Seal Team 666 by Weston Ochse

Rating: WARTY!

This was a DNF for me and it seemed like a real waste of a great title. I think the first problem was that the novel had no good idea what it wanted to be: a fantasy/horror story, or a "procedural" special forces novel. I think it tripped up going back and forth between the two. I made it only 64 pages in, which I think was a fair shot, especially when nothing really happened in that time except the highly improbable - and I'm not even talking about the supernatural! I think I can add some observations and commentary here that I've not seen in other reviews, too.

Actually the first problem was with the main character's name. Do we honestly need yet another in a tediously long line of action adventure novels featuring a main character named Jack? Seriously? Are authors so lacking in imagination that they go to trope as soon as the starting pistol cracks? I am so sick of this clichéd name that I swore off reading any more novels which feature such a character. Somehow I managed to miss that with this one, but it self-corrected! A Navy Seal would not have made that dangerous mistake! Anyway, Jack is training to be a Seal (a contraction of SE_a, A_ir L_and). He's four weeks from finishing his SCUBA training (which is only one step in a long training schedule), yet he's pulled out of it by a redheaded woman (who was so obviously destined to be his 'squeeze' that it was pathetic) to join Seal Team 666. How four weeks from the end of a twenty-four week course counts as "half way" through is a mystery, especially when there was more to come, but I let that go since there were worse problems!

This is the worse problem: Jack's specialty is as a sniper. Seal teams count not only on toughness and skill, but also on extensive mission practice leading to working together as a finely-tuned machine. You do not throw a new guy in there right as a mission is setting out! I am not militarily trained, so this is a pure guess on my part, but my guess is that a team like this would rather go one man short than bring in a brand new guy they never even met before, let alone trained with for this specific mission. I think this is especially true when that guy's specialty is sniping and no sniper is needed for this! It wasn't like he had something critical to bring, so this made absolutely no sense at all to me, because it presented such a ripe opportunity to get one or more of the team killed because of some misstep or miscue. I cannot see how this would have been countenanced.

They were operating on US soil, too, which seemed even more odd. The author justified it by saying that there is no police SWAT team trained to deal with the supernatural, but they really were not dealing with the supernatural - they were simply gathering intelligence from some Chinese guys who they knew were in this building. It was at this point in the story where the author wrote: "Walker had been watching the Chinaman's eyes." Does that sound a bit racist to you?

I talked with a couple of people (neither of whom is Chinese!) about this, and they didn't think it was any big deal, but to me it sounded off at best, and racist at worst. If this was someone's speech in the story, I can see how he might say something like that. Even the narrator might say it if the novel was told in first person PoV, but for a writer to put that in the narration when it's third person and not part of some character's speech, seems off to me. This guy who writes this used to be army intelligence which might explain a lot. He's now, apparently, defense intelligence, which also might explain a lot. It just seemed strange.

Aside from that, the story was just not interesting. The author seemed far more attached to spewing Tom Clancy-style technical descriptions than ever he was in telling a cool story about military men facing off against the supernatural. He couldn't simply say, for example, "he cleaned his gun" or "he fired his pistol" without providing a mini-description of the weapon every time. It had to be, "he cleaned his Super 90" or "he fired his MP5", which quickly became tedious in short order and irritating right afterwards. Here's one example of a partial paragraph so you get the boring idea:

And also like the M16 and the AR15, the Stoner used a gas-impingement system to automatically move the bolt back and forth, enabling semiautomatic fire down the twenty-inch barrel. Rather than the regular floating barrel, the Stoner was reworked to incorporate the URX 11 Picatiny-Weaver Rail System, allowing for better application of any mounted hardware such as laser sights, telescopic sights, reflexive sights, tactical lights and forward grips.

Now I don't doubt that there are readers out there who like stories larded with this techno-jargon, but I really don't care about it and it gets annoying when it looks like the author is more interested in showing off how much research he did, than in moving the story along nicely. It failed to grab me and I decided after a very short debate, that there were far too many other books out there begging to be read, for me to waste any more of my time on one which doesn't thrill me from the outset. This is the start of a series, and I sure didn't want to read any more of this one volume let alone another one like it.

Reboot by Amy Tintera

Rating: WARTY!

If Nicole Ritchie had ever written a zombie novel, it would have been this.

The story is of this world where a new virus runs riot through the human population. A side effect of the virus is that when people die, they sometimes come back to life - rebooted. They are six million dollar people: faster, stronger, more good looking (I am not kidding you!). And young. Adults, for reasons unexplained (a heck of a lot is unexplained here), do not do well on reboot. The reboot (a title chosen only for kewl factor, and no other reason, evidently) is known by the number of minutes it was between death and rebooting, so the main character is 178 (which is of course very unusual in its magnitude, to the point where she's legendary). Her real name is Wren. What? Yes, Wren! Weird. I frequently felt like giving Wren the bird. She was not kick-ass. She wasn't even interesting.

The world-building is poor. I'm not one of these readers who demands excellent world-building. I don't care if it's sketchy if the story itself is good, but even by my low standards, the world-building in this novel was atrocious. The status quo was just put out there as fact with no effort at any kind of backstory or any sort of explanation as to why it was this way. I don't want an info-dump, of course, but some credible words here and there about how things came to be as they are is really required if the story doesn't make it self-evident, and this was far from it.

Let's ask a few questions which this novel fails to answer: Why would a virus evolve to reboot people? Nature has no plan of self-improvement. The purpose of life is to survive and to reproduce, and a virus, even though it is on the border between biochemistry and chemistry, is no different. It has no agenda. Unless what happens to its host is beneficial to the virus spreading, there is no evolutionary impetus to promote it. So how would a virus evolve which revivifies people and makes them pretty? It makes no sense at all. What a virus needs is a host which doesn't die so quickly that the virus fails to spread. That's it! That's all! There is no benefit to resurrecting the host once it's dead or in prolonging life bizarrely, much less in bringing back the dead. Indeed, with Ebola, it was the fact that the host became bloody and died which helped it to spread given the practices of some peoples in various African nations, in preparing the dead for burial. The same kind of thing help Kuru to spread amongst the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, although Kuru is a prion disease, not a viral one.

Even if we buy into this though, how does this virus do what it does? Why does the person die rather than just become prettier, and faster and stronger? Given that they do die, how are they brought back to life? Nothing in nature does this - not literally die and come back to life - so where did this even come from? If it's merely a form of hibernation, then why call it death? What does this bizarre turn of events do to suicidal people? Do suicides increase? Decrease? Are people killing themselves so they can come back pretty, and strong and fast? We're not told, because this is a first person PoV novel and we're limited, confined, hobbled, constrained, and cocooned - in every sense of those restrictive words - to the perspective of Wren. This brings me to my next issue: even if we accept all of this so far, why would a reboot tell a story like this? Given the reboot's character and the perspective she gives us on reboots, it makes no sense that one of them would narrate their life, and even if we allow that one would, then the very least likely one to do this would be Wren. Again, no sense!

Viruses, with very few exceptions, are literally microscopic things which contain very little DNA. They require the host's DNA to even reproduce. In short, there is insufficient DNA even in the largest of viruses, to make all those changes to physiology that this story requires. There is no mutant X gene as Marvel comics would have it, that can give rise to a gazillion different and beneficial mutations. It doesn't happen.

Why is there no commentary on what the religious community had to say about people being resurrected? The novel is completely silent with regard to what religious leaders had to say about this! Not that I personally care what they have to say, but the fact is that if people started being resurrected, the christian religious community in a fundamentalist nation like the USA would be all over this: either seeing it as a sign of the end times and the devil's work, or as a sign of the rapture or something like that. Yet we get not a single word about that here! Again, it's poor world-building. Far too many young adult dystopian authors are like this! They get this one idea and fail comprehensively to apply it to the real world and explore the ramifications of it really happening. This is why they miss out on writing what would have been a much more interesting, faceted, and complex story. Instead we get vapid clones of other dystopian trilogies (they're always trilogies, aren't they, driven by the stark capitalism that is rampant in Big Publishing™?! Sad but true.). It's not interesting. It's not imaginative. It's not inventive. It's really a waste of trees or bandwidth.

Even if we accept all of that(!), then I still have to ask: how did society ever let it happen that these reboots became a police force, instead of simply sending them back to their family? Why do they even need a police force of reboots? Why are we told the reboots are emotionless, when they're obviously subject to emotions? Why label them as "not human" when they're exactly like humans: they laugh, they cry, they dream, they get scared, they have sex, they eat, they sleep. And why train these people to be a very efficient and ruthless para-military force when there has apparently already been strife between them and the non-rebooted humans? Why would they even work for the humans from whom they could simply run away, when they go out on patrol unsupervised? The Stupid is strong with this one. It made no sense to me. There were interesting bits, but also trope and clichéd bits which irritated me to no end.

I wouldn't have minded it quite so much if the author didn't flatly contradict every assertion she makes about the reboots. They're supposed to be 'not human', but there is nothing whatsoever about them that is different from humans - except they're faster? They're supposed to be emotionless, yet the record holder for biggest gap between death and reboot - the one who is supposed to be least human and least emotional - behaves exactly like the humans and shares the same emotions. She has her memories from when she was alive previously. How can she have all of this and not be human and not experience emotions? It's not possible.

She says the reboots don't need to eat as much as humans, yet they have a faster metabolism. How does that work exactly? Where does their energy come from? It has to come from somewhere unless this is really a book about magical beasts and where to find them! This is what happens when someone with zero science education starts writing science fiction, and it's not good enough. I don't demand that an author go deep into scientific detail to explain every last detail of the worlds they create, but I do like the world to make sense within the framework they've created. This one was like the kind of story my thirteen-year-old would write: everything is to be taken on pure faith without a shred of foundation being offered, and while I tolerate his stories, I'm not willing to extend that same largesse to an adult writer who should know better, and especially not when there are so many more, better-written novels out there pleading with me to read them! I cannot recommend this one.

Treasury of Egyptian Mythology by Donna Jo Napoli

Rating: WARTY!

Read indifferently by Cristina Moore, this audio book failed to ignite my interest and I DNF'd it. I thought it would be fun and engaging. You never know from whence your next idea for a story might hail, but all that the author did here was to take an Egyptian creation myth (from which the Biblical myth is obviously taken), and lard it up uninterestingly. It didn't come off as engaging at all, the way it was told here, let alone exciting, and I can't see many kids finding this a worthy read. I DNF'd it in short order after less than an hour of listening. That's all I can say about his one.

Rock Chick by Kristen Ashley

Rating: WARTY!

I made it to page five and decided it wasn't for me. I think that's a record for me. It appeared to be about an ex-groupie who now runs a used book store. It was written in 2011, so I'm asking, "Who would have their character running a used book store in 2011?" The store would be out of business! That's not to say there are no independent used book stores, and certainly not to say that there shouldn't be, but you cannot stick your head in the sand! They are rapidly dwindling, so unless your story is about that very issue, I see no point in taking such a lazy way out!

It was first person PoV, the most detestable voice in my view, which didn't help, and the main character claimed that the romance section did a brisk business, but who buys used romance print books any more when you can get the latest cupcake novel free or for ninety-nine cents from Amazon? A more interesting story would be about Big Business like Amazon killing off the book business (but I guess Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan did that!). They have at least one such book every couple of weeks of that nature available for free. Not that I buy them. I read one of them once and it was poor, but believe it or not, there is quite evidently a market for romance stories or even detective stories about women who run cupcake stores or run cafeterias.

But I digress. I have to say that I'm not a fan of writers who use bookstores in place of doing the work of making the character actually cool. It's the same kind of problem with writers who say their character reads (or has) a lot of books, in place of actually making them interesting or intelligent! This was undoubtedly part of why Rock Chick simply did not appeal to me. I didn't like the tone or the writing, and it was first person PoV which is the nail in the coffin for me unless it's done really well. That's all I have to convey about this one! Your mileage may very well differ. I hope it does. I'd hate for you to experience the same negative vibe from this that I did!

Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells

Rating: WARTY!

This book is a good reason why I don't read series. And another reason why I detest first person PoV novels so vehemently. This is number one (but it felt like number two) in the so-called "Prospero's War" series. There is no war here - not even close, so even the series title is a complete fraud. This is a novel set in a world where magic is real and available to anyone who wants to study it, yet nowhere in the portion of the book that I read (I made it to just over half way) was any magic used for anything! How dumb is that?

Dirty Magic sounded good from the title, and even the blurb, but this was 380-some pages of a bit of story and a heck of a lot of numbing filler. For god's sake this is a series! You have endless tedious volumes to fill, yet you keep interrupting the action in volume one to ramble about a meaningless blue plate lunch which moves the story not one inch? About a history with some non-villainous "villain" who looks more and more like he's going to be part of a triangle, when there's a murder investigation (not) going on? You ramble about your neighbors, about this dumb kid you're talking are of, and about your nasty partner - who is inevitably going to be the other leg of the triangle - and meanwhile what's happening with this critical murder investigation? Literally nothing. I'm sorry, but no! You don't get to treat me like that, and keep me as your audience. You don't get to insult my intelligence with trope, cliche, and rambling tedium. There are far too many other books out there competing with you, to diss your readers like that.

I kept turning another page and skimming a page or two here in the increasingly faint hope that at some point, a fire would light under Propero's ass and she would get into high gear, but it never happened, and if it ain't happened by the half-way point, then you don't get to have me as your reader for the other half. I have better things to do with my time.

The problem with magic stories is that once magic gets in, the rules of physics go out the window. This puts the author in the position of having to make up arbitrary rules which all-too-often make no sense - such as was the case here. As that great magician Winston Churchill said, never has so much trope and cliche been stuffed into so few ideas by so mindless.

Get this: the police were not allowed to use magic! Because it wouldn't stand up in court?! So they used none - not even magic to get hard evidence which would stand up in court! What is the point? If all you're telling is a drug story about a cliched cop then why add magic, and if you're going to add magic, why not actually let people use it? This story was pure bullshit, and I refuse to even remotely recommend it.

Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann

Rating: WARTY!

I started out liking this biography of the deaf and blind Helen Keller, but as it went on (and on), I started disliking it and gave up about half-way through. The problem wasn't the reader, for a change! Mary Peiffer did a workmanlike - if a bit pedantic - job. The problem was the boring and extensive asides the author insisted upon meandering into just when the actual story I wanted to hear - that of Helen Keller - got interesting.

For example, Helen's closest companion was Annie Sullivan, the controversial woman who brought Helen out of her silent darkness and into the world - almost as a mother births a child - and we hear a lot about Annie here, including the fact that she had a sort of control over Helen's life that only religious cults seem to manage these days. At one point, the author began a chapter talking about the unprecedented event of a deaf and blind woman graduating Radcliffe summa cum laude. Right in the middle of it, she meandered off to talk about Mark Twain, who couldn't be there because he was escorting his wife's coffin back through Italy. Just to mention this would not have been a bad thing. Helen knew Mark Twain, and he had entered the story several times, but instead of merely mentioning it and getting back to the graduation and Helen's story, the author completely subverted her account of the remarkable achievement Helen had managed there, in favor of rambling on in endless detail about Twain.

Whose biography am I reading here?! Now contrast this with the fact that when Annie Sullivan gets married, the entire event gets such short shrift that it may as well not have happened. This was seriously a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment. Get a life, woman - not a death! The author was quite evidently obsessed with Mark Twain. I think she needs a slap upside the head with a langhorn, the little clemens.

This was not the only time she rambled on either, and after a while it really ticked me off. I wanted to hear about Helen, not everyone but Helen. I'd like to visit this remarkable and intriguing person again at some point in the future, but I shall not read another work by Dorothy Herrmann. Next time I'll pick one which Helen Keller wrote herself!

Spoiler alert: Helen dies at the end.

Everyone Has a Mother by Sally Huss

Rating: WORTHY!

Just in time for Mother's Day, Sally Huss's young children's book celebrating motherhood in all its varieties and glory. The book focuses on animals - of all kinds. Even spiders are moms! There are all kinds of animals - every class is covered - but no bacteria, fungi or plants - or invertebrates (other than the spider)! The animals, mostly mammals - are sumptuously colored and playfully drawn all in celebration of motherhood. I think this makes a fine read for very young children.

The Aliens Are Coming! by Ben Miller

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
p103: "...one of the most distant object known..." - 'object' needs an 's' added to be grammatically correct.
p104: (footnote) Inflation came before the Big Bang!
p118: "...whih has five protons..." should be "...which has five protons..."
p130: "Mars' gravity" should be "Mars's gravity" since Mars is singular.
p224: The printing press wasn't invented in Gutenberg - it was invented by Gutenberg - Johannes Gutenberg who lived in Strasbourg at the time.

Note this is a review of an advance review copy. The errors listed above may well have been corrected by the time this book is published.

I first encountered Ben Miller in a TV show called Death in Paradise, which I fell immediately in love with, only to discover that he leaves the show after the first season. He had good reason, but I was crushed. I felt so betrayed. I never wanted to speak to him again. Not that we have ever actually spoken, but then came this book and I forgive him for everything!

Not to be confused with several other volumes with this same title, The Aliens Are Coming!: The Exciting and Extraordinary Science Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe, is a book is about aliens in space: where are they? Are they even? How are they even? Would we actually know if we received a message from them? It's beautifully written, and it's highly amusing. It's also factual and smart, scientific, and very entertaining, covering the origin of life on Earth and extrapolating from what we know of that to ponder what we might discover in space.

The author did his homework, and given that he was studying Natural Sciences at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and was planning on pursuing a PhD in solid state physics before he relinquished those pursuits to take up comedy and acting, he definitely knows what he's talking about - and almost more importantly, he knows how to share this knowledge in a light-hearted manner with others in a way even I, with my math, can understand!

That's not to say it was all plain sailing! At one point he brings up the old Carl Sagan chestnut that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', which is nonsensical. An extraordinary claim requires no more evidence to support it than does an ordinary claim, because any claim requires sufficient evidence to establish it, and that's it. Once it's established, there is no requirement that we must keep piling on ever more evidence until it reaches extraordinary amounts before we can rely on on it! I really liked Sagan's Cosmos series, but I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's version better. I went to one of Sagan's talks once and frankly, he was a bit of a jerk and pompous, too. I didn't like him in person.

At one point I read that "...the tennis ball in the men's final at Wimbledon..." makes gravitational waves. There's no disputing the science there, but why the men's final? Why not the women's or the mixed doubles? Why mention that at all, why not say "...the tennis ball in the final at Wimbledon..." or better yet, "a tennis ball," since there's more than one in use? It felt a bit genderist, but this was a relatively minor complaint when compared with all the things which the author got right.

As it happens, gravitational waves were discovered in September 2015, but not reported until February 2016, which accounts for why it's not mentioned here, I assume. At least they're confirmed with 99.99 (etc.) percent confidence, so I'm on board! Two black holes (not to be confused with back-hoes!) merged and released energy the equivalent of three solar masses. That's pretty impressive by any standard. When you realize how much energy is out there for the taking - if we only had the smarts to figure out how to get it safely - it makes our pathetic and self-destructive search for more oil and gas pretty sad, doesn't it?

I really liked the chatty way the author tosses in random examples (well, they're random to me!). This is how we get brief mentions of subjects like Breaking Bad, Simon Cowell, Lady Gaga, and cups of tea. There's lots, lots more of course. I loved this book and I recommend it as a first class read about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (aka SETI) and what the likelihood is that we'll ever find any.

The Glass Arrow by Kristen Simmons

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with The Glass Arrow by Gerald Verner , this novel was awful! Pretty much from the first track (I listened to the audio book) it was tedious, trope-filled, irrational, and not remotely credible. That it was first person PoV did not help. I detest that voice because it's so rarely done well, and on audio it can sound bad even when the writing is good, depending on who reads it.

The story is about Aya aka Aiyana, a fifteen year old girl who is a free woman - that is, she's not owned by anyone. She lives in the wilds with her sister and some twins, Tam and Nina. Because women are so rare in this world, they are hunted brutally, and enslaved by men. That should have stopped me right there. I honestly don't know why I even picked this up from the library because it had trope trash written all over it. Well not literally, but, as Doctor Who said, give me time - and a crayon....

My problem with it was the absurdity of the opening chapter, where Aya comes back to her 'family' to discover that they're being hunted. The males and older females are killed, and the young one - that would be Aya and the twins, are taken. There was no explanation as to how the world got like this (maybe that came later - I didn't want to hang around to find out) and the premise, now that I think about it, is ridiculous on the face of it, but my real problem was Aya's narration of coming back "home" and finding devastation caused by the hunters.

Her narration bore no relationship to what a fifteen-year-old - even a wild, self-sufficient one - would deliver. I seriously doubt that she would be calmly describing her discoveries and her thoughts and her family relationships at a time like this. It was so unrealistic it almost made me laugh, but the laugh was stifled by the fact that this only made me so sad that we're seeing this kind on nonsense ever more often in YA novels. The only advantage this one has, so I understand, is that it isn't a trilogy so the author deserves a freaking medal for that, but for me, even that was not enough to make me keep on listening when other novels beckon so temptingly!

I can't imagine a girl calmly describing the scene as Aya did in first person. A disinterested third party observer - one ho with a complete lack of passion - may well have delivered this narration, but not the person to whom it was happening. This is one of the problems with this voice - it's completely unrealistic. It didn't help that the narration by Soneela Nankani made the first person voice even worse. Great name, poor reading voice. Instead of delivering anger or outrage, we got wheedling and stupidity in the narration and the voice didn't help. It turned me right off this story. I gave up and returned it to the library where scores of other audio books beg to be listened to.

If Bees Are Few by Various Writers

Rating: WORTHY!

I have to say up front that I am not a big fan of poetry. Too much of it seems way too pretentious to me, but I am a big fan of bees. The aim of this book was to bring together "a hive of bee poems", with the profits from it going to the University of Minnesota Bee Lab. So, if you don't want to read the book, at least consider sending some money to the lab! Maybe they'll send you a free beard of bees!

No, they won't - the bees would just die without the queen, and if they included a queen, she would probably die from being so exposed! This is how vulnerable bees are, and whatever is causing Colony Collapse Disorder isn't helping. If the bees go, we're screwed for a host of food plants, and gorgeous flowers and trees which we can only enjoy if the bees pollinate them. Besides, bees are cute!

CCD has affected a lot of nations: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA, to name a few. Unfortunately these nations are not all well represented in this book! France, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland have no representation as far as I can tell, and continents like South America and Africa not at all or hardly at all. There seems to be a strong focus on Minnesota (about 20% of the writers are from there or live there), and around 80% of the writers are from or resident in the USA. That said, there is some representation from a wide variety of nations, if only to the tune of one or two writers each.

The title, If Bees are Few comes from Emily Dickinson's 1755 poem To Make a Prairie, and though I am not a fan of hers, her poems were nonetheless among the best here. There is a preface and an introduction which I skipped. I never read those things, but I did read the afterword by Marla Spivak which talked about the whole purpose of the book. She's well-worth listening to.

The poems are from people both living and not, and there were some sterling names among those who have gone to that great beehive in the sky: Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Devereaux, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, DH Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, and William Shakespeare, Alfred Tennyson, Vergil, Walt Whitman, and William Butler Yeats. Let's face it, whether you're a fan of poetry or not, these contributors are no lightweights! The variety of poetry is remarkable. Some are long, some short, some are like traditional poems, some not, and some are more like short stories than poems. Some are serious, some amusing, some descriptive, some truly poetic, if not obscure! Some are solely about bees, others have bees make cameos, just buzzing in and out. There is something for everyone, though, which I really liked.

I found myself preferring the older poems but there were some more recent ones that had a good voice, too. All in all, it made for an entertaining read even for someone like me. And it's for a really good cause. It's for all of these reasons that I recommend this book.

World Tales Volume 7

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another in a series, several of which I reviewed back in March 2016. This one featured two stories as usual: Pinocchio read by Danny Aiello, and Tom Thumb read by John Cleese. Again there was music attached to each story - which I could have done without because it was too intrusive. There was a brass band theme to Pinocchio (why do I keep wanting to type two 'n's for that?) by a band called Les Misérables, of whom I've never heard, and Elvis Costello did a sort of free-form background music to Tom Thumb. Not impressed.

Everyone knows Pinocchio, I imagine, but the actual original story is much shorter than the Disney-fied version. No songs, for one thing! Danny Aiello - of whom I am a fan - does a really, really good job. I recommend this one. The story is short - the music pads it out to less than a half hour.

I had no idea what the Tom Thumb story was about other than that it's the story of a guy who is literally as big as a thumb - or as small. And no I'm not going to give Tom Thumb the finger! I liked this story too, although I confess I thought John Cleese was going to go over the top when he first began. He didn't. He reined (or reigned or rained) himself in and did a good job. Being of Monty Python extraction, he obviously does pompous Brit accents to perfection. The story was fun. Tom is at a loose end, and ends up joining the knights of the round table. Again the story is short: under twenty five minutes. I liked it. It was funny and I recommend it.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second time I've reviewed this! Normally I don't review books twice, not even when one is print and the other audio, but this was the audio version, it was one disk sitting on the library shelf looking at me like audio books do, and so I thought what the heck? I can tell you it was nicely read by Meryl Streep, but then she does have a lot of Streep cred....

The previous review was of the print book back in June of 2015, so you can visit that if you want the full take on it. For this review I'll just confine myself to one issue which is the use of music. There was no music sold with the original novel, and there is no music in the novel, so why the producers of this audio version felt the need to lard it up with music by George Winston (of whom I've never heard) is a mystery, but make a note: they did! And it was loud. And intrusive. And irritating. Maybe the age-range at whom this is aimed won't be bothered by it. They might even like it. For me it had no place on the disk.

That said I recommend the story. Meryl Streep does a fine job when she's not being interrupted and told to take a back seat to the music! George Winston? Not so much.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Rating: WARTY!

This novel was written by the same guy who wrote Cloud Atlas. I read and favorably reviewed his Slade House back in October 2015, but this one I could not get into at all. it was bo-ring. I think part of the problem was the reader's voice. William Rycroft is not someone I can stand to listen to. His voice really grated and I could not take it seriously.

The blurb advises us that "A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia" and going to find their lives intertwined. I should have stopped right there. I listened in horror to the first of these, and not for the reason you might think.

This terrorist had just unleashed a bio-weapon or gas attack (I forget which) and was in hiding, and that's exactly how interesting it was: nothing happened. Literally nothing. It was first person, too, and this moron was a whiny-assed little snot who constantly spawned venomous thoughts over every-single-person-he-encountered. It was tedious to listen to. That was the horror of it. if we had followed him as he unleashed his attack that would have been something at least, but this crap? I started skipping tracks after the first two or three, and ended up skipping all the way to disk two, which featured the second character in the blurb list. He was as tedious as the first: another self-centered first person story about events that were so mundane I don't even notice them in my life, yet this jerk was going on and on about them as though they carried Earth-shattering import.

I said "No!" and returned this to the library on my way home, the same day I'd begun listening to it in the car. Ick! No more! I cannot recommend this based on what little I could stand of it. Life's too short to allow a train of whining people to blow through my station, even if they are fictional.

The Demon Girl’s Song by Susan Jane Bigelow

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an excellent novel which I fell in love with quickly and which I highly recommend. The main character is a lesbian who doesn't fully realize it to begin with, but this is not your typical LGBTQ novel. Nether is it an historical romance, although there is romance in it, nor your usual fantasy. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have liked it. It's not a ridiculous YA love triangle of a novel. Thankfully there are no triangles here! It's a novel about a woman who has an adventure, and she doesn't need to be validated in it by male or female. I was so pleased with that! Finally an author who gets it! This woman is my idea of a strong female character done to perfection. That doesn't mean she doesn't have moments of weakness or doubt. It doesn't mean she doesn't need friends or lovers. It means she can take it or leave it and she does just fine on on her own.

The story is set in the early twentieth century it would seem, but it's hard to tell because it's in a parallel world - one of magic and empires, and the world is nicely fleshed out. The main character, Andín is possessed by a demon - accidentally - or maybe not! (It's not remotely like "The Exorcist" as it happens!). This demon isn't outright evil - not in a psychotic fashion like in the Exorcist anyway. He's occupied the rulers of the empire for a thousand years, moving from father to son (or whoever is the heir) as the father dies, and expanding the empire with an iron fist, but now a wizard has tricked him into going into this peasant girl instead of into the emperor's son.

When the demon talks Andín into going to the capital and manages to wangle a meeting with the new emperor, he discovers he's been deliberately tricked by the palace wizard, and he's stuck inside this girl's mind. Even if the girl dies, he can't get back into the ruling family. But now the girl and her demon have been exiled from the entire empire, which meant a train journey of several days to cross the border into a mountain kingdom many miles from the capital. The oddest thing about this however is the weird empty shape they see in the wasteland as they cross the border - maybe it's a portal to somewhere. I have a feeling the girl is going to find out, and also going to meet the woman who sat beside her when the demon first occupied her. Yes, for the demons, it's occupy peasant week. They don't have a wall street, you see!

I loved the main character Andín - in a platonic way of course! She's only seventeen after all, but she's about to go on a life-altering quest, and she isn't the only one who will change. So, too, will the demon. Will she end up more like him, or will he become like her? Or will they meet in the middle? And if so, what then? Well, if this is any clue, here's how she responds to a noise in the night: "She checked around the bed and picked up the little pen she kept on her nightstand. If some strange man were to come at her, she could stab him in the eye with it." Shades of Jason Bourne!

The story is masterfully written! I'd say mistressfully, but that just doesn't sound right unfortunately! How sad is that? It's paced perfectly, relationships grow and change organically, it's very well-written, and the story never once got boring. There was always something new around the corner, and Andín's growth was perfectly reasonable.

On a technical level, and while this novel was well formatted for the Kindle app on my phone, there were a couple of issues with the chapter headers towards the end. It seemed like the intention was to use the possessive, but the titles ended up looking like this instead:
Chapter 20 Judyís Sword
Chapter 23 Shashalnikyaís Trail
Chapter 27 The Demon Girlís Song.

Overall, I couldn't have asked for a better fantasy novel, and I'm not really a fan of fantasy unless it's done really well. This one was. It was understated and nicely depicted. I was very pleased to have been granted a chance to read this advance review copy and I fully recommend it. I look forward to this author's next work. I hope it comes, like this one, with great expedition!

City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau

Rating: WARTY!

I got this audiobook from the library, and having seen the movie a while ago thought it might be interesting to read - or listen to - the book. It wasn't. The movie wasn't that great, but I don't recall it being entirely without merit. This audiobook failed to grab my attention. It's the start of a successful series, but it's for younger children and it failed to move me. I'm not a fan of series, but I'm willing to make an exception for something exceptional, which this wasn't.

It's about an artificial city wherein live people who know nothing about the artifice, but the city is coming to the end of its life. No good reason is given why it has a lifespan. This is quite a short novel, but instead of getting into it, the story rambles and meanders and wanders around, and I had zero interest in following this drunken walk. if it had been an interesting or funny ramble, I might have meandered along with it, but no. I couldn't. I can't recommend this, but I experience very little of it, Your mileage on your drunken walk may differ!

Street Magicks by various authors

Rating: WARTY!

This book came to me under false pretenses! Yes, I requested it, but it was listed on Net Galley under 'Comics & Graphic, Sci Fi & Fantasy', and it's not - it's not graphic at all, that is. It's actually a collection of short stories - all text and no illustration. I don't go in for such collections because they tend to be boring. I was only interested because I'd thought it was a series of short graphic stories, but now I'm saddled with it, and it did not disappoint: when I read it, I found it largely uninteresting as I've consistently found such collections. I have a theory about this.

About 75% of the way through the book, I realized that one of the problems with it was that I wasn't really getting into the stories. In a way, I was doing this on purpose because I knew the story would be over before I truly got into it, even if I liked it, and this wasn't doing me any good. I had no incentive to invest in the story or the characters, and this is precisely why I don't read collections of short stories! I had thought that a graphic version might be different, but of course this wasn't a graphic version.

In fact, in theory(!), a collection like this ought to have something going for it, because some of the author's names were impressive: Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, Charles de Lint, and Neil Gaiman jumped out at me (not literally, Silly!). You'd think people who are doing as well as they are could afford to put out their short stories for free, just as a generous gesture to celebrate their success and thank their readers! I know I would. It occurred to me though, that the reason these well-known authors were scattered in amongst the lesser-knowns is that this was really a vehicle to get the lesser-knowns' stories out there by attracting people using the better-knowns.

On the other hand, maybe the better-knowns contributed their stories for free in order to give exposure to the lesser-known authors? That's a generous gesture if it's true, but I have no idea if it is and on a personal level, it still did nothing to make these stories any more palatable to me. Maybe others will have more success with them than I did. I hope so. For m, though, when reading a collection like this written by one author, you know what you're in for, and if you don't like it after three or four stories you can quit knowing you gave it a fair chance. You can't do that when every story is by a different author. You have to at least try each one. Here was my experience with this collection, edited by by Paula Guran:

Freewheeling by Charles de Lint struck me as a pointless story about a delusional kid who was shot by police. I read it the whole way through and found it had nothing new or particularly interesting to say. A disappointing start.

A Year and a Day in Old Theradane was a wizard fantasy by Scott Lynch which held no interest for me.

Caligo Lane by Ellen Klages was a story about a witch creating a map in old San Francisco, but it was not something that appealed to me. It rambled on with little to say and was far too obsessed with the minutiae of creating maps. The graphic novel format might have improved this, but that's just Format's last theorem. Talk about cart a graphic!

Socks by Delia Sherman was the first story to grab my interest. 'Socks' is the nickname of a young girl whose feet smell. She lives in a home for orphaned children where everyone has to pull their weight. A new girl arrives and fascinates Socks, but then the girl leaves, having cured her foot odor problem. That's about it. It doesn't sound very interesting when put like that, but it was an imaginative story well told, even though it really didn't have much of a place to go.

Painted Birds and Shivered Bones by Kat Howard is the story of an artist who thinks she might be going crazy when she observes a naked man transform into a bird. This man, it turns out is cursed to keep transforming back and forth and he becomes the artist's muse for a whole new collection of paintings, which bring her great success. The story wasn't bad, but it really didn't do much for me, and it was at this point I decided I was not necessarily going to read all of every story in this collection!

The Goldfish Pond and Other Stories by Neil Gaiman was the first one I skipped because once I began it, I found it to be deadeningly dull, and I had no interest in pursuing it. I've liked some works by Gaiman, but it would seem, overall, that he's not an author for me. This story was full of boring details about making a visit to Los Angeles to discuss making a movie out of a novel he'd written. It was purportedly fictional, but it felt like it was autobiographical and I wasn't interested in unoriginal observations of Hollywood. I took issue with this: "People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe." Nonsense! if you're working that hard then writing isn't for you! Yes, I can see the value of research on some occasions for some novels, but then I'm not one of those people who adores the realism in Tom Clancy novels or the verisimilitude in David Weber sci-fi. I find it tedious. There's only one novel I've written that honestly felt like work, and that one is sitting on hold waiting for me to evaluate whether it's worth finishing! I think that if it feels like work, then you're either doing it wrong or you're in the wrong profession altogether.

One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King by Elizabeth Bear aka Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky

I didn't like the title of this story and would have avoided it purely because it gave me a feeling of mild nausea and powerful boredom. But I had to give it a try! I had read and liked The Jenny Casey trilogy: Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired, but not enough to want to immediately chase down everything she wrote to read it voraciously. As it happens, I could not get into this one. It bored me from the start. I'm willing to give a novel a lot of pages to bring me in, but I feel no such compulsion with a short story. There's too little space to waste. If you don't get me in the first couple of pages, you've likely lost me, and especially so if your story starts out way overly dramatic. This one failed on both counts. I can't tell you what it's about except that it started on the Hoover Dam with an accident - or, given the title, perhaps a suicide.

Street Worm by Nisi Shawl
When I first read this title I thought it had said "Street Worn" and it smacked of 'too cool for school', like Lou Reed's Street Hassle title for one of his albums - same effect. Transformer was better! But I digress. The title isn't 'Worn', it's 'Worm' so this improved my perspective somewhat. The story did bring me in quickly. It's about a young rebellious girl who can see worms on buildings. Is she insane, or does she have a view of the world with which most people are not privileged - or cursed? I liked the story well enough but the ending was abrupt and rather odd given the build-up.

A Water Matter by Jay Lake
This was amusing because of the title and the author's last name, but then came the fact that no one in the story had a name - only a title. There was The Dancing Mistress, the Girl Assassin, the Duke of Copper Downs and on and on. I started feeling like I didn't want to be there pretty quickly, so this is another one which I largely skipped. The tone was too playful for the content, too.

Last Call by Jim Butcher was the one I was really looking forward to, but sadly, it was a Harry Dresden story. I have no time for the man. I loved Butcher's Codex Alera series, even though I typically refuse to read series with pretentious words like 'codex' in the title (or 'cycle', or 'chronicles', or 'saga', or other such names), but I can't stand his wizard series, so I skipped this one unread. I was hoping for something new and different in a short story but apparently Butcher isn't up to it. I have a theory about this business of slipping a short story based on your series into a collection like this, which I shall go into later.

Bridle by Caitlín R Kiernan
This one turned me off in line three when it mentioned 'unseelie'. Nevertheless, I skimmed the next few pages. It turned out to be the selfsame lost cause I'd feared. I'm not a fan of 'seelie' or 'faerie'. Actually I'd be more of a fan of the latter if the authors had the guts to call it 'fairy' instead of dancing away from it, like 'faerie' is something to take seriously, whereas 'fairy' is absolutely not! That this was first person PoV did not help.

The Last Triangle by Jeffrey Ford came next. Finally here was a story which took hold of my attention not because it was bizarre or quirky, but because there was a actually something going on. It moved quickly, too. Sadly, it was first person PoV, but I tried not to hold that against it given how much it had taken my interest hostage. In this one, a junkie crosses paths with a woman on a quest, and she offers him a place to stay, and food, as long as he keeps clean; then she asks him to keep a look-out in town for an obscure symbol which she has seen appearing on buildings. She has a theory that they come in threes and mark an equilateral triangle when plotted on a map. Maybe she has a point...! This was the most interesting one in the whole collection this far, but it still lacked sufficient gripping power to make it stay with me, I knew as I finished it that I would forget it quickly.

Working for the God of Love and Money by Australian author Kaaron Warren
This was very short and not very engaging. It was a about a man who was trapped into working for the god of the title - who had his 'boy' con coins out of people (paper money was no good). He would melt them down and immerse himself into the molten metal, after which he would rise up from it with a new suit covering him. There was no explanation given for why he did this. The boy, who is the man, comes up with a way to free himself from this god. That's it! It was much less than I had hoped for given how this initially began, and it quickly fell from grace with me. I wasn't sure, when I first started reading it, if the god was actually a god or if it was just a person whom the main character perceived as being godlike. This confusion didn't help the story.

Hello, Moto by Nnedi Okorafor
This is, unfortunately, a first person PoV story about magic. The weakness of the 1PoV approach is once again highlighted as the author switches voice so we can observe another character in third person. I am so tired of this sloppy technique that I quit reading this particular story at that point. It was a bit of a mess anyway.

The Spirit of the Thing: a Nightside Story by Simon R Green
The fact that this story was subtitled "A Nightside Story" suggested it was like the Jim Butcher story - a short story from a novel series, and since Simon Green evidently writes only series, this didn't bode well for this story. With very few exceptions, I am not a series fan, and I don't feel comfortable with an effort to drag me into a world with which I have no familiarity and little to no interest in, by means of a short story published in a collection. I skipped this story on principle. It was the same as the Jim Butcher story in this regard.

A Night in Electric Squidland by Sarah Monette
I have to confess a soft spot for writers named Sarah since it's one of my favorite names. As Bishop Goddard Larsen might say, "I've known several people named Sara(h) and been fond of them all." But that title? It turned me off to be honest. This story is about Mick Sharpton, who has clairvoyant powers. He can feel the personality of a person on things he touches, and can see some sort of aura over a person's head. He works with Jamie Keller for the Bureau of Paranormal investigations. Why is it always a bureau?! The two of them are called into a new case - a person has been found cut in half - longitudinally. It's connected with the Electric Squidland nightclub, where a person disappeared some time before. Evidently something weird and horrible is going on there. The problem was that the story kind of fizzled towards the end, and dissolved into attempts to shock with sex and gore, and horror which wasn't particularly sexy, or gory or horrible. But overall, the story wasn't bad. It just wasn't good, either.

Speechless in Seattle by Lisa Silverthorne
Okay, I admit this title amused me! And Lisa Silverthorne is a pretty cool name for an author, but the story was very trope magic - almost like it was lifted bodily from Harry Potter. It was a bit like reading a fanfic from someone who had morphed Seamus Finnigan and professor Quirrell together. The idea of a wizard who stutters and has to craft spells using language would have been an intriguing and entertaining material for a novel, but this was not that story. It was less a magic story than it was a romance, so I felt that the initial concept had been betrayed or at least sidelined by an inexplicable need to have the main character get himself a girlfriend. Why does this trope fill so many stories? Cannot men and women stand on their own? It's tedious and the story was too short for it, so I didn't like it on that principle alone, aside form any other issues. This 'love' had nowhere to go and no room to breathe.

Palimpsest by Catherynne M Valente
This was more of a poem than a story, and I have no idea what it is about even though I read it through (it was very short). It was really just a description of a place, so there really was no story there. I didn't like it at all.

Ash by John Shirley
This last story actually started out promising to be interesting, then it reached a point where I was convinced I knew what was going on. It reminded me of a play I wrote ages ago, but the ending was so unclear that I honestly don't know if I figured out what had happened or not. Either way the story wasn't holding my interest.

So overall, while I expected to at least like one or two stories reasonably well, in general terms, I found this whole collection to be less than desirable I'm sorry to say. I was disappointed that it wasn't what I expected, and then even more disappointed that these stories failed to really grab my attention. I cannot recommend this one.

Graphic Classics Romeo and Juliet by Gareth Hinds

Rating: WORTHY!

I found this to be somewhat rudimentary in illustration (and bizarre in parts, and unintentionally amusing in others), but very well done overall. It's a graphic novel based on Shakespeare's famous play, as written by Francis Bacon (yeah right! LOL!). One thing which hit me was that the appearance of the text in speech balloons and descriptive text boxes, really focused my attention on Shakespeare's words - and all the classic lines are here:

• Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
• My only love sprung from my only hate
• That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet
• O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
• But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun
• Parting is such sweet sorrow
• A plague o' both your houses!
• ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man

Despite it being in fair Verona where we lay our scene, there are few Italians on view be warned! The illustrations show largely dark-skinned and moderately dark-skinned people. Juliet is predictably lighter than is Romeo the rebel. Not that Italians can't be dark-skinned of course, but I'd wager they were a lot more scarce than depicted here in the era when this play is set.

Some obscure words were defined at the bottom of the page on which they appeared, but a lot of Shakespeare's wording/meaning also went uncommented, so this struck me as a bit patchy. Fortunately I'm familiar enough with Shakespeare that this was not a problem, but it occurs to me that it might be for people who are approaching this who are new to Shakespeare - the language is not modernized at all.

The story is well-known: Romeo Montague, pining for Rosaline, a niece of Lord Capulet, goes to a party at the house of his mortal enemies, where he meets Juliet Capulet, whose parents want married off to Count Paris. When she meets Romeo, all other priorities are cast from her mind as they are from Romeo's, too, who now has no feelings for Rosaline at all. That's how fickle he is! After knowing each other for five minutes, these two declare their love and plan to marry, despite Juliet being thirteen, and her own father having just talked Paris into waiting for another two years at least. Yes, Romeo and Juliet are morons, but that said, the play makes for a fun read, awash in Shakespeare's cheesy puns.

It goes wrong, of course. Juliet is to take a potion which will give her an affectation of death. When she has been interred in the family vault, the padre will send Romeo to her and the two of them can run away together. Well, Romeo doesn't get the message and the padre is delayed reaching the church. Romeo thinks Juliet is dead and takes a potion he'd had prepared when he first heard of her 'death'. He dies, and When Juliet wakes up, she stabs herself with his dagger. Thus endeth the lesson. I recommend this for anyone who is interested in the Shakespeare lite version of this play.

Manga Classics Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Crystal Chan, Stacy King, Nokman Poon

Rating: WORTHY!

I've never read Great Expectations, and in a way I still haven't, since this is a necessarily expurgated graphic novel version, but I have to admit after reading this, I'm interested in the original - so this one did its job! I'd never been interested before, until this version came along. It was well-written (edited! The original story adaptation was by by Crystal S Chan, the English translation by Stacy King) and nicely drawn. The illustrations by Nokman Poon were black & white line drawings.

One thing I don't get about some manga is the backwards format. Yes, I get it that if we're taking a novel originally written for Japanese audiences, blanking out the speech balloons and so on, and filling then with English text, then it necessarily runs backwards, but when it's created for an English market it makes no sense. In this case this was a translation, but it was still odd, because at the back - where it begins - the header for chapter one appeared on the left, and the text 'following' it appeared on the right - completely contrary to the instructions that had appeared on the pages immediately before! After that, though, it followed the reverse format faithfully.

The story follows Pip, who despite being an apprentice for a blacksmith, has a chance to taste the high life at the manor of Miss Haversham, a twisted woman who wears her wedding dress - every day - so as not to forget how much she hates the man who left her at the altar having taken her money instead of her hand. She's raising her adopted daughter to hate men too - and to take revenge on them for the hurt Miss Haversham has suffered. Estella appears to be learning the lesson well.

Pip become involved with escaped convict Magwitch and helps to smuggle him out of the country. Later, he finds himself the beneficiary of a stipend which pays for him to get a higher education. He becomes friends with a guy he earlier did not hit it off with (so to speak) and learns to be a real gentlemen, but there are undercurrents pulling very which way in Pip's life and he has no handle on them. All is revealed over the course of the story, and he is surprised by how much his life is entwined with the lives of others whom he had no idea he was connected.

I really liked this, and I recommend it for people like me, who had no interest in the original novel, or were maybe nervous about taking it on.

Oxford Portraits Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights by Miriam Brody

Rating: WORTHY!

I found this walking through the library in the entrance to the children's section, but this is way too dense and involved for young children - unless they're exceptionally precocious readers. It's more of a late middle-grade to young adult read. It details the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, who was a pioneer in women's rights at a time when women were held in Biblical-style ownership, giving up all rights to their husband upon marriage. They had no rights to property, no right to vote, and no money. If they were even lucky enough to get a divorce from a bad husband they were out of home and gave up their children, and probably would have been shunned by their parents, too,. for "bringing disgrace" upon the family name.

Wollstonecraft had an at best unhappy, and at worst miserable childhood. Her father was a drunk who squandered the family fortune. her mother was unsupportive, and it became obvious to Wollstonecraft that she was going to have to make her own way in life - something she had no problem with as it happened. She tried to start a school with her two sisters but realized quickly that while she loved her sisters, she could not stand to be in that close of a proximity to them for very long!

She eventually became known for her writing and became famous after she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects in 1792, but her life was never destined to be a completely happy one. She traveled in France during the French revolution and "married" Gilbert Imlay - an American. They were never actually married (she had written strongly against it in Vindication), and they were merely posing as married. He treated her poorly and abandoned her when she became pregnant. She raised her daughter Fanny, alone, but had the help of a servant/nurse whom she hired with her earnings

She traveled in Scandinavia and wrote a series of letters which were also published and won her more fans. It was after her return to England after this that she met (actually, re-met!) the man she would finally feel was her true match: William Godwin. Despite the fact that both of them has written treatises which derided marriage, they married and Wollstonecraft became pregnant with the girl who would grow to be Mary Shelley. But she died a few days after giving birth to Mary at the sadly youthful age of thirty eight.

This biography gives plenty of detail and commentary, and it pulls no punches. It's well researched and includes quotes from letters both written by Wollstonecraft, and written about her. I loved it and recommend it for both adults and young readers - but not too young!

The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner

Rating: WORTHY!

This audio book was a major disappointment. It began well and really drew me in quickly, but around halfway, when it ought to have been picking up speed for the David and Goliath-style grand finale, it just fizzled away into tedium and nonsense and became insufferable. I gave up on it. I have to say I would not have listened for as long as I did were it not for the excellent and talented reading voice of Carrington MacDuffie. Kudos to her!

This is book one in a series and I have no interest in listening to any more. I have no idea why it would even become a series, either, for that matter, but as I said, I did not finish it, so maybe there's something there at the end which gives some sort of reason for the book to go on to a second volume, however weak. I don't care what it is!

Here's one problem with audio books. If a word is unfamiliar to the listener - and this especially applies to names! - or if the word sounds like one you know but is actually a different word, there's no way to tell what word was used or how it was spelled, so I am relying on some research in Google books for the spelling of the character's names. Set in the period of the early days of the French revolution, this novel begins with a small troupe of entertainers being invited to the house of Marquis de Villeduval for a well-paid private performance. Yann Margoza, one of the three in the troupe, counsels against going, but the leader, Topolain insists upon it. He is signing his own death warrant by doing so, because also in attendance is and Count Kalliovski, who shoots Topolain dead by "accident" during his performance of his "bullet proof routine

This is the first thing which ticked me off about the story: I never did learn what it was between Kalliovski and Topolain which led to this. It may be that it was covered in the part I skipped, but I listened to a lot of this and it never came up. Either that or I was so focused on driving at the time it was revealed, that I missed it! Maybe the author kept this for volume two which would have ticked me off even more!

Topolain's death leaves Yann and the dwarf member of the troupe, Têtu (which is actually the French word for 'stubborn') running for their lives because evidently - again, I know not why - the Count is out for them too, and they'll be out for the count if they don't get away. Somehow, out of this, it winds up that Yann, who has started falling for the Marquis's daughter, Sido, ends up going to England. I have no explanation for how this happened. I'd been seeing this woman's name as Çideaux or Sideaux. Maybe Sido is short for Sidonie or maybe it's short for Do-si-do! I don't know!

The count has been loaning large sums of money to the marquis, but he knows he's not going to get it back. What he wants instead is Sido's dowry and eventually he forces the marquis to effectively sell her off in marriage, whereupon he will kill her and keep her fortune. Back then, women were essentially property. In some parts of the world this hasn't changed even today. They had no rights, no vote, no say, and could own nothing. Sido was money int he bank to the trope evil count, and nothing else.

The second thing which ticked me off was that the count is all set to marry Sido, and then suddenly two years are gone and we're with Yann in England. When we get back to France, Sido still isn't married! This made no sense to me, and again no reason was given for it - not in the part I listened to. It was at this point that the quality of the story began a rapid decline, and I lost all interest in it, so I can't speak for what happened after that. I can't recommend this base don my experience of it, despite the MacDuffie voice!

The Complete Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Leah Moore, John Reppion

Rating: WORTHY!

Originally published in 2005, this was adapted by Leah Moore and John Reppion, a writing team which has also adapted Dracula and at least one Sherlock Holmes story. I wondered what it means to title it "complete" if it's adapted in some way, but I don't know what adaptations were made. An interview in the back of the graphic novel suggests that there was some excision going on, but short of comparing this with the original novel, I can't say what or how much. The novel is complete in the sense that it incorporates Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (including the "lost" - at least until 1974 - chapter: "The Wasp in the Wig".

The original title for the first novel was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The novel is illustrated by Érica Awano, with colors by PC Siqueira, Ale Starling, and Jezreel Rojales. What a collection of fascinating names! The artwork here is very traditional, reminiscent of some of the original work, apart from a brief caesura between the two stories, which is illustrated in relatively drab colors and a different style. The colors are also appropriately muted in the main body of each story, each frame in a rigid box, old-style, and Alice is depicted in the now traditional blue frock with a white pinafore and Mary Janes on her feet. The dress seems to have originated in 1903 in Macmillan's "Little Folks" edition of the story.

The story follows the original faithfully, and appears to keep the important bits while dispensing with the chaff, but its been a while since I read the original (or rather, listened to). This compared favorably to Lewis Helfland's version, which I also read and liked back in September 2014. This version, however is much more traditional in style, so I'd recommend it for anyone who wants to read a graphic novel version, but also wants to feel like they're returning to the roots of the original.

I Hate Fairyland Vol 1 by Skottie Young, Jean-Francois Beaulieu

Rating: WORTHY!

This graphic novel was just nuts. I am so glad I managed to get an advance review copy! This is over-the-top done right. This little girl gets sucked into fairyland one night and to get out, she has to go on a quest to find this key. Well she's not particularly good at following instructions, so she ends up spending 27 years there, and she's not happy. Although she has the body of a young girl, she has the mind of a woman in her mid thirties and she's pissed-off, so she goes on a rampage with a short-handled, heavy duty halberd. Now where she came by that, I have no idea, but she's soon taking out trolls, and giants and fairies, and whatever she wants. It's hilarious. After she takes down a whole village of zombie fauns, she wise-cracks about Faun of the Dead.

The writer and illustrator was Scottie Young, although someone else did the coloring. The whole thing was absurd and hilarious and very entertaining. This was a kick-ass female character in the commonly-employed sense the word. That's not a sense that I typically employ it for, but it does have its uses!

I loved how wicked and irreverent the comic was, particularly how wicked the humor was. Let's face it, fairyland had it coming. I recommend this one.

Golem by LRNZ aka Lorenzo Ceccotti

Rating: WORTHY!

This graphic novel, which is an advance review copy that I was very grateful to have had the chance to read, started out quite stunningly. After a brief message from the president of Italy, proudly listing the advances technology has brought to the Italian people - advances which, which superficially wonderful, nevertheless carried with them a vague undercurrent of threat - the scene changed to the countryside and the artwork was stunning. Truly captivating. This imagery comes in the dreams of Steno Critone, the young main character who has slept badly. He wakes after another first person PoV dream of this man being shot. His day begins with a commercial bombardment where some sort of AI, watching his every move, can remind him he's low on toothpaste and push a new toothbrush on him. The news greets him with more acts of terrorism. Wait, terrorism? In this ideal society? What's gone wrong? I'm sure we're about to find out!

The truly scary thing is that this society is exactly where ours is heading, even to the detail of too many personal vehicles on the streets causing bumper to bumper traffic. Not that vehicles even have bumpers any more. Table tops show video, Amazonian reminders that you're out of product A or low on item B, pop up routinely. Information overload is dire. I loved the detail of the ambulance personal saying, "You can't die here sir," and no one even pays any attention.

One thing which hasn't changed is bullying. The trope of Steno being bullied in the classroom and no one doing anything about it is a tired one. Luckily for Steno, his friend Rosabella Filagone speaks up for him. Shortly after this is when it all goes to hell. The terrorists kidnap Rosabella and her father and Steno is pulled along with them, but are they terrorists, or are they simply a group of people who have realized that society is out of control and the wrong people are in charge? Steno joins with them, but shows a surprising lack of concern over the fate and welfare of his mother, Edea. This group behaves as though they've rejected technology yet they use it more, and in more advanced versions, than people back in society do. This is where the story became very confusing!

I felt it lost a little from the middle towards the end. It wasn't quite as engrossing, and a bit confusing at times, but the overall story came through and made sense. I can see this kind of thing happening - not quite as fantastical as is illustrated here, but definitely down that same slippery slope in many ways. I felt that the last half of the story expended an awful lot of pages saying very little - a lot of minimalist pages, and black pages. I feel for the trees! But that said, I enjoyed this romp and found it to be a worthy read. The artwork especially was captivating, and I recommend it.

Paper Girls Vol 1 Brian K Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson

Rating: WORTHY!

Well this was a fun romp and definitely something I'd like to continue reading. It proves you can write a story with the word 'paper' in the title and not make a complete johngreen of yourself. I can't say much about the art because this was an advance review copy and it looked like the artwork had been 'de-rezzed' to make the file size smaller. This made for quick page turning, but it was hard to see exactly how the final art will look. In very general terms, it looked fine, though. It was reminiscent of older comics, not in the fact that it was pointillist (it wasn't, thankfully!), but in the general style, and this was fine because this was set in the late eighties, and there are a lot of eighties references, be warned.

It has four intriguing, amusing, and interesting female teens all of whom deliver newspapers in the neighborhood. Three of them hang out together and the fourth joins them and gets to know them over the course of the early morning delivery, but there's a heck of a lot more going on here than delivering papers.

It's the morning after Halloween, so there are some costumed people still around (although why they would still be around at that hour of the morning is a bit of a mystery). The girls have a run-in with some of them - in fact that's how they all meet - and then they split-up to finish their rounds quickly. This is when trouble starts as one pair contacts the other pair over a walkie-talkie (no cell phones back then, remember!), and when they meet up, it turns out some weird dudes in ninja costumes have stolen their other walkie-talkie.

The feistiest of the girls, Mackenzie, aka Mac, vows to take it back. Tiffany and KJ are on-board immediately, and the new girl, Erin, follows along. They end up in a basement where there is a machine which Mac erroneously compares with an Apollo space capsule. It's actually more like a Mercury capsule, but she doesn't know enough to know that. Some sort of power or force comes out of the capsule and the girls immediately beat a retreat.

Here's where it goes to hell. Now there are pterosaurs flying around, which I note some reviewers misidentified as dinosaurs. They're not. They were no more dinosaurs than the aquatic reptiles from that era were dinosaurs). The thing is that these pterosaurs were carrying armored "pilots" who seemed to be zapping everyone they found with sticks reminiscent of the weapons from the Stargate movie. With so many disappearing, people think it's the rapture! The new guys in the armor seem to be at war with the ninja dudes and the girls are, in the words of Stealers Wheel, "Stuck in the middle with news." (That might not be what they sang!).

And that's all the spoilers you're going to get! Yeah, I know, I'm a mean old cuss, but I loved this story! There's feistiness, weirdness, time-travel, maybe parallel worlds, and it all starts with some girls delivering newspapers. I love that it's so different and, within context, believable. These girls don't do out of character stuff, and they don't act completely at random. They're totally believable in everything they do and say, and the story flows so naturally. My only complaint about this story is that, in the words of Queen, "I want it all and I want it now!" When's the next volume due out?! Sadly Queen doesn't get a mention in this graphic novel - and neither do any other bands, which is a bit odd, but no worries! I hold out hopes for some musical references in later volumes, and in the meantime, I recommend this as a worthy read!

Klaw The First Cycle by Antoine Ozanam, Joël Jurion, Yoann Guillé

Rating: WARTY!

This was an odd graphic novel and while I thought it was a good idea, I had too many issues with it and gave up reading it about two thirds the way through. This is what happens when I break my vow to never read any fiction with the word 'cycle' in the title! On another note, there are multiple stories titled "Klaw", believe it or not, and this isn't connected with any of the others as far as I know, so if you're looking for this particular one, make sure you get the creator's names memorized so you get the right book!

I was grateful for the chance of an early look at an advance review copy, especially one which had so much potential and with an amazing cover image, and while I recognize it was written for a younger age group than mine, I had some real problems with it nonetheless. One problem I didn't have was the artwork: it was beautifully done. Joël Jurion's drawing was decent - nothing spectacular, but nothing off-putting either, so that was a good start, but Yoann Guillé's coloring was magical. The plotting/writing left something to be desired however and that's a problem for me.

Angel Tomassini has a chronic bullying problem, but it's fantastical to the point of being ridiculous. He's chased in full view of everyone in the school and no one - not one single person, students or staff - does a thing about it. It's hardly surprising then, given how much fantasy we're already in, that he can turn into a huge tiger. He's not only bullied by the trope bullies, he's also bullied by the boyfriend of a girl he likes - a girl he was foolish enough to text. Her boyfriend Kurt saw the text and starts bullying him in full view of everyone at the pool, including the girlfriend upon whom Angel crushes. Again, no one does a thing about it, not even to raise a voice in protest, not even the girl in question. I sincerely hoped at this point that Angel was not going to end up with this lame, selectively blind, jerk of a girl, but that hope was forlorn.

The story gets interesting when Kurt is killed - by something with claws - even though it's obvious who's done it. It gets dumb again when the cops haul Angel down to the station without benefit of counsel or even his parents. Seriously? Angel is the son of a guy who owns the biggest fish wholesale business in the country. Yep, his dad sleeps with the fishes, and he also has major league mob connections, so Angel is freed pretty quickly. This begs the question as to why he's so freely bullied by all and sundry. Either he's a kid with ties to the mob and people are therefore in some fear of messing with him, or he's viewed as a no-import little guy who everyone (including some cops) feels free to bully. It doesn't work both ways. And Angel has to be truly stupid to have never figured out that his dad is shady at best.

As if this isn't improbable enough, Lisa, the girl who Angel is crushing on, and the now ex-girlfriend of dead Kurt, calls Angel up out of the blue and invites him to attend the same dinner she had planned on going to with Kurt. Seriously? But it gets worse. The next day at school she greets him by name, hugs him and kisses him on the cheek. More seriously? But it gets worse! This girl knows he has mob connections and despises them, yet she still asks him out and then later dumps him because of his mob connections! Even more seriously?! This girl has psychological problems, and none of these characters make any sense. Not that any of this bothers shallow Angel who is about as one-dimensional as you can get and still manage to exist in three dimensions. Supposedly Lisa was threatened in order to force her to go out with Angel, but if that was the case, how come she was so enthusiastic about it? How come she doesn't feel threatened when she summarily dumps him? Again, it makes no sense.

The story became too ridiculous for me when Angel starts donning a super-hero costume to fight crime. On the one hand he supposedly loves his father, but on the other, he's committed to putting him out of business. Okay, I'll give that the benefit of the doubt, but why does he need a super hero costume? He's already disguised as a tiger! I'm sorry, but I can't go with this. I wish the creators all the best because I like to support foreign efforts. This was a lot of work, but it didn't seem to me like it was well thought-through.

Don't Juggle Bees by Gerald Hawksley

Rating: WORTHY!

The title of this book would seem to be eminently safe and useful advice, as is everything between these covers! Back in February 2016, I favorably reviewed this author's book which advised readers what to do if they have a hat, amongst other things. It seemed such a sensible book that I figured this one had to be of equal utility , and I am pleased to report that I was not wrong!

Juggling bees, however, is only one aspect of this fount of wisdom. Other useful tips include advice on whether it's wise to take a bath with a crocodile, balance an elephant on your nose, bounce on the bed with a hippo (parents might want to weigh in on that), or let monkeys drive your car. I can't find fault with any of the advice given here, and so I can do no other than to recommend this book! It's full of fun, frivolity and silliness in fine fettle, and it's probably guaranteed to make your child smile if not belly laugh (although this should not be deemed as an offer or representation for legal purposes. Or porpoises. It definitely amused me. That, I do guarantee!