The Spirit Chaser by Kat Mayor (or KM Montemayor!)

Rating: WARTY!

No! I'm sorry, but no. I had read about one third the way into this novel when I encountered this paragraph (below) and immediately quit it on principle. Note that this scene follows right behind one where Casey, the woman depicted here, has quit her job because she's been betrayed by Austin. She storms off to her office, pissed as all hell, and starts packing to leave. The guy follows her and manhandles her as described below.

He strode over to her, grabbed her by her shoulders, and spun her around. Her bag fell to the floor as he pushed her against the wall and planted his lips firmly on hers. Her eyes widened in surprise. Da-amn. He has strong lips. So strong, she could feel her toes curling. Casey was too stunned to protest. He took that as a green light and weaved his fingers through her hair without releasing any pressure from her lips. Not once did he try to stick his tongue down her throat, but that didn't stop it from being one of the most powerful kisses Casey had ever experienced.

You don't get to describe a guy in process of raping a woman and have the woman fall in love with him because of it, and then expect me to rate your fiction as anything other than trash. No, you don't. And this from a female author? Her toes curled? Seriously? I half-way expect this kind of garbage in the young adult world, but not in a mature novel for adult readers which is otherwise written reasonably well.

Austin has manhandled her before, and the appropriate response from Casey here would be to knee him in the groin, or punch his face, or at the very least wrench away from him or start yelling for help. This is a guy who has already proven himself to be a complete jerk and a dick, to have had no qualms about abusing her mentally, and for whom she has no love at all. Yet suddenly when he becomes brutal with her, she melts and succumbs to his "charms"? No! The bottom line here is that I don't care how well you write, you put this abusive trash in your story and you get an automatic fail from me. This kind of writing is a disgrace. It's worse than pornography in how it inexcusably disrespects women.

I'd already had several issues with this novel before this point, and this is the second of this author's novels I've read and been thoroughly unimpressed. It will be the last. Despite the problems though, I was still plugging away at it hoping for something better while fearing that Casey was too stupid to be worth reading about and that she and Austin, despite his appalling behavior, were sadly going to be paired off. I'd overlooked a couple of grammatical errors, such as "You're going to want you're fantastic job back" (where the second one should have been 'your', of course), because this was an advance review copy. While I appreciate the chance to review it, I don't appreciate this kind of abusive writing, which essentially instructs us that all any woman needs is some rough-handling and she'll fall for the guy who is abusing her. No!

The basic story sounded good. I'm not a believer in spirits or ghosts or demons, but I love a good story about that kind of thing, and there are not that many honestly good stories out there on these topics. This one is the first I've elected to read in a long time because of this, and it seemed like it might be a worthwhile read. The story is that Casey is hired as the resident psychic on a successful TV show, Spirit Chaser Investigations, wherein a team of people visits and films haunted houses.

After she does a walk-through of a purportedly haunted house and declares it a non-starter - there's nothing there - a dissatisfied Austin, the show runner with a deadline to meet, brings in another psychic for a second opinion, and shuffles Casey off for the day so she doesn't even know he's done this. He doesn't tell her until the last minute, right before the team watches the rough-cut of the episode they plan on airing, and Casey gets to see this other woman making up stories about bad events in the house, and going on about a civil war soldier, pretty much feeding Austin a total bunch of rot.

This is what happens when you let your dick think for you and bring in your old girlfriend to piss all over your current psychic. Casey naturally feels betrayed and storms off, leading to the sickening paragraph above. Evidently, she doesn't feel betrayed enough, because all Austin has to do is slam her up against a wall, force a kiss on her, and she's his BFF forever. I'll let you figure out what that middle 'F' means.

The issues I'd had with the novel before this were annoying but not automatic cancellations. There was too much trope, for one thing - purloined ideas from movies, such as that one of the haunted houses was built over a 'Native American' (that would be American Indian) sacred site, and the rocking chair which started moving by itself, and the house which has a façade that looks like an evil face: "The shadows cast a grinning humanoid visage against the façade, and the two upstairs bedroom windows looked like sinister eyes." I like my stories to be a bit more original than that, but I was willing to put up with it for a while at least.

I was even putting up with author foibles such as when Casey describes someone as her "New BBF" How can you have a new best friend forever?! It's a minor thing, but a lot of minor things add up over the length of a novel, such as the author's obsession with "granite countertops in the kitchen." Some parts were well written. I particularly liked this bit: "she spotted his most shameful secret. It was in the corner of his mind wrapped in the brown paper of guilt and tied with strings of self-loathing," taken from when Casey reads someone's mind (at their invitation). But there was nowhere near enough of that to overcome the deficits.

Other parts, for example, made no sense: "Her third eye showed her the dark mist overlying the upper floor." This was on a photograph she was looking at. I found myself taken out of suspension of disbelief to wonder how this worked exactly! She's not looking directly at the house, she's looking at an image of it, yet she still sees this misty aura around it? Is the photograph haunted?! Or is it that idea from the Doctor Who episode where the image of a weeping angel becomes an angel itself?

Given that there was a total lack of world-building here, the reader is offered no additional information at all about how any of this was supposed to work. Casey was evidently far too stupid to figure it out or even be curious about it, so we got zilch from her. After reading a few items like this, it felt to me like the author was simply randomly pulling trope ideas from the history of horror fiction, without doing anything to weld it into a coherent whole. She had some eastern mystic guy on the team, a Catholic priest, and an American Indian shaman (we never did learn what tribal affiliation he had, not in the portion I read). The whole thing was a pot-pourri of random elements, and the predictable result was that it stunk.

Some parts were just plain dumb and made the main character, Casey, seem tragically stupid - such as where Austin once again forces himself on her and overrides her own wish for lunch with his own plan. I was really starting to dislike him at this point. He whisks her off in his fancy car and she's having the wilts and the vapors over his driving! "For some reason, she'd always found it strangely powerful and sexy to watch a man drive a stick shift." I know the reason: she's simply that shallow! Maybe she does have these bizarre fantasies, but right after that came, "Austin downshifted as he approached a red light. Casey studied his movements. They were automatic. He didn't have to think about it. His right hand just knew what to do." Like this is some magical super power? No! Everyone who drives stick shift drives like this! That's what competent driving is all about.

I detest stick shift, but even I drive like this when I'm forced to drive such a vehicle, so this observation just made Casey look like a juvenile moron - or at best, someone who had led an extraordinarily sheltered life (which she had not). Another example of her lack of smarts is when she observes of Austin, "you should be the biggest skeptic in the world." Yet this is said to the guy who is running a show wherein he repeatedly reports on inexplicable supernatural phenomena! Just how stupid is Casey? Too stupid for me to want to read any more about her, rest assured.

I've never understood why it is that we have to literally get on our knees and beg for aid from a god which is supposed to be infinitely loving. Check this out: "Would you allow me to say a prayer of protection with you and give you a blessing?" This is not a problem with the writing per se because people really believe this stuff, but it gets worse. At one point the priest says, "The more people we have praying the better." Why is that? Does this god only pay attention if more than one person begs? Does he need a crowd begging on their knees before he will act? We learn, "If God had not restrained the enemy, you would still be trapped." but we don't learn why he let these people suffer before he so kindly stepped in and helped out. If he cares that much why isn't he smiting the demons instead of letting them punish people? Is this god a sadist? It was just one more example of how poorly the story hung together.

I quickly tired of the appalling abuse of vegetarians and vegans in this novel, too. Here's just one example of how they were repeatedly dissed: "Liv can make vegan cuisine and a few other Austin-approved dishes that don't taste like baked dog turds." Examples of such thoughtless writing were not uncommon, such as this one, on a different topic: "...he thought about placing the cool, metallic barrel against his tongue. He shoved it down his throat and pulled the trigger." I've never heard of anyone considering committing suicide by pushing a barrel down their throat. Aiming it up at the roof of the mouth, yes, but down the throat? Not so much! But maybe this tied in with Austin's perverse attitude towards sexuality. Who Knows. Maybe this novel should have been titled Fifty Shades of Spirit.

Out of curiosity (about this mixture of Eastern religion, Catholicism, and American Indian tradition, I looked up what kind of monsters and demons the American Indians have, and they're so pathetic as to be laughable. One of them, Aniwye was an Ojibwe legend of a large man-eating skunk monster which kills people by breaking wind at them, causing them to become sick and die! The 'demon' names are pathetic by themselves: Basket Woman? Perverted Merman? How about the 'Cannibal Dwarves'? Not much fodder there for your standard Catholic-based possession story which is, I assume, why we saw no such demons in the part of the story I read. Graham Masterton had the right idea in his 1977 novel, The Manitou, but ideas seemed very limited here.

So no, this novel is not worth reading, and I actively dis-recommend it. I do recommend sensitivity training for the author so we don't get any more novels of women being abused and the reader being expected to believe this is how romances really ought to be.

The Face of Fear by Dean Koontz

Rating: WARTY!

This is my first Dean Koontz novel, and I have to report that I could not get past the first third of it. Koontz has more pen names than I have fingers on two hands: David Axton, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, KR Dwyer, John Hill, Dean Koontz, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, and Aaron Wolfe. This novel has been released under three different names, including his own. The other two names were Brian Coffey and KR Dwyer.

The worst thing about this novel was Patrick Lawlor's atrocious reading, which turned me off from the start. It was truly sickening when he made the police detective sound just like the eponymous detective in the TV series Columbo, but given the way the character was written, Koontz probably modeled him on Columbo anyway. I just couldn't stand it. I may go back and attack this again in a print or e-version, but right now all I'm interested in is evasion!

The premise is that a sick killer by the name of The Butcher is terrorizing female victims. I did not like the relish with which Koontz described this terrorism, not did i like the way the investigation was laid out. The detective (aside from his Columbo impersonation), was obnoxious to me. I actually liked the Columbo TV series, but I sure didn't want want to follow an entire story having to deal with this guy. I found myself losing interest in the story repeatedly and in the end, I simply didn't care who dunnit, and gave up on it. I was a lot happier once I'd made that decision! Naturally I can't recommend this at all.

The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade

Rating: WORTHY!

Obviously rooted in the 1831 Victor Hugo novel, Notre-Dame de Paris ('Our Lady of Paris', and not 'Le Bossu de Notre-Dame' which would be a literal translation of the English title!) this one takes the idea into a fantasy world, where the 'hunchback', here called Modo, has the ability to change his appearance, but it's at some serious cost to his personal comfort. In this, the first of a series, Modo is a precocious, intelligent, and sensitive child who is raised from a very early age by the "mysterious Mr Socrates", who wants to recruit him to the British empire as a spy. Yes, I said it was fantasy. It sounded weird enough to tempt me anyway, even though it's really aimed at middle-grade readers, or perhaps the younger end of the YA age-range.

It started out well and held my interest for the first two-thirds, but I have to confess my enthusiasm waned somewhat towards the end. I really liked that Modo was not presented as a studly guy, or as someone to feel sorry for, nor was he given a magical cure for his maladies. He remained the same hunch-backed, stooped, odd-eyed character throughout, although he employed his shape-shifting abilities for his spy work, and later out of vanity when he met Olivia.

Olivia was another employee of Mr Socrates, and another reason why I liked this. Neither of the two main characters was shown as needing help or validation from the other. neither she nor Modo knew about the other until they met and it was some time after this that they realized they were on the same side, whereupon they began working together without need of direction, and succeeded admirably in the end, although their journey was perilous.

I recommend this story particularly for the appropriate age range(s). It's full of self-sufficiency, adventure, mystery, gadgets, mechanical beasts, and fun. As the name Modo suggests, he is far from a quasi-hero and is, instead, a really worthwhile character with a realistic view of the world. Olivia is a charmer, and I recommend this story.

Millennium by John Varley

Rating: WARTY!

Varley is a writer whom I like, but this novel left a lot to be desired in the writing quality department. I first saw this story as a movie starring Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd (that's how old it is!). I loved the movie. It, in turn, was based on a short story titled "Air Raid" which appeared in the inaugural edition of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in the spring of 1977. I reviewed it in October 2013. I think this novel was - in the incestuous way that Hollywood has - taken from the movie, so it feels a lot more familiar than Air Raid did, but it's written to be somewhat different for some inexplicable reason.

This novel is one that has such an absurd premise that you have to turn off brain cells and skim the most superficial level of it, if you want to enjoy the story. The movie was a critical and financial disaster, but I actually liked it. It was rated badly and made less than seven million (in 1989) which is a fortune to you and me, but a sorry waste of time in Hollywood dollars. Cheryl Ladd was a breath of fresh air which more than made up for Kris Kristofferson's predictably wooden performance. I'd recommend it over the stories, though.

Varley has a real problem with time in this novel - and I don't mean in the actual story, but in the details he writes, which keep changing. As far as I could tell, that is set in a future as far ahead of us as the Copper Age coming to the Fertile Crescent is behind us. It's a society where we're led to believe that though this world is at an end, with pollution and genetic deterioration running riot, the amazingly advanced technology they have - including time travel - cannot do a thing to help? The plan they develop is to go back to the past and collect healthy human specimens which they will then dispatch to another planet so the human race can start over. How they managed to be eight thousand years into the future and not even begin to colonize other planets is a mystery which goes unexplained, as is why they waited so long to implement even this solution.

The plan for collecting healthy human specimens is to scavenge air disasters and other disappearances. What they do is scan history to find an airplane crash. Before the crash happens, they link to the airplane and send in a team to remove the living humans and substitute zombie-like replicas which bear a superficial resemblance to the rescued people. This was before the age of DNA "fingerprinting" so all they do is replace the teeth in the zombie with a set which matches the rescued human and they're good to go.

Given that they want healthy human specimens, it makes no sense to collect a random sample from a jetliner. Wouldn't you want to run tests and take the most genetically fit specimens if you want to reboot the human race and give it the best chance? Yes, it's Eugenics, but this is the end of the entire race we're talking about here (and it's fiction), not some Nazi ethnic cleansing. Besides, healthy specimens come from all races, not just the so-called Aryans. So why focus on taking passengers from US air disasters? Seriously?! Oh that;s right! It's another US author for whom the rest of the world simply doesn't count! Got it!

To be fair, there is mention of taking others, including the largely fictional Roman 'lost' legion, but it would seem to me to be a lot easier if they had taken people from prehistoric times, who would not only be genetically healthier than modern humans, but also a heck of a lot easier to snatch without causing problems down the time line. "Hah! Got you!" I can hear you saying, "If they did that, they could wipe out whole populations of humans which descended from a couple of initial individuals, if they took either one of those 'founding parents'," but here's the thing: there are engineers in this story whose job it is to scan the timeline and discover suitable people for this abduction. All they have to do is scan them to their death and snatch all the ones who don't live to old age right before they're schedule to die in their original time. Easy-peasey

Not that they had no harmful genes a hundred thousand years ago, but they had fewer than we do today because most of those with genetic defects above a certain level of severity would not survive, unlike today. And why take only white folks, when Africans have the greatest genetic diversity, even today? I should note that it's the movie, in true Hollywood tradition, which shows the rescued passengers to be almost exclusively white, not the novel, but the novel never said a word about seeking genetic diversity or representation. Perhaps the author expected us to assume this, but it would not have hurt to clarify it.

For me, the biggest unanswered question was, given the technology they have, why can't they fix these genetic problems? Another good questions is, if they can time-travel, why not go back and fix the issues that led to the appalling pollution and genetic issues, so they never happen in the first place? This is what I mean by setting your sights low if you want to enjoy the fantasy of this story. Do not go looking for good science or logical moves in this fiction! Yes, you can argue that doing something like that would screw-up the time line, but would that be any worse than doing nothing which has already screwed-up the future here?

Having said that, that was one thing I did like: is that the future people dare not make big waves in the time stream. Chronoclasms will echo down the ages if they mess with the wrong thing, changing their present (in the future!). This is why they take the passengers who are doomed. They will die in the crash, so if they substitute bodies and remove the living, no one will know they were snatched.

Of course there were many ways to achieve this same aim without limiting oneself to jetliners which is what the movie did. Why not get all those children who go missing every year? Bring them to the future, educate them in schools specifically structured to teach them what they need to know to survive on this new planet, and when they're mature enough, send them. The haphazard nature of this 'culling' in which they indulged themselves (and the future of the human race!) seemed ridiculous and dangerous to me.

There are many ways a writer could have gone with this and it's a bit depressing to think that someone of Varley's stature made so many poor choices. Dual first person narratives were really annoying. I am not a fan of first person voice by any stretch of the imagination and having two of them makes it twice as bad. The movie thankfully dispensed with that. In this case, the alternating narratives come from Louise Baltimore (all the future people are named after cities - mostly US cities) and Bill Smith, who is an investigator trying to figure out how two planes collided in mid-air (presented in a delightfully disturbing manner in the movie). The more he investigates, the more suspicious and confused he becomes. Baltimore is sent in to try and fix these issues, and ends up making them worse.

The writing overall isn't bad. There's too much info-dumping (which is a side-effect of the ill-chosen voice, I have to add), but aside from that, it's written reasonably well. There was only one big error I noted, which is that on page 36 it's 7:15, but two pages later, during the same sequence, it's only "oh-seven-hundred." Someone wasn't watching the clock! This is funny because later there is a problem raised with all the watches from the plane's victims showing the wrong time.

The problem as we begin the story is that one of the team who switches bodies loses her stun gun, and that kind of technology cannot be allowed to surface back in 1955. It gets worse when another such gun is lost in 1980. Louise Baltimore (everyone in the future seems to be named after a city) is sent back to recover it, and ends up encountering Bill Smith, one of the crash investigators, who is starting to suspect something truly weird is going on here. Love ensues!

There is some unintentional humor which leavens this book, such as where I read about the temporary morgue, wherein the head of the local NTSB board had "somebody" set it up. That struck me as hilarious, but maybe it's just me! The bottom line is that the movie is far better. Skip the book and go straight there. If you can still find it in this purported age of instant access and steaming video.

Our Amazing World: Dinosaurs by Kay de Silva

Rating: WORTHY!

I reviewed another book by Kay da Silva back in April, 2016. That one was about sea turtles.

This is a children's introduction to dinosaurs and has photographs of fossils and computer-rendered pictures of dinosaurs in their natural environment. I was able to read this on a smart phone with no problems, although you really want a bigger screen to really see the pictures. You can enlarge the pictures on the phone screen, but frankly, and unlike the claws of Deinonychus, they were not very sharp! This probably won't bother young kids as much as it did me!

The real value of the book is in the details it gives. The author really goes into dinosaurs and their life and habits; not so much that a child would get lost or overwhelmed, but more than you would typically find in a book like this one. The images are not all the typical favorites, either. Yes, Tyrannosaurus puts in an appearance, but we also see Tarbosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Albertaceratops (which looks like it's having a bad horn day), Yangchuanosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Elasmosaurus (which wasn't actually a dinosaur!), Kentrosaurus, Peteinosaurus (again, not actually a dinosaur), Plateosaurus, and a host of others, in addition to photographs of footprints, eggs, and skeletons, all supported in the text.

If your kids love dinosaurs (and friends) then this is definitely something you should consider adding to their collection.

Transhuman by Ben Bova

Rating: WARTY!

As a sci-fi fan, I'm familiar with Ben Bova's name and his status in the sci-fi world, but I've never read anything by him. After this, I doubt I ever will again. This was an audio book, and the reader's voice was awful. Stefan Rudnicki reminded me of the kid in the Home Alone movie trilogy who records his own voice on a tape recorder, then slows the tape down to make it sound adult. This reader sounded exactly like that and it was really hard to ignore that and focus on the story, especially since the story itself was utterly ludicrous and boring to boot. Audio books often cost a fortune, and I can't help but believe that one of the major factors in that is paying for a celebrity or a 'professional' to read it. They need to get people who can read and who are amateurs, so they can pay them well, but not exorbitantly, and get a good reader rather than some name or voice actor who are typically awful at this. In this way we would have listenable audio books at reasonable prices.

With a title like Transhuman (not to be confused with Transhuman by Jonathan Hickman or Transhuman by Mark vn Name, I expected something mutational and genetic to come out of this, perhaps along the lines of Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, but it certainly didn't look like it was going anywhere near there - or anywhere at all by the time I quit listening about half way through the story). I was already skimming by then because quite literally nothing was happening. Not that the term 'transhuman' accurately describes Bear's novel either, BTW, but I don't think Ben Bova really understands what 'transhuman' means.

The basic plot is that this guy kidnaps his own granddaughter from the hospital where she's being treated for, and dying from a glioblastoma. She apparently only has months to live. Grandfather wants to try an experimental treatment that he has developed, but it is a long way from human trials and was not developed for this, so quite understandably no one in authority will countenance it. His daughter and her husband don't trust him enough to go for it either, so he charges ahead by himself. This instantly made me dislike him. I might have reconsidered if the novel had been better written and I'd seen something happen in the first half of the story to make it worth listening to, but literally nothing happened other than the kidnapping and rounds of treatment.

Plus the story had all the hallmarks of fan-fiction, it was so badly written. The child's own attending physician abandons her job and takes off with this guy, which is utterly ridiculous. I've worked in hospitals and they are far more protective of children than this. Even if her grandfather was legally entitled to remove her from the hospital, he was not the child's legal guardian, and I can't believe someone would not have called the parents to check with them if this was OK. I've worked in pediatric wards, and I know for a fact that pediatric nurses are devoted to their charges. Not one of them would let this happen without notifying mom and dad.

In the end, I couldn't help but see this as nothing but a wish fulfillment story, given that the author was pretty much the same age as the protagonist when this novel was written. All the female characters love him and want to help him! No one sees him as a creepy kidnapper. No. Just no. I refuse to even remotely recommend something as poor as this.

Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Paul Krueger

Rating: WORTHY!

This is yet another advance review copy from Net Galley for which I was really grateful! It's a mixed bag and you can only chose by blurb what you think will be a worthy read. Sometimes it feels like Christmas and you wonder whether you will get coal in your stocking, or a real gem. This was without question a gem of the finest cut. My only real quesitont o begin with was: who is the real author? Goodreads has two versions, one which credits authorship to Grady Hendrix and lists Paul Krueger as a contributor and this is listed as a "chaplet" whatever the heck that is. The one I read which gives Paul Kreuger the whole credit. Are they one and the same person? Is one an excerpt from the other - because it bears no resemblance to the actual Last Call! Who knows!

The real Last Call took off right from the start, grabbed me and ran with me. I sped through the chapters. It had a really interesting premise: that bartenders are really protectors of humanity from the demon world, and it's not a metaphor! By mixing and consuming the perfect cocktail, they can give themselves a range of temporary powers to fight real demons which are appropriately known as tremens, and which manifest in a variety of forms. Different cocktails lend different powers and the book contains recipes for various cocktails between chapters.

Kudos for making the main character Chinese-American. Bailey Chen was such a break from the trope young adult world of dystopian trilogies or ridiculous love stories featuring Mary Sue Wasp. She was smart, determined, inventive, amusing, and fearless despite her fears. Even as she was introduced to the world of demon-hunting, for which she had a real talent, she was still trying to do the sensible thing and protect her future with a decent day job.

I was into this from the start, but the real question was: was our main character, Bailey Chen? She was bar-tending as a temp job until should could get something in the hi-tech world, and even when she discovered this weird world of alcohol magic and demon-hunting, she was still pursuing her dream avidly, even as the demon world began to go sideways in that it was no longer the predictable world it had been. But Bailey was up to it.

I adored Bailey, and liked all three of her companions in this fight, although one of them temporarily was a dick. I would have loved to learn more about Mona, but then I always seems to be more intrigued by the companion than by the star! However, it was a close run thing here - too close to call because Bailey was kick-ass also.

I loved this novel (in a sweet platonic manner...) and I recommend it highly.

The Cresswell Plot by Eliza Wass

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel, which I was thrilled to receive as an advance review copy and for which I thank the publisher and author, was very entertaining, despite being told in worst person voice, aka first-person, which is a voice I normally detest. The voice is one of the family patriarch's daughters, a fifteen year old, and it turned out to be a rare case where the author does it well. There are three sisters and three brothers in this strict religious family, under the thumb of the overbearing - some would argue totally psycho - master, aka father, who has written his own addendum to the Bible from which the kids are forced to read each night. Like some deluded Noah, this Dad has convinced his family that they are the only righteous family, perhaps in the world, and that they will all go to Heaven if they follow his teachings. Each sister will become the bride of one of the brothers: Castley will marry Caspar, Delvive will marry one of her triplet siblings named Hannan, and Jerusalem will marry the rather rebellious Mortimer.

Yes dad is sick. So is mom, but in her case it's physical, and she also has deformed legs, because when she fell (or was she pushed?) downstairs, family practice was to avoid doctors and let their god fix broken legs. Predictably, the god failed. Now she can barely move on her own. The kids are hardly any better. At least they can move around freely, and they are forced to attend public school (where they're considered freaks) after an intervention, but other than that, at home they are kept as virtual prisoners - and sometimes literal prisoners. If they misbehave, there is always the drainage ditch with a lockable grill over it, in the woods behind the house. Nearly all of them are intimately familiar with it.

It's predictably Castley who begins to rebel, and the disturbing question becomes: will these kids get out of this alive? Or will they end up 'in Heaven' sooner than they expected? The story is disturbing as we see the children struggle to make sense of life after being thoroughly warped by the very person - their father - whom they ought to be able to trust for guidance and protection.

There are many questions here, not least of which is why the authorities, knowing these kids are at risk having intervened once, do not intervene more. The kids routinely show up at school with bruises and the Cresswell's neighbor (and what's his story? It might surprise you) is keeping a very close eye on them. It beggars belief that things could have become so bad and continued in this way for so long unchecked. It's also a mystery where the kid's names came from given how strict and Biblical this family's patriarch is. Castley? Delvive? Those names are not Biblical! But that aside, Castley's story is moving and worth listening to. She's a smart and strong female character and I enjoyed her story even as it made me cringe and squirm. I recommend this as a worthy read.

Raelia by Lynette Noni

Rating: WARTY!

I had three strikes against this novel going in, so let me list them right here up front. Firstly, I am not a fan of series because they are rarely well-done and all-too-often spread what's at best a single novel over three or more sorry volumes, which is a dire waste of trees to say nothing of a waste of time in my opinion. Given a choice, I'd rather have the trees. Once in a while an author can make a series shine, but for me that's a rare treasure to encounter.

The second problem is first person PoV which almost never works, and it's astounding to me that so many authors, especially in the YA world, make the mistake of wooden-headedly jumping on this insane bandwagon. Thirdly, this is book 2 of 'The Medoran Chronicles', and I suffer from a long-standing revulsion towards any book which has 'chronicles', or 'codex', or 'cycle', or 'saga' in the title. This one, strictly speaking, did not have it in the title as such, and I thought that the simple one word title, Raelia, sounded pretty cool, but that fact that it was part of a chronicles did leave a bad taste in my mouth. Mitigating against that was the blurb, which suckered me in, making me think that this was an interesting story. It wasn't.

For one thing, the main female character was far too stupid to be of interest to me. Alexandra Jennings is a 16-year-old whose archaeologist parents are thoroughly irresponsible. They did not even notice that she had gone missing for an entire summer in volume one, evidently (I did not read volume one). Now Alex is coming back for her second year of champagne wishes and caviar dreams at the Akarnae Academy and in the words of Robin Leach, I don't know why!

Alex was a special snowflake in volume one evidently, finding herself roommates with the Princess of America and eventually becoming 'The Chosen One'! Yes, this is set in the US for obscure reasons, but everything is renamed. The US is Medora and inexplicably, it has king and queen. Even though this is in a parallel universe, I have no rational or logical explanation for how this came to be. Nor do I get how Alex can be openly threatened, at the birthday party of her best friend, the princess, by Aven Dalmarta, the man who kidnapped Alex in volume one, and not think once of calling out to everyone that this guy is openly threatening her. Again. Instead she deliberately knocks over the king and queen as they're dancing, in a dumb attempt to 'protect' the princess from a non-problem of a dramatically lesser magnitude. None of this made any sense at all to me.

The next dumb thing she does is to facilitate the princess going unescorted downtown, when the king has ordered his daughter to remain in the palace. Alex is dragged into an empty house by Aven, who somehow magically knew exactly which route Alex would take, even down to which side of the street she would walk on and at precisely what time, even though she has unexpectedly changed plans and done something even she had not expected to do! Alex gets no blame for this excursion. Only the princess is held responsible! That's how special Alex is.

It was at this point that I quit. I could not stand to read any more. The author is evidently a big fan of Disney movies, and it shows too much here. It was too hard to take this seriously. The novel is supposed to be about young adults, but it's written as though it's a middle-grade novel. It would have read better had the main characters been four years younger. I've read some good middle-grade novels, but reading this for me was like trying to walk on a floor made of giant, sticky marshmallows and wishing you could ski on the fresh powder instead of choking on it. While I wish the author all the best with this series of course, it's not for me, and I cannot recommend it.

Here's a thought I had after I posted the review and explains another part of my discomfort with this novel. There is this one section which reads thus:

King Aurileous was tall and intimidating, but even from where Alex stood she could tell he had a kind face with prominent laughter lines. His eyes were warm as he scanned the sea of cheering people and his smile made her feel relaxed despite the overwhelming atmosphere. Queen Osmada seemed, in a word, lovely. She was beautiful, with her dark auburn hair, and her smile was even more calming than the king’s.

Note the difference between how the man is described (Kind face, prominent laughter lines, warm eyes), and how the woman is dismissed: "She was beautiful". That's it - 'pretty' much. Once again a female writer tells us that the only value a woman can offer is to look pretty and smile as she hangs on the arm of her kind, warm owner. Barf!

Sawbones by Melissa Lenhardt

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"She came to sit by the bed of a dying man despite her own infirmary." ("infirmity" was needed here. The guy was already in the infirmary!)
"Is so, you give them too much credit." ("If so" was needed here)
"I hear a great many things people do not intend me to her." (intend me to "hear" was needed)

Sawbones is perhaps not surprisingly, a common title. Don't confuse this one with Sawbones by Lawrence BoarerPitchford, which has some similarities, or Sawbones by Catherine Johnson which is a rather different kind of story, but set in a similar period, or with Sawbones by Stuart MacBride, which is a completely different kind of story. Frankly, given the way the main character is treated, and in rather graphic detail, the title for this one perhaps should have been Sabines!

Set in the early 1870's (as near as I can gauge), this tells the story of Catherine Bennett, a prideful and prejudiced medical doctor who had a modest but thriving practice in New York City until she was made (by the victim's wife) the scapegoat in a murder. Fearful that she will not get a fair trial given the wife's powerful connections, she takes a rather cowardly way out and flees to Texas posing as one Laura Elliston, and making her way via Austin to a wagon train heading out to a newly-founded town in Colorado.

She never makes it out of Texas. After a savage attack by Kiowa or Comanche (it's unclear), she finds herself the sole survivor and also in charge of a wounded cavalry officer who came with his men belatedly to the rescue of the wagon train. It's rather sickeningly obvious from this point on that she has her love interest. That was one of my problems with this novel: events are telegraphed so far in advance that it's no surprise what happens to her and therefore no spoiler to give it away.

Another issue was that it's in first person which is the weakest and most irritating voice in which to write a novel, and it's completely unrealistic in this case given what brutality the author forces on this woman at the hands of men. It's simply not credible that she could tell this story the way she does. Initially, it made sense what happened to her, given her gender and the period in which she lived, and I was appreciating that this was a strong woman and looking forward to learning about her, but that rapidly fell apart after she ran away from the crime she never committed. From that point on she became not stronger, but weaker and more stupid, and the sorry plaything of a cavalry Lieutenant, subsuming her entire self to him.

Her protestations of moving on alone in her desire to be a doctor were so vacuous, especially given that you knew they were never going to happen, that I felt I was reading a young adult novel at this point. I'd have actually enjoyed the story if she had gone on alone, but we have to have all of our women validated by a guy in these tales don't we, otherwise how can she be a real woman? Her credentials as a doctor were called into question when she kept rambling on about "...trying to staunch the flow of blood" when she really meant "stanch," which is something that young adult writers of today do not know, but which a doctor would have known back then.

The male interest is Lieutenant Kindle, presumably because you could read him like an open book. He ought to have been named Lieutenant Nook (as in nookie) given his overbearing and single-mindedly physical approach to her. At one juncture, she outright tells him 'No!' (in one form or another) on four separate occasions and still he will not leave her alone. The fact that she was partly drunk and emotionally compromised offered no barrier to this guy whose name, we're told, is William, but which ought to be Dick. He sickened me with his non-stop pressing of himself upon her.

Having saved his life, you'd think this would have made him offer some respect, or show some deference, but instead he seems to have fallen victim to some early form of Stockholm Syndrome and he stalks her until 'she can't refuse him anymore', and has his way with her. The relationship at this point had become so co-dependent that it turned my stomach and I almost quit reading. But they get it on in a library, so I guess this made it okay for him to become a tenant of her Wildfell Hall. When they discuss "Laura's" previous sexcapade, Kindle actually has the hypocrisy to say, "He took advantage of you."! I am not making this up. But "Laura" is a hypocrite too. After repeatedly dissing and dismissing men, she says, “I refuse to believe men do the things they do for no reason other than they can.” Why would she say that when she's made is quite clear that she thinks they're the lowest of the low anyway?

Yes, this is the book "Laura" was reading, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and I had to question this. The novel came out in 1848, so it seems highly unlikely that it would have found its way into a library in a remote (and new) Texas fort by 1870 or so. Who knows? Maybe it's possible. This is fiction after all, but I found it even harder to believe that the "reading room" at this remote fort would have been so well-stocked with books that "All available wall space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowing with books." While the US was quite literate (if you were white) by the 1870's, it beggars belief that a library in a remote fort in The South would be so well stocked, especially so soon after a (not so) civil war.

Purely because of her work on saving Kindle's life, "Laura" is made the acting head physician at Fort Richardson in North Texas, where Nook, er Kindle, is based. This is definitely not where she imagined her life would take her, and especially not into his own house where she lodges upstairs on the pretense that he's more safely out of the way of infection in his own room than he is in the hospital, and she can take care of him. The hell with the rest of the patients! How bizarre is that? What about their risk of infection?

Bizarre is how this novel struck me, time after time. At one point "Laura" visits the bakery in town "...where a fat woman was setting out loaves of warm bread." What? Yes, you read it right. Why was it necessary to describe this woman as fat? Well this was a first person PoV, so we can take this as "Laura's" bigoted attitude to everything and everyone, but all this served to do was to make me dislike her more. Another problem I had was with her blind hatred of American Indians. In a way, it was understandable that she should have some PTSD from her experience, but her hatred was so rife and raised so often, it became quickly obvious that the next thing which would happen would be that she has an interaction directly with the Indians, and that it would not be a pleasant one.

This marked the second point at which I felt I really needed to ditch this novel. It was only, it seemed, the unintentional humor which was what kept me going at this point. For example, "Laura" thinks this of the overly amorous Kindle: "It'll give you the big head." I'm sure what he was doing to her did give him a big head, but I really didn't need to know that! Obviously she didn't mean it that way, but this phrase was just so in the wrong place.

"Laura" simply doesn't seem to understand men. She repeatedly downgrades men to nothing save vain idiots, then she falls for Kindle! What's worse than this though, is that at one point she thinks this of another army officer: " It beggared belief Wallace Strong would prefer an ignorant dreamer like Ruth to a strong, intelligent woman like Alice." Why would she think this given how often we learn of her opinion that the men around her are exactly that shallow? It made no sense for her to have this opinion given everything else she's expressed about men, who were evidently only one step above 'them dad-blamed redskins' to hear her talk and think.

She isn't very smart either. She repeatedly fails to appreciate how precarious her position is even when someone other than Kindle is obviously stalking her. This is another episode of telegraphing exactly what's going on, but it takes "Laura" forever to figure it out. I'm usually bad at this, but even I figured out exactly who this guy was long before she did.

Our doctor isn't above slut-shaming either. Of a prostitute, she thought this: "She would lay with multiple men out of wedlock but she would not swear on the Bible. It always amazed me where people drew their moral line in the sand," and this was from a woman who wanted to be treated like a man, yet who has no problem being subsumed as " Mrs William Kindle" when discussing marriage, and who herself has already had one lover 'out of wedlock' and is about to take another? I simply did not get her character at all. It seemed like the more I read, the further she strayed from the woman she appeared to be when the novel began, and none of this straying was into interesting, engaging, or even pleasant territory.

The oddities kept on coming. At one point Kindle is teaching Laura to shoot, a sadly clichéd way for a writer to get her main male character up close and personal with her main female, but the issue here that I found interesting was the plethora of bottles which were available in the middle of nowhere for her target practice! We're told the soldiers out on this patrol are allowed a tot of whisky each day, so no doubt some bottles came from there, but unless they're getting drunk each night, I doubt there would be crates of bottles for her to shoot up. Maybe they actually were getting drunk each night. This would certainly account for their poor performance during what happened later. It would not account for how you can tie someone to a horse when you "...rode through the night without stopping." Those Indians certainly do have powerful medicine!

At this point I did quit reading. There wasn't much left to read, but to be honest I could not bear the thought of reading any more. I wish the author the best of luck, but I cannot recommend a novel like this one.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: Castaways by David McDonald

Rating: WARTY!

I was interested to read this novel from Net Galley based on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy graphic novel series. This was a prose book, however, not a graphic novel, and although (judged by the cover illustration) it seeks to align itself closely on the characters from the movie, it fell far, far short of that movie I'm sad to report. It was a really fast read, fortunately, otherwise I would have quit reading it and relegated it to the DNF pile a lot sooner than I did.

I'm not a huge consumer of comics and graphic novels although I do peruse a few here and there, so I'd never heard of Guardians of the Galaxy before I got a chance for a sneak preview of the movie before it was released, and I was in awe of that. It was the best Marvel movie I'd seen to that point and I look forward eagerly to the sequel, so I thought in the meantime that it might be fun to read a novel about these characters. The problem was that this novel in no way captured the people I'd seen in the movie at all. It failed to add anything to that and unlike the movie, it was bizarrely humorless. It felt like a backward step for me in more ways than one, so this was a no, I have to say.

People who are familiar with the comic book characters might have a different take on this - perhaps the characters in the comics are different from the one sin the movie, but the stellar movie versions were all I had for comparison and the novel did not compare at all well. All of the characters except for Quill were put in the back seat for one thing, so there was pretty much none of the team interaction which the movie exploited and highlighted so very well.

This story was pretty much all about Quill and he was, contrary to the movie version, rendered completely unlikable for me. He was portrayed as a smooth-talking and rather callous womanizer, and this felt so unlike the movie character that it was honestly nauseating. Yes, in the movie he was a smooth talker and evidenced a strong hint of womanizing, but as the movie got into gear, he was all about the job and he had great depth. The character here in the novel was about as shallow and uninteresting as you can get. Does the public really want to read about yet another "heroic stud" who consumes women like so many hamburgers? I sure don't. One Captain Kirk is more than enough!

The movie was about dangerous misfits who paradoxically learned to become a family, yet here it was the precise opposite: a family who broke up, became completely domesticated, and disappeared almost entirely into the background scenery! Hi-tech was abandoned wholesale as the team landed on a planet, arguing with each other, and were hit by an EMP bomb which disabled their spacecraft. So, they left it behind and went their separate ways! It made no sense that the ship would not be shielded from EMP.

This planet had apparently become locked in medieval times, so instead of the Guardians of the Galaxy I was expecting, I got Star-Lord of the Rings - complete with giant flying animals, castles, and pitched battles. All the medieval people spoke like modern Americans, which unleashed a very effective bomb itself, one which disabled my suspension of disbelief. I don't expect Shakespearean English in a novel like this, but neither do I like stories where no matter how far into space we go, every habitable planet is populated with people who think, speak, and behave like Americans!

Perhaps the worst thing was that there was zero humor here. This was another thing which the movie did brilliantly. It was completely absent from this novel which was quite evidently far more intent upon exhibiting brawn and brutality than ever it was in showing off brains, bravery, and ingenuity. Given that, it was paradoxical that Drax was all but absent. Gamora was effectively reduced to being a school teacher. Rocket and Groot were as invisible as Drax.

As I said, it was all about the Peter, and for me, he raised far more disgust than interest. Rather than spend his time trying to figure out a way to fix his ship, he uncharacteristically retired from life and became a hanger-on at the court of some Duke, posing as the Duke's champion. This made no sense to me. What happened to the guy who was focused on his ship to the point, almost, of obsession? He was AWOL in this story, and I felt that this betrayed his character completely.

I made it to just past page two hundred in this 240-some page novel, and I quit because I was so tired of the lack of an engaging story, and the seemingly endless fighting. I cannot understand why the Guardians were hobbled and suffocated like this, and I cannot recommend a novel that offers them as little air as deep space.

The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

Rating: WORTHY!

I really like this novel, and I loved the ending, sad as it was in many ways, but it did take a while to get through. I think some editing would have improved things, but that said, I consider this to be a worthy read as is. It had a really strong central female character which is always a winner with me. She had her moments of weakness, and she won through in the end, but I am not convinced she really learned anything, which was a bit of a downer for me.

I have to say that one thing I am not fond of in books is chapter quotes - where the author begins a chapter or a section with some quote from some bygone writer, typically some poet I never heard of. I really don't care who it is or what it is because it's so predictably boring and meaningless. I know these things must mean something to the author (at least I would hope they do otherwise it's just pretension, isn't it?), but it's an imposition to assume they will resonate with a reader who has picked up the book to read the author's work, not random quotes from a bunch of other authors!

I skip these with the same diligence which I bring to skipping prologues, introductions, prefaces, and epilogues. The silliness of these quotes was highlighted for me by the attribution to one, which read, 'WILFRED OWEN (1893–1918), “1914” (published 1920)' All those numbers! I laughed out loud at the sheer absurdity of it and I still didn't read the quote, but I sure appreciated the laugh! As it happened, this novel did have an epilogue, and I skipped it. If it's worth saying, it's worth putting into a chapter. If you think it's worth no more than tacking it to the end like Post-it® note, then I'm certainly not going to imagine it's worth reading.

Fortunately for my rating, and despite all this silliness, the novel turned out to be very engaging and well-written (finally I find an author who knows the difference between staunch and stanch - but unfortunately not the difference between a Union Jack and a Union flag!). There was also an instance of "to watch the cortège pass" appearing twice in succession.

he main character, Beatrice Nash is trying to make her own way in the world after the death of her scholarly father, but she's being hampered by the severe constraints put upon women in 1914, and by the fact that an aunt is in charge of her money. This seemed to me to be a bit of a contradiction: that on the one hand, we're to believe that Beatrice has no say in her financial affairs because she's a woman, but her money is controlled by a woman who has every say in those affairs? Why her father did this to her is never explained.

Author Helen Simonsen is an ex-pat Brit (and I'd almost - almost - be willing to bet she still has her charming Sussex accent) who evidently has been out of the country a bit too long to remember all her British-isms (such as how to spell 'manoeuvrings'!), but for the most part she did a great job imbuing this with True Brit™. It felt very English, except for the odd bit here and there where I read, for example, "I am as dizzy as if the champagne was already flowing.” instead of "I am as dizzy as if the champagne were already flowing" which is what an educated Brit would have said back then. In fact the real war here was the rigid class system, not what was going on in Europe. In that regard, the title is misleading because this novel is about The Summer Before the War and the first winter of the war almost through to the following spring. But using that for a title would have been absurd!

I was a little bit slow getting into it, but very quickly it caught my imagination like a fresh wind in the sails of a yacht, and soon I was racing along. As the title indicates, it begins in the summer before the start of World War One, the so-called "Great War" and otherwise known as "the war to end all wars." Sha, right!

Beatrice made a real impression that stayed with me even after the novel was over. Hampered by the severe constraints put upon women in Edwardian times, and more acutely by the fact that an aunt who disapproves of her refusal to marry is in charge of her money, Beatrice nevertheless managed to secure for herself a job teaching Latin at a school in Rye, Sussex, yet she still she feels the pinch of her circumstances. Of course she's a lot better off than many others, enjoying the somewhat privileged station she does. It bothered me that she never seems to fully appreciate how lucky she was despite her life being put quickly into perspective as refugees from Belgium, which has been invaded by Germans, are brought into town to be housed, and the town, along with the rest of Britain, begins gearing up for a war they've never seen the like of before.

Navigating extreme genderism (by our standards - normal for those times), local politics, petty rivalries, and men who would seek by turns, to take advantage of her and relegate her to a position little better than the servants in the employ of the wealthy local families she encounters, Beatrice tries to stay mindful of those who are less privileged, particularly the Roma kid, Snout, whom she tries to help despite the opposition to him being even greater than it is to her, and her 'ward' Celeste, a refugee of whom she seems a bit neglectful at times, quite frankly. She never really gets there in the wising-up stakes, and ends up with an easy out.

It was not easy to like anyone in this story! I managed it with Beatrice, Celeste, and Hugh, but that was about it. The rest I pretty much wanted to slap the nobility off their privileged faces. Their conduct was disgusting to the point of laughable, but there is no doubt that it was how these people behaved and how all too many of them still behave. I have no time for royalty or for so-called nobility.

I did like the way the characters were moved around by the author, and the petty rivalries being disclosed like a body parts in a fan dance. I was a bit sad there was not more about Celeste. I think she merits a novel to herself, but she does have her moments and I enjoyed them. I think she was my favorite character although I didn't quite get how the tide turned as easily for her as it had originally against her. That seemed a bit too convenient, but I'll take that ending for Celeste! Beatrice never stopped trying to make her way with dignity and to empathize with others, and this steadfast approach to her life is what kept me on her side, despite her failings. Overall I liked the novel and even got a bit choked by the ending, so I consider this a winner and I recommend it.

The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff

Rating: WARTY!

This is an old (1980's) novel, but it tells what could have been an interesting story. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is on the school reading list this year, but some parents are objecting to the way it characterizes African Americans, and has a subtext of homosexuality (so they argue) if not pedophilia.

It's been so long since I read this book that I honestly can't even remember what it was about except in very general terms. I can say it left very little impression on me and I'd probably rate it 'warty' if I were to read and review it now. Quite frankly, I've never understood this American obsession with teaching the so-called classics when there are much better and far more engaging and relevant modern novels which can be brought into classrooms.

I did like that the author gave good arguments in favor of requesting the book removed, but it's not like the deck was loaded all on one side, which made for intelligent reading, which is a good thing in a novel aimed at middle-graders and young adults. The story is in many ways laid out like a court case - both sides give their evidence, and it's up to you, the jury to bring in a fair verdict, although there is a verdict returned in the story, too.

One thing I found very curious is that the author seems to insist upon using the full name - first and last - of all of the adult characters very nearly every single time he mentions them, at least in the first few chapters. This was very irritating. But I got even with him by playing with his name. I love names and I love playing with them. 'Nat' is short for Nathaniel, or Nathan, and this author's last name begins with Hen, so if you run the name together, you can get Nathen Toff out of it. I'm just weird that way!

My problem with this book was that there were some really good arguments which never got laid out, and the story itself felt rather antiquated. I think the author could have done a much better job and done it using a better example. That was really the problem. It was all black and white with no real grey areas. I can't recommend this novel and did not like the rather misleading title.

There is some interesting information online if you want to read more about real - and modern - censorship issues in schools:
American Library Association page on school censorship issues. Here's some recent news on censorship of a John Green novel which is fine by me - not for censoring it as inappropriate reading material for school kids, but for being a mind-numbing bunch of drivel! LOL! Here's another link to the National Association Against Censorship. There are lots more you can find online.

Tovi the Penguin Goes to the Seaside by Janina Rossiter

Rating: WORTHY!

I think the only Tovi adventure I haven't read is one where he goes into space, so quite clearly I'm into Rossiter (and if you can name the 1952 sci-fi novel that play on words comes from you get penguin points). I thought it hilarious that penguins would want to go to sunning themselves on the beach, so this one was a must-read for me. The penguins settle in the shade of a shady hummock and fall asleep, only to find themselves surrounded by saltwater from the the incoming tide! Oops!

Fortunately the tide is already going out when they wake, and the penguins keep their head. They discover a warning sign that fell down. Responsible little Sphenisciformes that they are, they replace the sign and make sure it stays up this time. I was all in favor of them taking the beach authority to court over this (I'm kidding!). I do have to say though, that I was rather disappointed that this didn't do more to educate young children of the dangers of the ocean and too much sun. It's never too early to educate children and bring them up to speed on safety as long as you don't scare them into immobility with dire warnings.

That gripe aside, the story was, as usual, charming and colorful, and actually eminently readable on my smart phone, so it's very portable! I recommend it.

A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a delightful story, well told, and very engrossing, of Victoria Darling, and her fight for independence from her overbearing father, and it takes place alongside the suffragette movement in London, in Edwardian 1909. We meet Victoria as she's about to be sent down from her French finishing school for posing nude for her extra curricular artist's group. It was an unplanned exhibition on her part, but it gets her sent home in disgrace. Her parents are outraged, including her mother, who was also a budding artist in her own youth, but Victoria isn't about to give up so easily.

A marriage, which, it is hoped, will encourage her to grow up and settle down, is arranged for her to the son of another nouveau riche family, but Victoria, through her growing ties with the suffragettes, has become involved - or however you care to characterize it - with a police officer named Will. As her wedding draws ever closer, she also draws closer to Will.

I grew to like Victoria, although sometimes she wasn't so smart. Will was a bit of a generic YA male portrait, with little going for him other than his picturesque value, and it's entirely predictable what will happen in the end. I had hoped for more in that department because the ending was a bit too convenient and sappy, but overall, Victoria's story more than made-up for the encroaching trope, and I grew increasingly to like her as I read ever more about her.

One issue I had was that Victoria didn't sound very high class! Yes, her father was a self-made man having built-up his own toilet business (he was flush with money! LOL!), but his daughter had been to the best schools, including the one in France. Her use of language didn't seem to quite reflect her upbringing.

Part of the problem was from Katharine McEwan's reading. For the most part she did a good job, but her American accent sounds Irish, and Victoria's voice sounded a bit too 'riff-raff' for someone of her breeding! her French pronunciation needs work too! She cannot say Étienne, making it sound more like ATM than ever it does a French name! Those were minor problems though, and I overlooked them because I enjoyed Victoria's story so much. I recommend this one.

Meantime Girl by Sindhu S

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Anjali blinked, allowing a sigh wander past her sneer" should read "...allowing a sigh to wander past..."
"The entire blame will to be on you" should lose the 'to' and read, "The entire blame will be on you"
The 'to' from the previous example belongs here between 'gotten' and 'her'!"The arrogance of Siddharth’s editor had gotten her"
"got along famously well with her son’s wife, and kids, than with her own daughter." should read "...better than she did with her own daughter."
"Her fingers, creased from the bath, slipped grandma in her musings."? "...reminded her of grandma's fingers..." maybe?
There's an odd speech quote at the end of stifling unease.” which should not be there.
There's an entire paragraph repeated. It begins, "When the first bell sounded minutes later, Anjali stood in the orientation hall..."
"Lunch chocked her" should be "Lunch choked her".

This is a novella which started life as a novel. Where the rest of it went, I don't know, but I think the author was smart to précis it. It would have been a bit of a trial to read a full-length novel in this style. Written in 2012, this novel by an Indian author and set in India, tells the story of a doomed love affair between the young, rather impetuous Anjali and the older, married Sidharth, who is frankly not worthy of her. It takes her a long time to realize it. The novel is very widely spaced between paragraphs, so it's actually even shorter than you might think from the page count.

The story read more like a poem than a prose novel and it was charming. English isn't the author's first language, and it shows in the way this is phrased, making for writing that is by turns endearing and confusing! The more I read though, the more I got into the rhyme and reason of it, and I found it to be quite exhilarating and really warmed to it, especially after I'd read the ending. I don't know if I really liked either of the main characters. Sidharth definitely not, but at least Anjali wised-up and took charge, and began to take serious responsibility for the way her life had gone, and that made it worth while for me.

In addition to the sometimes amusing phraseology, there were some intentional moments of real fun, such as this part:

"What can I do? God’s will,” the maid said picking up the laundry basket.
“Did you hear that, Anju? She just called a prick God.”

I laughed out loud at that one.

Overall I think this was a worthy read and I ended up liking the story. I have a soft spot for India though, so your mileage might well differ!

Princess Knight Vol 1 by Osamu Tezuka

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second of two different "Princess Knight" graphic novels I checked out of the library. I had never encountered this particular sub-genre before so it was odd I picked two out on the same trip. Sadly, neither of them was very impressive, so I guess I'm done with Princess Knight stories!

This one is actually titled Princess Knight and is the one, I believe, which gave rise to the genre, although the original Japanese title said no such thing. Ribbon no Kishi means 'Knight of Ribbons'. That title made less sense, however, since no ribbons were involved in this story! It's a gender-bending story which I typically love, but this one irritated me from the off. The story here wasn't very good and was larded-up with everything (I believe I may even have seen a kitchen sink in there somewhere).

The premise is that angels add a heart to genderless kids right before they're born, determining their gender, which immediately disrespects everyone who isn't bog-standard binary. That was cruel. I thought they might be using this 'gender assignment' as a target to take down, but that wasn't what happened. Note that while this particular candidate (referred to consistently as Princess Sapphire) was issued both a male and a female heart at birth by a mischievous "angel" unoriginally named "Tink" (Tinku), yet despite this, genderism was rife throughout this novel, with the princess side of Sapphire constantly being put in its place. At one point near the end, Sapphire is engaged in a sword fight when the 'boy' heart is ripped out, and immediately the remaining 'she' feels weak and useless, and cannot fight the dastardly villain. That was the last straw for me.

Note that this was written in the mid 1950's, so it was in some ways ground-breaking for its time, but it was still a traditional view. It wasn't like the rest of the story was that great either, and even after 350 pages, it was nowhere near resolution. The reader was invited to the conclusion in volume two! No thanks! I'd already read far too much to want to read another volume of this. I began liking it because the artwork - black and white line drawings - was charming and elegant, and the writing was fun for the most part, but it just dragged on and on without going anywhere and without doing anything with this great premise. Despite having both hearts, Sapphire was feminine no matter what guise he/she was in, and it was absurd to pretend that there was this big doubt about whether sapphire was male or female.

The prince who falls in love with her is categorically unable to recognize her when he sees her without a blonde wig. So much for the depth of his love! For me the story betrayed males, females, and everyone in between and beyond. That's not the only thing which is confused: despite the setting being medieval Europe, the currency is dollars! Another one of many annoyances. So overall, I can't recommend this. While I loved the artwork, the genderism - the very thing I had imagined a novel like this would completely negate - was nauseating.

The History Major by Michael Phillip Cash

Rating: WARTY!

This is another short novel I got from Net Galley, but unlike the previous one I blogged, this was not a 100 page excerpt from a four hundred page novel, this was the entire novella, and it was less than ninety pages. It contained two pages of self-promotional, positive reviews which I found to be weird. I already had the ebook, so what is the point of two pages of reviews when I'd already picked it to read? Leave 'em out and save a tree! The reviews were mostly from Foreword and Kirkus. I have zero respect for Kirkus, who never met a novel they didn't like, so their reviews are utterly useless, and I always skip forewords(!), so these two pages were wasted on me.

The story itself is hard to critique without giving away major spoilers. Let me just confine myself to saying that it's never a good sign when the author has to include a note at the end explaining what they just wrote! It was obvious what the author was trying to do. We've all been there, but stories of the type where it turns out it was all a dream in the end, or something along those similarly twisted lines, are typically more of a let-down that an uplift. The main problem with this one for me, was that it was so flighty and disjointed that it was just one long aggravation. I think this would have worked better as a short story than anything longer.

I think it would have been hilarious had JK Rowling ended the Harry Potter heptalogy by having Harry wake-up on the Hogwarts Express as it arrives in the station on that first trip, the entire seven book series having been a dream. Then, the ending would actually have been a real surprise. This was not such a dream novel, but there were no surprises here, only a torturous circular journey that felt more like a Disney ride than an engaging novella. While I wish the author well in his endeavors, I can't recommend this.

Weregirl by CD Bell

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not a fan of werewolf or vampire stories. The first because that genre has never actually interested me, and the second because vampires have become so larded with trope and cliché that they've become nauseatingly bland and ridiculously pathetic. This one was different in that first of all, the blurb writer got my interest, which is almost a miracle in itself, and the secondly, that the author made the story worth reading - as far as it went.

Note that the cover calls this a novel, but all I read was actually a novella (I'm guessing, without knowing the word-count). But you know, if Amazon is going to continue trying to force writers to sell novels at 99 cents a pop, like they involve no more work than a two or three minute song does, I don't blame authors for putting out shorter stories, or for releasing them the way they used to be released in the days of Arthur Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories: in episodic form. This one was not such a novel however. It was, as I learned after I had requested it, merely an introductory 100 pages from a four-hundred page novel, so the publishers actually made me DNF this! This review, therefore, is only of those first 100 pages.

The first thing I liked is that this wasn't told in first person. I'm tempted to build a shrine to author CD Bell for that. It would have been very easy to make that mistake and the fact that this author didn't is highly praise-worthy. The second good thing was the two main characters: Nessa and Bree, who were for me completely real and believable.

Nessa Kurland is a high school junior who is very much into cross-country running. She not only loves it, she needs it if she's to get a scholarship for college. While running one evening, she's bitten by a wolf, and over the next month she finds herself changing at first subtly, and then more scarily, until she can't deny that something embarrassingly and frighteningly weird has happened to her. Fortunately, Bree is a true friend and she begins to work with Nessa on handling this.

The story felt too thin. For a short story this would have been understandable, but for a four-hundred page novel, it's inexcusable. By 'thin' I mean there was not a lot of depth to it. It's written it like it's a first draft, getting all the essential elements down without adding any real atmosphere. I would like to have seen it a lot more fleshed-out, and by that I don't mean padding (which it evidently has if it's four hundred pages and is this skimpy), but filling in spare areas with some color and texture. The story also has a prolog which I skipped as I do all prologs. I've never regretted not reading one, nor missed it! If you don't think it's important enough to tell in chapter one or later, then I don't think it's worth reading!

For an example of the failure to flesh out, consider one of Nessa's fellow runners - a girl named Cynthia. Nessa is supposed to train with her one evening, but they miss their connection, and despite Nessa's wolf bite injury, there's nothing from Cynthia: no asking why she had not shown up on time the previous night, or asking after her health. There were several people I suspected of being the werewolf, but my prime suspect was this Cynthia, notwithstanding Nessa's inexplicable conviction that the werewolf was male.

Another such area is where Nessa wins a race but instead of hanging around at the end, she keeps running and disappears completely. There was a good reason for this, but there was no follow up to it. Any real event like that, where the record-breaking winner disappears afterwards, would caused a lot of suspicion! Maybe it wasn't Nessa, but someone else running, fraudulently pretending to be her? I can't go more into detail over this without giving away too many spoilers but this event was simply glossed over, as though there was nothing weird about it. Reality would have brought dire consequences: an investigation at the very least.

This was an advance review copy, and there were some grammatical problems with it, which I assume will be cleaned-up before actual release. There were some cases of a word missing from between two other words such as, for example, "The tooth from the wound" which should have presumably been: "The tooth came from the wound." Another was a case where 'here' was used when 'her' was meant. That's a really hard one to catch with a spellchecker! I normally list the errors I find in ARCs on my blog so an author can make use of the information if they wish, but Bluefire reader, on which I read this and which is otherwise an excellent app, makes it impossible to capture these errors. A final read-through will fix them though.

There were also occasional odd sentences, such as when Nessa walks by a garage and she can see "...a Toyota of some kind..." which sounded really strange. I think the author intended this to mean she recognized the make but not the model, but even if you don't know the model you can identify it as a car or a truck or an SUV or whatever. I think I would have just had it that she saw a Toyota pick-up or whatever it was. Or simply kept it completely neutral and said "...an SUV on a hydraulic lift..." or something along those lines. But that's just me! I also found it odd that it's copyrighted to Chooseco LLC rather than to CD Bell, but whatever!

When Nessa meets the 'shaman', the story lost a little something for me, not least because he was disgustingly racist. Also because he was precisely the trope male which turns me off these stories: chiseled muscles and so on. I thought at this point, "Nessa deserves a better dog kennel than the one that's being built for her here if this is to be her romantic interest!" Why this trope came to be associated with werewolves, which are not larded with bulky muscles (far from it!), is a mystery. It was also odd that Nessa feels, along with other physical improvements in stamina, hearing, and smell, her eyesight becoming acute. Dogs, including wolves (or conversely, wolves including dogs!), do not have great eyesight. They're most likely short-sighted, and are largely color-blind compared with humans. They do see better at night, and the reason they do is connected with their poor color vision.

It makes no sense for Nessa's sight to undergo the improvements it did. It should have become worse, except at night. You can argue that since she was hyperopic beforehand, then becoming more myopic could have corrected her vision, I guess, but that's a bit of a stretch. Wolves have a wider field of view, but poorer binocular vision than humans. So this super-powered vision is a trope which has no honest place in the cannon, although it has actually become cannon for this kind of tale. This random, nonsensical approach to telling werewolf stories is one of the reasons I'm not attracted to the genre. It's far too deus ex machina for someone like me, who thinks it would be nice if a potential writer of werewolf stories actually read-up on real wolves before they began their story instead of soaking their pages in the tainted water which they've blindly hauled-up from the well of trope that's been established by far too many YA authors of late.

So overall, based on one quarter of a novel, I can't recommend this. It started out great and drew me in, but as the story sailed on, particularly when the "shaman' appeared, it began to take on trope like a badly-holed ship takes on water, and this sunk the story for me! I don't any to read four hundred pages of this, and I can't recommend it based on what the publisher allowed me to read of it.

Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer by Satoshi Mizukami

Rating: WARTY!

I picked this out at the library because it had a delightfully absurd Manga title, and from a brief look at the first few pages, it seemed like it might be a fun read. Be warned: amusing perusing can hasten the crime of wasting time!

The story is your usual trope bland guy picked out by fate (or in this case a talking lizard) to be the hero who saves the world. Why he's picked out is never made clear despite some five hundred pages (I'm guessing since they're not numbered) of comic. I can't even tell you how this ended because the ending was such a confused mess that I'm honestly not sure what happened. Seriously! The first three fifths or so was ok - not great but moderately entertaining. Unfortunately, the last portion was a complete disaster when it came to intelligible story-telling. Finally I can tell you I found a novel that was three-fifths worth reading! Not really, because the ending sucked and robbed those first three-fifths of all value.

Evidently the bad guy was beaten, and the biscuit hammer did not come down on Earth, but what happened to it was unexplained. Neither did the princess, who was the bland guy's next-door neighbor destroy the Earth herself after she helped to save it. Again, why this was so went completely unexplained - or I missed it somehow, but how and when that happened was not at all clear! It wasn't explained why she ever wanted to destroy the Earth, and why - if that was indeed the case - she was helping save it.

If she so desperately wanted to destroy it, why waste all those days fighting the owner of the biscuit hammer (who we never met, unless it was blond super dude, but this wasn't at all clear - not to me, the reader, anyway, but why would an author care about keeping readers happy?!). Instead of wasting all that time fighting it, why not simply destroy it herself first? Or just stand back and by her inaction be the agent of destruction she wished to be.

Yes! None of this made sense but the first part was entertaining - for the most part. The biggest problem I had with it was the author's clear and present - and creepy - obsession with young girls' panties, a pair of which, in situ on the girl, were exposed every few pages. That was perverse at best. At least I didn't pay for this! Except with my valuable time.

White Sand by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, Mercy Thompson, Julius Gopez, Ross Campbell

Rating: WARTY!

The problem with reading an advance review copy of a graphic novel is that you can never be quite sure if what you're looking at on your tablet is what you would see had you bought the comic in print form. In this case, the drawings were poor and the colors muddy and posterized, as if they had been de-rezzed for the ARC. This made for a comic which was more appalling than appealing, but I decided to give this the benefit of the doubt and read on. For me the story is what matters most, even in a comic. Unfortunately the story, which began with a great potential to draw me in, failed to keep stirring my interest as it progressed.

The drawing also lacked good dynamics, as it happens. The character portrayals looked wooden and decidedly odd in many frames, notably the ones where the characters were moving. The frames themselves were deliberately skewed - no square corners anywhere. Sometimes this can work well, but in this case it felt like it had been done not because it suited the presentation for the page, but because the creators of the comic thought it looked super cool or something! That's never a good idea.

The weak presentation was owned-up to on many pages because we had little arrows showing us where to read next instead of being able to determine that from a soundly-designed page. To me, this was just annoying. The skewing and sharp angles worked against the idea of a culture which magically controlled the silky, snaking flow of sand. Some images were purposefully sliced through with a frame border even when it wasn't entirely necessary to split the image. This felt amateur and pretentious to me. On the other side of this coin there was some unintentional humor, such as on the bottom frame of page 139, where an unfortunate juxtaposition of characters made it look like the sand master was feeling-up his friend! LOL!/p>

The story began an a fairly engaging manner despite some grammatical gaffs, such as when one character said, "This council may do as we please" as opposed to "This council may do as it pleases," but on the other hand, this was a character's speech, so perhaps the character just had bad grammar?! Anyway, I was drawn into the story to begin with, but a lot of it made no sense. It's set on a planet called Taldain, which appears not to rotate, since one side appears always to have sunlight, whereas the other, known as "Darkside" evidently has none.

I can't imagine a planet like this being habitable, since the one side would be baked to a crisp and the other frozen. Perhaps an existence might be eked out on the dusk/dawn border between the two extremes, but this wasn't what happened here. There was no logic to the character's skin colors, either. The people who were apparently never exposed to sunlight, coming from the dark side, were inexplicably dark skinned, whereas the pale faces came from the perennially sunlit side. This made no sense!

The pale skinned people we meet first are supposedly "Sand Masters" pretentiously referred to as "mastrells" for reasons I could not fathom. This same pretension was employed by using made-up words for some things, yet not for others. These made-up words necessitated an asterisk and a common English word at the bottom of the frame. This struck me as idiotic. Just call it a water bottle for goodness sakes! The sand masters are supposed to be able to make sand do their bidding, but how this came to be and to what end it was manipulated was entirely unexplained. All I ever saw it used for was as a weapon and as a means to avoid climbing stairs. It had the potential to be something awesome, but it was a fail for me because it seemed so pointlessly squandered.

Note that this is a part of Brandon Sanderson's "Cosmere" universe, with which I am completely unfamiliar. Perhaps if I were, I would have had more out of this story, but given that I am not, a little help from the writers would have been appreciated. It was not forthcoming. I routinely skip prologs and introductions, but I went back this time and read the introduction, and it failed to shed even a photon of useful light, being more of a rambling self-promotion than a candle in the Darkside.

That just goes to prove my case that prologs, prefaces, introductions, and so on are a complete waste of my reading time. Anyway, when the sand masters are all-but wiped-out by some barbaric tribe, this one son of the master mastrell is one of the few survivors. He thinks he can be the new lord because he's the son of the old one (good luck with that!), even though he has had no proper training and history for such a position. He throws his lot in with the Darksiders who are traveling the light side for reasons which were as a muddy as the art work. I can't recommend this comic at all.

The Changelings by Christina Soontornvat

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an advance review copy which I was happy to read. It's aimed at middle grade (eight to twelve-year-olds) so it's not for me, and parts of it were not to my taste, but for the intended age group I think it's absolutely perfect. Isabella and younger sister Henriette have moved to a new home (why goes pretty much unexplained - yes, grandma died and left them her home, but they didn't have to move into it!). Izzy learns that the woman next door, through the woods, is a witch! is she? Maybe! Izzy and Hen go to spy on her and shortly afterwards, Izzy sees Hen disappear into the forest, hypnotized by flute music!

Feisty and capable Izzy chases after her and ends up in fairy-land with three outlaw changelings. What's going on here? Izzy has to find out and pursue her kid sister before the evil queen can...what is she going to do with the little girl? I have to say that these characters were beautifully drawn with words. Both Izzy and Hen were strong female characters, self-motivated, strong at heart, and independent. The thee changelings were fun, interesting, and complex. I was particularly intrigued by Dree. Lug (from the name on down) was a bit of a cliche, but even he wasn't all trope and no substance. The evil queen was delightful and also self-motivated. She was just on the wrong side, unfortunately, but nonetheless very real and believable. And the enigmatic Peter? Did he really deserve the title "Good"?

I loved this story overall, and I recommend it for middle grade readers who like a good adventure, and are too old for paper-thin Disney Princesses. If I had any complaints, they would be about the claim that King Arthur was just a made-up character. He's really not! Yes, the shining knights at the round table are fiction, but there really was a man beneath the legend. One of the characters said this, however, and there's no reason a fictional character could not be just as ill-informed as a real person! The other thing, and this really bothered me, was when one of the characters said "Just don't make me a goblin or a fat lady." It is unnecessarily cruel to put this idea into young children's minds: that overweight people, females in particular, are akin to goblins? Not a good idea. Fortunately that as the only distasteful part of this book. Even authors with awesome names shouldn't be allowed to get away with dissing people because of their weight! And yes, I know a character said this, but that doesn't make it go away. For the rest of it - it was great!