The Rejected Writer's Book Club by Suzanne Kelman

Rating: WORTHY!

While I haven't had great success with novels which revolve around books or librarians or book shops, I'm inexplicably always optimistic that I will find one, and this sounded interesting. In the end it proved itself a worthy read for which I was grateful (and thankful to the author and publisher for a chance to read this advance review copy)! Certainly it's a brilliant idea to pull in a readership of everyone who dreams of being a writer, or who has had an e-script rejected. Kinda makes me wish I'd thought of it first!

Suzanne Kelman is a fellow blogspotter, although I don't know her, but unfortunately, her blog seems to be nothing more than a promotion of this novel. I don't see any actual blogging going on which was disappointing! Her blog might have made for an interesting read. She's a writer of novels and screenplays, and also a film producer and playwright, so this novel isn't her first rodeo, so to speak. One of the things she also produces is 'blondie and the Brit podcasts' I have no idea what those are about, but they sound like they might be amusing.

I have to disagree with her comment in the acknowledgements: "When I started writing my first novel, I was under some strange illusion that just one person created a book." I've read this same thing from several authors. Those of us who have self-published are living proof that it takes only a dedicated author who is willing to put in the time and make the effort! The fact that we may not (yet!) have created a best seller (or any sales!) doesn't take a thing away from the work we did by ourselves to get this written and cleaned up, formatted, checked, proofed and published. Just one person can indeed create a book these days.

However, I'm reviewing the novel not the author, so here goes! I got into this novel right away, which is always nice. My biggest fear was that this would be yet another novel where an author creates a weird-ass assemblage of quirky characters and tosses them into this like it was a khichari, hoping for something to work without having an actual story to tell. For me, that modus operandi doesn't work and is just annoying, so I admit I felt some trepidation going in, but while there was some of this 'potpourri' business going on, I was glad to find that there was also a story that was worth reading.

Nor was the story confined to quirksville and stuck there: the location changed pretty quickly because it turned into a road trip, which itself had several diversions, so overall it was a fun read. There were joys and oddities, including unexpected ones which I'm sure the writer never had in mind. I loved the character Annie. Not so much Doris, who I really didn't like because she was stridently overbearing. I liked that when I reached Chapter Twenty-Three, my Kindle informed me that there were 23 minutes left in the book! Beautiful symmetry! I'm a big fan of print books (except for their murderous nature on trees), but here was something you don't get with a print book!

It wasn't all plain sailing, though. It seems to me that one thing a writer, especially one who writes about writers, should get right is the difference between' titled' and 'entitled', as in this quote "...entitled A Day Close to God..." While a book is entitled to be read, it is titled whatever the title is. I see this change in meaning more and more often, and with many different words. I guess it's foolish to think anyone can hold back this juggernaut of laxity in literature, though. Language is dynamic, and it has never been more so than it is in this era of tweets and texts.

It bothers me that in tossing every word into the same wash, we're squandering a rich literary heritage by mixing distinctive and colorful words, and bleaching out the fabric of our language, removing its subtle shades and hues. It's the same thing linguistically as we're doing to the planet with pollution and climate change: we're wiping out the unique, and the cute, and quaint, and charming, and above all: important, and the world will be a lesser place for it when we're done raping and pillaging. We need to stand together, keep our nose to the grindstone, our shoulder to the wheel, our backs to the wall, a firm hand on the tiller, and putting our best foot forward, march valiantly to the stirring bugle call of steadfast linguistics, and never lose our sense of direction. Now where was I?

Oh yes. Not plain sailing! My blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, so I tend to pick up on writerly things in novels whether it's a great turn of phrase or a weird one. There was the occasional oddity in phrasing here and there, or odd juxtapositions and so on. It was nothing major, but it was stuff which occasionally took me out of my immersion and made me realize I was reading. I think from a writer's PoV, it's worth looking at some of these and giving some thought to how me might have dealt with the same text.

At one point I read that a person "...was up and down like a whore's drawers." This for me was too much. It was out of place in the context of the story and I thought it was entirely unnecessary. It's not very kind to sex workers, either. If the novel had been a raunchy one, or one about rough and ready people, then it wouldn't have seemed so out of place, but it didn't belong here in this story. It would have been so easy to find a more appropriate substitute.

Another instance of a lesser nature was when I read: "bubbling brook." I'm very familiar with "babbling brook", but bubbling? Not so much! Maybe it's just me. Another instance was when I read, "These drugs were making me into a perfect floozy." Now a floozy is a loose woman, so this really didn't fit with the context since the character wasn't behaving loosely or immorally. She was simply out of it because of a pill she'd taken to calm her nerves about flying. "These drugs were making me woozy" would have made sense.

At one point I read of a character saying that she "...would appreciate it if it never, ever leaves this room...", 'it' being her secret past, but right after that I read, "...I will honor someone, someone who meant a great deal to me, someone I should have honored a long time ago before now." This struck me as odd - how is keeping it secret honoring him? I can see that if a Navy Seal earns a medal you don't want to go public with it and reveal their identity, but typically honoring someone means broadcasting what they're done so people actually can honor them. This felt like a contradiction, but it's no big deal. It's not going to destroy an otherwise worthy read, but this kind of thing is worth some thought if you're a writer.

At another point I read about Doris (yes, that Doris), one of the group of rejected writers who is a BBW. She was moving down an aisle and I read that "nothing stood a chance in her wake." that seemed to me to be, wait for it, ass-backwards! If she's moving through people like a snowplow, then surely it's what's ahead of her which stands little chance - the opposite of wake? On a related topic there was an issue of how many seats a passenger airplane has in a row. I read about four people sitting together, but one had a window seat. I may be wrong, since I'm far from an expert on air travel, but I'm unaware of any airplane which has four seats in a row together where one of the seats is a window seat. The four seat configurations (or the new five-seat configuration for the Airbus) are all in the middle of the plane, with only two or three seat grouped by the windows, and four seats are rare on inter-state flights. You usually only get them on the large jetliner trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific flights.

Again, this isn't a deal-breaker for me. We writers are supposed to write what we know, but I reject that nonsense. Did Bram Stoker actually take on a vampire? I doubt it! Did Mary Shelley create a living being from dead parts? Only in a literary sense. Did Suzanne Collins actually fight in a Hunger games in a dystopian future? No! It would be a sorry literary world if we wrote only what we know. We write what we're passionate about (if we're smart), and the hell with what we know, but that said, it can carry and expensive price-tag if we don't get it right.

In this case though, I wasn't going to let any of the above (or wondering how it was that Mary didn't know that her best friend couldn't swim), bother me or make me feel this book didn't deserve a worthy rating, because overall it was a great read. It drew me in and kept me interested, and that's all I ask for from a writer. I've always said you can get away with a lot with me if you tell me a good story, and this author didn't have to get away with a lot because the issues were few and minor. It was a good story, and I recommend it.

Helen Keller by Jane Sutcliffe

Rating: WORTHY!

I had no idea I had such a backlog of reviews to post. That's what happens when you get focused on writing and nothing else save for some reading here and there! So many of them are negative, too, which is sad, so it's nice to be able to post this last one of the backlog, and get caught up with a positive one.

I saw this in the library and thought it would make for an informative and interesting read, and I was right for once. Helen Keller was born about as regular and normal a child as you can get, although rather more privileged than many people in her time. Before the age of two, however, this all changed. She contracted some indeterminate illness which had the effect of rendering her both deaf and blind. This led to a life of acute frustration and anger for her until, through Alexander Graham Bell of all people, she learned to communicate. It was Bell who indirectly put her in touch with brilliant and dedicated teacher Johanna "Anne" Sullivan, who finally managed to break through these horrible barriers which had been erected by disease, and make a connection with the child inside the feisty Helen exterior.

Almost from that moment on (there was a certain period of frustration which this book glosses over rather!), Helen turned her life around and became dedicated to learning as much as she could about everything she could. She learned to read Braille and to write and eventually wrote her own life story. She and Anne stayed together for half a century until Anne's death. Anne became blind herself around the age of ten, but she was lucky enough that there was surgery to correct some of her problems, so she was with sight at the age of twenty when she came to work with Helen.

This short book with text and pictures is an ideal introduction for young children to these remarkable women. I enjoyed it and I can't imagine any child who wouldn't. I recommend it.

Awaken Me Darkly by Gena Showalter

Rating: WARTY!

I have no idea what that title means. It's nonsensical. Wake me without turning on the light? Wake me with a shocking revelation? That's what the blurb promises, but the blurbs always promise that, and it never is. Blurb writers are morons. This audiobook was read in the kind of purring chocolate voice that sounds intriguing to begin with, but runs a severe risk of becoming cloying, irritating, even nauseating with too much exposure. And it did.

Listening to an audiobook isn't like meeting someone at a function or a party, where you have a conversation with them and can move on at any time. In an audiobook, you're stuck with them for the duration! There is no conversation. You're lectured and expected to like it. The reading in this case was done by Justine Eyre. I had no idea who she was, and the impression I got was that she was a lot older than the character. Since this is told in first person, this seemed wrong to me. Later I learned that she is, very roughly, the same age as the character, but she still seems wrong for this voice. She eyred! The voice sounds too old and nowhere near appropriate to the character as depicted in the novel. It's not enough street for my taste, so the character, as read by Eyre, came off as inauthentic to me.

When you're reading a novel for yourself, you have the choice to picture the characters however you want, but when this is taken from you by a reader in an audio book, it can be a spark of life or a kiss of death. In this case I tried not to be lured to either extreme and just let this voice go by me. It wasn't easy! I am no fan of first person PoV and I cannot understand why so many authors are so compulsively addicted to it. Some writers can make it work in some cases, but for me it's too much "me" from the character: "Hey, lookit me! Look, I'm looking in a mirror and describing myself for you! Aren't I wonderful? Lookit what I'm doing now. Pay attention only to meeeeee! I own you!" Yuk!

Anyway, let's look at the plot, which makes little sense, but this is what we have to work with. At some point in the near future, interplanetary portals appear on Earth for no evident reason, allowing through several varieties of alien, all of which seem to be superior to humans. Feeling threatened, the humans fought back - literally - and were pretty much losing when a treaty was struck and an organization to police the aliens was formed. The main character, Mia Snow works for the New Chicago Police Department as an 'alien huntress'. I don't get why it's New Chicago, but this is sci-fi so you have to have the city renamed with the new prefix, right? It's the law! Why she's a 'huntress' rather than a 'hunter' I don't get either. Do women need to be especially labeled to pigeon-hole them as women rather than as people? Gena Showalter seems to think so. Why is she a 'huntress' at all? Why not a detective - or a detectivess in this case? LOL!

The story starts with an alien serial killer. The evidence points to a female Arcadian. Why the alien race is named after residents of the highlands in the middle of the Peloponnese in ancient Greece, I have no idea. I'm guessing Showalter doesn't either. The name just sounds cool, right? The body is a muscular male with dark hair. He's found naked and posed and tied with ribbons - which is why the idiot detectives insist it had to have been a female who did it. No male would ever use a ribbon, right? Genderism and pigeon-holing seems to be the order of the day in this future. "She" is identified as Arcadian by the fact that Arcadians have three hairs to each root as opposed to the single hair per follicle every other species evidently has. Et in Arcadia ego grew three hairs, apparently.

None of this could have been possibly, planted, could it? I'm sorry, but this story started out stupid and got worse. I ditched it DNF and moved on to something much better written and far more entertaining. I cannot recommend this one, and I'm done with this author!

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Rating: WARTY!

I should have known I would not like this book, but when I requested the audio book from the library, I didn't know it was a Newbery winner or I wouldn't have bothered. Medal-winning novels have been very nearly a consistent waste of time for me. I deliberately put them back on the shelf if they have some medal listed on the cover. This one turned out to be no different from nearly all of my previous experiences!

The biggest problem with dystopian novels is the utter lack of rational explanation as to how the world actually became dystopian in the first place. Most dystopian novels simply take it as a given - this is how the world is, and vaguely wave their hand at some tragic past, such as nuclear war, or disease pandemic, but this fails for me because while it explains that the world changed dramatically, it fails to explain why it changed in the way the author depicts it did. The author of the Divergent disaster, for example (who evidently borrowed heavily from this novel), simply took the brain-dead position that "Hey, it's perfectly natural that people would automatically migrate, like sheep, into one of five ridiculous factions, and we're expected to accept that all humans are alike, all conform readily, there's only one rebel, and no one else ever questions anything. That's major BS right there. Humans are not like that and it's an insult to the human race to suggest that everyone is.

In this novel, which is part of a connected series I'm sorry to say, everyone lives in supposed communist conformity, and children are assigned at age twelve into one of a limited number of assignments which last a lifetime. No one complains, no one rebels, and those who feel they don't fit will request to be forced into "release" - which is that they're murdered. Sorry but this won't work. It doesn't even make any sense.

In this world, all pain and hunger and suffering are taken away, but the "price" for this is the loss of music, art, and other human expressions of joy, such as love? Nonsense! They can't even see - or at least don't even know - what colors are? Seriously? It doesn't work in such a literal black and white manner, and it's not so much naïve to believe it would, as it's profoundly ignorant on the part of an author to even think that it does and that we as readers, would swallow this crap.

Perhaps a better writer might have made this work, but this author fails because the writing is utterly boring. It's so boring in fact that the audio book creators felt the dire need to inject irritating, jarring, monotonous musical interludes randomly into the text. Where those in the original novel? Did you open page 55 and suddenly a piano trilled forth? I seriously doubt it. So what is on the unimaginative brains of these imbeciles that - in a story where music is banned - a mind-numbingly mediocre musical measure or two are injected over the narration? You can't get that dumb naturally. You actually have to really want it and fight for it, to get it as chronic as these guys had it.

But even without that pain in the eardrum, even had I been reading it, I would have found myself skipping over paragraph after paragraph because it wasn't remotely interesting. Did I really want to listen to, in the space of four short paragraphs:

And today, now that the new Elevens had been advanced this morning, there were two Eleven-nineteens...Very soon he would not be an Eleven but a Twelve...Asher was a four, and sat now in the row ahead of Jonas. He would receive his Assignment fourth....Fiona, Eighteen, was on his left; on his other side sat Twenty...

I'd rather listen to paint drying. It's much more restful. I'm sorry but I can't get into a novel that plods the way this one does, with nothing happening save for one long info-dump of a set-up which occupied over half the story. Yes the novel - novella, whatever - is short, but it's still way too long for my taste. Any hopeful young writer who came out with this garbage as a first effort today would rightly have it rejected, yet it won a medal? For what?! The music?! It just goes to show how utterly worthless a Newbery is. I can't recommend it based on what I listened to, which was far too much. A real dystopian society would make you listen to books like this.

Magisterium by Jeff Hirsch

Rating: WARTY!

This audio book, poorly read by Julia Whelan, failed to get my attention despite my twice trying to get with it. It simply wasn't interesting, and the story made no sense. It wasn't even that original - it's another we v. they story, in this case scientists (The Colloquium) v. magicians (The unoriginally named 'Magisterium'), but the scientists, as represented by main female character, 16-year-old Glenn Morgan were so caricatured that they weren't even remotely realistic. The author would have us swallow the idiotic creationist position that science is blind and dogmatic and interested only in preserving the status quo, whereas the Magisterium is open to intuitive learning, which is nonsensical in real life. You can't "know" anything - not in any meaningful sense - without a scientific approach. You can blindly believe, and you can think you know, and you can fool yourself into 'knowing', but you can't really know.

In any story where magic is permitted, you're automatically throwing out the rulebook, which is why writers of such stories have to come up with rather arbitrary rules which the magicians have to follow, and unless they're done well, it fails. Usually there is no cost attached to performing magic in these stories, but then again it's magic, so why would there be? On the other hand, if there's no cost, then anyone can do anything and your story lacks any imperative, risk, or danger. There was no magic performed in the portion of the story to which I listened, so I can't speak to that here. I can only say it was boring to me, so I DNF'd it and moved onto something which turned out to be much more entertaining. Life's too short, y'know?!

Priceless by Nicole Richie

Rating: WARTY!

In which a spoiled-rotten rich kid discovers that her father is a crook and she's tossed out of house and home, losing everything except a few thousand dollars she can get from pawning her mom's jewelry. But she falls squarely on her feet anyway. I was hoping to be entertained by this because yes, it's that Nicole Ritchie, who has been there and done that in terms of living a spoiled brat's life. I thought she might bring some authenticity and realism to the story, but in the end all she delivered was exactly what every other author who writes in this genre delivers: a snotty spoiled-brat main character who is shallow and stupid, who falls into one lucky situation after another, who inevitably finds romance, and who learns nothing, grows none, and changes her perspective not a whit.

I have to say I really kind of expected that shallowness, but I was curious as to how a writer who had been there and done that would depict that life as opposed to a writer who really had no idea and was just wishful thinking, and dropping fashion names at every turn out of pure pretension. It turns out that Ritchie is just dropping fashion names at every turn, so there's no difference! I'd thought that maybe someone who was used to having that stuff around them would be less obsessed with it, but that's evidently not the case.

I thought maybe she might offer a better or more realistic perspective too, but she's just as shallow and blinkered as every other writer on these topics. It's really sad, because on the back cover there's this gorgeous soulful portrait of the author, yet underneath that pretty veneer is the most disappointing underbelly imaginable. It's such a contrast.

Despite the fact that her father stole the savings of thousands of people, this character in the novel is more interested in going shopping than in having any real concern about it, let alone in actually trying to do anything about it. Plus the SEC guy is falling in lust with her and she with him. For about half the novel it was interesting in some regards, although less than I'd hoped for, and in the end it was less and less the more I read. I ditched it as a DNF and I cannot recommend it. I'm done reading anything by Nicole Ritchie.

The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman

Rating: WARTY!

Read by Joshua Swanson, who doesn't do a bad job, this library audio book started out very intriguingly. I found myself wondering how useful obsidian would be for a blade. It's a material rather like glass, and so is readily shattered, but there are finds of obsidian being used historically for arrow heads. It can be chipped to a very sharp edge, so maybe an obsidian blade isn't such a stretch.

I have to say that the story caught my interest right off the bat. This kid Tucker is out in the yard and his father, who is a man of the church, is on the roof fixing a broken shingle. When Tucker hears a cry, he runs out thinking his dad fell off the roof, but dad is nowhere to be seen. What Tucker does see is what appears to be a shimmering disk hovering at the edge of the roof. Hmm!

His dad shows up later with a young girl in tow, whom he says he found in town. He denies all Tucker's suggestions that he fell off the roof, which is odd to Tucker, who is used to telling lies to get himself out of trouble, but who isn't used to his dad doing the same thing. Dad says that the girl, Lahlia is in need of adoption, but she seems rather strange and doesn't talk other than to say Tucker's name. His dad has also bizarrely lost his faith, now no longer believing there is a God. It turns out that Tucker's mom was also adopted, and it seems pretty obvious from the start that that both she and Lahlia, the new girl, come from a parallel dimension, which means that Tucker is half from this dimension and half from the other. Okay, I'm hooked!

So far so good, but the novel began to go downhill, and I had a few questions. Take the girl's name, for example. If she isn't talking, then how does anyone know her name, much less the spelling of it? I actually didn't know the spelling myself, which is one problem with audio books, but why is it Lahlia, instead of say, Laleah? Did she write it down for them?! The way the reader pronounces it makes it seem much more like the latter than the former to me. Obviously it's that way because the author chose it to be that way, but this is a writing issue worthy of some consideration for budding authors. To me, names are important in fiction.

Talking of writing issues, there was another curious one. When Tucker's parents disappear with an oddly uninformative note (obviously they've gone back to the other parallel world from which Tucker's mom hailed, but he doesn't know this and takes a tedious amount of time to figure out), Tucker learns that his uncle, who is known as Kosh, will take care of him in their absence. Shortly after they meet, I read this sentence: "He walked towards Tucker, stopped about eight feet away, and peered at him closely." I am trying to figure out how you peer at someone closely from eight feet away. I think I know what the writer was trying to convey, but to me he did it in a poor way. Just a thought from a writing perspective! Plus this 'initial' meeting makes little sense given what's coming later.

That "peering" reminded me of a character from the TV show, Heroes and the subsequent miniseries, which evidently failed to launch successfully. Character Matt Parkman can read minds, but the actor's portrayal of this made me laugh. When he was trying to catch someone's thoughts, he would frown and cock his head and push his head forwards, and it just looked ridiculous to me - as ridiculous as the head twist the 'wesen' characters do when changing faces in the TV show Grimm, which I think looks equally ridiculous, although I love that show. I call it the Sergeant Wu show because he's the most entertaining character in it, talking of facial expressions. But I digress! I imagined this Matt Parkman act when I read that sentence about Kosh, so it made me laugh too. This was probably not the effect the author was seeking!

These shimmering disks or lenses of air show up wherever Tucker goes, which seems to me to be too much unless he is somehow causing, triggering, or attracting them. That was a possibility, so I let that ride, but the first time Tucker travels through one, he ends up atop one of the twin towers in New York city right before the first jetliner hits. What are the odds of that? I have to say I have little time for uninventive time-travel stories which have their characters arrive at critical points in history (typically US history for US stories, and so on) or have them meet famous and influential characters. What are the odds of that? It seems to me to be a lazy way to write such a novels - picking an easy target rather than doing the work of writing a more realistic and more creative story with unknowns from history.

Worse than this though was how Tucker came to be there. How did the wormhole (or whatever it is), link the top of his uncle's barn to the top of the WTC? He was nowhere near NYC geographically, and nowhere near the elevation of the towers vertically, so how did this work? And why were the disks always up in the air - and conveniently next to a roof? Why were the spiritual beings known as Klaatu? Was that short for Klaatu barada nikto?! Maybe an explanation would be forthcoming. I had to keep on listening to find out, but I soon grew tired of unanswered questions and nonsensical rambling about the Klaatu and the wormholes. The story made less sense as it went on, rather than more sense, and I ditched it after a while as a DNF because I couldn't stand to listen to any more. I can't recommend this one. And I never did find out what the obsidian blade had to do with anything - doubtlessly because I dropped this one. Worse, though, is that this is a series, and I'm not a fan of series, especially not ones which start out so badly!

Where Silence Gathers by Kelsey Sutton

Rating: WARTY!

This is a curious novel wherein the main character, Alexandra, can see emotions/impulses as physical beings which manifest mostly as white men for reasons unknown. This seemed rather racist to me. It's a companion novel to an earlier one set in the same world, but with different characters. I have not read the previous volume.

Alexandra's almost constant companion and pseudo-best friend for many years has been one named Revenge, who has been with her ever since her family was killed by a drunk driver. When Revenge tells her that Nate Foster has been released from jail for good behavior, she takes the gun she knows her uncle keeps hidden, and sets out for Nate's home, but she only spies on him through a window. She doesn't act. She does see a new emotion there, but cannot identify it, and she leaves. Are these things all really emotions? That's how they're described in the novel, but there is quite a variety, most of whom spend very little time with Alexandra. They seem more like fleeting impulses to me!

Anyway, when she returns the next night, Nate isn't home, and his wife is crying in the kitchen. This is when Alexandra meets the new emotion face-to-face and discovers that it's Forgiveness. She also learns that her father could apparently see these characters in the same way that she can. She had never known this before. Her life has been on a downhill spiral, and no one, not her aunt and uncle, not her two best friends in high school, nor anyone else seems to have any clue where her head is at, but now, with this new information, maybe she can turn herself around? Who cares, really? She was an obnoxious, self-obsessed, whiny-ass brat, and I sure didn't.

One thing which made little sense to me was the almost constant companionship which Revenge provided. There is supposedly only one of each emotion (at least from what I saw), and they arrive fleetingly when needed and disappear afterwards, so how come Revenge gets to spend so much time with her? Was he not needed anywhere else in the world? Maybe they have only white revenge in the US, but in Africa there is black revenge, or maybe one for each nation? One for each race? The novel never makes this clear. Maybe it's covered in the first volume. I really don't care that much.

I came across a writing issue here - obscure text. At one point I read, "I refuse to let how much his presence affects me show." It was so curious I had to read it twice more before I fully grasped what it was saying. Wouldn't it have been better to write, "I refuse to let show how much his presence affects me"? One simple change and it improves readability immensely. At least to me it does. This is the value of good editing, which is all on you if you're self-publishing. It's a big burden to carry.

The writing, though, wasn't the real problem, not from a technical PoV. The real problem was the unending tedium of listening to the main character's obsessive-compulsive wallowing, which made me detest her. I ditched this novel as a DNF. I can't recommend it and I'm done with this author.

Interworld by Neil Gaiman, Michael Reeves

Rating: WARTY!

I'd like to like Neil Gaiman. I loved the Doctor Who episode he wrote a couple of seasons back, and I really liked his novel Stardust, and I liked his Underwhere graphic novel, but ever since those, it seems that he's determined to thwart my every effort to like what he writes. A few days ago I read a The Sandman Overture graphic novel and thought it was a nasty mess. I decided to try again with this middle-grade audiobook and I thought, finally, I'd found something I could listen to, but after enjoying the opening chapters, the novel went the same way that Sandman had: sideways, but in this case literally. It then devolved into nonsense and became just annoying. Maybe middle-graders will like this gobbledygook, but it sure doesn't leave anything but distaste in my reading mouth. I can't imagine my own kids finding it entertaining.

I say reading, but I mean listening since this was an audiobook, and to be fair ('cos I'm normally as unfair as I can get!), Christopher Evan Welch didn't do too bad of a job reading it. The story is about a kid named Joey. He makes a big deal about his lack of any sense of direction, which is not only irrelevant to the story, but it makes him look like a moron who doesn't even know where the sun rises. I don't know why any writer would do that to their main character.

The novel is first person PoV, which is sucky, and the authors admit how limiting it is by having "interlogs" told by another party. It's a clunker. Tell it in third and be done with it instead of performing these ridiculous acrobatics, for god's sakes. Get a clue.

Joey ends up wandering in a fog and no, it's not a metaphor. He comes out in a parallel world where his own mom, who has no son named Joey, but instead, a daughter named Josephine live. He's rescued from his ridiculously prolonged confusion by a guy named 'J', which is evidently 'Jay' - it's impossible to tell in an audiobook. In fact, everyone he meets thereafter - on the good guys side - seems to have a name beginning with a 'J'. No idea why. It was at this point that the story went downhill for me and never recovered.

Apparently there is an infinity of worlds which range on a scale from scientifically inclined at one end, which are inexplicably named binary worlds, and magically-inclined at the other end, inexplicably named HEX worlds. Earth - Joey's Earth that is - is of course in the middle. Despite this veritable plethora of worlds, there is a battle for control of them between various forces, and the "walkers" are charged with keeping a balance between them. Why? No idea. But you know there always has to be a balance even in a universe where the laws of physics are suspended, right? Because, well, it's the law. Either that or authors are either too dumb or lazy to think up something new and original. I'm sorry but no. None of this made any sense, and Gaiman's obsessive addiction to describing mathematical concepts in the Interworld, larding it up with geometrical ideas and paradoxes was just boring, and that's all it was. Like I said, maybe some middle graders will be mesmerized, but I was yawning. This was a DNF and I cannot recommend it.

The Sandman Overture by Neil Gaiman

Rating: WARTY!

Illustrated weirdly by JH Williams the 3rd, the graphic novel failed to launch. The story made zero sense and the artwork was lousy. I trudged through about fifty percent of it and then asked myself why, and dropped it right back into the library return bin. It was ugly and unintelligible. This is one of two Gaiman reviews I am posting, and both are negative. As I said in my review for Interworld, I'd like to like Neil Gaiman. I loved the Doctor Who episode he wrote a couple of seasons back, and I really liked his novel Stardust, and I liked his Underwhere graphic novel, but ever since those, it seems that he's determined to thwart my every effort to like what he writes! I'm done with him and I can't recommend this at all.

Spellcheckers by James S Rich

Rating: WORTHY!

With decent line-drawing art by Nicolas Hittori De, this small format graphic novel entertained me sufficiently to call it a worthy read. The story is about these bad-ass femmes in school who have zero respect for anything and an awesome line of wise-cracks. I laughed out loud and often as I watched them effortlessly take on two guys who were causing trouble at the school.

The only oddball point was the art by Joëlle Jones. She did the cover and flashbacks in the interior, and her cover picture of the three main characters bore no relationship whatsoever to the ones actually in the story. I know there is room for variation between artists, but in this case they were very effectively different characters. They looked much older and less rough-around-the -edges, so it felt a bit like bait and switch - or in the case jailbait and switch judged by the apparent age discrepancy! If I had seen a cover illustration indicative of the characters inside the comic, I might not have opened it to see what the story was like, because it would have felt like I was looking at a story aimed at a much younger audience, and I would have missed this story then!

As it happened, I was very intrigued by the title, and I was able to look inside and read a small portion of it, so I knew what was coming and I approved, and bought it. It just seemed a bit odd to me, is all. It felt like picking up a comic which sported an illustration of Batman on the cover, and then finding out it was really about the young Bruce Wayne before he ever became Batman, or picking up a Justice League volume only to find the interior is really about the teen Titans! Just so's you know! Other than that I rated this well-worth reading.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Rating: WARTY!

I fell in love with William Gibson after I read Neuromancer, but from that point on, he's been a bit of a disappointment. One or two of his books I've read since then have been entertaining, but none of them have blown me away like Neuromancer did or made me want to read them again later, and several of them have been real disappointments, including this one, which I DNF'd because it was so boring and so obsessed with product placement and rambling asides. I can't tell you what it's about (read the blurb!). I can tell you it was an awful read and I'm done with Gibson now.

The reading of the audiobook by Shelly Fraser didn't help. That was drab and lifeless enough as it was, but it was the story itself that was at fault. It dimply did not move. It rambled into endless asides with Gibson seemingly more interested in describing consumerism than actually getting on with the story he was purporting to tell, which evidently revolved around the anonymous positing of small snatches of video online. The video wasn't even described - not in the portion which I could stand to listen to, except in very brief terms, so I had no idea what was in the clips, and this was another issue. If you're going to write about them, at least have the courtesy to tell your reader/listener what's in them so we know as much as the main character does! I can't recommend this one. Not at all.

Sister of Mine by Sabra Waldfogel

Rating: WORTHY!

Originally published as Slave and Sister, this novel is set in the 1850's and 1860's in Cassville in the northwest corner of Georgia - the very route Sherman's army took on its march south in 1864. I'm not a fan of stories about the civil war at all, but this one wasn't really about that. That was more of a backdrop to the second half of the story, and it didn't intrude so much that it turned me off the story.

I was intrigued by the fact that the blurb really told the end of the story, which book blurbs almost never do! Of course it was not quite the very end, but it certainly wasn't the start of the story, either. This was a curious thing to me because I can't remember seeing that before on a novel's back cover (so to speak), although I may have. Just be warned it's a bit of spoiler because it takes a long time to get to that part of the story (some 75% of the way through, give or take). Even though I knew where this was going - and kept wondering when it would happen! - the story was still engaging enough for me that it wasn't an issue. it did feel a little bit like a bait and switch, because I'd been expecting one kind of a story and got another one, but the story I got was fine.

The story explores the relationship between two step-sisters, one a slave, the other the daughter of her owner. It's a complex story which moves very slowly, be warned. It seemed like it took me forever to get through it, but the story always offered something to keep me going and hold my interest. Be warned also that there's a lot of tell and very little show, so that it felt a bit clunky here and there, such as in the repeated comparison of the slavery experience of the Hebrews under the Egyptians in Biblical times, with the Jewish ownership of slaves here and now (in the 1850s), but that aside, I really liked the story and the characters, even when they were, at times, obnoxious.

For a novel about racism, there seemed to me to be a touch of racism in how the characters were depicted. None of the slaves had any really objectionable qualities. That is to say that they were pretty much all consistently good people with good hearts, whereas the white folks were depicted as money-grubbing and filled with disdain, cruelty, and brutality. The only two exceptions to this were Adelaide Mannheim, the oddly named daughter of an observant and practicing Jewish couple (Adelaide isn't a Hebrew name), and Henry Kaltenbach, the Jewish-German immigrant who Adelaide eventually marries. This seemed rather self-serving. Yes, these people were slave owners and had most no respect for the African Americans who were quite literally their property, but all of the white folks were all bad all the time and none of the African Americans had any real bad qualities? That strained credibility for me.

The rest of the story was good and engrossing enough though, that I was willing to let those problems slide. I liked that it did not flinch from telling history as it was (and as far as I can tell, the author got the history right: at least as right as it needed to be in a work of fiction). She didn't shy away from using painful words and concepts to tell it, and I appreciated that. I loved the ever-changing relationship between Adelaide and Rachel, who had been her personal slave since she was twelve. Adelaide's father Mordecai was also complex, if rather stereotypical in his love of money, take note. He was strongly contrasted with Henry, who was a sensitive man and had conflicted feelings about owning slaves.

Conflict is at the heart of this story - with Rachel and Adelaide having an awesomely conflicted relationship, especially when feelings of jealousy and betrayal start to enter into it, and they neither of them seem to be able to live with or without the other, but you can never forget that in their own way, they do love each other as sisters. Henry is in conflict with Mordecai over the huge debt which Adelaide's father has lured him into, and over how to treat slaves and looming over all of this later, is the North and South, which eventually come into conflict over slave ownership.

One thing I got to thinking about was early in the story when Rachel is hurt by being called a "nigger". Nowadays, and for many decades, this has been an evil word to use, and it is hurtful and mean, but as far as I know, it's only since the early to mid-twentieth century that it's really been seen, used, and felt as such a god-awfully bad word as it's viewed today. There's no way any of us can know short of someone inventing a time machine, but I couldn't help but wonder if this was true - if African Americans really were hurt by the use of this word back then, or if they really paid no mind to it than they did "Negroes" or than, for example, servants did from being referred to as "servants". Did the slave owners really mean anything hurtful or mean by it, or was it perceived by them as really nothing more than a convenient word to describe property (which was bad enough), but which was neither used, nor intended, nor felt as the acute abuse it clearly is today, and has been for some considerable time?

There's no reliable way to know, but it got me thinking about it because mindsets on both sides of that divide were so different back then - a century and a half ago. It doesn't make it any more right than it is now of course, but was it perceived back then as nothing more than a label, or is the author right that people were hurt by it as they would be now? Maybe there's more reading I can do - not of fiction, but of historical factual works - which might enlighten me on this score, but that was such a horrible time in history that it's actually painful to read those things. This novel did give me an idea for a novel of my own, however, so I guess I'm going to have to do some more reading! The author discusses further reading in a section at the end of the novel.

Talking of whom, Sabra is the Hebrew name for a prickly pear, and it's also applied to any Jew who is born on Israeli territory - an endearment or a statement of how tough and rooted they are, and this author tells a prickly story which in my opinion is well worth the reading. I recommend this.

Closer Home by Kerry Anne King

Rating: WARTY!

I got this novel from Net Galley as an ARC, and I was grateful, because it sounded good from the blurb, but this is the problem: many do, few are. This one was not, which saddened me, because it started out really well and had too good of a premise for it to fall apart as it did. One of the main problems, in addition to it being too 'one note' (especially for a story rooted in music!), was that the the two main characters, a woman and her niece, started out as reasonably smart people who unfortunately proceeded to get ever more dumb as the story progressed.

It's hard to explain this without giving away spoilers, which I'd rather not do. I don't mind a story where someone who starts out dumb, or naïve or ignorant - however you want to characterize it - improves over the course of the story. I don't even mind a character who stays dumb throughout the story if they're interesting or amusing, but when it goes the other way, and they just get dumber, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Women already have enough to deal with without being characterized like this, inadvertently or otherwise, in one novel after another.

Let me try and give one example without giving too much away. At one point the women are dealing with a sleazy used-car salesman (talk about cliché), and he recognizes who they are and starts effectively blackmailing (or bullying if you prefer) them in return for what they want. Lise is actually at the point of negotiating to buy a useless wreck of a car from him because they need something that's in the car, rather than simply walk away and then return at night and take it! I hasten to add that it's nothing that anyone would miss the next day - or even notice it was missing - and it has no absolutely zero value to anyone but Ariel.

I wouldn't even characterize this particular thing as stealing at all, and anyone who didn't have a rusted fuel pump for a heart would have let Ariel have it. Yet despite this and despite everything they've actually done so far, it never occurs to a one of them to sneak back that night. This was not only out of character, it was a complete betrayal of the characters, and for me it spoke direly against the competence of this woman who was supposed to be managing Callie's millions. If she can't even manage something like this, of what use is she? That's the point at which I quit reading, because I was so disappointed in these characters for whom I'd had such high hopes as the novel began.

The story here is that Lise is the older sister of Callie, and there is a rift between them which was for good reason and which never healed. Now it's too late because Callie, who became a popular country music star, is dead and Lise is named very nearly a sole beneficiary of Callie's will and also guardian of her niece, Ariel, whom she hasn't even seen for a decade or so.

Right from the start, this whole charade show is a disaster for Lise, because of the ridiculous publicity surrounding Callie's death, the farce of a funeral, and the psychotic money-grubbing by all and sundry. Rather than deal with this, Lise runs away, following Ariel who is desperate to discover who her real father is. The sad thing is that it's pretty obvious almost from the start: both who he is and how this will end, so there's really no suspense here, which brings us to the one note: one town after another, one lowlife high-school boyfriend after another, one paternity test after another, and while there is some variety, there's nowhere near enough to stop this from falling into a rut.

One writing issue I noticed was in the main character balking at hotel coffee, and then I read, "...then I ease out of the room in search of a hotel coffee kiosk, hoping against hope it will be open at this hour...". I wasn't sure what to make of this! First we get the 'cops-in-the-donut-shop' cliché that all hotel coffee is universally bad, but as soon as we learn this, we discover that she's going off in search of a coffee kiosk. What guarantee is there that this will be better? Why not go off in search of a starbucks or some other venue that promises to be better? Why not go to the store and buy your favorite brand if the hotel coffee is so bad? Why not step out of the rut altogether and have the hotel coffee be great? This made little sense to me, and it's not a big issue, but it's one more thing to consider when you're telling a story.

I didn't like any of these characters after the first few chapters, least of all Callie who I never did like. The two main ones began as likable, at least the aunt and niece did, but Lise's constant whiny attitude and litany of complains coupled with and Ariel's endless moodiness and bitchiness wore thin after very little time. Given how alienated both women were from Callie each in their own way, their tidal and maudlin grief had no more foundation than do the sands under rolling breakers, and so I found no authenticity here. It felt like they were simulating grieving rather than actually grieving.

The novel is told in first person, which I dislike because it's rarely done well, it has appalling limitations, and it's downright annoying. The limitation of this method, with which far too many writers are mysteriously obsessed, is demonstrated handsomely here when, every few chapters, we hear the discordant clunk of a third person PoV being dropped. It didn't work. Almost worse than this, there were flashbacks galore, which didn't work for me either, and I took to skipping them in short order. By the time I was fifty percent into this I realized that I wasn't into this at all, and I gave up on it.

Talking of discordance, I think the very saddest thing of all about this novel is that it was about the aftermath of the death of a music star. Her daughter was in her teens and no doubt was very much into music, and her estranged sister was a music teacher, but the story had no music in it - and no soul. There was nothing even related to music save for some sparsely scattered partial lyrics in one or two places. For a novel which was rooted in music, I was expecting much more and it wasn't there. I'm not even a country music fan - which brings me to the next problem: the publicity which Callie's death garnered.

I can see a major country music star making big headlines outside of the country music world, but I didn't get the impression from the novel that Callie was quite that big. She was no Carrie Underwood, Shania Twain, Alison Krauss or whatever - not from the way she was described here. Even if she had been, that doesn't automatically mean that everyone, everywhere in the country, no matter where you go, would recognize her daughter, or her absentee sister who had been far from the limelight for ten years. Country music is popular in the US, but it's not run-away-above-everything-else popular, yet now, suddenly, and everywhere they go, someone not only recognizes these people, none of whom are stars, but manages to take an embarrassing picture which makes headlines. It simply wasn't credible.

So it can be no surprise by now that I didn't consider this a worthy read and cannot recommend it. I'm sorry, because the idea was a good one. It just wasn't done well. I think if this had been told from Ariel's PoV (but in third person, please!) and Lise had been left out of it entirely, it might have been a better story. I think this writer has some great novels in her though, and is worth watching.

On that score, I'd recommend she get in touch with Goodreads! If you type 'Closer Home' into the search window and click, it will not find this author's novel. It will find every novel that has 'close to home' in the title, but forget about 'closer home'! That's simply not good enough in my opinion. You have to type the author's name, Kerry Anne King, to get 'closer home' to show, and even then the title lists after "Twelve Years A Slave"! What the hell is up with that?! Amazon brings it to the top of the list if you search for Closer Home in books, and B&N puts it in the second row, but Goodreads can't find it? Goodreads needs a better search engine.

Cogling by Jordan Elizabeth Mierek

Rating: WARTY!

I was asked by the author if I would review this after I gave a favorable review to a previous novel by this author: Escape From Witchwood Hollow back in February 2016. Well be careful what you ask for! I would have liked to have recommended this one, too, but I cannot. I was very disappointed in Cogling because it was so disturbingly far from what the previous novel had been. This felt like a first draft of a first novel by a new writer, whereas 'Witchwood Hollow', which also felt like a first novel, was a lot better-crafted and a lot more credible in its world than this one was.

This novel had a prologue which I skipped, as I do all prologues without exception. Never once have I missed anything by doing this, which only goes to show how useless prologues are. If it's worth reading, put it in chapter one, or simply omit it! Don't sacrifice any more trees to prologues! That said, this story was not technically bad in terms of spelling, grammar, and so on. Even the overall story was, in very general terms, an interesting idea, but it fell far short in the details, and while it was not an awful read, it was not a satisfying one at all for me.

The issues I had were many and ranged from general to specific. A specific one, for example, would be the use of 'kohl'. At least this author didn't write it as 'coal', which I have seen in a novel, but the phrase used was 'dark kohl' Since kohl is black, that phrase made little sense. To write, 'Kohl darkened her silver eyes' is one thing, but to say "Dark kohl rimmed her silver eyes" is not well-phrased at all. There were many instances of such suspect wording, each of which took me out of the suspension of disbelief and reminded me that I was reading a novel and not immersed in a alternate world.

The story is about Edna, a fifteen year old girl who discovers that her brother has been replaced by a cogling - a clockwork life-like replica, and she embarks upon a quest into the world of hags to rescue him. The hags use the dreams of children to power their machinery. This was my first problem, because it seemed like all that was being done here is that hags stole children to power machines to make more coglings which were used to replace the children being stolen. What was the point? Obviously they were seeking to take over the human world in revenge for a sour past history, but the hags had powerful magical and could control and enchant humans so why were the coglings needed? It made no sense at all to me.

The sad thing is that Edna is not allowed to rescue her brother alone. So much for girl power! Instead, she needs the trope YA studly male to prop her up and give her validation. That was bad enough, but the happenstance that she fell into the sphere of influence of the sole male in the entire country who was best set-up to help her was too much to take seriously, especially given his original story, which would be too much of a spoiler to give away here. The bottom line was that his behavior and living circumstances were simply not credible given his origin, and we were offered nothing to explain why or how he'd ended up where he had.

In this world, there is a history of antagonism between the hags (and their male equivalents, the ogres) on one side, and the humans on the other, and this is a story of the hags' revenge. These were not the only 'magical' creatures; there were others, but none of them were really given any freedom to breathe, and so they were consistently lifeless. It felt like they were simply added as pure MacGuffins or dei ex machina for no other reason than to help out Edna's quest, and then they disappeared completely. Most of them appeared so briefly that it was impossible to get a decent handle on them. I liked the idea of the 'foxkins', but the 'nix' and the 'tomtars' left me unentertained. Sometimes it seemed like these were actually mutated humans, and other times not, and there was so little to go on, that it left me frustrated that they had appeared at all.

I think one serious problem was that the author tried to do too much in one story. There was literally everything in this but the kitchen sink - and there may well have been one of those. In fact, I think there was in one kitchen scene. But there was fantasy, and magic, and steam-punk, and romance, and Oliver Twist (not in person), and a quest, and a hot air balloon which was not steam-punk, but which was called an airship which is often associated with steam-punk, and it felt like lots of little bits rather than one whole. It was the difference between Thanksgiving dinner and the next day's jumbled and assorted leftovers.

This story evidently arose (according to the acknowledgements) at least in part from a 'Victorian' fare in Rome, New York. I think that was the first problem: that Americans tend not to do Renaissance or Victorian well, or to overdo it, and consequently this novel was sadly warped, dragged down by a lack of authenticity. Granted we're not told explicitly where it was set (if we are, I missed it), but it seemed like it was professing to be set in Britain, as steam punk and Victorian dramas typically are, but there were far too many Americanisms for me to take that idea seriously.

For example, there are no klutzes in Britain - or at least there were not in Victorian times. There are clots, which means largely the same thing, but 'klutz' is a very American term which came from Germany via Yiddish, I think. Of course, American influence being what it is in the world, for good or ill, people probably do use that term in Britain now, but they didn't in Victorian times. This was as out of place as the word 'jerky' was. This is very much an Americanism, taken from the South American term char qui. It's not British.

There are very few cities in Britain which actually have the word 'city' in their name. Manchester City, for example, is a football (soccer) club. The city itself is simply named Manchester. The same goes for Birmingham, Exeter, Bristol, Leicester Norwich, and so on. Every single city in this story was named -something- City. The Brits don't have this insecurity which forces them to title a city as -something- City lest it be mistaken - gods forbid! - for a town!

Britain has no venomous snakes except for the adder (and yes, it does come in black!), which no one in Britain takes very seriously (notwithstanding scare stories in newspapers last year), so this Indiana Jones scene where kids are dumped into a pit of snakes wasn't impressive. Why would hags even do this when they have magic and can simply kill the kids outright? The real problem here though, was that the snakes are described as poisonous. No snake, to my knowledge, is poisonous, and by that I mean that you can eat any snake and it won't poison you; however, if you get bitten by one (and you're not in Britain!) then you may well become ill or die from it. Those snakes are venomous, not poisonous, and writers should understand this. Strictly speaking the British adder can do damage, but it's so rare that anyone is bitten, it's not typically an issue.

Edna Mather is supposedly fifteen, yet she behaves much younger. The story read like a middle-grade novel rather than a young-adult one. Several other reviews I've seen mention this and while I agree, I'm not sure I arrived at the conclusion the same way. The thing you have to remember is that this is not set in modern times and you cannot expect a fifteen year old Victorian era girl to have the same outlook as a modern one.

By our standards, she would seem ridiculously naive and sheltered, even though she would (had she any privilege) be far better read (and in better-written literature too!) than most modern fifteen-year-olds. In Edna's case, she was one step away from living on the street, and was largely in charge of running her home and taking care of her kid brother, so she should be expected to have the maturity which inevitably comes with that circumstance, yet she really didn't. She was desperately intent upon rescuing her brother, but this was all she had going for her, and it made her seem more juvenile than he was!

Worse than this though, for me, was the fact that Edna had magic in her - a magic which she thought was evil - a fact of which we're re-apprised to a really annoying degree. The problem for me was not so much that though, as it was that she never employed this magic. I kept waiting for her to go bad-ass and unleash it, but she didn't except in very minor and largely unimportant ways, and even then it wasn't clear if it was her magic or the magic embedded in this enchanted brooch she carried. This was really annoying. Why give her this power if it's not going to be employed in the entire story, even in dire cases where any kid who had magic would have pulled it out regardless of how they felt about it. It made no sense and was a major disappointment for me. It also made her look even more helpless and ineffectual than she already appeared.

I noted the author makes mention in the acknowledgements of a steamy romance between Ike and Edna, but there was no such thing. There was almost no romance, thankfully, and certainly no steam (not even of the steam punk variety except in passing mentions). There was impetus for romance, either. Neither Ike nor Edna were likable, and he was such a jerk to begin with that it's hard to see how she would ever come around to finding him romantic. The 'romance' felt forced and not natural - like the author was putting it in there because she felt this was the way things had to be done, not because there was anything organic or necessary about it. It felt false to me and it didn't so much get in the way of the story, as it was an annoying distraction, like a fly buzzing around when you're trying to fall asleep.

I noticed some reviewers had talked of there being a rape or near rape in this story, but there was nothing of the sort in the version I read. There was a case of highly inappropriate conduct of a doctor threatening to kiss a patient, followed by downright abusive conduct by that same doctor, but there was no sex involved. What bothered me about this scene and the events leading up to it was something I've seen no other reviewer mention, which is the absurd abduction of Lady Rachel.

Note that I do not believe for a second that celebrities and the wealthy should have any privileged treatment by law enforcement, but also note that this novel was set in Victorian times when nobility was highly respected (if perhaps derided in private), yet here we have Lady Rachel being forcibly taken from her aunt's home by two regular police constables, without a shred of respect or deference and based solely on this aunt's say-so. This was simply not credible in Victorian times, and especially not on the say-so of an aunt without any other reason. Never once was there any mention of contacting this woman's actual parents. Lady and Lord Waxman thought their daughter had been kidnapped, and yet instead of informing them she was safe and reuniting them, the cops haul Lady Rachel off for incarceration on her aunt's whim?! This robbed the story of all credibility for me, and frankly, I almost quit reading at that point because it was one straw dog too many.

The real killer was the ending. It's no spoiler to say it was a happily-ever-after one, but only for Edna and her crew. All her ideals and claims and vows to help the poor and downtrodden which she spouted regularly throughout this story were forgotten in the end. She did nothing to help anyone. This selfishness and self-serving attitude was brought into the light earlier, when she and Ike rescue a woman from a cruel psychiatric facility, which in itself is admirable, but they do it by kidnapping a homeless girl and substituting the one for the other in the blind assumption that this psycho doctor will simply toss the girl back out onto the street when he discovers the deception. I'm sorry, but no, heroic people do not do that. Good people do not do that. Jerks and villains do that. I already disliked the two protagonists before this, but after this behavior, I had no time for them at all. Frankly, this made me wonder if this neutered "dark magic' that Edna spent the entire story fretting over, had actually risen up and claimed her after all.

So, overall, this was not a worthy read by my standards. and I cannot in good faith recommend it. Read Jordan Mierek's previous story, escape From Witchwood Hollow instead. It's much better.

It Ain't So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a kind of coming-of-age story and although I typically don't like those, this was not your stereotypical USA cutely white-washed pretense. Instead, and this was the reason I was attracted to it, it was about an Iranian girl growing-up in the USA during the time of the Iranian Hostage crisis in 1979 - 1980. It's autobiographical, but with a lot of fiction mixed in.

Note that Iranians not actually Arabic. They are Aryan, aka Indo-European. Arabs are a Semitic people, so there is a difference, although to western eyes they are all-too-often "just the same." Iran used to be known as Persia, which sounds far more exotic, doesn't it? The hostage crisis arose out of the overthrow of the US supported (or perhaps more accurately, 'puppeteered') Shah of Persia, and is one more example of the US getting itself into embarrassingly hot water because of poor foreign policy choices and grotesque short-sightedness in demonstrating a complete lack of empathy for what a people need and instead exhibiting a tunnel vision for what the US demands. I was glad to see some of this come through in the story that was told.

The whole process of having the Shah dance to the US's tune because of oil is what has led not only to the hostage crisis which brought down the Carter government (although the Reagan government for all its bluster, continued exactly the same policy!), but also directly to the present troubles which are no more than the just deserts of poor policy choices in the past. Of course, there is no excuse for taking hostages and punishing the innocent, but this punishing took place on both sides, and the Iranians began by punishing their own people after the Ayatollah took over, remember! It began with US policy effectively punishing poor Iranians. Later, Iranian students punished the US embassy people. Subsequent to that, US residents punished innocent Iranians living in the USA, and so the wheel turns. As Ghandi said, an eye for an eye ends up leaving everybody blind. What he didn't say is that if people start out blind to begin with, this exactly what we should expect.

This author does a wonderfully humorous job of depicting other events, as some of the chapter headings make clear:
Sultans of Suntan
Never Owned a Camel
and
Are You There, Allah? It’s Me, Zomorod

The crisis, for me, was rather too intrusive, although it was obviously a critical and tragic event which cast a huge shadow over their lives. That said, it wasn't such a large part of the story that it overwhelmed other things which to me were more interesting because they were less predictable. I loved the humor in contrasting Iranian life with the life she experienced in the USA, but it bothered me that the wider perspective she thought she was bringing was in its own way just as blinkered as the one she sought to supplant, since the impression given here is that an exile can only get a decent life in the USA! There is this strong suggestion that nowhere else in the world can really offer anyone a life except for the US, and while Iran was criticized routinely, this same gimlet eye was never applied to the USA except in the most limited fashion. Frankly, that's nothing but a jingoistic insult to the rest of the world!

Those complaints aside, I did enjoy this story - the humor more than the horror, but both were engaging - and I recommend it as an educational and entertaining story.

Diary of Anna the Girl Witch: Foundling Witch by Max Candee

Rating: WORTHY!

Max Candee is a rather obvious pseudonym used by an author who also uses 'Austin Briggs' for his much more adult titles (that latter is also the name of a comic book illustrator who is no longer with us). This is the first work of his that I've read. This advance review copy, which I was happy to have the chance to enjoy, is aimed at middle-grade, and it was very well done. There were some minor issues with it, but nothing to spoil it, and nothing that would bother the intended age range. Note though that this is somewhat darker and deals with more adult issues than your usual middle grade novel.

I don't usually talk about book covers because they're nothing to do with the author, typically, and all about Big publishing™ but in this case I have to comment that no, the girl witch isn't pregnant, although the cover seems to suggest she is! It's just that she's holding something against her stomach. The illustrations inside the story were not bad - line drawings with one portion colored. Anna is a red haired girl, of course, but the drawings show her hair as straight, whereas the text says it's curly, so another mismatch there, but while I am not sure they really contributed anything, the drawings were not bad at all.

It's very much the trope 'orphan coming of age to find they're really special' kind of a story, but there are some differences. For one, it was a really refreshing change to find this set somewhere other than the USA. Of course, it took a foreign author (at least I assume so. I believe "Max Candee" is Swiss, but I am not sure of it) to realize that there are people and nations and lives outside of the USA, an important fact which far too few USA authors seem to be able to grasp, I'm sorry to say.

This is, be warned, a series, and while there is thankfully no cliff-hanger at the end of volume one, there is a teaser for the next volume in the series, titled, 'Wandering Witch'. Anna, who was evidently found in Russia being raised by bears, and delivered to Geneva by her "uncle" Misha, turns thirteen and comes into an inheritance, which in this case is actually money, but not just money. She is also the recipient of a stone fist, a brief letter from her mother, and a mysteriously animated drawing. It turns out, as she slowly discovers, that Anna is a witch and is being stalked not by your usual villain, which was another delightful twist in this delightfully twisted story.

Anna proves to be strong, determined, and in the end, unstoppable. Of course, those magical powers help, but this story doesn't take itself too seriously - as her mode of witchy transportation proves beyond a doubt, and although she uses her powers for good, and against largely non-magical enemies, there is a real and serious cost to Anna for using them - a cost she has to evaluate and judge wisely each time she employs her magic. This was a refreshing change from being able to shake a stick, chant two Latin words, and cast major magic whilst suffering no cost whatsoever.

Note that Misha is a diminutive of Mikhail, which is a variant of Michael, which is a Hebrew naming meaning "Who is like God". I don't know if this author puts any meaning into his character names like I do, but it's interesting to note that Anna is derived ultimately also from the Hebrew Hannah, who was a New Testament woman who recognized the divinity of Jesus. I don't put any more stock into those myths than I do into any other myth, but it makes me wonder if the author chose these names for a reason, or if they just were names he lit upon simply because he liked them. To me, as a writer, names always mean something, and while minor character names are not that important (unless you have some secret purpose!), I like to imbue my main characters with names that mean something beyond just being a character name! I promise you I will never write a series, but if I were going to, I would definitely put a lot of thought into what the names of the main characters mean! I can't say if this author did the same thing here.

So, that aside, aside, I liked this novel very much. It was about friendship and loyalty, unexpected allies, resilience and resourcefulness, and doing the right thing. It was nice to see the magical protagonist going up against bad people rather than your usual mustache-twirling evil magician. I think this was a fun story appropriate to the age range, and without any of the fluff and flounce too many middle grade stories sprout. I recommend it as a worthy read.

Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan

Rating: WARTY!

In 1859, the year another Charles published On the Origin of Species... Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in installments. Funny how the wheel turns full circle, isn't it?! Now we have series.... Darwin's book began, "It was the best of species, the worst of species..." - no, wait, that doesn't sound right...! But it does end, "It is a far, far better mutation that I get, than I have ever known; it is a far, far better species that I go to than I have ever become." No, that doesn't sound right either. Never mind....

This story is a retelling of that one (Dickens's not Darwin's!), but set in a parallel world where there is light and dark magic, and that's the problem - it makes no sense at all since magic plays no part in the story except as a faint background image - like a watermark in paper. It's sad, because I liked the way the magic worked here and how it was split into light and dark, and what each meant. That was what both attracted me to, and drew me into the story to begin with, but the magic itself really plays no part other than to demarcate the haves (the light, of course) from the have-nots.

The sheer lack of sense in this supposedly magical world was disturbing. Of course a magical world is inherently senseless, but usually an author has something going on to set out some ground rules. Here there was really nothing. I mean, why did no one ever use magic to do anything other than parlor tricks? It made no sense! How could a rag-tag bunch of people with swords defeat powerful magicians? It made no sense. Why did people fight with swords in a thoroughly modern world (trains, automobiles, cell phones, TV, etc). It made no sense.

There really was no magic (read into that what you will!). It was practically never used, which begs the question as to what purpose it served, and by that, I mean not what it served in the novel itself (where it did nothing), but what it served in the plot other than the purpose I mentioned. Why introduce it at all if it's going nowhere? It becomes merely a bait and switch, and I was really disappointed to be tricked into thinking that this great set-up had to portend great magic to come, only to discover that in the end, it delivered no magic, and nothing depended upon it.

The story could equally have been set in a sci-fi world where there are humans and aliens, one of which species (see I was right!) is the underdog. Or during the US civil war, or in any "society' where there is a sharp division of some sort. I'm tired of novels about magicians where the magicians are essentially powerless and constrained and confined. It's ridiculous. It also makes no sense that there would be a council of magicians. Why would anyone who could literally perform magic ever allow themselves to be subject to a council?! Now there, in that conflict, would be a story.

So what story did I get? I got Lucie Manette, a light magician from the dark magician's city, alternately being strong or weak, seemingly on a whim, which grew quickly annoying. Lucie, you got some 'splainin' to do! In the end she came off as short-sighted and stupid and worse, she never improved. I don't want to read stories about dumb, unmotivated, thoughtless women - or men for that matter. I don't mind if they start out that way and wise-up, but to see a person going through life never getting anywhere and never trying, and failing and never learning from it, and making dumb decisions, and willingly allowing herself to be trapped by a cruel and abusive Sidney Carton clone and accepting it meekly, is depressing. The Carton clone made even less sense. He threw Lucie over a hundred feet down into the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge the first chance he got, and we're supposed to see this evil, abusive brute turn into a hero? It doesn't work - not in the way it's told here.

The only time Lucie comes through is by means of passive aggression. It's hardly hardly heroic! Despite my issue with the swords, given that we had them, I did want to see her cut loose with one, but she never did. Why then give her a sword, make her grab a sword like it's a safety blanket during an escape, and tell us clearly that she's a great sword fighter if she's never going to fight? It's exactly the same problem with the magic: why have it if it's never going to get used? That was another problem: why tell so much if it's a no show?

If you're magician and you want to rescue someone, you do it with magic, not by starting a protest! Unless of course your story is set in India during the revolution. Which this was not. But it would have made more sense. Why recreate a story which was originally set in England and France, and move it bodily to the USA? Because everyone else does? Because Big Publishing™ doesn't care about your story if it's not set in the USA? Because US teens won't read stories that are not set in the USA? Screw them. For goodness sakes, write the story that needs writing, not the one you think the US publishing industry is most likely to offer you a contract for.

Since this was clearly a clone of Dickens's novel, I went into it already knowing the ending, so clearly the suspenseful part of the story could only come from how we got there and perhaps from wondering if the ending would get a twist. I've never read A Tale of Two Cities, but I do know how it begins and how it ends. The problem is that all we got was a vacillating Lucie who we're supposed to view as heroic, yet who quite clearly had no backbone whatsoever. There was more than one point, but one point in particular, where she could easily have turned this around and saved lives and saved the world from falling into chaos, and she shrunk from it every time. We're told she is an expert sword fighter, and by that means she could have saved the life of a woman whom she liked, who was a moderate, but she hid instead and watched the woman die.

By simply owning the truth, Lucie could have changed the world, but she hid and shrank away, and turned away, and ran, and buckled under repeatedly, and she made people die and she made me sick. I did not like her, nor any other character in the story, and her limp and retarded behavior was nauseating to watch when it was repeated time after time, day after day. I can understand an author liking an historical novel so well that she wants to pay homage to it in a rewrite, but I think the problem here is that the author was too close to her source and didn't want to let any of it go (which is no doubt why we had swords!). I think if she'd let it go and written the story based on her own outline and didn't worry about what the Dickens would happen, it might have been better for it. While I was grateful for a chance to read an advance review copy of this novel, I cannot in good faith recommend this as a worthy read.

The Tiniest Tumbleweed by Kathy Peach

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a delight. It's a well-written story, charmingly illustrated by Alex Lopez, about a tiny tumbleweed and a tiny sparrow who learn that they don't have to be 'all that' to be everything they really need to be.

Growing up on the diminutive side of the family tree, Tiny Tumbleweed isn't sure she'll ever grow big, and baby sparrow is sure he won't, but they don't give up, they give all and work hard, and soon they're growing and feeling useful. They'll never be as big as their brothers and sisters, but they will be big and they will be useful. The tumbleweed shelters the sparrows, the sparrows distribute the seeds, and it all works for both of them.

This little book was very readable on my phone, and so will undoubtedly work well on a tablet computer or in a print version. The illustrations are fun and compliment the text well, and the colors are bright and appealing. There are several pages of useful text at the end aimed at educational use. These pages don't reveal the scientific names of the species, which is FYI, Passer domesticus for the house sparrow.

There are many species of tumbleweed, including invasive species, and they really don't depend on sparrows to distribute the seeds - hence the 'tumble weed' part of their life cycle - the tumbling is a form of wind dispersal in a way, because the weed is blown by the wind, and the seeds (or propagules) drop off as it rolls. Sparrows really have very little to do with it, but it makes for a nice story, so I'm not going to discredit if for that because birds do play a roll in seed dispersal with many other plants. As it is, this is a great children's story and I recommend it.

Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

Rating: WARTY!

This is book one of the 'Sky Chasers' series (sky chasers? Seriously? Could you be any more pretentious?!), and it's one I will definitely not be following. It's not just because of the reading by Ilyana Kadushin and Matthew Brown, it's the story itself which was far too juvenile and trope for my taste. Admittedly it was not aimed at me, but I can't imagine my kids finding this entertaining either, and they're within its age range.

The first sickening problem is that there's a love triangle of the most clichéd kind: one girl, two guys, one of whom is an old, trusted friend, the other of whom is a bad boy. How utterly pathetic this is. Seriously. Any girl who ditches a trusted love for an unknown jerk without having an extremely good reason is a moron, and I have no interest in reading about her in even one volume, let alone the trope three volume deal for which I blame others as much as I blame money-grubbing Big Publishing™. We're explicitly told that Kieran is everything Waverly could ever want in a husband. Yet we're evidently lied to about that.

Worse than this, though, is that this is all that's on the girl's mind. It's like she cannot entertain a single thought without it being about her man. I have no interest in any female character who has no interest in anything but male characters. They're shallow and boring. The female in question is 15-year-old Waverly, who is traveling on a generation ship along with a sister ship to colonize a new planet. No explanation is given for the journey - not in the portion to which I listened, which was about 25%. What is wrong with Earth? Why is this solution considered better than, say, terraforming and colonizing Mars or Venus? Who knows. It just is.

I'd grant the author the smarts to see that this is the only kind of deep space journey that makes sense - sending two ships - but the only reason she has two ships featured in the story apparently, is to have one go rogue. On one of the ships, the 'generation' part of 'generation ship'; evidently fails - meaning that for some reason, the sister ship, The New Horizon, has been unable to conceive any children, and they are now demanding females from the Empyrean so they can breed new crew to continue the journey. There's no reason given as to why they feel this needs to be done immediately as opposed to the Empyrean, say, sending over a few young adults to help out. Instead it evidently leads to civil war. The story was pathetic and made no sense, and I couldn't stand to listen to any more of it, so I quit. Life is too short to waste it on bad novels!

Spooky Tales Vol 1 by Bill Wood, Vicky Town

Rating: WARTY!

This was a library audio book I picked-up when I was going through my audio fairy tales binge recently, and it was awful. Bill Wood and Vicky Town takes turns telling moderately scary stories, but they were really not that great, and the voices they used for reading were just tedious. Kids might be less discriminating, but I don't want my kids to be less discriminating when it comes to good stories. I cannot recommend these.

Counting to Ten and Sharing My Easter Eggs by David Chuka

Rating: WORTHY!

Okay, so I lied! Here's another book about Easter. The print version evidently comes with a free coloring book, which is always great whether you're a kid or not. Come on, don't tell me you've never colored a page in a kids book somewhere or other. It's been a while since I did one, so I'll get right on that as soon as I'm done here. Unfortunately there is nothing extra with the ebook, not even an Easter egg.

This is the third of David Chuka's books for kids that I've reviewed. I didn't like I Love my Dog which I reviewed in decmeber of 2015, but I did like I Love Baby Animals which I reviewed in August of that year, so now he's batting a .666, which is an interesting number with Easter on the horizon!

This book is refreshingly diverse, although there are so many people of color that you can scarcely see any pale faces in there, which is overdoing it a bit. The way to set things straight isn't to swing the pendulum way over to the other side, but to stop it in the middle and leave it there, otherwise it's only going to swing right back and hit you in the face! That said, this book was a delight.

Mom has, perhaps unwisely, given this little girl a basket of Easter eggs to share with her friends, but bless her little cotton Easter bunny, she does indeed share them, and counts them out as she goes. There is a math formula for adding sequential numbers:

Sum from 1 to n =	n(n + 1)
	2

but this may be a bit advanced for this audience! Substituting 10 for n above though, gives us 55. FIFTY FIVE EGGS?!!! I want some!

The story pursues her distribution of all of those yummy eggs, with colorful pictures and simple rhymes, encouraging children to read it over and count along. If you have some eggs to hand - plastic, hard boiled, or even small toys or Lego's or something, you can distribute then the same way among your kid's plush teddy bears and other cuddly toys. I think this is a charming way to teach counting. But for goodness sake, don't forget to brush afterwards!

The Beauty Volume 1 by Jeremy Haun, Jason A Hurley

Rating: WORTHY!

This volume (an advance review copy for which I am grateful!), collects the first six individual issues and seems like it could have been made for me, someone who rails against the obsession humans have, particularly in this media-soaked age, with physical beauty and who cares what lies beneath - with the emphasis on lies. I wish I had thought of this idea!

Yet another sexual disease gets loose in the world, but in this case, people actively try to get infected, because what it does is confer beauty upon those infected - youthful good looks, taut, fresh healthy skin, lush hair. In short, everything TV, movies, and magazines look for in actors and models. Very soon, this disease is no longer considered a disease. It's called simply 'The Beauty' and it has spread to almost every adult on the planet as this story begins, in a world where there are very few people of color, curiously enough. That was my only problem with this story.

Detectives Vaughn and Foster, one of whom is infected, the other not, are called to an apparent incident of self-immolation on a subway train. The curious thing is that it looks like the passenger burned from the inside out. Soon more and more of these victims are found, and they were all infected with The Beauty. This disease, it seems, has a long-term consequence, and now if a cure is not found, the world is going to burn.

The story is by Jeremy Haun and Jason Hurley, and is tight and paced, moving things along at a very readable clip. The art is by Haun and is excellent, although be warned it is adult in nature, with nudity and graphic violence. I recommend this as an entertainingly worthy read.