CSI: Crime Scene Investigation The Interactive Mystery by Sam Stall

Rating: WORTHY!

Come one, come Stall, and indulge in a real murder mystery. Really this is just a regular murder mystery with a few frills tossed in, but once in a while something like this, which you can't really do in ebook form to the same effect, is fun, especially if you do it with your kids (who need to be PG 13 or somewhere around that level of maturity given the graphical elements). The difference between this and your regular murder mystery, is that this novel contains items of evidence, such as a pamphlet of Haiku, a shredded piece of notepaper that you have to put back together, a blueprint of a house, a partially burned flyer, and crime scene photos among other things. It's a large-format hardback that was fun to indulge myself in.

Mr Bledsoe, a gated-living community developer is found shot dead one evening in his luxury home, and the CSI team has to process the various items of evidence. At the same time, another murder victim is found across town and that situation is as different as could be from this rather rarefied and pristine environment. That victim was shot once in the back of the head and then his rathe rlow-rent little home was burned down! Can the team (i.e. you!) solve both crimes? The actual solution - in a rather lengthy info-dump - is given at the end, so you have until then to solve it all!

The crime wasn't that hard to solve. We got most of it - although not all of it - right, and this despite some misdirection and red herrings. Usually I'm hopeless at this kind of thing, so it was nice to feel like I actually had a handle on the case! I liked this and I recommend it. I have another one by the same author that I'll review before long. It's not CSI though; it is a mystery solving story, but it's about a descendent of Dracula!

Elwen The Dwarf is Stolen by Rhonda Tyler

Rating: WORTHY!

I loved this book, and especially the title of it, because it makes it look like we know from the outset who stole the dwarf: Elwen The Dwarf is Stolen by Rhonda Tyler. See, Rhonda Tyler stole Elwen! It's right there!

Seriously I really liked this book. The colored drawings are as idiosyncratic as they are endearing, the text is large, so it's legible even (or is that Elwen?) as an ebook on a smart phone, and the story is a charmer. Elwen is accidentally brought home by a woodcutter, who decides that he can make enough money to dwarf his current financial status by selling the little guyn for a princely price to the king, which he does, but it all works out in the end and the prince married an unexpectedly rich woodcutter's daughter! Wait, what?

A great story - original in my experience, and lots of fun, especially the images. I consider this a worthy read.

The Shrinking Man by Ted Adams

Rating: WORTHY!

Based on by Richard Matheson's novel, and illustrated by Mark Torres, this is Ted Adams's view of the story. Set in 1956 to begin with, Scott Carey, a six-foot tall guy who was exposed to some sort of chemical when he was younger, is out on a boat when he gets exposed to a chemical fog, and from that point on, he begins shrinking at the rate of one seventh of an inch per day, which means he has barely more than five hundred days before he's dwindled to nothing.

I have to say I really didn't like Scott, who was small even before he ever began to shrink, but you don't have to like a character to enjoy a story about them, and I really liked the way this had been translated to imagery. It bounces back and forth between the recent past, when Scot was trying to cope with the beginning of his condition, and the present, when he's only five sevenths of an inch, and had less than a week to go. Normally I don't like these 'switch-back' stories, but in this case it wasn't so bad. The present part was far less interesting than the past, even though it ought to have been more dramatic and engrossing. In the present, Scott is trapped in the basement and desperately trying to climb the fridge to get to a pack of crackers, and is also trying to fend off a black widow spider. Hey, she was a widow, maybe she just wanted to marry him?

This preference for the past story was despite the petulance of the shrinking Scott. At first he noticed no change, but then as it started to become clear he was shrinking, there were trips to doctors who could do nothing for him evidently, even though they seemed to understand what was happening, and his life began to fall apart for him. The explanation for the shrinking was a bunch of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo of him losing nitrogen and creatinine and other such things, but the doctors never really explained how that worked without him getting sick, and the reason for this is that it wouldn't work without him getting sick!

His higher brain function at the very least would be severely degraded with such shrinkage, especially as it went below the normal human range. Maybe his shrinking brain actually did create issues, because Scott's treatment of his wife and child was inexcusable. All she did as love him and support him throughout this, but he increasingly rejected her and at one point took off with a circus midget! None of this is endearing. Note that there was no issue with the midget's brain being relatively small because she hadn't shrunk to it. Instead, she had grown into it. It was normal and ordinary for her, and her intelligence was perfectly fine, whereas Scott was daily losing parts of his previously normally-functioning brain.

This is the problem with shrinking character stories. The writers of such stories (and note that this is a criticism of Matheson's original story) give no thought to the real consequences of shrinking. Let's skip over problems with the fact that this would have to be a highly coordinated loss of literally every component, even solid, rigid ones such as as bone, reducing in perfect lock-step, and go to the issue with him at five sevenths of an inch, where even mild air currents would blow him over. His climbing to the top of the fridge is portrayed as though he was still of normal proportions and regular weight, but this would not be the case. He wouldn't even be injured from a fall because his mass is so low. He would pretty much float down! But an annoying sliver on a broom handle to us, might end up as a stake through his heart!

On the other hand, his mass is so low that his shrunken muscles would be barely strong enough to function, even in pulling his reduced weight up the thread. He would probably have the functionality of a person who had been severely afflicted with polio You can't shrink a human-sized person down indefinitely before something gives out! Yes, there are some very small mammals, as indeed there are humans, but these have grown into their situation, not shrunk to it from something larger. Essentially, this is one good reason why insects are nothing like us, or more accurately, we're nothing like them, since they were here first. As his size continued to shrink there would be a point where his veins would be too small to admit passage of his corpuscles, and he would suffocate - assuming he wasn't so small at that point that air molecules couldn't effectively fill his lungs!

But scientific issues and some quibbles aside, it's fun to read a story like this where a person is thrown into what is, effectively, an alien world. That makes for the best kind of story, and please note that the quibbles are actually with the original story, not with this, which is a fine graphic representation of it and one which I think is a worthy read, as long as you're willing to let the impracticality slide! I recommend it.

Insufferable by Mark Waid

Rating: WORTHY!

Nicely illustrated by Peter Krause, this comic was a riot. It was like the dark side of Batman and Robin, upon whom it seems to have been modeled in some ways. The super hero, Nocturnus, has trained Galahad, his side-kick and for a long time they worked together, but then Galahad decided he could do better alone, and summarily ditched his aging mentor. It wasn't just that he went his own way, either. Galahad did not live up to his name. We first meet him hanging in the wings as Nocturnus takes on a real villain who is televising his slow burial of a little girl. It's a telethon, and if the goal of fifty million isn't met, the girl inherits the earth.

Galahad cynically waits until Nocturnus has taken-out the villain, then he rushes in and "rescues" the girl, selfishly claiming all the credit for it. Galahad is very much a media personality whereas Nocturnus, as his name implies, stays to the shadows. There is as cop ho knows the truth, but for some reason she isn't telling. The crux of the story comes when the two of them are forced to work together to defeat a new threat.

Well written, with some nice humor and good action, and even a twist or two here and there, this is an interesting and moving story, well told, and I recommend it as a worthy read.

The Mantle by Ed Brisson

Rating: WORTHY!

I really liked this story. The Mantle is a conveyance of superpowers which are visited upon seemingly random people. The downside of this is that there is a super villain, named The Plague, who immediately starts after the current bearer of the mantle, and destroys them. No one knows why, but it appears to have started thirty eight Mantle-bearers before, when one super hero defeated The Plague and despite being requested to do so by the perp himself, did not kill him. The Plague escaped his imprisonment, and has been punishing mantle-bearers, it would seem, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate him! Why? How did that one hero guy beat The Plague back then, and no one has since?

That's what this graphic novel explores, and even though in many ways this is a very simple story, it still managed to tell it well. I liked the new bearer of the mantle - a feisty young female who after almost giving up, changes her mind, decides she isn't going to run - she's going to go down fighting no matter what. Even though there are other heroes who are pledged to help, she initially finds them of little value, but then she discovers a way - a long shot, but one which might work, and we follow her into this and step by step, slowly learning the truth about what's been going on here. It's a great story, with great graphics, and was thoroughly enjoyable. I consider this a worthy read.

Poet Anderson by Tom Delonge and Ben Kull

Rating: WORTHY!

This story has evidently had its critics, but I really liked it, although it's a bit young for me personally. I liked that the dream world was a real world which these two boys, Jonas and Alan Anderson, could explore, but that it had some rules - like they couldn't fly, for example (even though there are dreams about flying, I loved the way it was summarily dismissed!).

The world started out entrancing and beguiling, but in short order, there came the bad things, and things which were even worse than the bad things. This I enjoyed. The Night Terrors, however, have a counter-balancing force known as the Dream Walkers, and maybe at least one of these boys is a candidate for joining them. But the question is, who is behind the Night Terrors, and will he ever be able to find his way into the real world, and conduct the same sort of terror campaign there, that he seems to manage in the dream world?

I liked this for the characters, the fast-moving story, the inventiveness, which never went overboard, and the general set-up for a series. The art work by Djet was cool. Like I said, it's a bit young for me, but I can see a great potential here and I recommend it as a winner for the intended audience.

The Kissing Booth by Beth Reekles

Rating: WARTY!

This author's story is another one like those told about Amanda Hocking. The story in the novel was begun by Beth Reeks when she was fifteen, and published on a website named Wattpad when she was seventeen, where it quickly became popular. A representative from Random House saw it there, decided it was worth publishing (that tells us a lot about standards at Random House - the publisher evidently isn't named random for nothing!), and offered her a contract, so the novel got published under her school nickname Reekles.

The problem is that the representative apparently paid attention only to the numbers of views Reeks was getting rather than the quality of the writing or the content of the novel which by all accounts sucked. I listened to the standard two disks and decided this was not only not for me, it was not for anyone in their right mind. It's essentially another Hush Hush where a girl actively seeks out and adheres herself a guy who is openly disrespectful and abusive to her.

When I picked this up and read the blurb, I wrongly got he impression that that this was set in the past and was written by a mature author (i.e. mature in the sense of being a competent writer), but it was not. The writing quality was exactly what you'd expect from a fifteen to seventeen year old writer, and the issues with it were many. There are some young writers who can do it, but most cannot, and Beth Reekles is one of those. The novel isn't set in a more innocent time, it's contemporary, which made it inexplicable. Another problem was that the novel was written as an English novel, but it's set in California, a place to which the author has never been and evidently not even researched. Consequently all the Californian high-schoolers speak as though they're in England. Nonsensical.

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Given that it's not set in the past, the whole kissing booth idea fails. Reeks explained in an interview that that she moved it to to California because they don't have kissing booths in high school carnivals in Britain. They do in the US with the rise of orally transmitted diseases such as HPV and AIDS? No!!!! The sad thing is that none of this - the risk of transmission of disease - is raised. No one objects to it, and that's another issue with the novel - the complete lack of adult or parental supervision. There is none in this novel, not in any of it that I read.

This novel failed on so many levels that it's a joke, and the fact that Random House ran with it serves only to underline the problems I have with Big Publishing. All the more power to Reeks if she can rip-off the rubes with a crappy novel, but what does it say about young readers that they consider something like this to be perfectly acceptable reading material?

The Casquette Girls by Alys Arden

Rating: WARTY!

This is going to be a wa-ay long review even by my standards, so be prepared! My blog is about more than reviewing - it's about writing and about the language, but even so, this one is longer than usual. You have been warned!

This is a young adult kitchen sink story in that there is pretty much nothing from the paranormal world that isn't in this book. There's horror and voodoo, and vampires, oh my! This was an advance review copy which sounded really intriguing when I read the blurb, but by the time I was ten percent or so into it, I started having reservations about it purely because of the YA clichés which had begun to pervade everything. More on this anon. By the time I was a quarter the way through there was so much that made no sense and so many issues that I honestly started to feel I wouldn't be able to actually finish reading it, which is truly sad, because in many ways it was interesting and from a purely technically PoV, written rather well. At the risk of giving away details, and posting spoilers, let me try to explain.

Adele Le Moyne is fresh back from a disastrous stay with her French mother in Paris. Adele doesn't like mom. Why she went so late in the year that her return would cause her to miss the start of school isn't explained. Obviously the storm had some say in the matter, but it didn't really explain it. The storm is a whole other issue which I'll get to. Adele is returning to New Orleans with her father. They're coming back to see how their home and her dad's bar fared after a truly devastating storm. Adele likes dad, even though he treats her like a child. Actually, given how immature she is, this is probably a wise move on pop's part. Note that this storm both is and isn't Katrina, which gets no mention here, though other storms do. This felt to me, initially, like it was a huge storm in the near future, but I came to understand that it was meant to be Katrina. Why the author had a problem with identifying it as such is a mystery. The problem is that we're told it was the "largest" storm ever to hit the continental USA. That's not Katrina. I'll get into this later.

The city is largely deserted, but is slowly coming back to life. Adele's biggest fear is being sent back to France because the local arts school is closed indefinitely. As she starts to settle in, she finds strange things happening to her. On her first day back in the house, a bird attacks her and scratches her face. Later, she finds a freshly dead body in a car on her way home. It seems there's a rising murder rate, especially over the last twenty four hours. Oddly enough, despite the devastation and the lack of adequate policing, there seems to be no National Guard presence in the city. This struck me as me as absurd, and was one of the things which began chipping away at the credibility of the story for me.

Adele has other things happen, too. She visits a local voodoo store which she has never been in before, and she meets some slightly eccentric people. She experiences a weird event on the way home with a banging shutter and an inexplicably shattering window at a convent, yet despite being a New Orleans resident for her entire life (apart from the last two months), and therefore obviously aware of the voodoo culture, she never once starts to wonder if there's something to it after these odd events. Of course there isn't in real life, but this is a voodoo story inter alia, so you'd think there would be something, somewhere in her mind that starts wondering. The fact that there wasn't - even after all this - made me think that Adele wasn't very bright, which is never a good trait with which to imbue your main character.

There were some odd descriptions, too, such as the non-word 'chainmaille', which should either be 'chainmail' or simply 'maille' (which by itself means the same thing). I know this was an ARC copy, but I can't see this kind of thing being fixed in the final published version unless someone highlights it. On a slightly different issue, at one point Adele almost has an accident with a large nail, which she describes as a "giant nail twice the width of my palm" which struck me as badly described. I may be wrong here, but I think what's meant was that the nail was as long as two widths of her palm, but the way it's written makes it sound like the nail's width (i.e. diameter) is two of her palm widths, which would be a truly humongous nail!

I had an issue with the multi-language use. It may not bother other readers, but for me, it was too pervasive. Indeed, it felt more like the author was showing off her faculty with languages than really contributing to building a strong story. This kind of thing is done often in novels, and unless there's really a good reason for it, it's just annoying to me. It's even more irritating when we get the foreign phrase followed immediately by the English translation, such as in "J'en doute. I seriously doubt it." Although this isn't an exact translation (it would need sérieusement added for that) it makes my point here, and this just kept kicking me out of suspension of disbelief.

I found it hilarious that phones in New Orleans can text in French! One message from "Pépé" read, "Préparer un pot frais de chicorée" Evidently when envoyer des SMS en Français (texting in French), one doesn't use abbreviations! I'm sure there are ways and even apps which allow you to enter accented letters, but why would you bother when texting to people who speak English? Why not just send "make fresh chicory" and be done with it? Rightly or wrongly, this only served to reinforce my feeling that the author had been employing French much more as a pretension than as a legitimate writing tool.

Since this is New Orleans, I could see a French word here and there showing up, but when she meets two Italians, they're doing it too, and it was too much, especially since they also have grammatically perfect English - better than your typical native English speaker! LOL! Amusingly, the first phrase either one of them uttered was, "Well, whom do we have here?" The problem is that no one speaks like that, much less a foreign speaker of English. It's much more likely for the speaker to say, "Well, who is this?" The thing is that few use correct grammar in their everyday speech, so while you can write in your narrative, 'whom', it's just wrong to write it as part of someone's speech unless that particular character actually is a stickler for grammar. Most people are not, especially if English is their second language. It's also worth remembering, in a story like this one - which is told in first person, that the narrative should reflect the speech patterns of the person. Truly correct grammar is unlikely unless the narrator is an English teacher, for example.

I know it's hard for a writer to let that go (although personally, I'd kick 'whom' out of the language altogether), but it has to be done. Some writers, including this one, apparently, can't ignore a compulsion towards good grammar, which in a way is commendable, but it doesn't contribute to a realistic story. I won't get into the employment of the French in and of itself since mine is so rusty, but I'd be curious to know if "Comment a été Paris?" is more accurate than what was used here " Comment était Paris?" for "How was Paris?" - meaning, of course, how did you like Paris - what impression did it leave you with? Everything else seemed in order to my out-of-practice eye, so I guess I'd bow to the author's evidently superior expertise in this case.

The biggest problem for me in the first ten percent though, was when Adele met those Italian twins, Gabriel and Niccolò, who I quickly found to be creepy and obnoxious. Why one had a Jewish name whereas the other had the expected Italian name went unexplained, but it did occur to me that one is the name of an angel, and the other could be the name of the devil - as in 'Old Nick', for example. Actually they were not twins, but they may as well have been. They were brothers: a dark haired leather-clad bad-boy type, and a blond-haired good-guy type. Talk about trope good and evil!

This jumped out at me as a potential beginning of your typical and tiresomely clichéd YA love triangle. I was hoping I was wrong but it had all the hallmarks, and my stomach churned from reading about this "nauseating display of high school flirtation" (you'd have to read the book - or at least 22% of it! - to feel the full weight of that sarcastic comment!). As it turned out, the triangle was not over the two Italians, but it did involve the predictable one of the two. Nothing new there. Everything about these boys was a complete cliché from their height, to their chiseled good looks, to their foreign nature and athletic build. It's truly sad to find YA author after YA author who cannot seem to develop an original character as a love interest, and persists in going down the same tired and over-used macho guy and sad love triangle circuit that's been beaten to death, and which is already way beyond tedious at this juncture.

A real problem came with Niccolò's conduct, bad boy or not. I honestly don't know how an author can write inappropriate or overly familiar contact as though it's right or normal. Yes, some people do behave that way, but let's not make those people heroic or the love interest of the main character, please? This conduct should certainly not be portrayed as something to be meekly tolerated. At one point, one of the brothers, uninvited, gets right into Adele's personal space, and starts touching her and manually examining the medallion she has hanging around her neck (a medallion which is actually there for no good reason). He doesn't even do her the courtesy of asking. It's like she's now his property, and he can do whatever he wants with her, even though they'd never met prior to that very minute. This isn't the only time he abuses her so.

Adele responded (to his effectively fondling her) not by becoming assertive, but by becoming as compliant as a whipped puppy. We read "his fingertips grazed my cheek" as though it's supposed, I assume, to be intimate and romantic, but it's not. It's creepy and overly familiar. It's presumptive and assumptive, suggesting that young women are there for the taking, and it sends entirely the wrong message to both genders. If these two had known each other for years as friends, or were lovers, or married, or even if they were young kids, then yes, this would be fine, or at least expected, but for a complete stranger to effectively own a woman of Adele's age in that manner, and for her to very effectively lie down before him like he's the alpha male and she's just part of his pride or his pack is trashy at best.

The reason I was sad was that this author had drawn me right in and was writing pretty well to this point. She had a great facility with the language and with her descriptive writing, and it was honestly a shock to find myself suddenly suffocating under this worn-out, teen-aged fabric that was being unceremoniously piled on to the pretty decent material she'd been so skillfully working to this point in the story. I don't know why authors, especially female authors, feel they have to validate their female characters with male ones (the same applies to male characters, for that matter) I really don't, but it's never a good thing. The truly odd thing about these two Italians, by the way, is that while they claim that they're here to find missing relatives, they seem to spend absolutely no time whatsoever actually looking. Of course, since this is a first person PoV story, we have no idea what's going on when Adele isn't around.

Adele wasn't very likable for a variety of reasons. One of these is my own bias against the fashion world. I think it's the shallowest, most self-indulgent and least beneficial endeavors in human history. I have no time for fashion designers, fashions or runway models, and unfortunately, Adele wants to be a fashion designer, which as you can now imagine, did nothing to endear her to me. My gut feeling was that she wouldn't end up there, given the way this story was going, but the real question here is: why is she that character - the one who wants to join the fashion world? What does it contribute to this story except to further establish how frivolous she is? Why isn't she wanting to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a software designer? She's from New Orleans, so why doesn't she want to be a chef or a musician, or an architect, or even a merhcant marine for that matter? I didn't get where the fashion thing was coming from. She could have been aiming to be a chef or an architect, and still have justified the trip to Paris, for example.

The other issue with Adele is that she's a whiney, shallow, ungrateful little tyke who behaves inappropriately for her age. What with this and her fashion 'ambition', her age seemed more like twelve then ever it did sixteen. Yeah, I get that she hates her mom, but when her father wants to discuss school with her, she becomes resentful, tearful, and childish. Someone that emotional would never survive vampires let alone be able to stand up to them! She has the option to go back to Paris, which she flatly rejects. Fine! But she also has the option to study fashion design in California at a very prestigious school, and stay with her best friend who, we're told, she misses immensely, yet she rejects all of this in favor of staying in New Orleans where there's nothing to do and her career plans are effectively on hold. This tells me that she's not only a petulant brat, and that she really doesn't care much for her friend - or for her supposed fashion ambitions for that matter, but also that she's clueless and actually has no ambition. These are hardly heroic traits! On the one hand, rejecting fashion would warm me to her somewhat, but on the other, none of this bratty behavior endeared her to me at all. It merely served to render her into someone about whom (see, I can use it!) I cared very little, and whose story I really didn't feel much like following.

You'll note that I didn't mention 'scientist' as a possible career choice above. The reason for this is that Adele doesn't seem to have an even remotely inquiring mind. Even when she finally accepts that supernatural events are taking place around her and she has some influence over them, she still fails to pursue this with any kind of intellect or determination or with any sort of spirit of adventure. Instead, she idly tinkers with it like it's an old Rubik cube she found somewhere. I honestly don't know of anyone - male or female - who would be as lackadaisical as she is over such a series of events!

Adele toys with her new power, yet shows absolutely no motivation whatsoever (and she wants to make it in the cut-throat fashion world?!) to get to its root. She doesn't even think of taking her power out for a real run, or to start seriously investigating what it is or why she has it. Most damning of all, she doesn't even begin to consider ways in which she could use this power to help in putting her supposedly beloved city back on its feet. She's not too smart, either, over figuring out what the extent and limit of the power is, when it seems patently obvious to the reader. This character began as an interesting one, but for me, she became ever more unbelievable the further the story went on. In the end, she wasn't remotely credible. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Adele was really an insult to women with her all-pervasive inertia and her shallowness and lack of any real substance.

At the front of this book is a dedication to the people of New Orleans (the author is evidently a native), but it says nothing about how strong they are. It's all about myth and magic; however, given the story we have here, it would be hypocritical for the dedication to have talked about strength and motivation. This fictional character, as a New Orleans native, was an insult to the real-life people of that city, given what they've been through, and how they rebuilt and moved on afterwards. If Adele had been portrayed as a go-getter, and an industrious young woman who refused to be beaten down, and who worked hard every day, I could have seen a reflection of New Orleans in her, but the fact remains that she isn't a shadow on the real people there, and that was the biggest disappointment in this book for me. I know that some people are actually like Adele in real life - lazy, shiftless, unwilling or incapable of doing a fair day's work, and you could probably get a really good novel about such a character, but this wasn't it, and the character that Adele actually was didn't belong in this kind of a story. Like Adele herself, it didn't work.

This same lack of motivation pervades her whole life. We've been told that she wants to be a fashion designer, but she never works on designs, neither with a sketch pad, nor with a computer. That life she supposedly wants doesn't even pervade her thoughts at all! Pretty much the only thing in her thoughts isn't even her new power! In the first quarter of the novel, her mind is most often on some dude she hung out with in Paris. This is how shallow she is. Her assessment of this guy is: "he's very hot and very French" Seriously? That's the basis of her 'rapport' with him? Pure objectification? Instead of being the heroic figure a novel like this begs for, Adele is reduced to the status of a lovesick tweenie (her actual age notwithstanding), who has an impossible crush on some older kid. Worse than this, despite her assertion that she wants to stay with her dad in New Orleans, she spends virtually no time with him. Every day he's out all hours, working on fixing up his bar (at least this is what we're told, but I didn't believe it), yet never once does she offer to go help him. She'd rather sit on her lazy ass in the coffee bar, doing nothing, evidently, save for her almost ritualistic indulgence in growing paranoia and endless self-pity. That is when she's not lusting after one or another of several boys she encounters.

It seems like she's 'employed' in this coffee bar, but there are no customers, so how are the owners even paying her - and why?! All she does is sit around. At one point she thinks some guy is sketching her, and she resents this, yet she's so inert that she can't even think of changing where she sits, or perhaps moving into the back area where he can't see her. This is how inanimate her brain is. We're told that she's supposed to be attending this exclusive school in lieu of her own school being closed indefinitely, but she hasn't been attending, even though it appears to be open and this is now mid-October! Why she's so tardy goes unexplained. She eventually does attend, but it's only part time, and her overly protective father makes no arrangements for her to be transported to and from the school even when there's a murder spree going on in the city and he's supposed to be so protective of her!

The reason I initially felt that this story was set slightly in the future was that Katrina was never mentioned by name - unless you include a reference in the acknowledgements to a person named Katrina! LOL! The hurricane was described very vaguely as the largest one to hit the US, but 'largest' can mean many different things. By what measure was it the largest? By cost, Katrina was the "largest" by some margin, but every few years the "largest" by cost changes because property values rise, and so more damage (in dollars) is done, even if the hurricane is relatively tame. The problem is that by any other measure, Katrina was not the largest, not even by death toll, by which measure it was third (so far). By largest diameter, Katrina wasn't in the top five. By 'most severe' it barely made the top five and by 'most intense' failed to get into the top five. By highest sustained winds it wasn't even in the top ten. By barometric pressure it was tenth, by most tornadoes spawned, it was sixth, and so on. I wouldn't describe it as the 'largest' and I found it objectionable that cost seemed to be the only measure deemed worthy of measure here. Surely death toll is more important than property damage?

At one point Adel goes with Isaac (the other leg of the triangle and another Biblical name) to her friend's house to find something. Although Isaac has no clue what it is that she's seeking, he says, "I'll go check out the rest of the place" - why? What's he looking for? Evidently it was to give Adele some time alone with her powers, but this part made no sense to me, especially since he was supposed to be keeping an eye on her.

Adele's hypocrisy was annoying at best. This is the girl who is lusting after every trope male she meets in this novel, yet at one point she tells us, "My eyes rolled at the ripple of testosterone" Honestly? Her other faults were numerous and never deemed to be faults by her or anyone else, but perhaps the worst was her chronic indolence. This infests her every neuron, and drags this book out to an unwarranted number of pages. It's ironically reflected in the larger story arc, and is what contributes to the ruin of this story for me. The story felt very much like New Orleans appeared after the storm: a mess, a tragedy, and leaving an all-but hopeless feeling in the gut. Whereas New Orleans had a real human story which grew and heartened, this fiction never did. I know this is the south and the cliché is that it's supposed to be laid back, but there's a huge difference between 'laid back' and 'moribund' and that latter place was where Adele resided.

This business of guys taking advantage of Adele and her having absolutely no negative feelings about this abhorrent behavior, was what finally turned me off (and my stomach over) with this novel. There was another incident where Adele was with Isaac, and she became very emotional over the damage done to her friend's home. Isaac saw her emotionally weakened, and instead of asking if she wanted to leave, or if she wanted to talk, or even just giving her a friendly hug, this jerk-off kisses her. What a louse!

It was at that point that I decided I was done with this nonsense. It wouldn't have been so bad had she pushed him away and read him the riot act about taking advantage of emotional weakness and painful upset, but she never did. This is one of the two guys who both abused her like this, and instead of being outraged and repelled, she's falling for the two of them, not even caring that someone is going to get hurt through her irresponsible ambivalent behavior. Adele is obviously also a jerk and I feel no compulsion to read any more about a person like that, who quite evidently has no redeeming value, and is as clueless as they come. So no, I never made it to sixty percent because I didn't care if it improved. There is no improvement a writer can make which can ever fill a hole that's been dug this deep!

A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe

Rating: WARTY!

According to the book cover, the Star-Telegram out of The Fort Worth (that's the best they could do! LOL!) says that Gene Wolfe is among the best writers working in this country - although a search of the Star-Telegram's website returns zero results for 'book review gene wolfe'. Admittedly, the Star-Telegram's search engine sucks majorly, so maybe it's in there - it's just impossible to find. Google is no better, however, at finding it, so what are we to conclude? Well I conclude that whoever wrote this acclamation (assuming someone actually did) doesn't know what they're talking about. In pursuing their desire to discover what her dad knew, Coldbrook and Smithe track down an astrophysicist her father had visited, and this "best writer" turns him into a clichéd university eccentric professor wearing tweeds, smoking a pipe (this is in the future, remember) with a clammy handshake. Seriously, that's the best this 'best writer' can do?

Coldbrook is the girl whose father and brother have died, apparently in connection with something in a novel her father had locked in his safe. Smith is the clone of the author of the novel, titled "Murder on Mars". Coldbrook checks him out in order to try and figure out what happened. In this world, writers are cloned after their death and the clones are stored in libraries where they can be consulted and checked-out like library books. I found this an intriguing idea, but the execution of it made no sense, and I quickly grew tired of the amateurish writing.

This book was published in 2015, yet it has a 1950s feel to it. Let me complement that by saying I don't mean that as a compliment. There was something off about it, and it wasn't just the first person PoV which I typically don't like. That wasn't so bad in this case, but there was something off about the writing. The story, which is told from the clone's perspective, is about Colette Coldbrook and EA Smithe as I mentioned. The latter is called a 'reclone' but I have no idea why. Clone is quite sufficient. If you clone someone a second time, it's still a clone. At first I thought 'reclone' was being used to indicate when someone had been cloned before, but this was not the case, so this pretentious use of a meaningless word was annoying. It is, however, typical of the way in which sci-fi writers write.

Talking of which, the cloned authors aren't even allowed to write, so we're told. There is more than one "edition" of the clones, so what I didn't get the value of this when databases and AI's could do the same thing much more cheaply and without any controversy. I mean, what happens when you borrow one from library A and another from library B where they've 'grown up' apart and so are different? Which one is closest to the original? We do learn what happens when they are found to be no longer of use - they're burned. How that works in detail isn't explained. What also isn't explained is what happens when the clone exceeds the age at which the original died? Are they killed and cloned anew? I cannot imagine any society tolerating this! At the very least, even if the majority accepts it, there would be a solid and vocal movement against it, but we never hear of such a movement - at least not in the fifty percent or so of this novel that I read.

Smithe is kept in a library, and these library clones are not considered human, but how that ever came to be goes unexplained. Library clones have to sit on a shelf in the library - a shelf designed to resemble a small room,with one wall missing. They're required to stay there through library opening hours, but can get out and wander around when the library is closed, yet despite their demeanor being exactly that of a regular human being, not a one of them seems to have any issue with the fact that they are essentially prisoners and slaves.

The book, "Murder on Mars, was the only thing in her father's safe. Her brother had the safe opened after dad died, and now her brother is dead too. Two henchmen men show up at Coldbrook's apartment demanding the book, but they leave without it. Evidently these two victims are safe until and unless the henchmen find out where the book is. The blurb tells us, of the book, "It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police," but the book isn't lost. It's in her possession as it had been from the start of the story! Unless she loses it later, beyond where i could stand to read, then this is an outright lie!

Coldbrook struck me as precisely that - a cold brook. She was unpleasant and completely anal. When she takes her borrowed man home, even though she has a large apartment with many rooms, she confines him to the living room and bathroom, flatly refusing to let him use bedroom or even the kitchen. After the tough guys have tied-up both Coldbrook and Smithe (naked!), ransacked the apartment and then left, Smithe gets himself free, and using a knife from the kitchen, he cuts her free too, yet she chews him out for going in the kitchen! What a bitch!

Evidently there's something critical in that book, because when, out of curiosity, they try to obtain another copy by ordering it from a book printing shop, there are no more copies to be found. The story was therefore interesting if annoying. What could be in a book - a book that was until recently widely available, that suddenly became important when that one copy got out of the old man's safe? Unfortunately, I quickly lost interest in what the mystery was because the writing was so awful, and the world-building so nonsensical. I mean, for example, that these clones are not legally human, so what's to stop some jerk checking out the authors of their fancy and raping them? It couldn't be judged rape, could it, if they're not human? Maybe they just fine you for defacing library property?

If the cloned author was supposed to represent the original, it would be a spectacular fail because these clones were not the original and had completely different life experiences from the author, even if they did have the author's original memories - memories that would be subject to modification, and therefore thoroughly unreliable! Despite their unwarranted credibility in front of gullible jurors, eye witnesses are in fact the least accurate source of evidence in a trial precisely because they readily modify their memories for one reason or another, and without even knowing that they're doing it.

The author has hover-cars and hover-cabs! Why? That's never going to happen because energy is far too expensive and gasoline is going to be gone completely in a few decades. It takes far more energy to support the entire weight of a vehicle and move it, as would be the case in this hover world, than it does to support the vehicle on wheels and merely employ energy to move it, as is the case now. The robe (a robot rube - I made it up!) in the cab tells Colette that it will take a load of energy to go where she wants to go. Well then don't use a hover-cab! Duh! Worse than this, the cab is sentient at least to a degree, but speaks like this: "Don't mean nothing by it". Seriously? A cab is programmed to speak like that? The more of this crap I read the less confidence I had in this author having thought things through. Yes it's impossible to predict the future with any great accuracy, but that doesn't mean that anything goes in a sci-fi novel. The future will, as it has in the past (!), grow organically from the present. If you can't have your future doing that, then you're making the wrong choices in your novel.

One of the things the author repeatedly mentions is print-on-demand operations. Most things in this word are electronic, including books, but you can get print books by ordering them online and having a business sprint up one copy which is mailed to you. This is the same system which Amazon and others use to facilitate self-publishing. Right now, these machines which print and bind books are a bit on the steep side to buy, but the price will come down, just as it has for 3D printers. In the future, anyone who enjoys print books will have a machine at home which can do it. There may be online print houses, but it made little sense that a book-lover who was rich, like Coldbrook was wouldn't have such a machine.

There are some oddities which contributed to the feel that this was a fifties novel, such as when Smithe says, "I pulled off my shoes and stockings." Who calls socks stockings these days? Later, he refers to them as socks, so there was no consistency. Every time I read something like that, it kicked me out of suspension of disbelief, and this novel was a really bumpy ride! It didn't help that, true to sci-fi writing everywhere, the author was constantly trying to come up with cool names for stuff and failing epically. Computers were called screens, even though there's no such term, nor even a hint of such a term, in use today. The only way that term is employed now is to describe the things we swipe when reading an ebook! Worse was diskers! Disks are out of style already, yet he has us using them in the future?

I was also surprised to learn that men nearly always tell the truth because they're awful at lying, whereas women are good at lying and lie fluently. What?! He has Coldbrook say this, but that doesn't make it any less of an insult to both genders from what I can see. I got to the start of chapter nine, which is almost half-way through, and the chapter was so pathetic and so pedantic that I simply quit after reading one page of it. There are better things to do with my time. I cannot recommend this novel based on what I read.

Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta

Rating: WARTY!

I think it's time to take a vow never to read another novel which has a character's name in the title, and never to read another novel with the word 'saving' in the title! This means that Saving Francesca is a double no, or a no-no for short!

Initially, I thought that all the women in Francesca's family carried the 'a' suffix to pigeon-hole them as female: her mom is Mia, her kid sister Luca. Only the male has a rugged name: Bob. I was right about that last one, but wrong about Luca. It turned out hat she was a he! The thing is though, that the alpha (there's that 'a' again) male in the family is Mia. She's evidently maintained this position until she has a break-down at the start of this story, which sets the family adrift for reason which aren't well explained.

There was nothing in this story, no in the portion that I managed to stomach, to place it time-wise. It seemed like it was from last century as judged by the attitudes and schooling system, but other than that it could have been set today. Francesca attended St. Stella's, but that school has no year eleven or twelve, so she had to transfer to St Sebastian's, and thus we have the trope of a new kid in school. The trope of her being alone is enhanced by the fact that this is a boys school which has just opened itself up to co-ed. The level of misogyny here is truly startling, and the fact that no one seems to find it appalling is what made me think that the story is historical. I'd hate to think that Australian education system is this anachronistic; then again, maybe it's a sly comment on the Catholic church, which has been misogynistic since its inception, what with Eve being the downfall of mankind, you know.

All Francesca's friends now attend a school to which Mia refused to send Francesca under the belief that the other school would limit her options. As is typical with this kind of blinkered story, not only have her friends gone to a different school, they've also apparently gone to a different planet, or been expunged from history because there seems to be no way she can maintain contact with them - neither by text nor by phone call, neither by email nor by taking a walk over to their house. This is truly a blind and pathetic way to start a story. It's not remotely realistic.

But then this novel was one of caricatures. The boys are all stereotypical obnoxious boys no matter who they are or what their age. Francesca's friends are caricatures, too; one of them, Tina, is a 'feminist' so we're told, but she sounds far more like a radical communist than ever she does a feminist, and completely anachronistic to boot. Francesca herself is so emotional that she comes across more as a twelve-year-old than ever she does as someone in the latter half of her teens. She has a male love interest who she naturally detests at first sight, which confirms with a crystal clarity that she will be in love with him in short order an that this novel would be hide-bound by cliché and trope. Barf. Trite? They name is Melina Marchetta (there are those suffixes again!).

I couldn't continue reading this and I can't recommend it based on what I did read. This novel merely conformed my growing conviction that traditional publishers (like book award committees) pin the names of novel submissions (or nominations) to a large wall, blindfold themselves, and randomly toss darts at the wall. The novel titles which managed to garner for themselves a dart which sticks are the ones which are published (or awarded a medal) and the rest are recycled as material with which to stuff dartboards.

Ghost Buddy: Zero to Hero by Lin Oliver and Henry Winkler

Rating: WARTY!

Billy Broccoli has moved to a new home with his mom, which they're sharing with her new husband and his daughter. No word on what happened to his original dad. Billy is facing a new school and is missing his old friends (although why he can't visit them isn't explained), but he's not expecting that his new home is haunted by a ghost named Hoover.

I know this novel, the first in a series, is not aimed at my age group, but I found it to be far too black and white and simplistic to be even mildly entertaining, and Henry Winkler's reading of it left something to be desired. Maybe younger kids will like this because it seemed to me that it was pitched too low for middle grade. Cliche abounded and it was boring and predictable. Things were too disastrous to begin with, the pain-in-the-patoot neighbor kid was a ridiculous caricature (I can't imagine any cops even responding to a kid who calls them and reports a car being parked one inch over the no parking area, much less the cops having the car towed for that).

Billy does show some maturity in how he handles his revenge on this neighbor, but there was too much bullying and threats. It's stories like these which put a young kid's foot onto that dreary road to reality TV, sports is everything, and frat parties. if that's what you want for your kids, then have at it. I'd prefer something which has the guts to take the road less traveled instead of the lowest common denominator. I'd like to see some moral ambiguity, some gray areas, and some thought-provoking options which seem to me to be more age appropriate for the audience this book is aimed at. An approach like that that would have made for a much better story and a better educational experience for kids.

It's not like Winkler (or Oliver for that matter) is an unknown who doesn't have the mojo to ease a series like that through a publisher's door. Why would he need to take the easy way out as though he's some unknown children's book writing wannabe? For that matter, was the publisher so star-struck that they didn't want to look too closely at this? Whatever. I can't recommend this one. Winkler is dyslexic and I think he could have turned out better work than this on that and other such topics.

She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Rating: WARTY!

I swore after my last outing with this author that I wouldn't read another, but I'd forgotten that I'd ordered this book from the library, so I gave it a whirl in the hope that it would be better than Stuck in the Middle With You which I reviewed negatively back in October 2015. It wasn't!

This one just arrived at my excellent local library, and so, hoping it would be more focused upon what I was interested in, I plunged in. The problem was that this was just like the other (or that was just like this!). It was just as dissipated, random, lackluster and as meandering as the other one was. This disappointed me. Like the other book, this one was all over the place, starting in 2001 with a random encounter with two girls, one of whom had been a student of the author's when she was a both a professor of English and a he. This had taken place two years before the publication of the book. The second chapter referred us back to 1968. The third jumped up to 1974, then there was a weird interlude, after which we're off to 1979, and then to 1982. No. Just no!

I confess I don't get this "Nauseating Grasshopper" technique which, as a martial art, would undoubtedly be a deadly and disorientating fighting style, but which is nothing but irritating and off-putting as a literary conceit (and I use that last word advisedly). It's the same kind of thing which was employed in the other book and at a point just 50 pages in, I started to realize that I had little interest in continuing to read this despite the engrossing and important topic. I only ever had two English professors (post high school) and both of them were great in their own way. How this English professor can write a book about a n important and fundamentally interesting topic, yet make such a pig's ear out of it is beyond my understanding. Perhaps it's precisely because it was written by an English professor that it's so bad. Perhaps you have to have a certain distance from the language in some way I can't quite define, to be able to execute a story successfully in it.

If the skipping around like a cat on a hot tin roof had revealed anything, I could have maybe got with it, but it didn't. This wasn't a coherent story, not even remotely. It was an exhibition (and I mean that in the most derogatory sense) of miniatures - of impressionistic paintings in water colors that were so lacking in definition that they were essentially meaningless stains on old, discarded canvasses. They conveyed nothing, and I can no more recommend this than I could finish it. I wanted to learn just what had gone on with this guy who was really a girl, and I wanted to hear it in her own words, but I couldn't because she's not there.

Happy Marriage Volume Two by Maki Enjoji

Rating: WARTY!

This was volume two in a series. I noticed it in the excellent local library and decided to give it a try even though it's not my usual fare, so I picked up the first two volumes (it looks like it runs to maybe half a dozen volumes, but the volumes were not all there, so it was hard to tell. It's a Josei (mature romance) manga about an arranged marriage, but it's not quite what you might think at first glance. Normally I wouldn't go in for this because I'm not a big romance reader. Unless it's done expertly, which tragically few are, it's boring to me. Also I am not a fan of this style of manga, where every character, male and female looks exactly the same and the only way you can distinguish one form another is by clothes and hairstyle. They all have insanely large eyes and ridiculously pointy chins. This one also had issues with assigning the speech balloons - sometimes it was entirely unclear about who was saying what.

Those problems aside, I enjoyed this first volume. The girl, Chiwa Takanashi is far too much of a wuss for my taste, and both of the characters seemed to be as simplistic in their behavior as they were in their art work. over the course of volume one, they seemed to be growing more complex, but over volume two, it was obvious they had not grown at all. They were just as incompetent and stupid in relationships as they had been before they married. Their attitude is juvenile and rigid, especially Hakuto's, and worse, he evolved into a complete jerk and a monstrous control freak, and Chiwa became a passive, compliant lamb. This came to a head in the last chapter of the volume, where she finally decides to get out from under Hakuto's thumb and take a job at a start-up run by an old friend from college. Hakuto refuses to accept her resignation, and then browbeats her college friend into withdrawing his job offer (some friend), and Chiwa completely falls into line with this scheme of imprisonment and control. I'm sorry, but I don't want to read about a slave girl - a woman who is nothing more than a toy doll for a man. I sincerely hope that Japanese women are not like this!

Happy Marriage Volume 1 by Maki Enjoji

Rating: WORTHY!

This was volume one in a series. It's a Josei manga about an arranged marriage but it's not quite what you might think at first glance. Normally I wouldn't go in for this because I'm not a big romance reader. Unless it's done expertly, which tragically few are, it's boring to me. Also I am not a fan of this style of manga, where every character, male and female looks exactly the same and the only way you can distinguish one form another is by clothes and hairstyle. They all have insanely large eyes and ridiculously pointy chins. This one also had issues with assigning the speech balloons - sometimes it was entirely unclear about who was saying what.

Those problems aside, I enjoyed this first volume. The girl is a bit too much of a wuss for my taste, and both of them seemed to be as simplistic in their behavior as they were in their art work, but as the story played out, they started to fill out, growing some character and some foibles, which made it interesting. Each volume has four 'chapters', and the author (who is also the artist) added in some amusing comments here and there about the story and the development of it, and some things she had thought of which were left out, which made it more interesting for me.

Despite some issues, I liked this volume and I recommend it as a worthy read. I can't say the same for volume two, however!

Doll Bones by Holly Black

Rating: WORTHY!

These three twelve-year-old kids, Alice, Poppy, and Zach, have a healthy imagination and play together in an elaborate fantasy world they've created, featuring pirates and mermaids, and evil queens, based on their respective toys - action figures, Barbie dolls, and this one bone china doll in Poppy's mom's cabinet. The way Holly Black evokes these kids and their passion for this fantasy world is remarkable. The way it's read by Nick Podehl contributed greatly to the atmosphere and representation of the kids, too. I can only speculate uselessly how I would have found this novel had I read it first rather than listened to it. I would still have liked it, but would I have liked it as much? More? It's impossible to say, just as it's impossible to say if I would have disliked it had the narrator been rather nauseating. You pays your money and you takes your chance! Except that in this case it's "You borrows your audiobook ...."

Zach's dad thinks Zach is too old and too male to be playing with dolls, so he throws out all of Zach's figures one day while Zach is at school. The boy already resented his father for disappearing for some time before slowly sliding his way back into the family, but now Zach honestly hates him. For reasons which I didn't feel were well explained, Zach is too embarrassed to admit to the girls that his toys were thrown away, so he brusquely states that he's done playing these childish games. This begins a thread of discord which runs uncomfortably through this story like a out-of-the-way itch

The girls are crushed, but he's adamant about his decision, until late one night Alice and Poppy show up outside his bedroom window with a story that Poppy has been having night-time visitations from the ghost of the bone china doll, which she says is made from real bones of a dead girl who wants to be buried or she will curse them. Poppy has some actual ashes and bone fragments she says were inside the doll. They look like they came from someone's cremated remains.

Zach isn't sure that she's being honest, and he only half-way believes the ghost story, but he's impressed by Poppy's earnest demeanor, and by Alice's bravery at risking being grounded for life by her strict grandmother. Alice said she would only go with Poppy if Zach came, and Poppy was determined to go alone if she had to. Zach may have been skeptical, but impressed by the strength of conviction in his friends, and interested in one more adventure with the girls, the three of them hop on a bus to East Liverpool in the wee hours. it's a three hour ride to whence this dead girl supposedly hailed. Their plan is to bury her and lift the curse.

Thus begins their quest! The story is told well and has a lot of action and adventure, and some interesting conversations and shifting allegiances. There are some less than noble behaviors indulged in by these three kids, and I would have liked to have seen some sort of remorse or cost to the kids resulting from these, but there was none. I didn't like that. That aside, though, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I recommend it not only for age-appropriate readers (/listeners!), but for anyone who likes a good adventure story.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: The Power of the Mind Worms by Steve Darnall

Rating: WARTY!

I was a big fan of playing Sid Meier's Civilization game when I first discovered it, but I only liked the 2D version. The "isomorphic" version was just confusing to me. It made it really hard to keep track of where your pieces actually were. I know of no battle strategy display that uses such a bizarre system. On top of that, the bizarre rules were heavily biased towards making it all but impossible to win, especially if you had the gall to trespass above level two or three. I reached a point where I lost patience with trying to get the rules to work or the game to work within them, so I refused to play by those ridiculous rules, and I developed methods for bypassing them, such as creating a large number of cities quickly, defending them well, making them close enough that cities co co-defend each other, and upgrading military units as soon as better ones became available.

In terms of economics, instead of building up large cities with all manner of amenities, I would have each city build one thing (typically city walls to begin with, and later cathedrals, for which the sale price was higher). I would keep selling and rebuilding the thing over and over again, to fill my coffers, and eventually I would have so much that I could conquer cities just by bribery, and then sell off their buildings and use that cash to bribe the next city. I tried to be at peace with all other civilizations, but this is not a game that promotes peace and harmony at all (which is why this graphic novel was such a joke to me!).

Once another civilization betrayed the peace, I would became ruthless in destroying them. My leadership was always despot so I never had to worry about my 'advisers' or 'government'. I always kept one token 'enemy' village alive, though so I could continue playing out the game and not have it end prematurely, but after a while I started quitting the game as soon as it looked like I was unbeatable, because it became boring then. It also annoyed me that a civilization never really got anything for exploring or for however many years of peace you maintained. Like I said, it was all about hostility and this really didn't interest me that much. It was the exploring and building up a civilization which I really enjoyed.

The supposed goal of the game was to build a rocket to take your civilization to a new world, but I rarely made it to that stage of the game, and I didn't care because it was boring and time-wasting to me, since you never could actually go to another planet - not until a later version came out, and that version didn't interest me. This story, then, is based on that idea, and on those later games which were produced which took Civilization to the next level - where you started the game by colonizing another planet.

This graphic novel, with amazing art work by Rafael Kayana, takes it from there. People are living on the laughably unoriginal planet named Gaia, and the female ruler of these people is at odds with another faction of humans led by a guy. She wants to live in harmony with the planet, and her opponent essentially wants to strip-mine it. The situation is literally black and white since she's white (or pale Asian at least) and he's black. She's the 'gentle passive female' and he's the 'aggressive, belligerent male'. It's so pathetic as to be a joke. There is no gray area here.

Her position is as sad as it is weak because the planet isn't in harmony with the people. How can it be? Humans did not evolve there, and evidently do not belong since they cannot even breathe the atmosphere. They're required to wear a mask outdoors in the same way the humans were so required on Pandora in the Avatar movie. There's no harmony here, although I'd take issue with the contention we read at one point which states that nitrogen is harmful to humans ("If the nitrogen in the air doesn't kill you, the mind worms will"!). Seriously? Eighty percent of our atmosphere here on Earth is nitrogen. It doesn't kill humans - unless, of course there's no oxygen with it and we therefore suffocate, but that's not due to the nitrogen. Any other gas would suffocate us in just the same way that water does. And water is made from oxygen! This poor science is inexcusable.

Of course, once she bonds with the psychic worms, then she can commune with them and use them to defeat the militaristic and superior forces opposing them. There is, of course no explanation whatsoever for the existence of the mind worms: no word on how they evolved so far and yet failed to evolve further, much less on how they're even able to commune with a completely alien species, or even why they would. Despite the beautiful art work, I can't recommend this because the story was quite simply too stupid to live.

Dante's Divine Comedy by Seymour Chwast

Rating: WARTY!

In which I play the back nine with Dante Alighieri!

I almost picked up a copy of the Divine comedy in audio book form, but I declined it in favor of this graphic novel, Wise decision! The book seemed like too much to take for me, and the graphic novel confirmed it. Much simplified - indeed to a degree greater than I would have liked - the book depicts pretty much the Cliff's Notes version of the story, with lots of low grade illustration (in the form of monochrome line drawings and very little text. There's a mild sense of humor running through it, but overall I was neither impressed by the graphic novel version, nor by the primitive and idiotic original story, steeped as it was in the most asinine superstition and bullshit imaginable. I was so glad I didn't plump for the audio book which would have been a nightmare to listen to if it was as tedious as this version.

This is where the nine circles of hell originated, at least in popular consciousness, and which in turn evidently owes a lot to the seven deadly sins. It's also very confusing. The first seven circles are each dismissed with barely a page of illustration and text, and having been through that, I have to question the mental health of Dante, although having said that, I do fully realize that this was how people in general and the church in particular really viewed life and death back then. Or at least tried to sell it, in the case of the church.

The first circle of hell is Limbo, which is apparently simply hanging out solely with, it would appear, celebrities. It left me not knowing quite what to do, because for me that would be hell. I imagine it wouldn't seem remotely like hell for all-too-many people, and especially for those who live in a celebrity culture like the population of the USA seems to do!

The second circle of hell is the naked truth. We're told that it's inhabited by "Lustful creatures who committed sins of the flesh who are tossed about carelessly in the dark by the most furious winds." Now they spend eternity locked in carnal embrace. I can't imagine all that many people actually going beyond this level. They would be happy here - probably most guys, and more women than you might initially imagine. It would be like going back to the sixties. For eternity. How is this hell? LOL!

The third circle (or the turd circle as it happens) is to punish the gluttons, and this one is the first level which actually does punish. Evidently the fate of gluttons is to float around in the very excrement which has resulted from their own gluttony. Ick! You gluttons better get your shit together or you're actually going to get your shit - together!

I really wanted to get my hands on the fourth circle, which is devoted to avarice. It's also where apparently Rolling Rock beer got its name, because rolling rocks is what these people do - around a circle until they crash into the other team coming the other way, then they turn and roll the rocks back in the opposite direction. This sounds like a rip-off of the Sisyphus myth, but not really much of a hell as compared with the previous level, at least!

The fifth Circle is a joke, apparently. It's naked mud wrestling! It's not exactly my cup of mud - although I guess that would depend upon who it is I was scheduled to wrestle! LOL! There's a kind of a break here, where we see out traveler and his guide traveling the River Acheron (take that, Percy Jackson and your river Styx lowest common denominator!) Evidently these three rivers, The Acheron, the Phlegethon, and the Styx, flow from the mouth of a statue. I never knew that! Nor can I figure out how Greek mythology took over this story about Christian punishment! Rip-Off!

As the two travel (Virgil and Dante) with Phlegyas across the Styx now, they pass sinner Filippo, who is killed by other sinners. Wait, what? Wasn't he dead already?! We are in the afterlife (written as two words in this version!) are we not? It's no wonder that three furies appear and call upon Medusa. I felt like doing the same at this point. The sixth circle consists of heretics and Epicureans, sitting in coffins surrounded by fire. They look bored, but I would imagine they would have some great debates and discussions going if this weren't fiction.

The seventh circle is devoted to violence to begin with, but this is where the neat nine circles goes to hell - as it were, because there are now sub-divisions, and anyone who has lived in a badly-designed subdivision will know exactly what kind of hell it is. On level two, a minotaur guards a ravine of broken rocks across which Dante rides on a centaur, because those broken rocks are hellish, don't you know? Dante seems to have a particular obsession with naked bodies and broken rocks. You have to wonder what state his own rocks were in when he was naked. Possibly New Jersey, but more likely Arizona. Oh, and centaurs prevent the violent folk from escaping the boiling blood river! I imagine they would become trapped when the blood congealed from being boiled. Have I ever boiled blood, you ask? Well this ridiculous theology makes my blood boil. Does that count?

On level three of the seventh circle, you can catch the direct line to Buckingham palace. Oh, wait, wrong hell! No, here, harpies feed on the suicide trees, which are like the ones in the Wizard of Oz movie - living beings. They have it better than those who were violent against god, though! Those villains have to lie on hot sand and have ashes rain upon them. Seriously? Dante's god is so petty that he punishes people for eternity with abusive and nasty pettiness because they were violent against him? I know some parents are harsh on their children, but for the most part, a truly loving parent forgives their kids and loves them unconditionally, continually striving to help them all they can. God evidently gives up after four score and ten. For all our faults, when it comes to looking after our loved ones, for the most part, we humans put all gods to shame.

In the second zone the sodomites are punished under fiery rain! The thing is that flames evidently burn-off the features of the sodomites, so not a one of them is ugly! Yeay! Next up, eighth circle, which is yet another sub-divided mess: the fraudulent, the pimps and seducers, oh, and astrologers, magicians and diviners! Hypocrites. Serpents attack thieves and the two merge. Sowers of discord have to walk in a circle where they're repeatedly stabbed, heal, and are stabbed again. Falsifiers of metals get scabs. Now scabs merely cross picket lines. The ninth circle is pretty much more of the same. It's all about betrayal and usury - which is a sin! Bankers of the Earth beware! You have nothing to lose but your bottom line....

Curiously, Dante has an out. Giants lower him to the bottom of hell where he can use the devil's own tunnel to climb out and escape! He makes his way to purgatory where he's required to wash his hands of hell, because he's not a spirit. He notices that he casts a shadow, but Virgil, his companion does not. Spirits, we're told, cannot cast a shadow but can feel pain. How does that work?

The dead are begging Dante to tell their loved ones to pray for them. Why is this? Are we to understand from this that two spirits, both equally stained with sin, will have different outcomes if one has people begging for him whereas the other does not? This is the same thing as saying that it's not your own sin which condemns you, but the level of groveling you can command from your followers! Honestly? Why would the prayers of the living matter? Why not the prayers of those already dead, who have gone on to heaven? Wouldn't their evaluation be more accurate? And why would a perfect god need to be told anything? Or asked for anything? Doesn't he already know? So the purpose of this is for people to debase themselves with no guarantee of an outcome, evidently. It has nothing to do with actually affecting, much less effecting, an outcome. Indeed, how can a perfect god's mind be changed by prayer? To suggest it can be changed indicates the divine mind is in an imperfect state!

Of course, the value of Dante's insights is rather lessened when we learn of his cosmology, which has Earth at the center and the sun out in a "sphere" between Venus and Mars.... Comedy is definitely the word for this. It's a joke. Not only is the original story complete trash, as well as being both juvenile and vindictive, this graphic rendition of it felt to me like it was tossed together on the cheap. It was lackluster and minimalist to an extreme degree, and I can't recommend it.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Rating: WARTY!

I started listening to Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief this past weekend and this morning. It's pretty bad and very much a rip-off of Harry Potter. It's like cut-price Greek mythology - set in America no less - meets Harry Potter. There's even a wand, after a fashion - it's Zeus's lightning bolt. Someone stole it and evidently the gods are, as usual, utterly incapable of discovering who took it or where it is. For reasons unexplained, they zero-in on Percy Jackson, who is, unbeknownst to him, the son of not only his mother, but also Zeus's brother Poseidon, who's been banned by Zeus from seeing his son. The Greek gods were the original dysfunctional family.

In order to protect Percy from unspecified potential enemies, his mom evidently had no other choice than to take-up residence with a disgusting guy who abuses her to a caricatured degree, mentally and physically. Evidently his smell is powerful enough to hide Percy from enemies who are evidently as dumb as the gods. Percy attends a special private school, although who pays for this goes unspecified. The only thing taught at the school, it would seem, is ancient Greek mythology, and Latin. Why Latin, I have no idea whatsoever. No Roman gods are involved in this story! I studied Latin for two years in high school and got nothing out of it other than a better understanding of English, which I could have arrived at in far less painful ways, trust me!

As is typical for this magical child trope, Percy, like Potter, grows up in pain and is kept in ignorance about his true origin and nature. Like Potter, he's bullied at school, and he's been told that he suffers from ADHD and dyslexia. He discovers he can read ancient Greek with no trouble, but plain modern English escapes him. I never knew that was what dyslexia was all about! Wow!

I was having a hard time getting into the story, mostly because Percy was incredibly stupid and blind, and the mythology had been dumbed-down to childish levels presumably to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I had quite liked the movie, which despite its flaws, was considerably better than the novel. It was tighter, smarter, better told, and more 'sensible', although it still fell short of being truly good.

The movie changed a few significant things, too - such as Percy saving Grover from the minotaur in the book, which was changed to Grover saving Percy in the movie; then came the second movie which sucked! This morning, I decided that this first novel was very much of the same nature as the second movie, and I skipped to the last couple of disks figuring I could skim through those before I drop it off at the library this afternoon. It's gone, girl!

My conviction that this novel would never improve and would be just as bad at the end as it was at the beginning, was fully confirmed and amplified upon. After hearing the guy who was reading this story pronounce Charon as Karen as opposed to Care - on, and discovering that Kerberos (not pronounced with a K, but begun with a 'ser' - as in Ser-bian in this novel), and discovering that this fierce guardian of hell was really just a puppy who liked to chase balls, I had pretty much heard all I could stand. I never like Annabeth in the movie (she was better in True Detective), and I liked her just as little in the novel. And why was she named Annabeth? She's the daughter of a Greek God and she's named with a Hebrew name? Grover is a Satyr, and gets an English name?!

This author has no respect for the mythology and dumbs it down incredibly. What in the name of the gods inspired him to take Greek mythology and then divorce it entirely from Greece and set it in the USA? What logic or rationale is behind that? Obviously none. The Empire State Building is Olympus? It's really saddening that he trashed and cheapened some fine mythology instead of fully capitalizing on it. On the other hand, he has a best-selling franchise from treating his readers like they deserve nothing better, so maybe the rest of us should jump on this bandwagon and start turning out equally careless LCD novels? I honestly don't l think I can do that, and I certainly can't recommend this as a worthy read. The grpahic novle is no better. I posted a negative review of that in June of 2017.

The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber

Rating: WORTHY!

James Thurber died in 1961, and has largely been forgotten except for when someone makes (or remakes) a movie based on his best known story: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I've been a fan of Thurber's for years, so I'm pleased to be able to write a positive review of a children's story he wrote that I had never read before.

This story is delightfully full of Thurber's sly and dry sense of humor, and is illustrated in a style reminiscent of Thurber's own, by Marc Simont. There is a princess kept imprisoned in Coffin Castle, by the cold Duke. Within the castle are thirteen clocks which are stopped at ten to five (and the odds of starting them are much longer). Along comes a prince to try his hand after so very many others have failed, and as usual, he's given impossible tasks to complete for the princess's hand (and, presumably, the rest of her). The first is to gather one thousand jewels and deliver them to the Duke in nine and ninety hours. The second is to restart the clocks - if he has the time! Can he succeed? Only Thurber knows!

This delight of a story, with an introduction by none other than Neil Gaiman. The tale is charming, funny, irreverent, and well told with, of course, a happy ending. I recommend it.

Kat McGee and the Halloween Costume Caper by Kristin Riddick

Rating: WORTHY!

"Long Ranger" should maybe be "Lone Ranger"?!

This is my first Katherine McGee, and indeed my first Kristin Riddick, novel, and it was a worthy read, although as a series, it’s not something which at my age I feel any compulsion to continue, but for the intended age range, I see no problems with it at all. It was a fun, inventive story of wild derring-do, support and friendship and sends a very positive message. I have to add that the illustrations are remarkable and worthy of a novel aimed at any age. Nick Guarracino is a fine artist - and a useful contributor. For example at one point the questers came upon a wall of trumpets and I was picturing that completely wrong until I saw the artist's depiction of it. Hopefully he saw it as the author intended!

Kat loves Halloween, and makes her own costume every year, but this year, "the menacing Dr S" has prevailed upon the powers that be to cancel Halloween, based on problems of vandalism and theft which have accompanied previous events. I strongly suspected Dr S of actually orchestrating those very events, and we soon learn why. Kat's grandmother - the only one who fully supported Kat's amizing costuming ambitions, feeds her a special home-made lollipop one evening which not only puts Kat to sleep, it transports her from her native Totsville to Treatsville, which is the town where the Halloween costumes live. Someone there, who looks remarkably like Dr S, is stealing those costumes for his own benefit, which in Treatsville, where the costumes have a life of their own, is nothing short of kidnapping!

Kat is hosted by Dolce, who frankly creeped me out despite her charming demeanor and her appealing looks. Dolce initially prevaricates about being a witch, and certainly doesn't behave or look like traditional witch, but later she describes herself as a "wee witch-in-training," and she explains to Kat why this young girl is so important to Treatsville's future - but can she brave the Forest of Fear, the Pits of Gloom, and the Swamp of Sorrow? Kat calls to herself costumes from previous Halloweens: The Jujitsu Princess, and The Candy Cane Witch, and with these trusty companions, she launches herself on this quest, bravely if cautiously, but with Preppy Pirate spying on them and Snaggletooth trying to kidnap all costumes and thwart (yes, thwart!) her quest, can she succeed? I guessed that she would!

I had an issue or two over some of the events in the story like this one: "...like when Ellie Byrd stepped on the end of a rake two years ago. A fish head attached to the handle flew in her face. She hasn’t been able to go near a hay maze since." I know that's meant to be scary and funny, but stepping on a rake can lead to puncture wounds that in turn necessitate a trip to the Doctor for a tetanus shot, or at the very least a painful whack in the face. Even if we assume it was a leaf rake it's still potentially dangerous. Could the author not have called it a hoe or a shovel or something less spikey? Or maybe had the fish-head come at her by some other means?

Minor complaints like that aside, I liked Kat's attitude and the sense of humor which pervaded this story, and some of the text was choice. How about this for a rich phrase: " A festering laugh", or this comment on vampires: "...if this vampire’s bite doesn’t kill me, his four-hundred-year-old breath will!" I loved that, and it's for those reasons I am rating this a worthy read for the intended age range.