Runaways Vol 2 Teenage Wasteland by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

This was my first venture into Marvel's Runaways, a comic book series in which a band of mostly young teens, but including an 11-year-old, learns after seeing them literally sacrifice a girl, that their parents constitute an evil organization they call 'The Pride'. The series was created by Brian Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, but Joss Whedon has also had some involvement in it, leading some to wonder if this might be Marvel's next big venture - into movies or into a TV series, adding another foundation stone in their burgeoning super hero empire.

I decided that if this was indeed somewhere Marvel was going, I should try to get a leg up on the whole thing since I knew squat about these guys other than the vaguest notion of what they were about. This chance came from my beloved local library when I saw a whole bunch of these on the shelf. I had two immediate problems. One was that of what appeared to be two separate series, and not a one of them had a volume number on the cover or on the credits page, so I had no idea which one came first. I had to look it up online, only to discover my second problem, which was that volume one wasn't on the shelf! I did get vols 2 & 3 though.

Why are graphic novel creators so devoted to keeping people in the dark about where they are? This is one reason I detest series! I know these graphic novels are already aggregations of single issue comics, but could they not put something on the cover to indicate cardinality?! I had to go online to find out which ones to start with, and even then I couldn't figure out who's on first, or whether I was looking at two sets that were really separate or whether they were merely different print runs of the same stories (it turned out to be the latter). I finally picked volumes two and three of the small format paperbacks and a volume of the large format because it was written by Whedon. I have no idea what order that one was in.

That said, I blitzed the two small ones and found them to be quite entertaining despite a few issues here and there (which were no worse than any other comic book). Yes, issues in the issues! The parents of these kids were chosen by aliens to usher in the end of humanity. The reward they were promised was that six of them would live through the genocide of their fellow humans and become immortals. I'm sorry but I see no incentive there! We're supposed to believe that these evil parents were cool with the idea that they would have one child each thereby creating the six survivors? Either they're stupid or far from evil. The aliens told them that only the most devoted of their servants would be the ones who were saved, so there was no reason to believe they would accept substitutes or care about children or their servants' wishes!

Their parents are an assorted group of aliens, time-travelers, scientists, telepaths, and wizards, and what happens is that the kids, who have surprisingly been unaware of how evil their parents are, spy on them and are shocked by their behavior, so they...run away! They try adopting super hero names but it doesn't work. The youngest makes her own thrown-together costume, but none of them really are interested in the traditional super hero path, which made this very appealing to me, especially since I'm working on a super hero novel myself right now. The characters are also mostly female and of diverse ethnic backgrounds, so this is another feather in its cap as far as I'm concerned.

Talking of diversity, Karolina Dean is the alien and she knows she's literally alien. Like superman, her power comes from the sun, but unlike the foundational DC hero, her power fades at night. This was another thing I liked. I've never understood how Superman managed to be as super at night as he was during the day, but perhaps he worked like a capacitor?! Molly Hayes is the daughter of the mutant telepaths, but she's more like Superman in that she has super strength and invulnerability. Nico Minoru, like Harry Potter, is the daughter of wizardly parents and can do magic, although in the two volumes I read, she did very little of it. She's also the de facto leader if there can be said to be one.

Chase Stein is the son of the scientists and has no super power, but he did steal his dad's 'fistigons' which are gloves which seem confined to emitting fireballs and extruding metal claws rather like Wolverine. Alex Wilder is the son of gangland capos, and is described as having a precocious and forward-looking intellect, although he never came off as being particularly smart to me. Gertrude Yorkes (there's that out-of-style name again, but maybe it's because she) is the daughter of the time-travelers. She has an empathic link with a velociraptor nicknamed Old Lace. She goes therefore, by Arsenic. Once again we see the velociraptor way over-sized as it was in the Jurassic Park movies, but since this one is genetically engineered, perhaps there is a reason for that.

This series was written in the mid-'oughts, yet all of these teens seemed unusually familiar with - and addicted to - anachronisms. This brought me out of suspension of reality quite often because it didn't feel like things these teens would say or reference. I mean, how many teens, even US teens, would even know about a 1939 play adapted into a 1944 Cary Grant movie titled Arsenic and Old Lace, as opposed to how many older comic book writers?! They did explain the Beatles references by mentioning that one of the kids had an album, a present from a parent, but this doesn't explain how all the other kids would be familiar enough with them that they never questioned the references.

Those gripes aside, I did like the off-the-beaten-path route this story took, its basic premise of rebellious teens, its cast, and the overall story. This one was focused on the kids establishing themselves in a 'base of operations' and their move towards helping people in a rather forlorn, misguided, and half-hearted effort to right their parents' wrongs, but there as very little super hero activity here. it was mostly focused on the interactions between the teens, but even so, it was very readable and interesting, so I recommend it.

Runaways The Complete Collection Vol 4 by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

I have to give this fourth volume a negative rating too, along with the third volume I also reviewed. This one I didn't even finish, ditching it about half way through. I'm done with the Runaways series now: it was tedious and repetitive and nothing new was being offered. The characters which had held so much promise when I first began reading their adventures now seem to be running out of interesting or entertaining things to do, and they had nothing new to offer me. Add that to the tedium of some of the characters behaving the same in story after story, making the same mistakes or the same bad jokes, never developing, growing, or learning, and with Molly becoming ever more nauseating it's not appealing to me any more.

I mean Molly is supposed to be thirteen, but she consistently behaves like she's six - and a boy! There's nothing wrong with girls being masculine or tomboyish, but in her case it's not a character trait, it's a consistent failing of the writers to grasp the first thing about twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls. Although they do know how many teeth a thirteen-year-old should have, which is one nice thing I can say! LOL! But Molly never has a period. She's never interested in boys or girls on an emotional level. She shows no growth whatsoever towards maturity despite approaching young adulthood - and living on the street, and fighting for her life from time to time. It's simply not credible that she is a perennial juvenile. Chase is a perennial airhead jock type, Nico is perennially running out of new spells to cast. Frankly, it's boring and unimaginative and I'm done with this series although I still have some individual reviews to post of earlier material I read which was better!

Runaways The Complete Collection Vol 3 by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

I have to give this a negative review overall, but portions of it I shall be reviewing separately and positively. This review is for the complete volume four collection which to me was not a worthy read. The art work was bordering on Japanese style in some portions: over-sized eyes and so on, of which I am not a fan, and even when it wasn't drawn that way, it was less than thrilling. The stories in the first half of the volume were not entertaining to me. It picked up in the second half, but I'll review those separately since I read them separately prior to getting my hands on this volume.

This takes place during the time of a super hero civil war which was recently and very excellently captured in the third of the Captain America series, which this volume references several times. The main Marvel heroes don't really feature here, though, but the young Avengers, with whom I was not at all impressed, played a lead role. One problem I had with this set of stories was the Skrulls. I am not a fan of this invasion by aliens. I don't know what it is, but it fails to impress me and doesn't stir my interest. I had the same problem with the first Avengers movie - the story was great right up until the alien invasion began, then for me it fell off and was not so interesting.

So while some of the individual stories later were engrossing (once the young Avengers and the Skrulls had departed them), I was not impressed with the overall package, so I cannot recommend this.

Wonder Women by Sam Maggs

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a book about twenty five women in various fields of endeavor who have distinguished themselves as 'innovators, inventors, and trailblazers'. I would say twenty five plus women, but that gives entirely the wrong information! But there are more than twenty five women discussed here and every one of them is interesting - some much more so than others. Note that there's a score of books out there with 'Wonder Women' in the title - make sure you ask for the genuine article by name: Sam Maggs!

I was impressed that the mini-bios began with women of science, which featured astronomer Wang Zhenyi, mathematician Ada Lovelace, nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, mathematician Emmy Noether, and Chemist Alice Ball. Next, in medicine were Jacqueline Felice de Almania, Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Ogina Ginko, Anandibai Joshi, and Marie Equi, all doctors. On the secret world of spies, there was Brita Tott, Mary Bowser, Sarah Edmonds, Elvira Chaudoir, and Noor Inayat Khan. Among Innovators were Huang Daopo, Margaret Knight, Mariam Benjamin, Bessie Blount Griffin, and Mary Sherman Morgan (who actually was a rocket scientist!), and explorers/adventurers featured Maria Sibylla Merian, Annie Smith Peck, Ynes Mexia, Annie Londonderry, and Bessie Coleman.

These women lived from the thirteenth century to the latter half of the twentieth, so there's some serious history here too, and each section was punctuated with some mini bios about yet more women, and interviews with contemporary trailblazers, including a transgender woman who was fired by IBM for...wanting to be who she felt deep down she was, as well as one with Buddhini Samarasinghe, founder of STEM women. The book was a fun read and a great introduction. Many of these women, such as Zhenyi, Anandibai, Noor, and Annie I had not heard of before. Others such as Ada, Emmy, Lise, and Hypatia were much more familiar. These women were cutting edge in their time, and enlightened even by our standards.

I never read introductions and what-have-you so I skipped that, and launched right into the bios which was all the introduction I needed. The author's tone is warm and light-hearted, which makes for a cool refreshing read for the most part, despite the wealth of facts which are delivered. Plus the author is evidently into Doctor Who, which is never a bad sign! I did have one issue that I have to raise though. I can understand and appreciate the author's enthusiastic tone despite it being rather over the top at times. That's fine! These women need to be celebrated and in far too many cases it's long overdue, but I don't think you serve the cause of feminism well by insulting half the population on what felt like every other page.

It made me wonder who the target audience was - are we preaching only to the choir? If we are, isn't that simply putting the same limitations on these women as they suffered during their lifetime! Are we to confine these revelations only to a female audience? Even if that's the plan, it's still no excuse to indulge in flagrant and liberal man-bashing here and there, as though modern men are no better than men have historically been.

Yes, male-dominated societies have treated women abominably historically, and still do in far too much of the world, but it's only recently that this injustice has been widely recognized and combated. In the past, it was the way things were because so few people had the wisdom, education and influence to change it into what it needed to be. That doesn't excuse what it was, nor does it make it acceptable, nor should we ever forget it, because that's the surest way to let it come romping right back through the front door. In fact, trying to wedge that door open is precisely what the Republicans are doing right now in the US as I write this review. Next they'll be trying to get us to believe that if Hilary wins, she's going to rename her workplace 'the ovum office'. I sincerely hope she does win not only because of what she can bring to the table, but also - given the current alternative - it's a dangerous step backwards for the US if she doesn't.

The way to address a pendulum which has swung too far in one direction is not to swing it to the same extreme in the opposite one. The solution is to bring it to a stop at dead center and nail it down so securely that it never moves again! Writing as though modern men are inevitably tarred with the sins of their forefathers, or trying to project modern views backwards to show how shockingly far short of today's standards men fell a hundred or five hundred years ago, isn't a wise move in my view, especially not in a book of this nature.

That said, I really enjoyed this for the most part. There was some great humor in it, such as an aside that daguerreotypes are "...not something that steampunk authors made up," and "...the late Middle Ages, a time when everybody had weirdly flat faces if you believe the artwork..." were most welcome. The stories needed this to leaven the ofttimes heart-breaking revelations I was reading, such as in Lise Meitner's story. On a related note, I personally found it interesting how many unsung women of Jewish descent have made their gender proud over the years.

Describing Emmy Noether as "a total BAMF" might not be the wisest description, although it is a powerful one! I'm sure that the author humorously intended it as the acronym for Bad-Ass Motherfucker, but it’s also become a well-known word in the comic-book world used to describe the sound that Nightcrawler makes when he teleports, and by extension, a word used to describe teleporting in general. Might be a bit confusing, although given what's been learned of late about quantum teleportation, maybe there is a tie-in!

The 'Sub' articles on people like Hypatia, Sophia Brahe (yes, that Brahe!), Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet (whose name alone is worthy of celebration), Marie Curie, Lanyang Lin, Rosalind Franklin, Marie Daly et al were most welcome, and I couldn't help but wonder how it was determined who got a long article and who got an honorary mention. I'll bet it was tough. Of course, with some of these women, there is very little known about them - another problem with how history treated women. Others are still living today, such as Dr Lynn Conway of whom I had never heard, so I owe the author a dear thanks for that education!

The story of the Blackwell sisters was another welcome learning experience. Elizabeth Blackwell became, despite strenuous opposition, the first woman in the USA to graduate with a medical degree. She went on with her younger sister Emily, who became the third woman in the USA to graduate with a medical degree (the second was Lydia Folger - not that Folger! - Fowler who graduated the year after Elizabeth), to start up the very excellent New York Infirmary for indigent Women and Children. Having said that, I was sorry to read the author citing their policy of "no boyz allowed" as she puts it, as though it was a proud credential. It made me sad, because this was just as discriminatory as it was for the male-dominated colleges and universities to declare no women allowed in their medical programs. Or indeed to abuse women in places like Pakistan for wanting nothing more than a basic education. I didn't see that approach as a positive or commendable step. It's that pendulum again! This kind of thing is one reason why I wrote and published Seasoning!

It isn't mentioned in this brief bio, but Elizabeth was also instrumental in founding and running a school aimed at supporting her family after her father died prematurely, and she started a slave Sunday school. She was a self-starter to her core! Elizabeth never married - claiming she could never find anyone good enough to make up her other half, although some would say that Florence Nightingale was a contender. That didn’t happen, but her sister Emily moved in with yet another female Doctor, Elizabeth Cushier. I guess female doctors were a very close-knit community back then!

I encountered another similar instance in the story of innovator Margaret Knight who invented (inter alia) a machine which could create flat-bottomed paper bags. I know! It's not something to which anyone pays attention in our spoiled-rotten modern (western) world, but back then it was a labor intensive process to make such an ostensibly simple thing. Margaret fixed this by creating a machine to do it and do it well (and almost got ripped off for it).

The author casually mentions that the machine "did the work of thirty humans!" I know (at least, I assume!) that she intended this as an enthusiastic compliment on Margaret's ingenuity, but this was in 1868, and back then it would have been a tragedy for thirty people to lose their livelihood - multiplied over and over again for each machine which was produced. Progress runs rampant and people do lose their jobs. Tesla and Edison between them, for example, put professional lamplighters and snuffers out of work, and this kind of thing was repeated over and over again with every new "labor-saving" device.

It bothered me that the author trotted this out with such abandon when it was clearly bad news for those self-same poor families from which Margaret herself had only just risen. Whilst I commend the enthusiasm, I think for the sake of balanced reporting, this wasn't something which should have slipped by so cavalierly, especially when it's still going on today as robots take over more and more jobs which thirty (and more) humans were once earning their keep from. And no, this is not a Luddite call to arms! It's just something we should not let slide by our attention.

Aside from having an amazingly cool name that I'm totally going to steal for a novel at some point, Ogino Ginko (that would be Ginko Ogino in western cardinality), did in Japan what Elizabeth Blackwell did in the US, and against tougher odds, in my estimation. The Indian equivalent to these two women was Anandi Joshi, who said, "I thought that I should never learn any more, and I would rather have died." if that doesn’t emote a tear in your eye, you’re a statue. In pursuing a medical education, she faced the same kind of abuse that too many Muslim women (and one is too many) face even today.

I read with pure pleasure the stories of the unstoppable force of nature named Marie Equi, and the mini-bio of Agnodice, an Athenian woman who was equally feisty, and who exposed herself in a court room and got away with it because it was evidence! There's also Maria Dalle Donne, the first female MD ever, in 1799, Rebecca Lee Crumpler (whose name might have been better assigned had it been owned by Marie Equi!), the first African American woman to become a doctor of medicine, Okami Keiko, the first Japanese woman to earn a medical degree in the West, Sarah Josephine Baker, Fe del Mundo, the first woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School (they evidently didn’t know that Fe was a Filipina name...), and Gurubai Karmarkar. There is a bunch more, and every one is worth reading about.

The book was well-written, as I mentioned. There were a couple of minor writing issues, such as "Margaret Knight was born the youngest of five children with two older brothers and sisters" and which seems not to make sense at first glace, or which seems to be tautologous. It actually does make sense. I just think it could have been better worded! The last gripe I have is about factory safety. The author mentions at one point men objecting to women's hooped skirts in the factory, and she dismisses it as sexism. I agree that genderism was a part of this back then, but there is also a very practical safety issue here. I've worked in places like that (not, thankfully, in nineteenth century conditions!), and even today there are safety rules in place about loose clothing for very, very good reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with genderism and everything to do with protecting limbs. About every four days in the US someone gets injured because hair or clothing is caught in machinery. This is what I meant about commentary being a bit over the top at times.

But those issues aside, I highly recommend this book, because the problems I encountered with it are far less important than it is that knowledge like this be preserved and disseminated.

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston

Rating: WARTY!

This one had a great opening chapter about some apparent entity appearing in a black hole created by a particle collider, and then for the NEXT FIFTEEN CHAPTERS it completely abandoned that and went meandering everywhere but in pursuit of this beginning. It was so tedious it made my eyes water. Either that or I was crying over the loss of my time in listening to this garbage. We were slammed with one new character after another, NONE OF WHOM DID A DAMNED THING, and all of whom were the most simplistic trope cardboard cut-outs imaginable. This novel sucked green wieners big time. I am done with this author. But I do appreciate his putting "A Novel" on the cover because I was so convinced that this was a learned treatise on a victimless crimes that I was ready to send him money finance his campaign! Waste. Of. Aluminum and petroleum byproducts.

The Witch Hunter by Virginia Boecker

Rating: WARTY!

This one I could not get past the second chapter. It was first person PoV, and I am so deathly sick to my guts of that PoV that I honestly can hardly stand to read it any more even if the story isn't too bad. In this case it was too bad. It was bog-standard trope from the off. Hey lookit me! I'm a special snowflake teen! Lookit how I move and fight! Lookit how I'm the one girl in a manly man's world! My friends are named Caleb and Marcus and Linus! I'm so awesome! Snoopy's probably around here somewhere doing a happy dance because I am genuinely so superlative! Hey, lookit me again! I'm in training, and I am a klutz, but you know I'm going to become the most important person in the universe! No, seriously, lookit me some more! I'm so wonderful, it's magical! No, focus on MEEEE! I have a secret!

Who the hell cares? Seriously? I hope the necromancers do get you, because you are tedious to an extreme. Bye Bye! I have to go find some serious anti-nausea medicine at the nearest store.

Heist Society by Ally Carter

Rating: WARTY!

I used to be enthusiastic about Ally Carter when I discovered her Gallagher Girls series, but that didn't last long. Initially I liked it and positively reviewed I'd Tell You I Love You, but then I'd Have to Kill You which was ridiculously titled but not bad. The next two in the series were awful, though. I didn't like Don't Judge a Girl by her Cover which I reviewed negatively back in February of 2013, nor did I like Cross my Heart and Hope to Spy. Normally I won't read on in a series if I dislike one, but in this case I had both novels from the library at the same time and decided to give it a try. I wished I hadn't! Cam, the main character, had become too stupid for polite words.

I got a chance to read a 'spies and thieves' author promotion collection in July 2013, titled Double Crossed and liked it, which encouraged me to give a different young adult series by this author a chance, which means she's lucky indeed when there are so many authors competing for my attention. This particular novel turned out to be better than expected when I began it, but over the course of the novel, it proved to be decidedly sluggish in actually getting on with the story, and some of it made no sense whatsoever. Worse than this, the ending was remarkably limp.

Kat is a thief in a family of thieves, but she has conned her way into a boarding school to get out of her family's way of life. Despite this, she's dragged back into that life when someone frames her father for a theft he didn't commit, and she herself is framed for a stunt on the school premises which results in her expulsion (in quite flimsy premises I have to say). The man her father appears to have crossed is a seriously bad and very powerful Italian mobster. The person who framed her and got her kicked out of school is someone she's not even angry towards. This seemed not only to be entirely inappropriate, but to be out of character for her. She wasn't remotely pissed off with him for indulging in what frankly was at best a form of harassment, and at worst an exertion of control over her - control she had fought tooth and nail to free herself from. Her response (or rather complete lack of one) simply wasn't credible, nor was her complete capitulation to fall back in with these guys and save her estranged father.

She seems the kind of character who would be so peeved that these people got her expelled from a school in which she was doing well, that she would simply disappear and ditch them all to their fate, but she doesn't. She buckles under and goes along with their scheme, which made me dislike her considerably. I began wishing we could have kept her in school and follower her career there! It might have made for more engaging reading. On the other hand, she had four fingers and a thumb. Kidding. No, on the other hand, she was a very confident and capable young woman who knew how to get things done, which was no doubt why they'd dragged her into this. She immediately takes charge and gets things moving, but her easy access to money and unfettered and unescorted travel around the world is a bit of a stretch. Did no one ever wonder why she wasn't in school?!

I had a couple of other problems. Kat was presented as a sharp operator, yet she lets a new person into their crew at the last minute when none was needed, which seemed way off to me. It felt like she was constantly pining after for Hale, her old friend, which was annoying and made her look weak and pathetic. She'd had her chance at him, and rejected it along with everything he represented, yet now she's suddenly all a-flutter over him despite the fact that he's clearly a womanizing jerk? That stunk, because it made her look really stupid, and brought back the ipecac taste of Cam from the other series.

The ending was so flaccid that it proved to be the final straw. How she dealt with the mobster made zero sense given all that had happened. Why the mobster was so obsessive about her and so convinced her father having stolen his property was another big hole in the plot. it never felt real - it felt like a big game the author was playing with me. So. overall, I don't consider this a worthy read, and I do not plan on following the series. I'm done with Ally Carter! Next author please, right this way!

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Guardians Disassembled by Bendis, Bradshaw

Rating: WORTHY!

Not very long ago I reviewed a (non-graphic) novel about the Guardians of the Galaxy and I was not impressed with it. Since I've never read a Guardians graphic novel, I was curious to see how it compared with both that and the movie. My excellent local library had several on the shelf. I chose this one because the title was such an amusing play on "Avengers Assemble!" The interesting thing about this though, was that in many ways it paralleled the earlier novel in having the team split-up at the beginning and get back together later, so it was also a really good novel to compare to the previous one. I have to say now, having finished it, that while I still had a problem or two with it, this graphic novel was light years ahead of the text novel I reviewed here.

What was missing was the humor that I had come to expect, having been first exposed to this team through the excellent Marvel movie, but that aside, writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Nick Bradshaw did a pretty decent job. The novel seemed much more focused upon violent conflict than ever it did in other forms of entertainment, but aside from that, the novel was in many ways reminiscent of the movie (or vice-versa!) so it was familiar territory and it worked pretty well for me.

The only other problem I had with it was that the creators seemed to have taken the disassembly to a rather extreme level, getting off topic (it seemed to me) towards the end of this story to the point where I wasn't even sure it was the same story, but comic books have always been rather loosely wrapped for my taste, so this didn't faze me that much, and overall I liked it. I especially liked the chance to see Captain Marvel aka Ms Marvel make a guest appearance, since this is also to be an upcoming (and long, long overdue I have to say!) female super hero movie from Marvel. The novel introduced a host of other super heroes, with only some of whom I was familiar, so this was interesting too.

Star Lord (also known by the unfortunately phallic monica of Peter Quill) and his team are disassembled on the orders of his dad, who is the despotic ruler of a stellar empire. Apparently dad wants his son back in the fold, which begs the question as to how truly evil this guy is. It seemed a bit of a stretch to me that he would bother to do this, but in order to achieve his aim, he contracts a diversity of other villains to take the team apart, selling off Rocket for scientific experimentation, bringing Peter home, turning in both Drax and Gamora over to the villainous groups who had the biggest ax to grind with each, and so on.

The rest of the novel is about their individual experiences, and about them getting back together. As I mentioned, there was a lot more fighting in this than I was accustomed to from the movie and a lot less interesting inter-character interactions. In the movie, the action scenes were fun, but mainly because they were interspersed with sections which explored character idiosyncrasies and which allowed the viewer to really get to know and empathize with the characters. It made me really invest in them. The graphic novel - not so much, although I imagine you would be more invested had you been following the comic book series.

Outlaw Princess of Sherwood by Nancy Springer

Rating: WARTY!

Read quite charmingly by Emily Gray, this very short novel from an author I intend to avoid like the plague from now on, was awful, and the writing did no justice to the reader's game voice. It was vacuous and frivolous, and downright stupid and offered nothing whatsoever to anyone with an ounce of integrity.

The absurd plot was not in having a fictional character named Rowan Hood, the daughter, supposedly, of Robin Hood, which might have made for a good story (maybe the previous volume was better), but in attaching to her a princess of an absurdly named king of an even more absurdly named kingdom, neither of which ever actually existed, and have that princess fart around in Sherwood Forest mooning over the fact that her mom the queen was being held hostage by her dad the king in a cage(!) out in the forest, guarded by three rings of armed men, in some sort of brain-addled attempt to get their daughter back.

Rather than "man" up and turn herself in, the daughter fretted for day after day about how her mom was suffering, and then cooked up this ridiculous plan to kidnap the king and hold him to ransom - the ransom being her mom's freedom. Seriously?

These people were outlaws for goodness sake! Robin Hood was also around to rescue them, so gone was any hope of a couple of strong female characters. All they had to do was sneak up in the night, shoot arrows through everyone except her mom, and they were done! But no, let's fret and whine, and pick daisies, and worry about our clothes, and fret and whine some more. This novel was beyond ludicrous and headed deep into plaid. It ought to have been put into a cage, dragged through the forest, and dropped into the ocean instead of getting published!

The Case of the Left-handed Lady by Nancy Springer

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first of two negative reviews of novels by Nancy Springer. I guess I'm done with pursuing her as an author of interest! The two stories were very different, and whereas the other didn't grab me at all, I found this one rather engaging for the first half of the novel (which is quite short). It's an audio book which is read acceptably although not particularly inspired by Katherine Kellgren, and it's about Sherlock Holmes's younger sister, who of course didn't exist according to the Canon of Conan the Anti-Barbarian. Out of keeping with Doyle's style, this one is told in first person which is far from my favorite PoV and rather spoiled the story in the long run. Why the author chose to go this route is a mystery, but it was a capital mistake! For the most part, I managed to put that aside without becoming nauseated by it, but there were times when I was shaking my head and wishing the author had been smart enough to write in third person.

Enola Holmes is only fourteen, and having been given access to some money by her mother, she ran away from home and established herself as a private detective or a perditorian, as she calls it - a finder of the lost in London. She's rather surprised to be visited one day by Doctor John Watson, who has never met Enola, and who engages her to find herself - and her mother, who is also apparently missing. Enola is posing as Ivy Meshol (that last name being an anagram of Holmes - Enola isn't very inventive or very smart). Ivy is purportedly the secretary of the renowned perditorian Doctor Ragostan, who of course doesn't exist, thereby leaving "Ivy" free to take on any case under his name and investigate it herself.

Enola pursues her calling in much the elementary way as Sherlock does, employing disguises and making deductions, although she isn't anywhere near as sharp as Holmes when the game is afoot. Unfortunately she's given to ruminating idly and pointlessly on her rather slack investigation far too much. Completely unlike Holmes, she obsesses over her clothing to the point where it nauseated me, particularly in the latter half of the novel. Rather than go looking for her mother who (she has a good idea) is off pursuing art and staying with 'gypsies', Enola decides to look into the disappearance of a Duke's daughter which appears superficially to be an elopement, but which upon even modest examination, seems much more like she left of her own accord, but Enola has issues with that explanation even after she's already determined that the daughter evidently has a split personality.

I have to say that this is probably the very last novel I shall read that rips off Arthur Doyle, because that's all this is - cheap and cynical theft of property, even though copyright on this has long expired. I call it theft, because if you're going to have a cousin, or sister, or whatever, of Sherlock Holmes, I think it's beholden upon you to at least offer a respectful nod and a wink to Doyle's style and Holmes's expertise and methods. It's a tragedy of Adlerian proportions if all you're going to do is steal the name to sell your book and offer nothing else, and you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

This story had nothing whatsoever to do with Holmes or Doyle, or with the brilliance and insights of either of them. It was just a young adult story which shamelessly abused the name to sell more copies than it would have, had the character been made to stand on her own two feet - something at she would have singularly failed in my opinion. I actively disrecommend this novel.

Human Evolution by Robin Dunbar

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"resting, dosing..." Dozing? I don't know what 'dosing' means int his context! p229
"No species of primate devotes more than 20 per cent of their day to social interaction" - perhaps 'ape' was needed in place of 'primate' since humans are primates?

This was a fascinating glimpse into human evolution and had a lot of material which captured my interest. I don't know if this is all up-to-the-minute material or has a mix of new and old, but I was happy to encounter material I had not seen or heard of before, so this was a good educational experience for me, and well worth the learning. This is a dense book; not scientifically dense in the sense a published science paper, but a lot of information coming down the pipe in short order, so no space is wasted here and it's all good stuff, as they say, packed with science, with references (there are extensive end notes, as well as a bibliography and an index), and with in-place nods to authorities in the various (and diverse) fields this work touches on.

The author pursues a position that I have very little familiarity with, so it was interesting to me to learn of it. Its focus is on time-budgeting: how much of their day early humans, and before them Australopithecines (and before those, apes and monkeys for comparison purposes) needed to devote to resting, foraging, and grooming in order to get the rest, the nutrition, and the social interaction completed in order for their society to function. A lot of this is speculative in relation to ancient societies, in the sense that these things don't lend themselves to fossilization. but there is indirect evidence to support the contentions which are explored here. There's also direct evidence for some facets of this. For example, it's possible to learn from the chemistry of bones whether an individual was stressed or healthy and even what they were eating. What's offered here makes sense in the context of what evidence we do know, and I liked the arguments.

This book was clearly written, and it placed early humans and Australopithecines in an easily grasped context which certainly clarified things for me. I was interested to learn more about just how transitional H. habilis was, and I was also interested to learn more about Neanderthals. I've never viewed them as the bumbling hunched-over people of the historical view, so my quandary has always been just how much like us they were, and I read arguments here that offered some interesting and surprising differences.

There were also some novel (to me) cases made from topics which you don't normally read about in books of this nature such as, how important are things like laughter, singing, and religion, things we take for granted and spare little thought for, in sculpting the kinds of societies in which these individuals existed - or could exist? Laughter is offered as an interesting and viable substitute for grooming in societies who had so many members that a decent amount of physical grooming could not have been indulged-in to cement such numbers together given time constraints on their day. With grooming, we're told that only one of the grooming pair benefits (but perhaps these people sat around in a grooming circle, each grooming the one in front?!), whereas with singing and laughter, more than one recipient benefits, thereby cutting down on how much time was required. I think more study is required, but these seem intelligent arguments to me.

One which I found intriguing is the position that, in modern societies, it seems that three is the size limit for shared laughter in the form of amusing stories or telling jokes, and this may well be true in a modern society where there are so many distractions, and so many topics to talk about. Neanderthals, after all, had no cell phones and played very few professional sports I imagine! I have to wonder if, in a primitive society, we really need to revise our estimates of this nature? Even in modern societies, many more than three people can share a joke if they're attending a performance by a comedian, for example. Not that I'm suggesting that archaic humans had comedy clubs, but they did have camp fire gatherings, so I was rather leery of too much comparison with modern human society.

It would have been nice had this been explored more, and perhaps in scientific circles it has and it would have bulked-up the book too much to go into a deep discussion of it, so my speculations may be immaterial, but this was not the only area where I would have liked to have known more. Another of these was with regard to burials. We can only speculate about the elaborate burials of some individuals that have been exhumed: bodies buried with lots of personal artifacts, rich clothing, tools, weapons and other artifacts. This has been used as an argument for religion, and it is persuasive, but nowhere have I seen another argument set forth, which is that these burials were simply an attempt by friends or relatives to express their love, respect, and sense of loss for those who died. The revelation that an ochre-packed extraneous human femur was found in one grave tends to suggest that not everyone was buried with reverence! I mean, if all of the dead were so decently buried and decorated because of religious belief in an afterlife, then how did this one individual end up being employed as a repository in the burial of two children? Could these people not have been accorded a respectful and loving burial without any thoughts of an afterlife entering into it? It seems possible to me, but then I'm no expert on these topics!

I loved the non-nonsense science which puts creationists in their place anytime, anywhere. One thing which rang throughout this book was that there was a plethora hominins and hominids, which show a continual transition from apes to modern humans This is indisputable. What is harder to nail down are less physically evidenced things such as the arrival of speech and whether Neanderthals had it. here, scientific evidence can still be employed, but it's not quite as cut and dried as are other aspects of evolution. I enjoyed this discussion immensely - it was clear, to the point, and well supported, as was the discussion on friendship and the differences between men and women in this regard. It seems there are six potential requirements for a real friendship to form, any three of which can cause a level of bonding: language, place of origin, similar education, shared interests/hobbies, world view, sense of humor. These things are worth knowing for those of us who are interested in writing novels and imbuing them with realism!

Overall, I enjoyed this immensely. I appreciated the well-referenced, clearly argued text, and the wealth of good and fresh (at least fresh to me!) ideas. This book was very engaging - more so than I had feared it might be!) and kept my interest throughout. I'm grateful to the author and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance review copy, in return for which I offer this honest review.

Gertie's Leap to Greatness by Kate Beasley

Rating: WORTHY!

I don't know her, but in my opinion, Kate Beasley is a mischievous-looking author, so it was hardly surprising to me that that this came from her keyboard! It's a nicely-written middle-grade novel and is of course about Gertie, who is planning on being the best fifth-grader ever this year. She's well-on-track to kick-start it with her zombie frog, until Mary Sue Spivey shows up as a transfer student. Mary Sue is smart and her father is a movie director who happens to direct movies featuring Jessica Walsh, who is a hero of fifth graders everywhere, so Gertie's plans have to hop-it.

Her phase two decision to become a genius student and thereby overshadow Mary Sue also gets a D. It seems like every plan Gertie comes up with is effortlessly derailed by Mary Sue and now, looming on the horizon, is career day, wherein Mary Sue gets to have her movie director father show up maybe, and Gertie can't even bring her own father because he's gone for two weeks working on an oil-rig out in the ocean. Gertie decides she can handle this alone. She's a big girl now. The problem is that career day doesn't go anything like Gertie planned or even imagined it would, and now Mary Sue is more popular than ever and Gertie is looking more and more like the villain in this little drama they have going. Talking of which, the school play is auditioning next....

The story was a bit of a roller-coaster, and Gertie was in many ways her own worst enemy, but this state of affairs wasn't random. For reasons which go unexplained, Gertie's mom abandoned her and her dad, and married another guy, and Gertie has never come to terms with it. She grew up with her dad, who was absent periodically, and her great Aunt Rae, and an annoying little kid named Audrey who was often parked with Rae when her folks wanted a date night or day (both of which seem to be very often). Gertie doesn't suspect that her 'perfect' nemesis also has personal issues with which she wrestles, too.

Names of characters in my stories are important to me and (as they used to in years gone by) tend to carry a meaning behind the façade, which relates something of the character who carries them. In that context, I have to observe here that the popularity of the name Gertrude - which I personally don't like - fell steadily throughout the twentieth century, becoming very effectively non-existent since the mid-sixties, so why this name was chosen for this character, who I think deserved better, is a mystery explicable it seems to me, only as a rather forlorn attempt at alliteration, but I decided not to fret too much over that any more than I wondered why it was Kate Beasley and not Kat Beasley which to me is a kick-ass name! Not that Kate is awful; I have several nieces named in some variation on 'Kate'.

But I digress! I had some technical issues reading this in Adobe Digital Editions reader. The chapters were slow to load, taking about eighteen seconds for the screen to appear when turning the page to a chapter header, whereas pages with images on them (which often do load slowly in ADE) popped up right away! I don't know what that was all about. The only problem with the images was that some of them were truncated so it was impossible to see all of the image. In contrast, on the Kindle app on my phone, I had no problem with slow screen loading or with seeing the images (although the images were understandably small). The best of all, though, was on the Bluefire Reader app on my iPad, where it was picture (and text) perfect.

I had some minor issues with the writing, too. I felt the story ended a little too abruptly. There never did seem to be any resolution. It felt like it was left hanging a bit. Although the very brief epilogue (which I typically don't read since the epilogue ought to be the last chapter, not some appendix), was unexpectedly interesting, and peculiar in that it didn't wrap-up the story at all. In fact, it seemed like it was actually the prologue (which I don't read either) to another story! I felt that Mary Sue was portrayed as much more of a villain than she actually was, which was misleading given later revelations), but perhaps middle-graders won't be so picky.

Those gripes aside, I really liked the story and the general way in which it was unveiled. I liked the tone and the chapter headers and the excellent gray scale illustrations by Jillian Tamaki (now there's another great name to play with!), and taken overall, I recommend it as a worthy read for its intended age range and perhaps, beyond, too! Go read it if you don't believe me!

Salem's Cipher by Jess Lourey

Rating: WARTY!

Be warned there are spoilers in this, I've kept descriptions as vague as I can and also somewhat out of order - in order to minmize spoilers, but I can't address specific problems with a narrative unless I talk about what those problems are, otherwise it's simply a vague list of complaints without any supporting evidence, and I'm not that kind of reviewer. It's of even less help to a writer if I don't explain what the problems are, but I shall try not to go into more detail than I have to, to make a point.

I struggled with this one in consideration of whether it was a truly worthy read or not, but when I went back and analyzed my notes afterwards, I had no problem downgrading this. In some ways, it had a lot going for it, but in the end, the highly improbable plotting, the literally incredible coincidences, and some really poor and/or thoughtless writing made my mind up for me. The ending did not help the case at all, so I can't recommend this novel. Plus it was way too long for what it offered, and as if that isn't bad enough, it's the first of a series where even though the bad guys are soundly beaten in this volume, we find they're not really beaten at all in volume two. What?! Yeah, that's what I mean about improbable.

I am not a fan of inane story arcs like this any more than I'm a fan of the 'girls in peril' genre of horror movie where the psycho is killed two or three times but always gets resurrected and comes after the girl(s) again just when they think it's safe - and this is all in the first movie! As if that wasn't bad enough, we get not one, not two, but three villainous assassins, two of which are straight out of horror movies. Their behaviors make little sense. One of them is supposed to be so strong and muscular that he can dislocate your shoulder by a simple squeeze of his fingers - and this guy travels around under the radar? No! Another of the villains can literally rearrange his face so his appearance changes. He can even pass for a woman. What? No! Just no! This isn't a Marvel comic book!

Written very much in the Dan Brown mold of "impossible to solve" puzzles which are really rather juvenile, and in the National Treasure mold of hidden booty and arcane clues which are so old they don't even matter any more, this one featured a female protagonist by the name of Salem Wiley, who we're told is a 'genius cryptanalyst', but we see very little of that (although she is smart enough to know that lightning does strike twice in the same place!). She's partnered with a Chicago cop named Isabel who was a lot more interesting, but who got second-billing and relatively little air time. There never was any good reason why these two resisted going to the police or the press, or the Internet with what they knew at any given point in the story. In fact, most of the time it would have made far more sense if they had. I don't mind stories where they go it alone or avoid the police, but there has to be a good reason for that. Here, and for the most part, there was not.

After every few chapters there was a huge info-dump on Salem's past which I took to skipping after perusing the first one. They were boring and unimportant and they brought the story to a screeching halt if you stopped to read them, as did the chapters which pursued the campaign of the "first viable candidate for election as a female president," which were irrelevant to the main thrust of the story and should have been omitted. Oh, and excuse me, what is Hilary Clinton - chopped liver? Well, only if you're a Republican!

Worse than this, the extra pages bulked-up the novel embarrassingly and were, frankly, a potential waste of trees, as was the formatting of this book with blank pages all over the place. In this era of ebooks, trees are not so raped and pillaged as they used to be, but if this novel ever went to a significant print-run, I would fear for the forests to the tune of a hundred or a hundred-fifty or so superfluous pages.

The story's central premise is the most ridiculous of all: that there's a secret society of men which is dedicated to keeping women out of power (and it's not even the Republicans! LOL!) - to the point of assassinating them if necessary. Excuse me? Since when have men ever needed a secret society to step on women? The whole thing is utterly absurd, as are the links the author makes, calling in Emily Dickinson to offer clues to Thomas Beale's treasure via absurdist non-puzzles hidden in even more silly, improbable, and risky locations offering an inanely ancient, but still extant trail of clues which any middle-grader worth her salt could uncover, and at the end of this trial is a list of the members of this society - which itself is really irrelevant given how much families have intermarried in the intervening century and a half?

The list is supposed to be still relevant because it travels in bloodlines, so we're expected to believe that in a republic which came together to overthrow a monarchy, power is passed down like royalty from mother to daughter to combat the status quo which is power passed down like royalty from father to son? How is that even an improvement?!

My question here is why would any secret society keep a list of their members hidden by simplistic clues so that their enemies could find it? If it's passed from mother to daughter, why would they even need such a list? Why would anyone care about such a list if all they wanted to do is keep women down, for which they're already doing a fine job by sabotaging "uppity women", and undermining them, and assassinating them if necessary? Why would they even be considered a threat (or conversely, a success) if they're doing such a lousy job that women have sprung-up everywhere around the world into positions of power and influence despite all this?! The premises of this establishment were vacant!

In general, the writing was technically good, which you would (hopefully!) expect in an author's thirteenth novel, but the plotting too often felt like it came from an author's debut novel, with far too many convenient coincidences and overly dramatic characters. Some of the writing left something to be desired ranging from the minor to the major (as I've already explored). There were instances like, for example where I read, "Cards and gifts at all the appropriate holidays" which would have made more sense if it had read, "Appropriate cards and gifts at the holidays." Is there an inappropriate holiday to send cards?! But then I wondered: is it cipher?!

Once again I was sorry to see that I had run into yet another female author who was practically labeling women as worthless unless they were physically attractive. At one point I read, "Pretty flight attendant" and at another, "Catherine wasn't beautiful, but she was smart." Excuse me? Beauty comes first, but since she's ugly at least she has the consolation prize of being smart? It's not as good as beautiful, but being smart is the best she can do? It's sad, but it's all she has to offer? In a novel about a "genius cryptanalyst," smarts is on the back burner? That's frankly a disgraceful insult to women. I didn't get why the flight attendant's looks were remotely relevant, unless we're to understand that her death would have been somehow less tragic had she been 'homely'. That kind of writing is nauseating and obnoxious - and it's unacceptable.

There were unintentionally amusing portions where for example, I learned that Emily Dickinson lived behind the green door. No wonder she was depressed! I'm guessing the door wasn't green when she lived there, but who knows? Maybe it was! There were some instances of intentional humor, but not many. Unfortunately, there were lots of minor hiccups such as when a guy comes in dressed for Halloween and has five-cent pieces taped to the back of his T-shit. How did Salem see them when he never turned around? Nickelback never sounded so bad. On another topic, I think by "200 convening years" the author actually meant "200 intervening years."

There were larger issues, though. One of the most glaring was when they were supposed to get rid of their phones and one of them doesn't. The other knows she has not done so because she's shown the phone with her phone number in the case, yet later the other one is supposed to be pissed-off upon just discovering that her trusted friend lied about ditching the phone? In movies this is known as poor continuity, and the sad thing was this part (showing her phone number in the case) could have been completely excised! It wasn't necessary to the story. This is the problem with long novels: you grow tired of reading through them to catch errors like this and inevitably some get missed! We've all been there. This is why I don't write long novels!

At one point Salem and Isabel take a trip to Massachusetts, and the timing for the various stages of their journey is completely amiss throughout the trip, with hours disappearing unaccounted-for so we have sunset and sunrise popping with undue haste or undue tardiness. Also on this trip we have an assassin who is itching to kill these two women, and yet when he has his best opportunity - when they're sleeping in the car on the side of a deserted road at night, he has six hours in which to kill them, yet he fails to act despite previously vowing he will get them asap? There was no explanation for this, except of course that these two are our heroes so we can't kill them off - and this assassin is quite literally the most inept assassin ever.

That makes my case for not viewing this novel as a worthy read so I'l leave it there. This author can write, for the most part, and I wish her luck with her career, but this novel fell flat for me despite the appealing premise of two women taking care of business without needing men to save them. I'm sorry I could rate it better.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu

Rating: WORTHY!

After someone whose reviews I follow mentioned this, I requested it from the library thinking initially that it was a woman's account of being in the IDF, but while the author has indeed been in the IDF, this is a fictional work about three other women in the IDF. As such, I'm sure that it does contain biographical elements, but it is not a biography. That clarified, I found it an eminently worthy read. It was fascinating, funny a hell in parts, and engrossing. A couple of pieces fell completely flat for me, and the penultimate chapter was completely bizarre, but overall I loved it. The closest thing I've read to this was Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which I favorably reviewed back in February 2014. If you liked that, you'll probably like this, and vice-worsted.

This fictional work follows three Israeli women (Avishag, Lea, and Yael) from their last months in high school in an isolated north Israel village, to enlistment the Tsva ha-Hagana le-Yisra'el (known in the west as the IDF or Israeli Defence Force), and beyond. It's written by a Harvard graduate who grew up in Israel in a location similar to the one where the novel begins. All Israelis, male or female, are required to enlist at age eighteen, for two years. There is no distinction between genders. That's what makes the IDF so amazing. The rest of the world is scrambling to catch up to this obviously optimal state of affairs.

The story isn't exactly linear, nor does it follow the usual story flow. Normally this would annoy me, but once in a while it works, and it works here. I lived in Israel for a short period of time (a while ago!), and this story came across as authentic through and through. The layout is a series of slightly disconnected vignettes or impressions - almost still life's - of these three girls as they travel through the next two or three years, and it is by turns disturbing, frightening, saddening, hilarious, and heart-warming. The way the story is laid out makes the reader feel disconnected, too, and makes nonsensical stories make sense in this context. It also serves to give the reader a good idea of what it's like to live in a nation which feels itself constantly at war even when no overt war is going on.

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For me, Lea was the most fascinating character, especially after her experience with a man who slashed the throat of her fellow guard on the border-guard duty they were engaged in. How Lea reacts to this - the slow burn she undergoes - is disturbing and deeply unnerving. Avishag is the most amusing character. Her entire life seems almost like a Monty Python sketch and her name seems particularly à propos. At one point she completely loses it while on guard duty in a tower across from the Egyptian border. They are so bored with nothing happening day after day after day that when she takes off all of her clothes and lays down in a fetal position on the floor of her tower, the Egyptians don't even notice for some time.

Eventually one of the Egyptians is so bored that he decides to actually do his job as a break from the monotony, and when he aims his binocs at the Israeli side, there are two female border guards lying naked on the floor of their watch tower. The Egyptians think it's some sort of trick or insult, and a report travels up the Egyptian chain of command to the top, crosses the border, and travels down the Israeli chain of command. The girls get eight weeks in the brig for being improperly dressed on duty or something. Yael, for me wasn't quite so interesting, and some of the snapshots in general were boring to me, but overall, the novel was quite stunning and I fully recommend it.

The Bitches of Everafter by Barbra Annino

Rating: WORTHY!

This is without a doubt the most hilarious and best-written (with a couple of amusing exceptions I shall point out) novel I've read in a long time. It's humbling to read something like this and distressing to think I might never write one this good, although Femarine, which came out this month, would give it a good run for its money on a level field, I'll warrant!

In a lot of ways, it's like the TV show, Once Upon a Time, which I used to watch, but gave up on because it became boring and repetitive. There were no worries about that here until I discovered that the ending wasn't. There are two more planned volumes. This annoys me, and it means I did have a problem because I am not a fan of series. They rarely end well. Having said that, there are some series I've read and enjoyed throughout. The horns of this dilemma are: dare I pursue this one and risk disappointment or should I quit while I'm ahead?

This novel also got away with breaking a rule which I normally like to see enforced: don't start chapter one in the future and then flashback in the rest of the book. In this case it was done perfectly, which just goes to show that some authors can write and others can't. We quickly meet the main characters, which is another good thing about this since they're far too good to keep them waiting in the wings. A third wonder about it is that it's written in third person. Far too many stories of this nature are in first person, and I am ever after grateful to the amazingly-named Barbra Annino for giving that route the derision and disdain it so richly deserves. Twit to all YA authors: you can write a brilliant novel in 3PoV! Rilly! Wed this and Reap!

We do get the story mainly from the perspective of Snow White, who has committed some crime over which she holds no regret, but for which she has a ninety-day psych eval to endure. She's not confined to a hospital ward, but is living in Granny's Home for Girls, along with Aura Rose, an ex-car-thief and burglar, Cindy Glass, a non-recovering drunk, and Punzie Hightower, who can currently be seen stripping at the Fairest of Them All club downtown. All of whom are corralled and controlled by the estimable Bella Bookless, whose dog is named 'Beast'.

These girls were all put there by Judge Redhood, aided by the surprisingly deep and self-motivated Tink, and these villainous vamps are watched over by parole officer Robin Hood and psychiatrist Jack Bean. So far so good, but what is happening in this house when Snow finally gets settled in? What are the odd lights she sees? Do patterns on the walls really move? What's behind the forbidden doors? Why is the fearless Aura suddenly and inexplicably terrified of a spinning wheel?

I devoured this and loved it until the last page when I was a bit disappointed to see that it ended on a cliff-hanger because it was part of yet another trilogy. I know trilogies and series are very lucrative, but how about doing we readers a favor now and then and fitting it all into one volume? I was tempted not to pursue this purely out of spite, despite enjoying volume one, but having thought that, I can’t deny that for as much pressure as Amazon megacorp is putting on book prices to squash them down to next-to-nothing, maybe the only option we authors have anymore, is to revert to the way novels used to be published: in installments.

The unintentionally amusing portions of this book were few. There was the common one of thinking biceps has a singular form: "spearing through his bicep." I had an online discussion with a friend about this, and yes, technically you can use 'bicep', but my point is that does anyone honestly think that your typical author knows anatomy well-enough to specify that one muscle? I'd have a hard time believing that! No one uses the singular form - unless it's an anatomist!

I've never seen a novel where someone was wounded through the triceps, so I'm guessing authors who do this are not actually being anatomically precise but simply don't know the difference between bicep and biceps any more than they know the difference between stanch and staunch. My guess is that they think 'biceps' refers to the muscles of both upper arms, so the muscles of one upper arm must be 'bicep'! Who knows? OTOH, Barbra Annino isn't just any author as her writing chops demonstrate, so maybe I'll give her the benediction of the doubt here and dedicate a song to her (not original with my I hasten to add):

My analyse over the ocean
My analyse over the sea
My analyse over the ocean
So bring back my anatomy....

The other mistake was one that I personally have never seen before in a novel as far as I can recall, and for which even I can offer no excuse: "Not that she was opposed to murder, per say." The Latin is per se, FYI! Some of us writers fear for the English language the way it's going with all this self-publishing, texting, and tweeting. OTOH, language isn't what you see in a dictionary - it’s a living, morphing, growing thing, so we can only guess at what we'll be reading in fifty years, but with this kind of thing getting loose, I fear for the language Dear Hearts! Fear for it I tell you! It's enough to make my tricep twitch....

Anyway, that aside, I recommend this as a worthy read.

Above World by Jenn Reese

Rating: WORTHY!

Read excellently by Kate Rudd, this remarkable novel, which to be honest did have a couple of stagnant portions, came bouncing back from every dip, was inventive, amusing, adventurous, playful and fun. It's the start of a series, which I don't intend to pursue at this time but to which I may return when I've addressed other books in an ever-growing virtual pile which I am excited at the prospect of reading. That's the best feeling in the world, isn't it? A new novel?! Writing it, reading it - it doesn't matter!

Aluna is on the cusp of young adulthood, but despite her human roots, she's lived her whole life in the sea, with her people, the Coral Kampai in the City of Shifting Tides. When she incurs the disfavor of her stern father (rather like Ariel the mermaid!) she leaves with her best friend Hoku on a quest to free Willy. No, I;m kididng,. She;s on a quest to find a solution to the problem of the Kampaii's failing breathing apparatus. Yes, despite frequent denials, the Kampaii are humans who need an oxygen extraction device in order to breathe, and have to take a genetic pill at Aluna's age, in order ot exchange their legs for a tail - a sign they are now adults in the eyes of their people.

Aluna isn't there yet, and it's fortunate because she needs those legs to explore above world - on the alien dry land, where she has to track down the hydro-tech corporation which supplied them with their under water technology many years before. This is, inevitably, going to bring her into contention with Fathom, not remotely human any more, and the evil leader of a large band of misfits who have taken transhumanism to scary levels. Why? Because he can.

The book fell down in small ways, such as the world building. While it was great and glorious, some of it made no sense at all. Other parts of it were wonderful. I completely fell in love with Barko, the talking dog and Kate Rudd's representation of him was first class. Also, as at least one other reviewer has pointed out, the past tense of 'tread' is 'trod', not 'treaded'. Tires are treaded! Any decent spellchecker should have caught this. Those quibbles aside, I really liked this novel and I recommend it.

Marvel's Captain America: Sub Rosa by David McDonald

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this novel under false pretenses. I don't know who decides how to categorize these novels when they're put up on Net Galley as advance review copies. I suspect it's the publisher, but whoever it was misrepresented this one. It was categorized under graphic novels, but it's no such thing! There are no graphics in sight - in this case not even a cover, so I was disappointed before I began this. My advice to publishers is not to put your text novels under the graphic novel header. It's misleading at best and dishonest at worst. Nevertheless I gave it the old college try, and I have to report that it was not a beautiful day in the neighborhood for Mr Rogers, aka Captain America. I really could not get into this. I made it to just beyond the half-way point, and when it didn't remotely look like it was getting any better (indeed it got worse, descending into monologues and pages of exposition), I gave up on it.

I'm not a huge comic book fan, but then this was not a comic book, as I was sorry to discover. My experience of Captain America is all from the Marvel movies which have been hitting the screens with a routine and regularity, and a runaway success that's nothing short of breathtaking, and every one of those movies has been funny, amazing, action-packed, intelligent (for Hollywood!), fast-paced, and thoroughly entertaining. This novel was none of that. Instead, it was a series of uninspired fights followed by uninspired dialog, followed by more fighting. And there was neither anything super nor heroic about it. You could have taken out the Cap, and substituted one of the GI Joes, or one of Schwarzeneggar's older characters, like the one from Commando, or tossed in a Jason Bourne or James Bond, or any such macho action dude, and it could have been exactly the same story. There was no reason for the Cap to be here.

The story began with Commander Maria Hill contacting Cap to ask him to take care of her niece, Katherine, who plays the standard maiden in distress, despite the fact that she can handle herself and gets the Cap out of more than one scrape, yet she never gets any respect. I think this story would have been a much better adventure if Commander Hill had taken charge and cap had not been involved, but it is what it never was, and that's what I have to review.

The dialog was uninspired and not amusing, except unintentionally, such as at one point when the Cap is fighting a character named Taskmaster, who has "photographic reflexes" (what's really meant is cinematographic reflexes - any move she sees he can emulate). At one point, while fighting Taskmaster and attempting a futile distraction, Cap asks, "So who's paying you, Taskmaster, and how much?" Was Cap not paying attention two minutes before when Taskmaster came flying through a window and announced, as an introduction, "...she's worth a lot to me. Two million dollars to be exact."? I guess not. His motive is to collect a bounty. he's being paid two million dollars to be exact! Cap doesn't come off as very smart in this story, which is another problem. Of course that doesn't explain who's offering the bounty, but that's not exactly what Cap asks, is it?

The writing is a bit clunky, too. Workman-like for the most part, but not inspired. At one point, in the same paragraph we got "Then it came to him...then with a jolt it came to him..." which made for jarring reading. I guess the first time it came to him it didn't jolt him enough? Or maybe he needed to drink a Jolt cola before it came to him? Character descriptions were boilerplate, along the lines of "a lion's mane of hair" and "a curved beak of a nose." Not very inspired or inspiring. It felt like the author had cut & pasted these from other tepid random novels.

It was hard to find this on Goodreads because the title there is different. In fact the title seems very fluid. It's listed as Marvel's Captain America, but the novel itself is titled Marvel Captain America Sub Rosa. That latter Latin means literally beneath the rose or by way of translation, in secret. But it can be no secret that the Cap deserved a lot better than he got here. I can't recommend this based on what I read, which was more than enough for me when there are other novels out there which are desperate to be read and enjoyed and promise to be more rewarding.

The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan

Rating: WARTY!

I made it through 43% of this advance review copy, which I honestly felt was way more than it deserved. The blurb leads in with a virtually breathless rant about climate change and freezing winters (Note to blurb writer: snow in Israel isn't uncommon as it happens!), but climate change was irrelevant to this novel. The same novel could have been written about survivors of a plane crash in the desert, scientists cut off in in Antarctica, shipwreck survivors on an island, or people living in a Biosphere 2 type of environment. It would have made no difference to the story, so I didn't get the deal with the climate change at all. Maybe in the second half of the novel things happened to make it more relevant, but I was so bored with it that I could not bear the thought of reading any more to find out.

There was no indication given (not in the half I read) as to how things got so bad so quickly. This novel is set just three or four years from now, and while climate change has indeed reached a point of no easy or sure return, and governments are still doing diddly about it there's no indication it's going to go south (or in this case north) so quickly.

One of the characters was gender queer and I didn't get her purpose either. I mean it's great that we're seeing this kind of diversity in a novel, but if all we're seeing it for is its novelty, then it really contributes very little. Admittedly, this could have turned around and become a truly dramatic pivot point at 44% in, but from what I read, this was seen as a handicap and treated like one, and it seems to me that it would have made no significant difference - actually it might have made for a better read now I think about it - if this same character had had an actual handicap, such as a mobility issue (being confined to a wheelchair for example and dealing with slippery ice and slushy snow) instead of simply a gender trait, so I really didn't see what this brought to the story that was supposedly so vital.

The two main female characters in the novel were actually offered-up not as strong women, but as maidens in distress, held hostage and threatened by the ice dragon, and the guy shows up like a latter day St George to slay the beast and rescue them from its evil clutches. It was rather disgusting, and none of these characters was particularly interesting to me. It felt like the author had created a bunch of quirky characters and tossed them together expecting them to cook up a story. They didn't. It doesn't work like that. You have to have a story too, not just quirks on legs, and the story actually has to go somewhere.

As stories do go, this one does not go well. There was screen after screen of largely unattributed speech followed by long paragraphs of description, followed by more lines of largely unattributed speech which made for tedious reading. A better balance would have made for a better read. The speech was odd, too. Brits tend to denote speech with single quotes at the start and the finish, but this novel had only an em-dash to mark the start, and no indication of when it ended. Most of the time you could guess that it had ended when a new line was begun, especially if that had an em-dash at the start, too, but sometimes it would end with a period and on the same line we would get "she said" or something tacked on the end. It was just irritating trying to read that, because it looked at first glance like that was a continuation of the character's speech rather than, as it did at forced glance, an attribution.

So, while I wish the author well as always, I can't recommend this based on what I read. It didn't hang together well, and it didn't inspire interest. I mention the 43% because I typically quit a novel like this at around 25%, but then people complain and say, oh you should have read on, it gets better. I have two responses to this, neither of which are rude! First of all, if it doesn't get better until 26%, then make whatever you have at 26% be the start of the story for goodness sake! Secondly, in this case I did read past 25% - I read another twenty percent past it, and nothing changed. I rest my case!

On that topic, this novel has a prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues (maybe that's where it gets explained how things went north so quickly? In that case it's an info dump and just as unwelcome as a prologue). The funny thing is that I advise writers that if it's worth telling, it's worth putting into chapter one instead of a pretentious prologue, but in this case, chapters one and two, and maybe three and four (I forget) were also prologue. I think the story could have started significantly later than it did and not have missed out on a single thing. That's never a good sign. I hope your mileage is better, but I'd rather chill out with a nice read rather than an ice read.

Princes of War by Claude Schmid

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this at one third the way through it. I know they say war is a lot of sitting around waiting, punctuated by intense action, but this novel - in the third of I could stand to read - consisted of nothing but sitting around and no action at all. All there was, was soldiers introspectively hashing endlessly over and over what they're doing there, what the political purpose is, what the stressors are, and it goes round and round. Nothing came out of any of this, and there was literally nothing else on offer here. That was fine for the first few pages, but every single page was the same, relentlessly and without end for page after page. It was boring. How you can make a story about the Iraq 'conflict' boring is a mystery to me, but this author achieved it.

I don't expect a novel like this to be endless action either. That would be boring, too, and amateurish, but I do expect, in a war zone, some warlike activity to be taking place, and there was none in sight here. It was so tedious that I was simply not prepared to suck it up for however many more pages it took to get there (assuming we ever got anywhere other than here).

The sad thing is that this was written by someone who has been there and done that, so I thought at the very least it would offer some interesting insights into life over there, but it really didn't, unless life over there was one long nonstop run of boredom from start to finish, which is not my experience form other things I've read about it. I honestly believe that a true biography of this author's time there would have been more entertaining than this novel. It certainly could not have been less so. Even if life was boring, there's no need whatsoever, in a work of fiction, to transmit that to the reader.

For a novel set in such an exotic location, there was nothing to excite the senses here, nothing revelatory, nothing humorous, and nothing to engage the mind, unless you happen to be one of the probably very rare people who is quite literally clueless about Iraq and what went on there. That aside, there was nothing here that you would not have gleaned from watching the nightly news in 2004 (when this novel is set). In fact you would likely have gained more, because this gave me no insights and very little by way of explanation of the whys and wherefores of the activity the soldiers were engaged in. For example, one day they go out to conduct a census in a street somewhere, and never is the purpose of the survey explained. Yes, of course it's to discover who lives where and how many there are, but to what ultimate end? I got no idea from this novel.

One big problem was the endless meandering back and forth with constant flashbacks without any good reason. They contributed nothing to the story for me, and worse, they did nothing save add to the tedium. I took to skimming these in short order. This addiction to flashback-ing ill-served the story too, as I shall explain here! The author gives times in military time of course, but there is no punctuation, so instead of 20:35, we got 2035. This was the first time I saw a time in numeric form in this novel, and I thought it was a date. It honestly looked like, in context, one of the soldiers was flash-forwarding, fantasizing or looking forward to a date thirty years into the future where he would be retired from the military and hanging with his friend having survived and lived to a ripe(r) old age, but he was actually just talking about eight thirty-five that evening! It was confusing for a second or two and then provided the only laugh I got from this novel!

I like a good military read with something to say, but this wasn't it, and I cannot recommend it based on the portion I read.

The Body Reader by Anne Frasier

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an novel with a really interesting set-up, which was well-written, and which actually made good on the promise of the premise!

A woman who was a police detective was abducted and held in an underground cell, abused for three years, then suddenly she got a chance to escape and ran with it - literally. Now she's back in the world and trying to cope with three missing years of her life while the world, including her boyfriend, moved on. One thing she learned in those three years, apart from resilience, was how to expertly read even the minutest of body language. The problem is, her troubles are far from over.

Jude Fontaine's take on, and reintegration into everyday life was what made this story engaging from the start for me. She wasn't up for taking the usual trajectory. She wanted to take charge of her life again in her own way, and most of all, she wanted her job back. Eventually she gets it, but on day one there's a murder of a young girl which is ham-fistedly set up to look like a suicide, and something is off about this whole thing.

The investigation doesn't go well. No one seems to want to trust that Jude is really ready for the job despite her evaluations coming back fine. She's dumped on a new partner who doesn't trust her and doesn't think she can handle it. Their best hope for a lead doesn't want to talk (or does she?), and someone is trailing Jude as she rides home on her new motorbike one night. What the heck was going on here had me making some wild guesses. Did she not kill her captor when she escaped? Was he working alone? Is there some sort of conspiracy or trafficking going on here? Are the cops involved? What happened between Jude and her father all those years ago before she emancipated herself, and ditched him and her brother for years?

This novel was told well from the off. Even the prologue was actually chapter one, which is perfect for me because I've been arguing that's how it should be for a long time! Finally an author who shows everyone how it's done! Put your prologue in chapter one and I'll read it, otherwise, no!

It wasn't all plan sailing though. It became pretty obvious who the villain was quite early in the story, and if I can figure that out, you know it has to be quite glaring, because I'm usually hopeless at that. That aside, there were only a couple of places where the writing fell on its face. One was in Jude's interaction with her boyfriend. In some ways, he ended-up ironically being treated like a kidnapped girl who had reached her expiration date. It felt like the author included him and then didn't know what to do with him, so decided to write him out and really didn't care how it looked. It really showed badly in the writing of that scene. Why even involve him? If she'd left it how it ended after their first encounter it would have been fine. That second bite really bites and was embarrassing!

The novel was also one chapter too long! If it had ended with the helicopter taking off it would have been just about perfect. That last chapter rather spoiled things I felt. I was thrilled that the author realized that Jude (the un-obscure!) - of all female main characters - didn't need a guy to validate her. That was a smart move. I liked Jude, despite her off-the rails behavior here and there, and she was well-worth reading about, so I was happy! I was glad to have read this, and I recommend this novel as a worthy read.