouped by ability." - but how do you gauge the ability without some form of testing? Crickets chirp. Claim after claim about what he thinks we should do, but not a single suggestion as to exactly what we should do or how we should do it and finance it. The author asserts, "We need to have school resemble the real world as much as possible." Why? No word. How would that work? No word. What improvement would it bring? No word. How do you gauge where a student is without some sort of measurement or testing? No word. And if this is what he wants, why advocate getting rid of advanced placement programs?

In an article, we read of him comparing public school curriculum with that of a school in San Franciso called "Brightworks", but what he doesn't say is that this school is not a public school - it does not have to accept all-comers. There is an admissions process and an admission fee. They can afford to select the brightest students with the best social skills and aptitude - the ones who will fit and work in their system. You cannot make a comparison between a very selective school like this and a regular public school! It's nonsensical and meaningless The author sadly and blindly seems to have narrowly-focused his views on his own personal school experience and derived all of his "ideas" - which are not novel - from that. He appears to have done a very limited survey of educators, but not of schools, so he doesn't appear to know about what schools are doing outside of his own tunnel vision.

Like too many Americans, the author harks back to a golden time of colonialism, when he appears to be claiming, without a shred of evidence to support the claim, that the colonials were very well-educated without any formalized schooling system. He conveniently forgets that the colonists were not your everyday people, but were actually "gentlemen" fortune hunters come to exploit the colonies for whatever they could get out of it. Even later in the time of Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, the population was very largely rural and did not have to handle anything like we do today. The farms of today would be essentially unintelligible to the gentlemen of Franklin's era. But it serves the author's thesis well to compare the education "system" from those 'golden days' with the one today, whilst failing to compare the complexity of life and the employment skills needed today, because to do an honest comparison would fail him miserably. It serves him well to recall simpler times and say it will all work out in the end, without having to show how such a loose - and better-financed (these were wealthy men he's quoting and referencing) education system "beats" ours.

He asserts at one point that "school environments discourage the fostering of deep relationships and a larger sense of belonging" - so schools don't have sports teams, or clubs, or school 'houses'? No schools have uniforms? What school did he go to again? He says, " Out of the thirteen years most of us spend in school, we can usually only recount a handful of teachers we were genuinely attached." I can't recall one. How is this relevant again? And to what is it relevant? Is that crickets I hear again?

The author brings in a character named Sam, and goes on and on about him. It's a personal story and a good emotional trigger, but it's an anecdote, not data. There's no reason to believe that what Sam went through is "so common", or the norm, or representative. At one point we read:

Then finally, after two years of round-the-clock bullying [round the clock bullying at school? Was Sam in a boarding school?!], Sam's time in school improved slightly in the eighth grade. He grew taller. He gained some respect, made a few friends, received support from teachers, and didn't get ridiculed nearly as much as before.

And all of this was without a radical reform to the school system! How on Earth is this even possible?! The author conveniently doesn't go into any details about what changed and how it changed, so that others can learn from this experience and build on it, because none of that would support his thesis that only a radical makeover will work. On the contrary, this actually argues instead that the present system can work if it's handled properly.

Sam's idea for reforming the system is to let him sleep in:

That's another quibble Sam has about school: the sleep schedule it forces him to conform to. "School starts around 8 a.m.," he said. "I have to wake up at 7 a.m. It's actually really tough. You feel unmotivated, sleepy. Your eyes are weary. It feels terrible." In another conversation, he told me, "My natural sleep [bedtime] schedule is around 12 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Get thee to bed early, Sam! Duhh! You can't be up watching TV, or playing video games, or reading comic books, or whatever, until midnight and then expect to be awake the next morning. I have no idea what he means by his natural cycle being 12pm (that's twelve noon) to an hour after midnight! That would mean he's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed well before school starts. He should be at his peak at 7am if he wakes up at one! Did he mean 12am to 1pm? He wants to go to school in the afternoon and evening?! That's called night class.

He says, "In order to be popular, you need some combination of good looks, athletic ability, and brand-name apparel. Students who don't measure up or conform are inevitably ostracized." Welcome to the real world - the one you want schools to be more like! LOL! But once again. his unsupported claim is flawed. It's based on the assumption that bullying is violent, cruel, rife, and all-pervasive, yet he hasn't even attempted to make that argument! As with his entire thesis, he's started from assumptions and built his assertions on those without actually checking to even see if they're true, let alone if they're important. He asks, for example, "Why is bullying so common in traditional schools?" This a classic question along the well-worn lines of "Have you stopped beating you wife?" It's a question which carries on its back the assumption that bullying is very common in public schools, and the author takes this assertion and runs with it, without even once attempting to establish that what he claims is actually true. There's a huge difference between bullying existing in schools at some level, and it being "so common".

He then goes on, "Up to roughly 94 percent of a school's population consists of students, with the rest teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, and staff. So what you have is 6 percent of the population making decisions on behalf of the 94 percent without their consent. If that's not considered antidemocratic, I'm not sure what would be." This is a quote in a section about how bullying begins. All he's done here is make it look like that 6% are the bullies! Is he was trying to argue that all school bullying is done by teachers? I'd agree if he was talking about my school, but I'm smarter than to let myself be deluded that my experience can be extrapolated to the entire nation and what would maybe have worked there will apply to everyone else. If he's not arguing that teachers are the bullies, then how is his out-of-left-field statistic even remotely relevant to one kid bullying another kid?

His "solution" to school bullying? We must teach children to be kinder to one another! I can't believe no one ever thought of that before. Thank god for this author! All these years the evil system has been fomenting bullying by evidently teaching kids to be meaner to one another when the answer was right in front of us from the start! How could we all have been so incorrigibly blind?! Well, I guess it's not just we readers! Illiteracy in the US in 1870 was 20%. Now it’s almost zero. Besides, literature and conversation was pretty much all they had for home entertainment – so what choice did they have? Assuming the could afford the candles or oil to read when it grew dark, and they were all done with their endless chores.

At one point the author lauds Summerhill school, an experimental school founded in England in 1921, that still exists. He praises this school, but when I looked in Wikipedia to see what outstanding students this school had turned out, all it listed were: John Burningham, a children's author, Keith Critchlow, an artist, Rebecca De Mornay, an actor, Storm Thorgerson, a rock album cover designer, Gus Dudgeon, a record producer and Mikey Cuddihy, an artist. Now one of these was also a professor or architecture, but this is all that Summerhill can deliver? No outstanding scientists, no such engineers, no such doctors, no great leaders of society?

So how is this of value? If the author had been able to show school after school, that does not restrict admissions, that teaches as he advocates, and that turns out outstanding members of society - people who create, and lead, and invent, and strike out in new directions, then I would believe he has a point to make, but he has failed comprehensively to do this. Despite the lousy (according to his lights) school system, the USA has one of the best educational systems in the world that turns out outstanding people in all fields. So once again, I ask, what is it, exactly, that's so bad about this system and how will this author's assertions improve upon that? And no, I'm not asking for breathless, adolescent, idealistic castles in the sir, but real world examples of what this would bring to the table. The author is completely empty-handed on this measure, it would appear.

Nowhere in this book did I read about any role for parents in their children's education (although admittedly, I skipped much). Why not? Why are parents irrelevant in this "struggle"? This author's problem, I believe, is that he's lacking a sufficiently wide education to know what he's talking about. As with any teenager, he's all idealism and devoid of practicality. He's using anecdote for data and he's trying to parlay idealistic examples into general conclusions. Worse, he's confusing school with college. School is where children get their basic education,. College (university, however you want to describe it) is where they make the very choices he's advocating - choices about which career to follow and which educational path to choose. That's not to say that there should be no such choices or guidance in lower schools, but there's a certain realism which this author seems either loathe to face or of which, at his youthful and inexperienced age, he's either ignorant or foolishly dismissive.

Without that preliminary basic education, children are not equipped to make intelligent informed choices because they do not have the tools to do so. He wants to put education into the hands of the very people who do not have the education and experience to be able to make properly informed choices which will best determine what they need. Suppose, in this free choice, the kids want to spend all day playing video games? Is his system going to allow that? Suppose they don't want to learn to read and write? Suppose they want to hang out under the bleachers drinking and smoking? Is he going to allow all of this? How is letting kids have complete control going to end bullying? What's going to become of such ill-prepared students? Is society going to pay their way throughout their life - to take care of these kids who are completely unprepared for a real life and a career: for finding work and housing, for taking care of their future, their savings, their health, the life, liberty, and happiness? The author is silent on where any of this will lead. And he's woefully ignorant of the fact that play and education can successfully and vitally go hand-in-hand.

A lot of his referents are appallingly outdated. He's referencing and quoting people from a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, and so on. That's not to say that no one back then had a handle on education, or had anything useful to contribute, but it is to say that the world we live in now is very different from what it was even in the seventies, when no computers existed as far as the general public was concerned. Harking back to ideas from those times might inform as to which directions have worked and - something he fails to address - which haven't, but the mindless wholesale trashing and abandoning of progress that's been made in the last half century in favor of juvenile daydreaming about idyllic golden ages isn't a solution. It's escapism at best and vandalism at worst.

As Michael Douglas, playing President Shephard in The American President put it, "We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them." Maybe this author can reform education, but he's not going to do it by writing frantic books. He's only going to do it by becoming an influential expert on the topic and rolling up his sleeves and getting it done. What Nikhil Goyal most needs to help him get there is - an education! Until then, his fifteen minutes are up.

Get Back, Imagine...Saving John Lennon by Donovan Day

Rating: WARTY!

NOTE: I understand from the author that this book is undergoing some changes, so this advance review may not apply to the final published edition.

Erratum:
"They wanted a good more than that." A good bit more than that? A good deal...?
"We need to keep our stories straights." - too many esses!
"I’m going back to December 9, 1980" - you'd be a day late. He was killed the night of December eighth!

I finished this book yesterday, and while I went into it thinking "Don't let me down" and so wanting it to please, please me, in the end it didn't come together, and it can't buy my love. This fiction followed a long and winding road like an old brown shoe, as it asked the question, "What if someone could go back in time and save John Lennon from being killed that chill, early December night in 1980?" It sounded like a great premise to me.

Lenny's ("Is his name actually Lennon?" I initially asked, but no, it isn't, I'm sorry to say!) story is that he's staying with his granddad and his granddad's husband (which was a nice touch) while his mom is out of town. Dad left a long time ago for a girl he met at a ball game, and Lenny was angry. He became Lenny the Lion, stealing coffee cups from the display at Starbucks and selling them. This eventually earned him a trip to a psychiatrist's office, which is oddly where he learned to play guitar. Anyone who has actually tried to learn to play guitar is going to resent how easy it was for him. I know I do!

A day in the life of first person PoV Lenny Funk (which is why we get no perspective on Yoko) consists of him playing his guitar in the Columbus Circle subway station to make some cash. Yoko (not that Yoko! This is a younger, modern Yoko who isn't even Japanese) shows up when a bully is giving Lenny grief. Lenny talks her into singing with him, and we read, "A crowd of people gathers around us..." What would have been wrong with writing, "A crowd of people stopped and stared" - a line from the Lennon-McCartney song, A day in the Life, one of the few songs to which they actually both contributed significantly, and specifically, a line that Lennon himself wrote? That would have been so cool, but it was a glorious opportunity missed, and in the end, that came to signify the entire novel. I was guessing at this point that we'd be seeing very few Lennon or Beatles references of this nature, and I was right. It was one in a too-long line of chances which were squandered thoughtlessly. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da!

The real starting point of this story is where Lenny discovers that an iPod nano, given to him by his grandfather, is his ticket to ride a time portal. When he plays a song from a certain time, he can physically travel back to that time and interact with people there, although how this works is rather arbitrary and very convenient for Lenny and Yoko, and when a friend like Yoko says, "I wanna hold your hand" they can travel with him. This is a great premise which reminded me of the Kathleen Turner - Nicholas Cage movie, Peggy Sue Got Married, which I loved and which was also heavily influenced by music. This is a different story, but while it's technically well-written and was quite engrossing to begin with, overall, I can't recommend it as a worthy read because there was far too much wrong with the story to let it slide.

The first sickening problem I had was with the "women are only worth anything if they're beautiful" insult to which far too many writers seem addicted, and with which this novel is replete. I know Lenny is a high school kid and this is his PoV, but he gets on this one-note song and he never gets off it. Pretty much as soon as Yoko showed up, I read, "...but this girl is maybe the best-looking female to talk to me. Ever." A couple of screens after that, he's convinced he's in love with Yoko. This shallowness gave me no confidence whatsoever that Lenny would ever be able to do anything for John Lennon! Worse than this, and at the same time that we’re being told that only beautiful young women are worth anything, we’re also learning not a thing about how Yoko feels about anything, and this is serving only to reinforce what we’ve been told: that what’s going on in a girl's mind is unimportant because only her looks matter. It’s truly nauseating, especially from a near-adult make character.

The litany of beautiful was ugly:

• Even the most jaded of commuters can’t ignore a beautiful girl singing her heart out.
• Did a beautiful girl my own age...
• I'm the one with the beautiful girl...
• Yoko’s beautiful face pops into my mind.
• ...where a group of beautiful women are crowded around the owner...
• There are, of course, beautiful women with them
• “I knew it was her because she looks just like you, just as beautiful.”
• She is so beautiful.

None of this necessary, and it's not just with the word 'beautiful' either. It's a full-frontal assault on women's credibility as people as opposed to window-dressings and trophies. Consider, for example, "...the band members are posing with a young, hot Asian woman." It couldn't be merely an Asian woman, or even a 'young Asian woman' or even 'a cool-looking Asian woman'. It has to be a "hot" one. All others can just go home. Then there's this double-whammy: "Instead of beautiful English girls, this club is filled with stunning French women...."

The insults get personal too. Shakira gets this: "Shakira is an exotic beauty" - and this was to imply that Yoko was not, which is insulting at best and racist at worst. It;s insulting to Yoko and to Shakira nbecuase it implies she has little or nothignt o offer other than her looks, which is pure bullshit. I'll bet you didn't know that Katy Perry has nothing to offer but her looks, either did you? That's what this tells me: "Well, John is a man and Katy Perry is a looker..." That insults not only Katy Perry, but also John Lennon! It could have said, "Well they're both talented musicians" but it didn't. It could have said they were both about human rights, but it didn't. Instead, it deliberately took the low road and thereby promoted John as shallowly searching for a hot babe, and Katy Perry as a skin-seep sex doll with no self respect.

Yoko (her name means ocean child, but it can mean many other kinds of child - ko - depending on how it's written) Ono comes in for some abuse later, too. It seems evident from this writing that this author is one of those who blames the Beatles break-up on Yoko, when the truth is that she really had little to do with it. It implies that John Lennon, who had already left the band but had not yet publicized it, has no mind of his own, and it also ignores the fact that the break-up was actually about many things, including Paul's very public quitting. All of this in turn was really all down to the lack of effective and consensus leadership after Brian Epstein died. Paul's hissy-fit over the other three not wanting his father-in-law to run Apple Corps didn't help. Of course, there were more currents running, and running deep here, than can be detailed with any simplicity, but the absolute best you could argue is that Yoko was merely one catalyst. You cannot realistically or fairly make her carry that weight alone.

A major issue for me was how unbelievably expert these seventeen-year-old kids were about the sixties. Yes, I'm sure there are some young people out there who do know more than you'd expect, but these two (Yoko and Lenny) were Mary Sue and Gary Stu. They had an all access pass wherever they went, and they knew everything about everything no matter which time period they were in. it was too much. At the same time, paradoxically, they knew nothing, because their entire focus was on musicians and music and they were completely oblivious to everything else around them. This made then truly annoying, juvenile, and shallow.

The idea comes up in the story that Jim Morrison can be prevented from overdosing, and later, that John Lennon can be saved from being murdered, but never once do we hear it even suggested that they could go back and save Martin Luther King, or Bobby Kennedy, or the passengers on the Pan-Am 103 flight that crashed at Lockerbie, or some three-thousand people in the Twin Towers, or the sixteen thousand or so who have died from the Union Carbide incompetence at Bhopal. This complete lack of awareness and this obsessive-compulsive focus on The Beatles only made the characters seem more dull and more shallow than ever. I get that this was about one theme, but the failure to even mention, let alone address other possibilities made the two main characters callous and selfish. I didn't like either of them.

On a matter of a pet peeve which has nothing to do with this novel, I used the word 'murder' back there deliberately, because from everything I've read about John Lennon, he was one of the least pretentious and most down-to-Earth people there was, and I honestly don't believe that he would want to be put up on a pedestal or compared, via this kind of terminology, to people like Ghandi. If he was that kind of a person, he would never have returned his MBE.

On top of all the other issues, Yenny and Loko were shown to be incredibly stupid, making the same chronically bad decision twice in a row in allowing someone to stay back in time for a visit. Lenny in particular was shown to be thoroughly clueless and incompetent with his decisions. This occurs often in time-travel movies. For example, Marty McFly's decision in Back to the Future to add only a few minutes to his return time to save Doc Brown's life, when he could have added an hour or a day or a week is a direct parallel to Lenny's last minute idiocy. Authors so easily forget that these are time travel stories: you can go back and back and back again until you get it right, unless there is some feature to the travel which prevents it. Indeed, this was a feature of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day movie, but Lenny never gets it. Yes, his time is dwindling, but he still has plenty of time and he fails.

If this had been one of those 'butterfly effect' movies where something that's changed in the past results in a horrible dystopian future, I could see how the ending, while still poor, might have made a limp kind of sense, but we'd already been shown that this isn't he case, so that excuse wasn't on the table. If we'd been shown that fate intervenes to 'correct' changes that are made, this would have been another validation, of a weak kind, of the ending, but none of that held, so the ending made zero sense. However, it was infinitely better than the dumb alternate universe we did see, which was truly sad (and not in a good way).

Even the times he does go back he fails in an epic manner, and he's too stupid to figure out why. We can work it out, but he evidently can't. At one point, a simple call to the police would have fixed all of his problems, but he's quite evidently not smart enough to entertain such an idea. One of the best loved episodes of time-travel sci-fi series Doctor Who actually makes a virtue of the "Why don't they ever go to the police?" question, and is the better for it. Unfortunately, Lenny doesn't know how to ask for a little help from his friends!

The overall impression I had from this was that the story had not been well thought through, so it's hello, goodbye to this one, and I feel fine about that. It read more like a second or third draft than a finished story, and on top of that, something about the way it portrayed John Lennon, particularly in the later chapters, felt disrespectful. While I could bring up other issues, I think this is plenty to make my point. I can't in good faith recommend a story which is obviously lacking so much in plot and character and where, in the end, the sum total of what we learn about the main character is that all he needs is love, but the fact is that he's a real nowhere man and this bird has flown.

The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel was beautifully written and had an historical feel to it even though it was set in modern times. It was also set in France commendably, thereby proving that the USA isn't the only nation where interesting stories can happen. The main character, however, was American.

Twelve-year-old Maya and her family - kid brother James, her mom, and her all-but-absent father - have moved to France for a year. Maya's father has been offered a job at the chemical philosophy society, Why, we never actually learn, we can merely guess. Maya and James attend school, and meet their oddball cousin Louise, who is all but invisible to everyone, and even when Maya looks at her she's inexplicably hard to see. But she's a great French teacher.

Close by where Maya is living, there is an odd building with a sculpture of a young woman's head above the door - a sculpture which looks disturbingly like Maya. And did that weird brass salamander door-handle actually turn and look at her? And smile? What's the deal with the old man she meets and his 'cabinet of earths'? What earths are they and where do they come from? Is there any connection between those and the children who seem to disappear too often - and then return somehow changed? And what's going on with her oddly good-looking and beautifully purple-eyed uncle?

The answers to these questions are original (at least in my experience!) and engrossing - and even disturbing. Will Maya be able to protect those she loves or if she does, does it mean she must sacrifice herself to do so? This is the start of a series, so you know she's going to come through okay - that negates the drama somewhat. And there's a guy - Valko - who befriends her, but there is no romance here, just friendship, and Maya certainly doesn't become a wilting violet in his presence or become dependent upon him to rescue her. She's a commendable young woman: responsible, thoughtful, strong - a female main character of a kind which is all-too-rare in stories written by female authors. Maya puts to shame a score of young adult female characters, and Anne Nesbet is to be congratulated on writing such a character and putting her into a story which wholly immersed even a jaded adult reader, I recommend this story highly.

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.