The Demon King by Cinda Williams Chima

Rating: WARTY!

The Demon King is part of some sort of series, but at least it said that squarely on the front cover "A Seven Realms novel". I have no idea if this means it's just set in the same world as other novels, or if it's part of a series, but it read like a stand-alone - at least in the way it began. The impression I get from fellow reviewers though, is that this is nothing more than a five-hundred page prolog for the other books in the series. Yawn. I blame the money grubbers in Big Publishing™ for fostering a culture of series in YA novels, and authors for tamely going along with it like so many sheep about to be shorn.

While I'm not a fan of series, I don't mind stories set in the same world. It would be truly foolish to do so! Unfortunately, this started out larded with trope and cliché, and in the beginning, it managed to avoid pissing me off with that, but it danced so shamelessly with those banes of young adult authors that I harbored serious doubts I would get very far. In the end I made it a little over one-third the way through before it became far too mired for my taste.

The sad thing is that this novel is just over five hundred pages long, and yet in that first third, all it had achieved was to establish a love triangle between the princess, the son of the captain of the guard, and the son of the palace wizard. Yep. That's all it did. The author could have put this into a prolog of a few pages long. I would have skipped it as I always do, and everyone would have been happy! But no, we have to spend a hundred-fifty pages crawling through this overblown set-up. Oh, and yeah, there's some dude whose people are rooted in American Indian culture too. Han Alister is the Luke Skywalker of the story - a powerful person of honorable descent who has spent his young life in ignorance of his power and destiny. Blecch! And yes, there's a Darth Vader (the head wizard), and a Han Solo (the guard captain's son), and a Princess Leia, er Raisa.

Wait, there are American Indians (close enough) and a queen? Yes. Believe it or not, there are. Even after a hundred-fifty pages, I still had no idea about this world, so poor as the world-building. It could have been Star Wars! I couldn't tell if it was in the very early days of the wild west, or in steam-punk Victorian times, or more modern even than that. Obviously, it was a fantasy world, so there are no direct ties, but even so, I felt lost. After we had been introduced to the captain's son, who, now back from military school (where warring tribes all train together? What?), is tall and muscular and chiseled, has a square jaw, and has girlish eyelashes and flecks in his eyes! Barf! It was at the point that I went looking for a good dose of Phenergan to stem my nausea, and ditched this novel post haste. Are YA authors medically incapable of originality? It would seem so. It's the precious few who are off the reservation whom I seek out, and they are a rare and treasured breed. This author isn't one of them.

In terms of writing, there were some common errors - common to many YA novels I've read of late, that is. One was where a snake was described as poisonous: "As if he had a large poisonous snake in there" but snakes aren't poisonous, they're venomous. A native would know the difference between venom and poison, especially if they collect herbs and fungi for medicinal purposes and trade, so this one tugged me out of suspension of disbelief briefly.

On the very next page, I read an example of what is evidently fast becoming a change in the English language as yet another author used 'staunch' where 'stanch' was desperately seeking employment. Personally I am a staunch supporter of those who stanch blood flow from open wounds, but I guess this author is not! It's sad to see this from young writers, but the English language is without a doubt extraordinarily fluid and dynamic, and never more so than it has been of late. But this and several other such issues - when added to the tedious love triangle, and a frankly limp and lackluster female main character - were enough to persuade me that this was not worth finishing, much less pursuing into 'seven realms'.

Pop Gun War Vol 1 Gift by Farel Dalrymple

Rating: WARTY!

Frankly this comic book was a complete mess. I read the whole thing through and had no idea what the author was trying to relate! The story began with some young kid picking angel wings out of the trash and discovering he can fly with them, but he does nothing, goes nowhere, learns nothing, and delivers nothing. And I have no idea what the title has to do with the story!

If this is "more about a feeling you, the reader, get from the story", then what I got was disappointed. Very. I'm sure the author knew what he was putting into the page, but it failed to come out on the reader's side for me! The artwork was black and white (99% of it anyway), very heavy on the black, and the story jumped around so much and was so light on text that I was lost most of the time trying to figure out what the heck the story was doing. While I am always glad to have a chance to read cutting edge advance review copies of graphic novels, some of them just are, quite evidently, not for me, no matter how interesting they sound from the blurb. I can't in good faith recommend this one, although I wish the writer/artist good fortunate with their career.

The Crystal Skull by Manda Scott

Rating: WARTY!

Well I guess I'm done with Manda Scott as an author of interest! This is the second I've tried of hers and it was a non-starter - or more accurately, it was a great starter, but rapidly fell apart. Reader Susan Duerden's voice wasn't bad, but neither was it wonderful. It was okay.

Not to be confused with Crystal Skull by Rob Macgregor, this story had a wonderful premise which was sadly squandered, but what lost it for me was when the book started flashing back to Elizabethan times and modern times got boring. I lost all interest. In a print book, and somewhat in an ebook, you can skip parts you don't like and get to the next good bit, but it's really hard to do that in an audio book!

The story was of two young newly-weds, Stella and Kit, whose wedding gift to each other was to explore one of the limestone caves in Yorkshire, England (which is where my parents were born! Not in a cave, silly, in Yorkshire!). They were the first to enter this one particular cavern in over four hundred years (hence the Elizabethiana), and just as this one obscure legend had it, they discovered the heartstone, which appeared to have mystical powers. Either that or Stella seriously needed a brain scan to detect that tumor she certainly has growing in her skull.

Of course it's not that easy. The authorities don't care of course, that someone who values life very little wants to take that stone from them, either to own it or to destroy it, yet instead of turning the stone and the location of the cavern over to appropriate authorities, these two complete dicks start squirreling it away. Stella lies, even to her husband, that she's disposed of it. I stopped liking them both at that point. They are irresponsible jerks and I lost all interest in reading any more about them. If they'd had good reason to do as they did, that would be one thing, but the author gives us no reason other than selfishness and stupidity for them to hold onto the stone and keep the cave secret, and that never makes for a fun story in my experience. The monotonous flashbacks to that delusional charlatan Michele de Notredame and the wa-ay overrated John Dee were trite and laughable, worthy of an amateur writer, not a professional. I can't recommend this based on what I listened to.

Anna The Girl Witch Vol 2 Wandering Witch by Max Candee

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second I have read of this series, and although I am not a fan of series, and this one is definitely outside of my age range, I found it to be as entertaining as the first, which I rated positively. There were a couple of portions where I became bored, notably when Anna spends so much time with her grandmother, Baba Yaga before she goes on her quest. This wasn't entertaining to me. I am not a fan of Baba Yaga stories at all, which was one reason this bored me. The time spent in this endeavor seemed to really drag and produce very little fruit, and there were, for me, far too many pages expended on Baba. The quest was much more fun, and really kicked the story back into high gear, but then we hit another tedious section where Anna is involved with this really annoying cat, and frankly I skipped most of that because it was even more boring than the time she was with Baba.

Those sections aside, I enjoyed the story very much and consider it a worthy read for the intended age range. Anna continues to be a strong young girl who wants to do good even as she fears that using magic is somehow allowing the same darkness into her heart which has overtaken and possessed her grandmother. It's a bit scary for Anna, who is trying to find where her father is and rescue him. Can Anna rebel against her grandmother - who is seeking to own her as she tried to own her father - without letting either that darkness or her grandmother take her over?

Anna learns a lot more about her family history in this volume and frankly, it was a bit too much for my taste. Maybe others will like the firehose of family history, but I would have preferred the same volume delivered as a trickle over the length of the story. It was interesting in some ways, but it rather deadened the mind when so much of it was unloaded all at once, and it really brought the story-flow to a bit of a halt.

There are moments of good humor, though, which helped to lighten the load, despite the rather oppressive tone of the volume as a whole, such as when I read "...the sound of an enraged tiger in the taiga." which made me laugh out loud. Anna is an impressive character who fears the consequences of her use of magic, but who also wants to do some good with it if she can. Besides there's a father to rescue, and a matching hand for her disembodied helper, Squire, to be found. I recommend this for the age range, but it's not a series I am interested in following for myself, especially when I have so much else to read!

Love Volume 3: The Lion by Frédéric Brrémaud, Federico Bertolucci

Rating: WARTY!

(Note that this was an advance review copy)

I've been following this series since it began, and after the first two volumes (The Tiger and The Fox, I found I didn't like this third one. The art work was poor in comparison with the previous two volumes (although decent by your average run-of-the-mill comic books standards) and the story was nothing but one long run of violent and bloody encounters between lions and their prey, and between lions and other lions.

It was not interesting to me, and there really was very little respite from it, especially given that the art work offered nothign truly appealing to look forward to. This doesn't accurately even reflect the life of a lion, which is actually much more along the lines of lying around all day, day after day, and once in a while going on a hunt, and of course, once in a while mating and defending territory. It's really pretty boring, and why people think lions are majestic and kings of the jungle is a complete mystery to me.

On a technical note, I had a problem with this advance review copy on the iPad in Bluefire reader - it would not open at all and locked-up the app! I was able to open and read it on Adobe Digital Editions on my desktop computer. I think this had the potential to tell a really engaging story, but somewhere the lions lost the scent and meandered off. I can't recommend it.

Black Magick Vol 1 Awakening by Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

(Note that this was an advance review copy)

This is one of the most engaging comics I've read in some time. It's black (magic) and white - or more accurately, gray-scale, but this took nothing from it and may actually have been a far better choice of "color". The drawing was excellent!

The story is of Rowan Black, a detective with the Portsmouth Police Department, and someone who is my idea of a strong female character. Not that she goes around beating people up - that's not what I mean. She's strong in that she's self-possessed, confident, can handle her own life, doesn't need a guy to validate her, is loyal to her friends, but not afraid to upset them if police work interferes with her social life. Honestly, I really liked this character. I'd also like to see her in a regular novel. I'd like to see her on the movie screen, too. And I could see Tatiana Maslany playing her!

Her social life? Well apart from a drink after work with her fellow detectives, she's a witch and attends coven meetings - not new age pagan and Celtic throwback stuff, but real witchcraft. Here's how invested I was in this story and this is in the first few pages. I was so focused on what the characters were saying that I went through two or three pages and didn't even notice that they were naked under their skimpy robes! I guess I'm not a "real man" any more! LOL! So yes, be warned that this is an adult novel and the artist doesn't shy from nudity.

As in any homicide detective story, a corpse (or two) show-up, but in this case, the more Rowan and her partner investigate, the more it appears to Rowan that someone is targeting her. How can someone else's death be aimed at her? You'll have to read this one to find out! And those who are after her aren't at all concerned how much collateral damage they cause. I want volume 2, and I want it now, or hexes will be cast!

The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean

Rating: WARTY!

I reviewed this author's The Death Defying Pepper Roux this month and really liked it, so I was curious to see how a second novel by this same writer would turn out, and this was just the opposite. Again I have to offer kudos for setting the story outside her comfort zone (as defined in this case by a British author writing a novel set in China). We see far too little of that, especially in young adult novels, but the problem here, for me, was that the novel really delivered nothing to hold my interest. I kept finding my mind wandering onto other things rather than saying focused on the story (it was an audiobook fyi), and that is never a good sign!

I made it a third the way through, but couldn't sustain interest in some kid who decided that being lofted on a kite was a good career move! What won me over in the previous story was the humor. There was none here, and I really missed it. I can't recommend this based on the portion of it I heard. The reading was okay by a mixed cast, some of whom actually sounded Chinese, but no amount of feeling injected into a novel is going to make it listenable if the story doesn't grab you.

Gotham Academy Vol 2 by Becky Cloonan, Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Mingjue Helen Chen, Msassyk

Rating: WARTY!

I had an advance review copy of volume one in this series and wasn't overly impressed with that, so why I went back a second time I don't know! Call it rum spring air, Hamish! LOL! This story was just boring. Maybe younger readers who liked volume one will find this entertaining, but to me it was just a mess - a mishmash of sub-stories (and sub-standard stories) pulling every which way and it was hard to follow. Random characters (Batman put in a very brief appearance, as does someone who might or might not be Robin, as well as some villains such as Manbat and Clayface), but the story was a mess and uninteresting to me. The artwork wasn't bad, but the writing was tedious and the whole thing unappealing overall. I'm definitely done with this series now!

Lumberjanes Vol 2 by Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Brooke Allen, Maarta Laiho

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of two graphic novels I picked up from the library, and neither was very engaging. I've wanted to read The Lumberjanes for a while, so I was pleased with the chance I got courtesy of the local library, but the novel turned out to be a real disappointment. It's volume two, and I missed volume one, so I may be lacking something from not having that read under my belt, but even if I had, I think I would have still found this a disappointment. Stevenson's and Ellis's writing wasn't awful, and the artwork by Allen and Laiho (colors) wasn't bad either, but the story itself was boring to me. It's just a bunch of weird girls at a summer camp in the woods. They're not lumberjacks. They routinely are invaded by fantastical or anachronistic creatures (in this one, for example, dinosaurs and giant fireflies). They beat them off, rinse, and repeat. it was tedious and I can't recommend this. Maybe younger kids might like it, but parents might not approve of the PG-13-rated version of swearing employed by the kids. I DNF'd it about one-half to two-thirds the way through.

The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean

Rating: WORTHY!

Finally I get to post one review out of this set that was a really decent read - or in this case a 'listen' because it was an audio book from my ever praiseworthy local library. The novel is praiseworthy too, in that it's funny (laugh out loud funny at times, although it falls off a lot in the last third, be warned), and it's set in France, which is different at least, even though it's written by an English author. It's nice to read a story not set in the US or the UK for a change! It's also the kind of novel which makes me want to read more by the same author, which is always a good thing. I am particularly interested to see what she did with Peter Pan - she was commissioned to write a sequel to it! Note that McCaughrean is pronounced Muh-Cork-Ran

The story here (or there, since it's set in historical times rather than modern day) is that Pepper Roux thinks he's going to die and runs away from it. Why 'Pepper' rather than the French word for Pepper, which is 'Poivre' is a bit of a mystery. Poivre does appear to get a mention here and there, but with this being an audio book, I cannot be sure. I initially thought the reader was saying 'pauvre', which is French for 'poor' as in 'sorry-assed', and it may well be that he was. I wasn't sure. The reader was Anton Lesser. As far as I know, he's no relation to Kenneth Moore. Or Ronald Biggs. Or the old British comedy team of Little and Large. Given his name, he might be related to Daphne du Maurier, which is French for "More bay tree!" Actually I just made all of that up. I don't know more about Lesser except that the did a really good job reading this novel.

Pepper is told by an aunt that he will die on his fourteenth birthday, so he's at a really loose end. He goes to see his father, who is holed up in un hôtel, drunk, and so Pepper takes his hat and coat, dons them, and boards his father's ship in his dad;s stead, setting sail with the crew as their captain. Yes, the story is ridiculous and improbable, but it's told in such a way that it really seems like this might have happened. What Roux doesn't know is that the crew has been paid to scuttle the ship for insurance money!

This is only the beginning of a series of equally improbably, but highly believable adventures, each as amusing as the next. The story rolled on in this fashion in high style until the last third, and particularly the last sixth, where it became mired in self-justification and exposition. I think it would have been better as a shorter story with no conclusion, but with Pepper simply heading off into the sunset on his next adventure instead of explaining everything. That didn't work for me. But given how much I had enjoyed this story for the first two-thirds, I am very happy to rate it as a very worthy read.

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff, or Bad Monkey by Curtis Smith, or Superfreak: Bad Monkey by Melanie Kendry, this audio book I got from the library was a plodding bore from the off, so I DNF'd it. Plodding is appropriate since in Britain that's a derogatory name for a cop and this cop story set in the US was insufferably plodding and meanderign into a bunch of tedious crap that had nothing to do with the murder. The reading by Arte Johnson did not help at all. It was like listening to a Public Radio documentary - and not one that was interesting, but one that was so tedious you wonder how it ever got green-lighted to begin with. It was awful.

It did not help that the main character, Yancey, was a jerk, a moron, and a complete dick to begin with. He was one of the most unappealing main characters I have ever encountered: lazy, immoral, clueless, unmotivated, selfish, womanizing, and a slob. I was unable to see anything in him that would make me want to read (or in this case listen to) any more about him. The plot sounded interesting: a severed arm is hauled in by a guy on a fishing trip off the Florida keys. The arm bears a valuable wedding ring but is missing a wristwatch, and which has its middle finger extend from its fist? How can you start with a premise like that and bore the pants off me? Ask Carl Hiaasen. He managed it. I can't recommend this based on what little I could stand to listen to.

Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with William Johnstone's Dreams of Eagles!

I could not get into this book at all, so I don't know how much value this will be - it's not so much a review as an opinion about writing! After I realized I was never going to read this, which was shortly after I began reading it, I went out to look at some reviews of people I follow, and others, and I quickly realized my initial impressions were right. I wasn't going to like this, and since it's almost five hundred pages, I also wasn't going to read this when there is so much else out there which is not only just begging to be read, but which is also willing to offer me a square deal as a reader. I do have an audio book by this author on a different topic, so I will revisit her and see if she can engage me with that.

I was interested in this because it's about Boudicca (change the 'u' to an 'a', and the second 'c' to an 'e' - easily done when writing by hand - and you have 'Boadicea') who has long been of interest to me because I don't think any writer has depicted her as anything other than a gallant 'warrior woman', when really she was nothing more than a terrorist. She may have felt good reason to lay waste to several cities, but the bottom line is that she simply went on a rampage because the Romans pissed her off, and she mercilessly slaughtered literally thousands of men, women, and children for no reason (like there ever is a reason other than insanity for such actions), including thousands of her fellow Britons. She probably wiped out more Britons than ever she did Romans. Se was such a poor warrior that an inferior, but well-organized force of Romans wiped out her hoard of barbarians, and brought peace back to a country which she had thrown into terror and turmoil by her intemperate and precipitate actions.

The name, Boudica, is mentioned only five times in this entire book! She has been known by many names, but the one used here is one I've never encountered before: Breaca? Whence that came I have no idea, but it appears (as Breaca nic Graine) only in this novel to my knowledge, and when I began reading this, I started to think this was not about Boudicca, but about her ancestors, and she wouldn't show up until volume two, until I realized that Breaca was in fact Boudicca. Yes, this is a series, and I am not a fan of series, which was another good reason to abandon this before it gets any worse.

If the first volume is so unappealing, I sure am not interested in reading another three five-hundred page (or whatever) novels after this one! And this volume was so diffuse and wandering and ethereal that it was entirely unappealing to me. Plus it's complete fiction of course, with very little history. Admittedly facts are hard to come by in this case, but we do know of the life these people led, to some extent, and I saw very little of it here, the author preferring to meander off into occultism and dreaming. We could have been reading about American Indians instead of the Iceni people.

I really don't get what it is about historical fiction writers that drives them to produce massive tomes and then sequels to those massive tomes. Of course it's very lucrative, isn't it, if you can suck (or sucker) your readers in and addict them to endless derivative volumes? Publishers love authors who do that. As for me, I prefer authors who write for their readers, and not so much their bank balance, and I think this author would have served her readers better with one volume, cutting out all the extraneous ethereal nonsense and focused on the known facts.

The problem of course with that, is that the facts are few when it comes to Boudicca. Almost nothing is known about her other than her crazed rampage. It's not even known how she died or where her final battle was (although one possible site is quite close to where I grew up, amusingly enough!). There is a rumor that she's buried on platform 9¾! I am not kidding. I wonder if this is why Rowling chose that location for her Potter series, because one rumor has it that Boudicca is buried between platforms nine and ten at what is now King's Cross station in London. This burial is doubtful, though!

We know nothing about her before and after the rampage. Her real name? Boudicca means the same as Victoria - victory. It probably was no more her real name than is Breaca nic Graine! The names of her daughters? Unknown, although there are wild guesses at them. Where she died? Unknown, Where she's buried? Unknown. My guess is that she died at what's known as the Battle of Watling Street, and was left along with the thousands of other corpses to rot. Find the battle site, you'll find her. It's possible that her surviving supporters returned later and buried her, but the chances are that those who knew her died with her and no one else would know her well enough to recognize her body.

So based on what I saw of this novel and the portion I read, I can't recommend it. You'll have to read someone else's review to get a better overview of this one than I can offer though.

Smart Girls Get What They Want by Sarah Strohmeyer

Rating: WORTHY!

I seem to have entered a period of really bad books that fail to gain my attention (apart from the initial discovery, where the blurb made it seem like the book might be really interesting). Fortunately, I happen to have access to a really excellent public library with awesome librarians, so my mistakes cost me very little! I can DNF these experimental reads/listens without impoverishing myself. All Hail Public Libraries!

This is how I came to have yet another trope YA novel in my hands and one which appears, yet again, to be written by a female author who seems to dislike women. I mean, if she didn't, then why would she characterize them like this? Not to be confused with Mary Hartley's The Smart Girl's Guide to Getting What You Want, which this main character could have probably benefited from reading,Smart Girls Get What They Want is your typical YA story of the nerd and the jock, 'forced' together in a ridiculous fashion and falling for each other notwithstanding some heavy-duty reasons why they should not. This much I knew from reading only the first chapter.

The author makes the classic mistake of imbuing her main character with her own qualities, views, musical tastes and perspectives, even though she is old enough to be the main character's mother, if not grandmother. Thus we get references to the Rolling Stones and other anachronisms. That's not to say that no seventeen-year-old girl can quote lyrics from The Rolling Stones - only that it's so highly unlikely that it really kicks a reader out of the suspension of disbelief. What, there were no bands to which a seventeen year old might listen to and quite from? Or is the author simply too lazy to look them up? In this high-tech age, it's not hard to look up the bands to which teens might listen, and find the lyrics to a song or two by them. Or make up your own bands and lyrics. Or simply not have her quote a lyric, and thereby lend her a little more inventiveness and originality if you want your readers to really dig her. And this wasn't the only anachronistic reference.

The story is ostensibly about three friends, but it's really about only the first person narrator, and the friends (so-called) are given short shrift as ever. They're really more tools than friends. Because it's first person this gives the impression that she's all about herself an no one else, which is another problem with first person PoV. Genevieve (aka Gigi, LOL!) is the privileged, spoiled rotten MC, and Bea and Neerja are her 'friends'. They realize that Neerja's older sister was a nobody at school, perhaps because of her position as the smartest person in the class. The three decide they don't want to be that way, but Gigi's plan is derailed when she gets accused of cheating on a chemistry exam. How the teacher managed to grade the tests and discover the similarities before the students even left the classroom is a mystery. I can only assume time passed, but it was written so badly that it looked like as soon as they got up to leave the classroom, the teacher was calling them back with the graded tests already on his desk!

She didn't cheat, but because the jock's answers, including the extra credit question, are so much like hers, both of them were tarred with the same cheating brush, and the jock is such a selfish dick that he turns it all into a joke. Gigi is supposedly this go-getter girl, but she fails dismally to defend herself, and the school "discipline" hearing is such a complete and utter joke that it lacked all credibility for me. The school didn't even contact the parents about this. This is all so unbelievable as to really throw the story out as far as I was concerned, although I did read on for a while to see if it offered any hope of improvement. It just got worse. At this point I not only detested the jock, I detested the main character. This is never a good sign.

It wasn't believable for several reasons, the first of which was that the jock seemed out of place in the AP chemistry class. Not that no jock can be smart by any means, but that this particular one seemed like a complete jerk from the start and the author offered no rationale whatsoever for his even being in this class. Secondly, the ball-buster of a teacher who summarily accused them of cheating on his test was right there in the classroom. Are we supposed to believe that never once did he look up? Never once did he see this pair and notice that the jock was cribbing? Bullshit! It wasn't credible. This is amateur stuff. Thirdly, Gigi had already proven her academic chops and integrity over several years, and it just didn't sound likely she'd automatically be even suspected, let alone accused, found guilty and condemned without a trial. Her guilt is assumed throughout by both this teacher and the principal! This was done so ham-fistedly. They didn't get forced to take a new test to see who was cheating and who wasn't?

Clearly, the sole purpose of all this ridiculousness was to artificially throw these two together in a chemistry project, where they could fall in love. Why would Gigi even be remotely attracted to this selfish jerk who got her into all this trouble? I was so disappointed. It's not like this was a self-published first novel from a new writer! If it had been, it would likely have been rejected, but once you have your foot in the door, all the rules cease to apply to you, don't they?! I expected a lot better from someone who supposedly already had some writing chops, and I thought a female writer ought to have served her female character a lot better than she did in the portion of this I could stand to read. This novel was nonsense and trash.

The Black Magic Series Starter by Dennis Wheatley

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a collection of three full-length novels by Dennis Wheatley, who was a phenomenally successful writer in Britain from the 1930s to the 60's. For me, The Devil Rides Out was his best work, but the other two in this collection are also excellent reads if you're interested in the subject matter. I devoured these as a teen. Viewed as historical fiction, they hold up well, but there are some caveats.

The Devil Rides Out

I reviewed The Devil Rides Out back in January 2014 as part of a different Wheatley collection, but this one contains the same story so I will just refer you to that review for details. The basic story, set in the 1930s, consists of a group of close friends who find themselves up against the works of the Devil himself as embodied in his black magician disciple Mocata. Mocata is striving to achieve some devilish ends, and one of the friends, Simon Aaron, has foolishly got himself under the man's sinister influence. The Duc de Richlieu who is the only one of the group who has any magical experience, enters the fight along with Rex Van Ryn, who falls in love with one of the Satanic women who is also a neophyte in the Devil-worshipping group. Friends Richard and Marie-Lou Eaton also join the fray. It's a good old fashioned scary-story smothered in Christian religion mythology. I'm not a believer, but I love a good Satanic magic romp!

Strange Conflict

This is another in the Duc de Richlieu series. In it, the same people from The Devil Rides Out join forces again, to wage a battle, but this time on the astral plane. The story is set in the beginning of World War Two, with the question of how are the Nazis discovering the travel routes of British warships so successfully? Well, a magician is using the astral plane to convey intelligence, and the Duc and his pals array themselves against him. The story is replete with weird and wonderful conflicts in astral form, and also a tour of life in Haiti, with the attendant zombies - not the ridiculous ones of the modern era, but the original zombies - and they are surprising. Be warned that Wheatley is pompous, opinionated, devoutly upper-crust, rather racist, and full of British jingoism made worse by a war mentality, so if you want to enjoy this and his other works, you have to turn a blind eye to those failings. Whether he would have been a more enlightened person today, I do not know. I somehow doubt it.

The Haunting of Toby Jugg

Again set in World War Two, this novel features the improbably-named Toby Jugg, who is about to turn twenty-one and looks towards inheriting his grandfather's business fortune, since his father and mother are both dead and he has no siblings. His only relatives are his uncle, Paul and his aunt, Julia. There is one problem: he seems to be slowly losing his mind. It's not his only problem. Having been shot while flying on an air raid, he's paralyzed from the waist down and needs a nurse to take care of him. That's fine during the day, but it's at night when the nightmares come: visions of horrific creatures slithering and crawling all around him. His new nurse, charmer though she is, doesn't believe him and thinks he's just a spoiled, rich, baby. She doesn't know that his guardian, Helmuth Lisicky, is Satan worshipper who is causing his nightmares.

These stories were entertaining enough for me when I was in my young adult days, I wonder if I might find them so engaging now? If you have never read them, they do contain - aside from the irritating and offending parts, which are not overwhelming - some great occult and black magic story-telling which is untainted by modern custom and trope. It makes for a refreshing read in that regard, at least. I'd recommend these - with the above-mentioned caveats - for a change from modern reading and a different story-telling perspective.

The Toothless Fairy by Timothy Jordan

Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated in nice and colorful detail by Matthew LaFleur (and alternately written by Skeeter Buck according to Goodreads!), this rhyming story for young children was quite entertaining, and I liked it. Note that this was an advance review copy, and there are kinks in it which I hope will be worked out before it goes on sale. For me I was glad to have had a chance to read it.

One problem I often have in trying to read children's books on a phone is that the text is too small to read. Well, don't read them on a phone, you say, but I'm thinking of parents caught with a troublesome child in a waiting room, where the phone might be the only thing to distract them. And to support my case, this book was quite legible on my phone. The problem here was that pretty much every word in every line was run together, making it hard to read because of that. This was significantly irritating! This is one problem with ebooks. When you get a print version, you're getting what the author envisioned. Amazon's Kindle app doesn't necessarily agree with the author and renders its own version for better or for worse!

So take a pad next time, you advise. Well, I looked at this in the Bluefire reader app on my iPad, which is usually a sterling way to read graphic works and there, it was a quite different problem with the text! It was WAY TOO LARGE! It was so large that it was not readable, because aside from literally two or three letters, the entire text was off the page - and it wasn't possible to pinch the page to make it smaller and shrink the text! In short, this ARC version of this book is definitely not ready for prime time as it is! However, I treated this as if it were going to be fixed by publication date and pressed on, and it proved to be a worthy read.

This story might have been written by a dentist - and I mean that in a good way: as in written by someone who cares about your health. Poor dental hygiene can lead to serious ailments well outside the region of your mouth. The toothless fairy knows this, and she doesn't want children to end up like she did - eating too much sugar and ruining her teeth - so she takes action, replacing one child's candy with a musical instrument which is of far more use to the girl. Success! This is what we did with our kids as it happens - trading them cash for candy (while leaving them some, of course!). Lately as they've grown older, we've taken to going to a show or a movie for Halloween, especially one where we can get a square meal as we watch. It's worked out great.

But I digress! I liked the message in this story, and the fact that the fairy wasn't shown to be some impossible paragon of beauty. Quite the opposite in fact. I liked that the story was educational and fun, and very positive. I think it would be a great book to read to your kids in the weeks leading up to Halloween - or at any time when there's likely to be a chance to eat far more sugar than ever is good for a growing body!

Orange Animals on the Planet from Speedy Publishing

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not sure about the idea of an authorless book, since no author is named here, or about a publisher named 'Speedy', but I think this is the second children's book from this publisher I've reviewed and they're not at all bad. This one was quite dramatic: "on the planet"?! But orange animals are often dramatic, although the definition of orange is stretched somewhat here. Flamingos put in an appearance at one point, for example. I guess pink is the new orange! LOL!

That said, the book is very colorful and informative - a bit of information here and there - just enough for growing minds, and some really engaging photographs of the various animals. What was most impressive to me was the unusually wide range that's covered here. Typically a children's animal picture book favors mammals - the cuddly ones, even if cuddly when used there is stretched a bit to include lions and tigers and bears, oh my! It was nice to see a wider world here, with representatives of all five vertebrate classes featured: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There were also insects and arachnids, so kudos for that. It's important for children to learn how varied life is, and how important it is that we protect that variety.

We get to meet the clownfish (a mated pair here, evidently). What we don't learn is that Pixar's view of Clownfish life was biased in that typically, when the female dies, the male spontaneously goes transgender and becomes the new dominant female! Nemo could never have had his dad chasing him across the ocean after mom died! Not that a parent fish chases its offspring across the ocean! If it had, it's far more likely to have been the mom clownfish, but I digress. We also get to see and learn about the Andean cock-of-the-rock, the tiger, the Julia butterfly, the Baboon spider, orangutans, spider crabs, river hogs, newts, corn snakes and so on. It's a lot of orange. Note also that weights and measures in this book are in metric, not the lone hold-out USA system.

I liked this book. It's bold and straight-forward, varied and colorful, and educational. You can't ask for more in a children's book.

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.