Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda

Rating: WARTY!

Yes, it's talking book Thursday and here's my third review of an audiobook today.

I really enjoyed Sarwat Chadda's The Devil's Kiss which I guess I read before I started blogging reviews, since I find it nowhere on my blog, but if I'd known this was the start of a series titled 'Ash Mistry Chronicles', I would have left this audiobook on the library shelf. I have sworn-off reading any book (single or series) which has 'chronicles' in the title (or 'saga' or 'cycle', and so on). The very name Ash Mistry is a warning. The novel turned out to be every bit as unappealing as I would have expected for a chronicle

Mistry and his daughter and Indian who have grown up in England, and are visiting the city of Varanasi here they run afoul of the evil Lord Savage (I kid you not with these character names). The main reason for this is that Ash is a petty thief. he damages an archaeological site and finds an arrow head made of gold. Instead of turning it in to the people running the dig, his first thought is that the can sell it and get some money. His selfish thoughtlessness directly leads to the death of an aunt and uncle, and he sheds not one tear nor offers a single expression of regret for them. Not in the part I could stand to listen to.

Worse than this, the novel is genderist. When Ash and his younger sister lucky are in hiding, someone offers to train them in the fight against the supernatural evil that Lord savage controls. One of the two gets to be a warrior - Ash. His sister gets to be a caregiver! Not that there's anything wrong with being a caregiver by any means, but why is the male the warrior and the girl the 'nurse'? Could they not both have been warriors? Or nurses? Could they not have chosen for themselves what they wanted to do rather than be assigned traditional gender roles? it was at this point that I quit reading.

The story was read rather melodramatically and breathlessly by Bruce Mann, which didn't help my stomaching of it. Also, if I'd known that this had been recommended by Kirkus reviews, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it at all. Kirkus pretty much ever met a book they didn't adore, so their reviews are utterly worthless. I cannot recommend it.

Sixkill by Robert B Parker

Rating: WARTY!

Last trip to the library to pick up a requested book, I happened upon this audiobook, which is about a private dick named Spenser (and yes, he's for hire!) who is investigating the murder of a movie star's one-night stand. Over in the young readers section I happened upon a second audiobook also by Robert B Parker, titled Chasing the Bear, which was about the same character but when he was younger. I thought it would be an interesting study to compare and contrast.

Was I ever wrong! Nauseating was a more apt description, and the major reason for it was that this author sucks at writing prose. His problem is that he has all the individuality and inventiveness of a metronome when it comes to writing conversation between two people, and he writes a lot of speech with nothing to break it up. It's like listening to two automatic tennis ball throwers trying to play tennis with each other, and every bit as engrossing.

Of course this was first person because god forbid anyone should ever deign to imagine that it's legal under US law to write a novel in third person! Here's an example of this author's appalling conversational writing, from the beginning of chapter one. Note that this is a transcript of the audiobook, so my punctuation (and spelling of names) may differ from the printed page:

"Care for a coffee?" I said.
"Got some!" Quirk said. "Nice of you to ask."
"You ever read Frazz?" I said.
"What the fuck is frazz?" Quirk said.
[small descriptive section omitted]
"A comic strip in the Globe," I said. "It's new.'
"I'm a grown man," Quirk said.
"And a police captain," I said.
"Exactly," Quirk said. "I don't read comic strips."
"I withdraw the question," I said.
Quirk nodded. "I need something," he said.

Said, said, said? Has this guy never heard of words like, "asked"? Or exclaimed? Or "interrupted"? Or of simply adding no attribution once in a while? I quote this novel shortly afterwards in sheer disbelief that a grown man could write so god-awfully badly. It didn't help that Joe Mantegna's condescending, and I felt insulting version of an American Indian accent was vomit-inducing, and worthy of American western movies of the 1940's and 50's. I used to like Joe Mantegna.

I do not like this author and after listening to the opening portion of two different novels about the same guy at different stages of his life, I've come to the conclusion that there's no difference! I also have to ask how this thoroughly obnoxious lout - the accused murderer in this novel - ever became a major movie star. It's simply not credible. The story makes no sense at all. I'm all done reading Robert B Parker, I say.

Chasing the Bear by Robert B Parker

Rating: WARTY!

Last trip to the library to pick up a requested book, I happened upon an audiobook titled Sixkill by Robert B Parker, which is about a private dick named Spenser (and yes, he's for hire!) who is investigating a murder. Over in the young readers section I happened upon a second audiobook also by Robert B Parker, which was about the same character but when he was younger. I thought it would be an interesting study to compare and contrast.

Was I ever wrong! Nauseating was a more apt description, and the major reason for it was that this author sucks at writing prose. His problem is that he has all the individuality and inventiveness of a metronome when it comes to writing conversation between two people, and he writes a lot of speech with nothing to break it up. It's like listening to two automatic tennis ball throwers trying to play tennis with each other, and every bit as engrossing.

Here's an example from the beginning of chapter nine. Note that this is a transcript of the audiobook, so my punctuation may differ from the printed page.

"Not what you had hoped for," Susan said.
"In those days," I said, "I knew less about why women cried."
"And now?"
"I understand why men and women cry," I said.
"The advantage of maturity," Susan said
"Being young is hard," I said.
"Being grown is not so easy either," Susan said
"But it's easier," I said.
She nodded. We were quiet for a moment; then Susan said, "You hunted!"
"Sure," I said. "We all did."
"You don't hunt now," Susan said.
"No," I said.

Seriously? Good God! What is wrong with this guy? I quit this novel right around that point, because quite literally, I could not bear to listen to another word. I moved on to the adult version of Spenser only to find it was no better! I'm done with this "author"! The reading of the novel by Daniel Parker (the author's son) wasn't bad, I have to add, but neither was it anything special, although to be fair, you'd have to do a super human job to make this garbage palatable.

Machinations by Hayley Stone

Rating: WARTY!

erratum:
"I walk like I belong her0e." That zero clearly doesn't belong! Did the machines put it there?!

Not to be confused with Machinations by JS Breving!

I should have listened to the blurb! It told me right there that it was "Perfect for fans of Robopocalypse" - a novel I detested! I had hoped that this wouldn't make the mistakes that one did, and my hope was rewarded in a sense, because this novel made a whole different set of mistakes. I made it only twenty-five percent through it before I gave it up as a lost cause.

I know people might decry giving up at that point, offering forlorn and misguided claims that if you don't read it all, you can't be sure it won't win you over, but I'm sorry - I can. I've read scores upon scores of books and if one doesn't get me by the time the first quarter is over, I know for a fact that it's not worth wasting more of my time on, not when there are still scores upon scores of other novels out there which are just begging me to turn that first page so they can grip me and thrill me.

The first problem was first person (and it's evidently the start of a series, I'm sorry to report). This is nearly always the wrong choice of PoV for a novel, and I cannot for the life of me understand the OCD which causes so many writers, particularly young adult and new adult authors, to be so irremediably addicted to this voice. It is so limiting and so irritating because it's all about "me" all the time! Hey lookit me! Lookit what I'm doing now! No, pay attention to meee! It doesn't help at all when the narrator is the self-obsessed, incurious, whiny and retiring wallflower that this one is. She's supposed to be a leader - a commander - yet she evinces nothing to make me believe she is or ever was such a person.

Nor does it help when she has nothing else to offer a reader. She's not interesting. She's not smart. She's not curious about anything. She's purportedly a trained soldier but the first thing which happens to her is that she gets shot, and not in some heroic way' but in the same dumb way extras in the form of cops and security guards always get killed on TV shows and in movies - in the most ridiculously unrealistic way possible.

Rhona is brought back to life as a clone in a process that is never explained (not in the portion I read) and which, absent any explanation, completely lacks any credibility. Perhaps some explanation for what happens appears later in the narrative, but from what we're given in the first quarter, it looks like the author believes that when you clone someone, not only do you get a fully-grown adult body in short order, you also get that person's complete memories. Sorry, No! Cloning doesn't work like that! If you want me to accept that it does in your world, then you owe me some sort of explanation as to why this process completely overturns the laws of biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience in your world!

Like I said, maybe there's a better explanation later, but that was the problem with this novel - there were no explanations for anything. We get dumped into this world, humans v. machines, with very little guidance as to how it ever got into this state, including why humans appear to be on the verge of extinction. I kept reading-on hoping for some background to filter through in the narrative, but it never came. Naturally no one wants a bald info-dump, but instead of listening to a twenty-five-year-old mooning over her lost love like she's a fifteen-year-old, I would much rather have had those maudlin paragraphs cut and replaced with some background.

That brings me right into another problem with this novel. Admittedly the author has nothing to do with the blurb unless she self-publishes, but the blurb for this novel is trying to sell it to readers as an "action-packed science-fiction" novel, when the truth is, based on what I read, that it's really a romance novel with thin sci-fi veneer. There's very little action packed into the first quarter of the story, and what we do get is limp and mundane. I obtained this as an advance review copy from Net Galley, and I do appreciate the opportunity to read such books, but it would make me happier if I felt I was getting what I thought I was requesting rather than something else entirely!

I had some hesitation in choosing this one because it seemed a lot less like it was Robopocalypse and much more like it was something of a mashup of two Schwarzeneggar movies - Terminator and The 6th Day, because it has humans fighting the machines, and what appears to be instant cloning. The narrator, Rhona, who appears to be in her mid-twenties, and is a soldier fighting against the machines, is killed in the first couple of pages, but then she's revived and discovers that she's been cloned. Her old body has died, and this revival is supposed to be not only a physical duplicate, but a mental one, as well.

It's implied that because the process is somehow interrupted, she doesn’t have everything she had before, at least not to begin with, but what she remembers is bizarre and makes no sense. Without any kind of explanation as to exactly how she's been cloned and how her memories have been retained, I can only speculate. It appears that what's missing is most of her personal stuff - she seems to recall everything else, including how to fight. Her muscular coordination is spectacular because within a few minutes of waking up, she's on the run, and can move her body without any physical issues: - no muscular atrophy or weakness from being a fresh clone, and no tiredness. It simply wasn't credible.

On top of this she understands and speaks perfect English, though her clone's body has never learned it nor spoken it using that clone's vocal tract. She recalls a huge amount about the war and about how to be a soldier, yet nothing personal comes to her easily? It seems to me that your personal memories are the ones you'd have embedded most deeply, and the skills you learned later in life would be the ones which were harder to retain. This is why older adults can recall things from their childhood better than they can recall things which happened a few days ago, so this made no sense to me, and with no explanation being offered by the author as to what was going on, it wasn't possible to arrive at any satisfactory conclusions.

This being kept in the dark for the first quarter of the novel became truly irritating very quickly, especially when Rhona finally makes it back to HQ and we discover she's the commander of these forces, such as they are, yet she's locked in a prison cell for no apparent reason other than that she's a clone? What? At first, I thought that maybe there was some suspicion that she might be an agent of the machines - that they might have reprogrammed her or something, but no one ever suggested anything like this.

Instead, there was simply this irrational, baseless suspicion and detestation of her by pretty much everyone she encounters, including her old lover - or more accurately, the current lover of her old body! Again there's no information about how she was cloned, how cloning is viewed in this world, who suggested cloning her, who authorized it, or who actually did it (and Rhona shows no interest whatsoever in learning the answers to any such questions! That was a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot right there. It made no sense whatsoever.

When it came down to a bizarre fight, with some subordinate physically attacking Rhona, I quit right there because it had become too ridiculous for me to take seriously anymore. It was especially sad that an experienced soldier like Rhona was getting her ass handed to her on a plate by this subordinate. That was too much for me and I gave up reading because it was requiring to much work! I might as well be writing it myself for as much effort as I had to put into it to try to work out what the heck was happening!

The lack of information was bad enough, but the fact that Rhona - a purported commander - was the most incurious and retiring person on the planet with regard to trying to learn what was going on, how the fight was going, and who cloned her and why, was simply beyond the bounds of belief. Never once did she take charge. Instead, she behaved like a girl starting out her first day at a new school, but even such a girl would have a bunch of questions. Rhona had none. She constantly let others - all males - push her into a back seat. It was pathetic and disturbing to see.

If she had come back in a machine body with her human brain, then a lot of this story would have made sense. It would still have been a romance disguised as a sci-fi story (and a lot more interesting romance for that, I would argue), but it would have made more sense than it did, because it would have accounted for the universal suspicion under which she was held, but that's not this story. This story gives us nothing to work with. I mean how did a twenty-five-year old girl become a military commander in the first place? We learn nothing of that. Was she in the military? Was she a known leader from the start or did she rise to prominence through bravery, ingenuity, and success? Were there no other leaders left alive? What was happening in the rest of the world? Or do Americans not care? It would have been nice to have had a word or two about all of this, but we get nothing.

One more thing which bothered me was trying to determine which side was the dumbest - the humans or the robots. The humans get the dumb award for designing guns which have a power 'clip' just like with a clip in a regular automatic gun, but these soldiers have to remove the power 'clip' to see how much 'ammo' they had left - in this case, what the power level is. That struck me as poor design. Why wouldn't you be able to read the power level while the clip is still in place? You disarm yourself every time you have to remove it! This kind of thing in a novel makes me wonder if there's a purpose for it, or if it’s just not been very well thought-through by the author.

In the case of the robots, the stupidity came with the soldiers' use of EMPs to take down the machines. We're told the machines are getting better at cycling back up faster after an EMP strike, but why don't the machines simply build themselves with a Faraday cage around their body, built into their armor, to stop the EMPs getting them at all? If the machines are that dumb, how is it that they're winning? I guess because the dumb humans have to keep disarming themselves to check their power supply....

I'm not a fan of authors using dream sequences and we get more than one here. In each case it's a huge info-dump, but it dumps info which doesn't really tell us anything interesting, and which certainly fails to explain how the world got to where it is. All we get are details of life when things went south for humanity which contribute nothing to the story and which fail to clue us in as to how things went south. In this case there was a really long dream sequence the first time Rhona sleeps after awaking to the realization that she's a clone, and it was as boring as it was confusing because it went on and on and turned into a flashback. I’d rather Rhona had simply woken-up and told Samuel (briefly) of her dream. That would have made more sense.

So in short, and given the list of grievances I have against this novel after reading only twenty-five percent of it, I can't in good faith recommend this one. I do wish the author all the best in her career, but I can't say that I personally want to follow it base don this sample.

Return To Sender By Julia Alvarez

Rating: WARTY!

This one sounded interesting from the blurb, but it quickly turned into a clone of all the other stories of illegal immigrants in the American South - or in this case the Northeast. Eleven-year-old Tyler's family hires migrant Mexicans to work on their Vermont farm. They don't worry too much about whether the workers are legal. Tyler gets to know the migrants' oldest daughter until he learns that she's there illegally.

I got to about one third the way through this and quickly lost interest. This story is nothing more than a duplicate of every other such story, showing Mexicans as struggling, trying to build a better life for themselves, which no one can blame a family for, but just like all the other stories, it depicts the Mexicans as religious, family-centric, and it tosses in cozy Hispanic family words like Tio and Abuelita. But if every story of this nature depicts Mexicans as just like all the other Mexicans, isn't that racist? It sure seems that way to me. Why are these writers not interested in telling a different story: in stretching themselves and pushing the envelope instead of parroting the precise same thing all the other writers have already spewed ad nauseam?

I'm sorry but I'm not going to rate a novel as a worthy read when it's a Xerox of every other story and rather male-centric to boot. I do like it for the idea it gave me, but that's as far as I can compliment it!

Bearded by Jeremy Billups

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a charming and weird rhymed tale of a bear with a beard. The redheaded child is telling us about this bear. The bear is apparently a beard-wrestling champ, and rumor has it he may have even beaten Santa Claus himself! If you sign up for the author's newsletter, you can even get free coloring pages from the book, for your kids to color between the lions...er lines. There are no lions. Perish the thought. Who even said that?

This bear, and we know he's not bare-faced, so I'm assuming he's not a bear-faced liar...has been knighted even though he may (or may not) hang around with pirates! The redhead likes to travel far and wide with her bear, and it was pleasing to see that this author knows whence bearded dragons hail!

I loved The End! I heartily (yes, people still say that!) recommend this one for young children and their parents and guardians and grandparents and baby-sitters and older siblings. It's crazy enough that it doesn't even have to be educational, which I normally look for in children's books, but even though it's crazy, it will still tell you where bearded dragons can be found! I discovered that most children's books are shockingly mum on this topic, and even seem to be dragon their feet....

Write To Die Charles Rosenberg

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with several other novels which have this same title! Let this be a warning to writers! Make it unique!

I have to confess I had some really mixed feelings about this novel. On the one hand the 470-some pages flew by, which is a good thing and overall, the writing in general was quite good. The story-telling also made me want to keep turning pages. On the downside, however, I had some real problems with some parts of the plot which lacked credibility, and with some of the writing which essentially reduced women to skin-depth, strongly implying that a woman who isn't beautiful, pretty much doesn't merit consideration.

I can't tolerate that kind of writing and I'm starting to think I need to give an automatic fail to any novel which takes that approach regardless of how good it is otherwise. Plus this is episode one of a series, and I typically have no time for series. I was not informed of this when I requested this advance review copy! While I do appreciate the opportunity to read and review this novel, it would be much more preferable to have known more about what's going on with it up front.

I want to say a few words about this beauty issue to make it crystal-clear what I mean here. If this had been a novel about the modeling industry, for example, where anorexic women routinely present themselves as a disturbingly perverse norm, quite literally offering themselves as nothing more than "pretty" clothes-hangers, then I can seen how beauty would be a factor in the writing, even if it's still wrong-headed. If the novel had been about competition between actors for a movie role, then looks (wrong as it still is), might a valid topic for the author's pen. I have to add that it would be a more valid topic if the issue of looks was an internal conflict in one or more of the actors or a story based on how unjust the move business is in this regard.

If the novel were in first person and the narrator was commenting on people's attractiveness I wouldn't like that. It would be valid however, because people do see others that way, but I would downgrade such a novel for being first person - and for being about a shallow character! If the novel is third person (for which I would commend it) and had various characters make comments about looks, that would be valid because people are like that even if we don't like them. And finally, to have two people who are in love comment about how beautiful they find each other (regardless of how third-parties view them) is not a problem either, because love does foster the discovery or uncovering of beauty in people.

But to have a third person novel, as this commendably was, yet have the author write the narration and repeatedly make it about looks, is not acceptable to me. It's not acceptable to foster this ridiculous view we have today that you have to be thin as a rake and have Hollywood looks ("beautiful" if you're female, and "buff" - or whatever word you like - if you're male) or to have an hourglass figure to be attractive. It's dangerous and damaging. I don't think it serves society and I don't think authors should contribute to it; quite the contrary: they're in a very powerful position to counter it.

It saddens me when I see so many novels, particularly in the young-adult world, facilitating this evil fiction that beauty is everything and women who don't (according to the author's lights) have it need not apply. It's even sadder that all-too-many female authors aid and abet this nonsense. Countering this isn't the same as saying we should have all our female characters described as 'ugly' or 'homely', or our male characters described as 'skinny weaklings'. That isn't accurate either. To me, countering this is not to swing the pendulum the opposite way, but to stop it dead in the middle by writing stories which do not address looks at all. Leave that to your reader. Offer a vague description if necessary, but make it neutral. There are better ways to convey real beauty than by rendering character as caricature.

It would be rather hard to put out a police description in your novel without mentioning eye and hair color of course, but for the most part, if looks are not actually relevant to what's happening or necessary (for whatever reason) to further your story or make a specific point about a character, why mention them at all? I feel you should offer a vague sketch if you must, but trust your reader fill in the details as they see fit. Focus your description on other qualities to emphasize that real people are much more than looks. If you sketch your character by their (non-physical) attributes, their skills, and their personality, then you reader will have no trouble picturing them. Trust me on this. Better yet, trust your readers on this. 'Show, don't tell' isn't restricted merely to dissuading info-dumping!

Although this novel is indeed about the movie industry in a way, it's also about a law firm and two lawsuits, and looks have nothing whatsoever to do with anything which takes place in this novel, yet when major character Sarah Gold is described, the description cannot help but launch into a rapture about about how "beautiful" she is! Here's how we first meet her:

When Rory entered his office, a young woman was standing there...She wasn’t just pretty but beautiful—high cheekbones, lovely nose, alabaster skin and the figure of a model back when models were allowed to have hips and breasts. Her eyes were green and wide, without a trace of makeup around them, and the thick hair cascading to the middle of her back was the color of spun gold.

Spun gold? Not just pretty but beautiful? Figure of a model? She'a a law-firm associate. Why does she even need this description? I don't doubt that there are such law associates, but must every one we read about in fiction be those few? Are we that addicted to trope and cliché?

The author would no doubt argue that she has other qualities that we learn of, and I agree, but we learn of those as secondary qualities over the course of the story. The very first, and evidently the most important thing we learn about her is right there up front: it's her beauty that's clearly the most defining characteristic of this woman. And it's completely unnecessary. Had her beauty (or even her looks) not been mentioned in any way shape or form in this novel, she would still have been the same character, so please don't ask quo vadis ask, quid pulchra?

If that description had been Rory's view, that would be one thing, but it wasn't. It was given as an objective view. We know this because later, we read, "Maybe he was attracted to her and didn’t know it." If it had been just that one instance, that would have been bad enough, but this view is repeated, and not just about Sarah. Here's another line from the novel:
"He was naked and there was a naked female leg draped across his. It wasn’t exactly a movie-star-quality leg, but it was a very nice leg nonetheless." How generous of him. She's not movie star quality but she'll do?

This is not about Sarah Gold, but about a different woman with whom Rory has sex and it was disgusting. About which encounter, I read in a depiction of the next morning: She giggled. “Which reminds me. Did you use protection last night?" Seriously? She has to ask? The funny thing is that Dana completely disappears from the novel never to be heard from again at about the halfway or two-thirds stage. Disposable women! How beautifully convenient!

Other occasions I read things like, "An attractive woman in her midthirties." Why is this relevant? Age or looks? Here's the second worst one: "Sarah walked into Rory’s office, still beautiful..." Thank the Hollywood Stars for that! I was afraid she'd got ugly in the intervening period since Rory last saw her! That would have ruined the story! Aphrodite forbid that we have a character who is less than beautiful! What possible use would she be in a novel?

There were few other writing issues I'm happy to report, but they were interesting ones. One of them was this weird one:

I hope you can see my point about Dana Barbour.”
“It’s Barbour...."

There's a whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment. I can see what the author had in mind, but since he uses the same spelling in both sentences, it's completely meaningless. I assume it's the English versus the French pronunciation, perhaps something like Barber v. Barbour, but by using the same spelling twice he makes it unintelligible to the reader no matter how clear it might have been in his own mind when he wrote it. Given how many people are credited with helping out here, I'm surprised something like this slipped through, but we've all been there, I know!

Another plot problem was that the author confuses two consecutive weeks, the first as the novel begins, with the second week. Very early in the novel we learn of a script which has just been discovered, and which has the potential to lose Rory his previous cut-and-dried case. A week later, we're told the same thing: the script was discovered a couple of days ago, which is why he hasn't been supplied a copy of it. It cannot have been 'just discovered' on two different Mondays! Again it's an easy mistake to make, but it needs to be fixed.

This same script causes problems later when we learn that Sarah electronically compares two scripts. The problem is that they didn't have an electronic copy of the script they'd just been handed, so how did she compare it? If she was comparing two other electronic scripts (and not the printed copy they had literally just been given), then what was the point? It told them nothing about the new script. If the script they compared was with an e-copy they already had, then why had they not run the comparison before? What we needed to have been told was that the e-copy they already had possession of (by other means) was the same as the printed one they'd just been given. That would have validated the comparison.

Aside from that, it was pretty decent - if confusing at times! Its like the author occasionally lost track of what he was writing, and we've all been there, too! This sentence, for example, could have used improvement: "It didn’t pass Sarah by that Gladys had just referred to Sylvie in the past tense, but she let it pass." There's too much pass, past, pass! In another case, I read, “I’m going to go see Quentin Zavallo and get debriefed." No, Zavallo is going to get debriefed. Rory is going to get briefed! Legal terms, not military! In another instance, Rory was pacing around a table, then he sat, and evidently the author forgot, because Sarah says, "You're not sitting. You’re walking around the conference table, remember?” No, Sarah, he was sitting right there!

There were other issues I had which, when looked at overall, were what contributed to my rating this as a less-than-worthy read. Looking back on the story, I find that I really didn't like either of the two main characters, Rory, and Sarah. What kept me reading was the story in general, but in retrospect, I would have liked it a lot better had those two characters been switched out for more savory and entertaining ones. I certainly wouldn't want to read a series about these two people. Rory came across as a sleaze and a bully, and Sarah was simply annoying, like some kid sister from a middle-grade novel might be deemed by her older brother. She was insubordinate and undisciplined, and either outright broke the law or skirted with breaking it on several occasions. She went off on tangents without keeping her boss in the loop. This was passed off (or attempted anyway) as some sort of psychological disorder, but I found that patronizing and insulting. There was also an association made regarding Sarah as part of a governmental organization at one point which was then never mentioned again - like it had been added as a plot point and then forgotten about! It made no sense.

The ending was messy and all-too-convenient with a guy showing up to rescue a girl, which completely betrayed her self-sufficiency, so yes, in the end, she was nothing more than the maiden in distress, which was frankly pathetic. The rescue was highly improbable, and a supposed assassin who was "on his way" completely disappeared from the narrative. So the ending was entirely unsatisfying, which for me was the last straw.

The book blurb (which I know is not on an author unless they self-publish) didn't help! It tells us that "Hollywood’s latest blockbuster is all set to premiere", yet the plot for this movie isn't the kind of plot that makes for a blockbuster. People can, of course, disagree on something like this which isn't well-defined, but although such a movie might be critically acclaimed, and make some money, but it simply wasn't credible to me that this movie (the plot of which we do learn) would even make the hundred-million dollars that's predicted for it and even if it did, it's not really a blockbuster - not by box office receipts these days. A movie like that could just as likely be deemed a failure depending on production and advertising costs.

There's one more thing I should (belatedly!) add to this, and it's something I've been paying more attention to lately, which is how much paper a novel would use were it to go to a print run as opposed to being distributed as an ebook, and therefore how many trees would have to die for you. This novel ran to 477 pages, but the line spacing was about 1.5. Note that this was in the iPad Bluefire Reader version, which is, I believe, how it would look in print (in the Kindle version, where formatting all too often sucks, it appeared to be single-space lines). This author seemed to be rather proud of how the "great-looking and feeling" print version, but in my opinion, it could have been improved in an area that's far too often overlooked.

If the spacing had been 1 in the print version as opposed to 1.5, then this novel could have been slimmed down to some 320 pages. We can round that up to 350 in case I errored in this calculation. In addition to this, every one of the chapters had a blank page preceding it. It had 62 chapters, which meant sixty two blank pages, or 31 blank sheets in total. If these had also been eliminated, the entire book could have shrunk to little more than 300 pages from this alone, regardless of typeface or font. Even if we couldn't get below 350 pages, this would still be 25% fewer trees killed to produce a print run. It's worth thinking about this unless your novel is only going to be issued as an ebook, because even if you employ recycled paper, it still uses energy to produce.

Even if your novel is an ebook, the larger it is, the more energy it requires to move across the Internet, and it's a lot harder to recycle ebooks (in terms or passing them on to other people or turning them over to Goodwill or a used book store) than it is print books, which require no energy at all once they're produced - no reading device (except maybe a light from time to time!). No batteries. No electricity. No electronic storage space which requires power to retrieve from. Personally I think this is is all worth consideration if you're a writer, and especially if you self publish. Admittedly, if you go with Big Publishing, you really don't have any say in how they turn out your novel, so that's worth considering too, but you can determine how wordy it will be. Just a thought!

So overall, given the machismo and genderism on display and the problems with the plot and the ending, and while I appreciate the chance to read this from the publisher, and wish the author all the best in his future endeavors, I can't in good faith recommend this as a worthy read.

One Came Home by Amy Timberlake

Rating: WARTY!

One Lame Tome.

Quite frankly I'm not sure why I picked this up at the library. I can only assume it was in haste. When I look at the blurb now, it sounds like it might be an interesting plot, but I honestly cannot remember my thought processes when I checked this out! I should have considered it more deeply. It turns out this is yet another Newbery award novel and I've already sworn off those because they've been almost one hundred per cent garbage in my experience. This one was no different.

Set in 1871, a young girl named Georgie Burkhardt is evidently responsible for her older sibling Agatha running away. Later a body is found wearing Agatha's ball gown (why she ran away in a ball gown is anyone's guess), and everyone is content to believe that Agatha is dead - except of course Georgie, who starts off on a quest: will the real Agatha Burkhardt please show up!

The biggest problem with this story is that it's way too damned 'down home' for my taste. If there is one thing which gets me irritated out of all proportion in novels, it's down-home country folk in stories of historical America spewing their catch-phrases and their home-spun wisdom. Yuk! I cannot stand them, and this is not only one of those stories; the reader of this audiobook, Tara Sands, reads it in the most nails-on-a-chalk-board voice imaginable. I literally could not stand to listen to it, and I doubt that even if I got the print book, I would want to actually read it. First of all it's a Newbery, and second of what's left, the writing is far too self-satisfied. The arrogance of that home-grown "country learnin'" is nauseating and just obnoxious. Y'all don't cuhm back nah!

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening Part 6 of 6 by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Rating: WARTY!

This final part - certainly the final part I plan on reading - continues to have Maika and the monster explore her consciousness (or unconsciousness if you like) while she's imprisoned in the sarcophagus. The monster looks more like a one-eyed mummy here and less like the evil tarry, sticky creature we've hitherto seen. Maika continues to pine for Tuya, who evidently doesn't feel the same way about her!

The artwork is once again remarkable, but this is supposed to be a story, not a coffee table picture book, and the story has become far too bogged-down to be interesting to me. There's a reason that Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 - he's quite literally an action figure, and while he is rather trite and simplistic compared with this story under review, he does move (faster than a speeding bullet!). This story doesn't - or more accurately, it doesn't feel like it moves; it feels mired and stagnant, and this made me lose all interest in it which is sad in consideration of how appealing it was in the early parts of this volume. I can't recommend this one and do not feel inclined to pursue this story any further.

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening Part 5 of 6 by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Rating: WARTY!

This one went further downhill for me and I really can't recommend it at this point.

We meet the almost insanely cruel Ilsa, then move to the half-faced "angel" who offers Maika, Kippa, and Ren the two-tailed cat safe harbor, but in the words of Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap!" Maika becomes confined to a sarcophagus, where she retreats into her memories followed, unexpectedly, by the monster she harbors. The monster tries to convince her to give him control, whereupon he will, he claims, free them.

I can't recommend this because although the art work remains good, the story itself seems to be circling the drain rather than going anywhere interesting, and where it is going is taking forever to happen. Reading this has become too much work for the reward.

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening Part 4 of 6 by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Rating: WORTHY!

While the art work continues to be remarkable (which is why this gets a 'worthy read' appellation), the story has begun to fall off somewhat. Initially it was full of mystery and promise and adventure, and while some of the mystery is being exposed, the story has begun to develop a meandering quality like it doesn't quite no where to go. I'm committed to finishing these six parts of volume one, but I am not enjoying this as much as I had hoped and expected to based on the early parts.

It has become difficult for me to figure out who is who and what they're after, and while sometimes that's not a bad thing, I think as this point, the lay of the land ought to have had a lot more clarification in this case. We keep meeting people and they're not often introduced properly for my taste, so I feel left in the dark rather more than I ought to feel by this place in the story.

This is a problem with writing - you may have the plot all mapped out and be intimately familiar with the characters, but your readers are never automatically so well-informed. Without some help they're never going to get to know them like you, the writer, does. Naturally this doesn't mean larding up an elegant story with a massive info-dump, but this graphic novel is quite wordy, so it's not like the writer is shy about telling the story. I just wish it was more informative.

What it looks like to me is that grown-up versions of our main characters (Maika and Kippa) are hunting for them. At first I thought we had leaped forward in time and these characters actually were the grown-up versions of the young ones we first met, but it soon became clear they're not. We meet a bunch of new characters, including a monkey guy and more multi-tailed cats, and we see Maika once again wrestle with her monster, but the story itself hasn't really moved in a couple of parts now. Maika is still int eh dark about what's going on, as is the reader, and it's becoming annoying. I'm recommending this one only because of the art and the fact that it's necessary to read this to get to the next part! For the art, it's a worthy read. The art really is wonderful.

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening Part 3 of 6 by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an advance review copy for which I thank the publishers and creators, and I have to say the quality is maintained with great writing and lush art work (lush in the sense of rich and detailed not in the sense of being created by an artist with a fondness for alcohol! LOL!). One thing I was pleased with was how quickly the pages turned. Sometimes with a publication that is heavy with images, the page turns can be excruciatingly slow, but that is not the case with this series. The only issue I had was that some pages were missing the speech from the speech balloons! I've seen this before in other graphic novels, and I also encountered it in part one of this series. In this particular part, it was pages 14, 16 (where all speech balloons were blank except for one which appropriately read >GASP<! LOL!) and 18.

In this part we again meet Yvette and Destria who are fond of wearing bird-beak-like masks over their faces. Yvette was the one who was brought back to life in part two. Apparently she was forgiven, but not to the point of regaining any sort of normality in appearance. The mask evidently hides her disfigurement, but regardless of their physical appearance, these women are not pleasant people.

One thing I have to ask about is why we get the title of Monstress? Why not Monster? It seems to me that the two words do not convey the same thing, irrespective of whatever gender content they might profess. Monster indicates that the bearer of the title is a monster, whereas Monstress, which invokes 'monstrous' could be construed as the way this character, Maika, actually is - a person who has some sort of control over, or link with a monster or monsters? But I have a better question: if we're going to have Monstress, then why not have Inquisitress? But we don't get Inquisitress, nor do we get inquisitor. We get Inquisitrix, which is no more of a real word than is 'Monstress' or 'Monstrix'.

Of course, it's entirely up the the writer what word she chooses, but to me words are important and convey meaning, and this is especially true in a work of fiction where new concepts and ideas are being promoted, so I can't help but be curious about what's being promoted here. On the one hand we have a powerful story, populated with powerful females who dominate the tale (males are highly conspicuous by their absence), yet on the other, we have word forms which are gender specific and which in other contexts are not typically used with respect towards women. Anything ending in 'trix' is unlikely to be complimentary since the one most commonly used is dominatrix, something which these days has strong sexual and perversion connotations. The only other comparable word is aviatrix, which has fallen into disuse.

Words ending in 'ess' are even worse, the most common one being 'mistress' signifying at best, a possession, and at worst, a women of questionable morals. Words ending in -ess and applied to women typically are used to segregate. Is that what we're seeing here in this matriarchical world? It's questions like this which are part of what interests me. I am curious, inter alia, as to whether these words were chosen deliberately to serve a purpose, or thoughtlessly offering nothing more than cheap novelty? I hope it's not that simple! I shall be very disappointed if it is.

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening Part 2 of 6 by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Rating: WORTHY!

Part two (featuring the disturbingly foxy feminine profile on the cover), takes up right where part one left off, thankfully. Maika has escaped with Kippa and the two-tailed sentient cat, with whom she definitely does not get along, and her captors are being abused mercilessly for their incompetence by a new faction - the bitches who are witches, evidently. One of the dead is brought back to life to account for her incompetence - that's how evil these guys are!

This is a lot shorter volume than the previous one - as are all the rest in this series - at a more standard comic book length of 32 pages. The trio have taken up with a farmer who is traveling to sell her potatoes and such, but Maika's journey is about to be interrupted.

Before writing this review, I watched a show on Netflix about these guys in Britain who built a robot using only prosthetics developed to replace human body parts. The final thing was worth a million dollars in parts alone. It was weird and creepy and ultimately unsatisfying because they appeared to promise a lot more than they delivered, but one of the guys involved in the show sported a prosthetic lower left arm, and when he removed it, his limb looked exactly like Maika's! I mention this, because it's in this volume that we learn what Maika's arm looked like before.

Again the artwork was outstanding, but in terms of moving the story, not a whole lot happened until the last portion of it, which made me feel a bit like asking why the first part wasn't split into two and this actual part two not shortened somewhat? That said, it was still a worthy read and made me look forward to part three. We got some background and some holes filled in, and met some new characters who proved to be as scary as they were interesting.

In part one, I'd noted two pages where, in this advance review copy, the speech balloons were completely blank! I've seen this in other graphic novels, but in this case, part two was fine with no missing speech. Once again thanks to the publisher and creators for the chance to read and comment on this advance review copy.

Monstress Volume 1: Awakening Part 1 of 6 by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
Two of the pages in this graphic novel had completely empty speech balloons! I've seen this phenomenon before in other graphic novels. There are no page numbers to quote from the graphic novel itself, but on my iPad, Bluefire Reader identifies the page numbers as 52, and 62.

In 1999, the American Library Association found that only 33% of children aged 11-18 read comic books, and when considering girls alone, this was down to 27%. More recently (2014) on Facebook, self-identified comic fans numbered some 24 million in the USA, of which almost half (~47%) were female. These were two different surveys covering different demographics and using different methodologies, but from this it sure looks like women are beginning to feel like they're finally being catered to.

I think that's a very good reason to celebrate by reading this remarkable series which is both written (Marjorie Liu) and illustrated (Sana Takeda) by women. It's also a very good reason to ask why, after over a decade of modern blockbuster comic book-based movies, we have yet to get one which is centered on a female character! I'll leave that question out there!

This is a very richly illustrated series of which I got the first six installments as advance review copies, and for which I thank the comic book creators for this fine work, and the publisher Image Comics, and Diamond Book distributors. The series is comprised of six volumes, all of which are thirty two pages except for the first, which is seventy-two pages long. It is beautifully illustrated in sumptuous detail, and the time and effort which has gone into this is quite staggering to contemplate. But it was worth it! Takenada must really love her work!

The story is well told and begins with teenager Maika, a naked, one-armed female slave, who is part of a collection of 'freaks' being sold to an idle bunch of self-centered and wealthy old white(-haired) men for the purpose of being their property. It's rather reminiscent of a scene from the Australian movie Sleeping Beauty which has nothing whatsoever to do with the fairy-tale, but which is a live-action movie starring the remarkable Emily Browning who at one point finds herself in a similar position, but at least Lucy has a choice in her participation. Maika does not.

This is however, a matriarchal society, and just as the bidding on Maika, who is referred to as an Arcanic, begins, she's quickly snapped-up not by one of the men, but by an influential nun known as Sophia Fekete, who maintains a lab at the Cumaea compound. Maika and her 'companions, a "fox cub, the cyclopean freak, and the stubby one with those useless wings" are transported to the city of Zamora with a sour-faced guardian by the name of Ilsa, who tells them they will be killed. Ilsa tells them that being smart and obedient might keep them alive, but nothing will keep them whole.

For Sophia, the interesting thing about Maika is the symbol tattooed above her breastbone. It has associations with monster worship, and Sophia has never seen a person branded with it before. Most people discount and discredit stories that people can raise the monstra, but Sophia does not. Maika and her 'friends' are incarcerated.

This is not a story for children. The art is beautiful although at times disturbing. The writing is threatening, deadly, and abusive. There are four-letter words and dismemberment, and some weird and crazy characters. But Maika doesn't have that particular tattoo for nothing, and just what it's for? People are going to find out in short order. I recommend this volume one unreservedly.

Panel to the Screen by Drew Morton

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"The majority of the sequence is represented by a blending what McCloud describes as moment to moment panels..." A blending of? (p29)
On page 92, n comparing the comic of 300 with the movie version, the text reads, "Below is a panel", but the panels in question are actually on that same page, above the text! There were several instances of images and text being out of sync to a greater or lesser extent.
"From a stylistic criteria" should read 'criterion' since the singular is required, or drop the indefinite article if a plural is intended. (p101)
Pictures appear on pps 102-104, but the text mentioning them appears p106! Slightly out of sync.
"We're not going to play be all the rules..." should be 'Play BY all the rules' (p141)

I had some mixed feelings about this, but overall came to consider it a worthy read because it held my interest and offered me an ocean of material that I found interesting. On the downside, I have to ask for whom this swell rolls, because it made for very academic and dense reading. I cannot imagine many comic book fans and movie-goers being interested in this as it stands, so perhaps it is aimed at academics.

The author is an assistant professor of mass communication at Texas A&M University–Texarkana. He's also the co-founder and co-editor of [in]Transition, a journal devoted to videographic criticism. Personally, I can testify that he's also very fond of the phrase "stylistic remediation," which he uses a bit too often including, in one place, employing it three times in the space of twenty-one words! He is also fond of employing 'entitled' when the technically more accurate 'titled' is required, but these are minor quibbles of mine. Language is a dynamic thing, and I feel as ineffectual as Cnut in holding back the changing tide in this era of texting and trash talking! Like Cnut, I know I'm doomed to failure!

That aside, the book was, with some effort here and there, readable and delivered on some interesting information and premises. While I'm not a big comic book fan, I am a big movie fan, including the spate of comic-to-movie translations we've seen over the last two decades, and notably in the blitz over the last few years successfully spearheaded by Marvel. I was interested in how they get brought to the screen, but please note that while this book does discuss some of that, the main focus is not on the mechanical process, but on the stylistic choices in translation from one medium to another, how they worked, what kind of effort was made to stay true to the comic or to depart from it, and where perhaps this may go in the future. It also looked at the reverse process - how some movies have translated into comic book form.

The book is solid and well-supported, with some twenty pages of end notes, a fifteen-page bibliography, and an index (missing from this advance review copy but intended for the published version). It was interesting to me to read a comment in the conclusion to the effect that comic books are, in some ways becoming a form of R&D for the movie companies, but as this author shows, it is in some ways a crap shoot as to whether something which appears to have done well in the comics will do well on the big screen. The comic book readers and the movie-going public, which having some (and perhaps increasing) cross-over elements, is not at all the same audience.

I found a curious fixation on DC comics. Others, including Marvel and smaller imprints such as Dark Horse, get a mention here and there, but the focus seems repeatedly to return to DC properties (particularly Batman) with very little discussion of the Marvel 'Universe' and the runaway success it has had of late. I have no idea why that should be. For me personally, I would have liked to have had this author discuss how Marvel has fared in translating its properties to the screen, in comparison with the approach DC has taken. There is also little discussion of TV properties, which have been growing dramatically recently, and which have a long history. These other media (including radio and video gaming) get mentions here and there, but really have little 'screen time" of their own.

I was however fascinated to read the material that was here, which is extensive and well-presented. The author knows this world intimately, and I learned a lot from his presentation. I recommend this for anyone who is seriously interested in the migration of one entertainment medium (particularly comic books) to another (particularly the big screen). I consider this a worthy read and I recommend it. I thank the University Press of Mississippi and the author for the opportunity to read an advance review copy!

Kris Longknife: Undaunted by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WARTY!

My attempt to get through all fourteen (or whatever it is) of the Kris Longknife (aka Mary Sue) series this year, continues apace. This here is volume seven of the series, so I'm half way through, but I can pretty much cut & paste my review from previous volumes since they all run along the same lines. Indeed, I routinely copy the title from a previous review, and simply change out the third word, and it seems like the review could follow that same sort of principle since the stories are typically so formulaic. This is one reason I am not a fan of series, but I think even the author was getting bored with himself since this one was rather different in some regards - but depressingly the same in others.

This departure made it interesting to me to begin with, but it went downhill pretty quickly. I don't know if the author couldn't flesh out a plot for his usual "the hapless Kris & crew stumble upon a remote planet which the rival Peterwald family is trying to take over, gets into bombings and firefights, wins over the local down-home populace with her self-deprecating style and comes out victorious," or what, but this one failed disastrously. There seemed to be no intelligence built into it at all. Kris meets the Iteeche. They refuse to talk to anyone but Kris's "Grampa Ray," despite the fact - we learn later - that channels have been kept open with the Iteeche! It all comes down to this impossible 'chance' meeting in remote space between the 'son' of the Iteeche leader and the daughter of the Human leader? It's not remotely credible.

From the point onward, the story meanders pointlessly. The aliens, which the author makes a valiant attempt at rendering them alien initially, turn out to be exactly like humans in everything but physical appearance. They're more like centaurs with beaks and extra arms, yet they're purportedly descended from an aquatic species. And despite this, Kris finds herself physically attracted to the leader? What?!!! The Iteeche young are spawned in shallow saltwater and left to the mercy of predators, until they're later "chosen" by an adult to raise to adulthood. These then become 'family'.

This makes zero sense from a biological and evolutionary perspective. No organism on this planet, least of all the sentient ones (and with an odd exception or two such as the cuckoo), grow and raise young in this manner. It couldn't work for a truly human-like species, notwithstanding the fact that humans have historically adopted children here and there. I'm talking about biological evolution here, not culture.

It's a sad fact that Americans are really poor at science and it's also a fact, in my opinion, that we'd get better sci-fi if we had a better science education, but given that the US reading audience is just as poorly educated about science as far-too-many sci-fi writers are, I guess it doesn't really matter in the final analysis, does it?! Except that we'd get far better and more compelling and engrossing stories if this sorry state of affairs was rectified. There's a quiz at the link. I got 100%, which surprised me, because I thought I might have missed at least one question, but at least now I can say I know what I'm in the top 6% and I know what I'm talking about! LOL!

Back to the novel in progress. Instead of getting Ron directly to King Ray, the perennial Lieutenant Kris meanders through space to visit her "aunt" Trudy because of problems she's been having with her personal computer, Nelly, which are never actually resolved. Far from it. Instead of fixing it, Nelly buys computers for the closest people in Kris's retinue, so the problems of one computer are now exacerbated several-fold. Only then, when Kris has her personal needs taken care of, does she get back to the diplomatic mission and they go visit King Ray, who offers them nothing whatsoever, so off they trot into space. Kris never stays on the ground.

Instead of going off investigating the Iteeche disappearance problem, she calls in at a planet named Texarkana which is based on American (surprise!) interests and which has a city folk v. country folk mentality. Yawn. Kris gets blown up, the bad guys are captured in short order, Kris's millions open a bank and the local problem is solved. Everybody loves Kris-who-can-do-no-wrong. Boring.

This one was different in that the usual bombing/firefight was merely an end-note to the main story which was the discovery of the Iteeche in "no man's land" space between the human and the Iteeche empires. Of course Kris does everything right and befriends them even though the evil Peterwald contingent is trying to shoot the crap out of them. This was interesting to me because in every volume the evil Iteeche are mentioned, yet we learn literally nothing of them. There was a huge war eighty years previously, documented in a previous series by this author. I have no interest in reading that. Here we learn something about them, and it turns out that there's something the Iteeche have discovered with which they need human help. I found this a bit too incredible to believe.

The Iteeche have lost three scout ships in a certain part of remote space they were trying to colonize. It would seem like this story would lead to an investigation, but it doesn't - it's merely a cliff-hanger for a subsequent volume in the series, which means there isn't really a story here. This volume is more of a place holder while the author actually thought up a plot for the next volume. It leads to Kris transporting the Iteeche to Wardhaven so the leader - who is known as Ron - can meet with Kris's grandfather, the elected king (don't even ask; Kris is a princess, but her brother isn't a prince?!) of the United Sentients - named that way so the author, who is as gingoistic an American as ever lived, can name his warships the 'US Whatever'. They did the same thing is Star Trek which despite the fiction that it's an all-inclusive united federation of planets, is really American from root to core to stem to bloom. Despite the fact that the United Sentients are supposed to be descendants of the entire planet Earth's population, we only ever really meet white southern Americans with patriotic values and guns.

Then Kris takes the Iteeche back to her own planet and then back again out into space. Huh? We get the usual 'everyone disses Kris and she doesn't even react any more', yet the same people who diss her are utterly devoted to her safety and welfare. Despite having been in firefights and bombings. Kris routinely tries to slip her marine guard and personal body-guard, Jack (the tediously trope-ishly named jack). This is how she gets blown up. She's a moron here.

The marines are incessantly praised as the ultimate mean, tough, disciplined, incapable of failure fighting force, and the reader is constantly hit in the face with this ad nauseam. The author is completely in love with the phrase 'full battle rattle' to the point where it's a mantra chanted endlessly - again, tedious. The author repeats tired old military phrases and similies like they're fresh and new (such as 'no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy') and like the reader has never heard them before - and in this same series.

In addition to this there's the same nonsensical crap about interstellar trade, which is farcical. Yes, even with jump points that allow ships to bypass light-years of space, it is still not economical to transport trade items unless they're desperately-needed items that cannot be grown or fabricated locally, or very expensive items such that the transportation coasts are more than made up for in sale price. No one is going to be transporting weapons or tractors, unless a planet is freshly being colonized. So, yes, I've let more than one volume in this series slip past as a worthy read, but this one I cannot. It was less than it ever should have been and simply not worth reading. I will contend right here that you can skip this one altogether and move to the next in the series without missing anything of import or utility.

Oliver Twist or The Parish Boy's Progress by Charles Dickens

Rating: WARTY!

This is actually my second attempt at this! I really did no better here than previously. I had much better luck with graphic novels: Fagin the Jew which I positively reviewed in October 2014, and Zombies Christmas carol which I favorably reviewed in December that same year, when I also posted negative results on a previous effort with this material!

A while ago I had an idea for a novel set in Oliver Twist's world, so I decided to go back to the source and listen in. Fortunately my excellent local library had this on audiobook format. The novel is also available for free from The Gutenberg Project as both downloadable text and audio books (but be warned, the audio version sounds like its read by Stephen Hawking. It's not - it just uses the same kind of text-to-speech engine. I think after this I'm just going to watch the movie!

I have to say that while the overall plot was convoluted, it was not awful, but the uninspired reading of Dickens's even more uninspired material was a deal-breaker for me, and I couldn't get past the first third of it. I know it was the style back then, but the incessant flowery speech and rambling diversions were too much. Plus, Dickens was rather preachy about conditions back then. This was commendable, but it was very intrusive, and it became annoying after a while.

Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, this novel was original published in installments which in this case ran monthly for a period of over two years starting in February 1837, so as an enterprise, it had more in common with our modern comic books than our modern novels. All the favorite characters were there of course, from the more commonly known Oliver, The Artful Dodger, and Fagin, to assorted prostitutes such as Bet, Charlotte, and Nancy, to the evil Monks and Sikes, to Mr Bumble, Old Sally, and the oddly-named Toby Crackit, right down to the even more unforgettably-named Master Bates (I kid you not).

Contrary to the story you might expect - of Oliver being a perennial down-and-out, he is actually a boy of extraordinarily good fortune. Ollie's mom died in childbirth and he ended-up at the parish poor house, where he was passively abused until he was of an age where they could get rid of him by pretty much literally selling him to an undertaker (Ol protested against being a sweep's assistant and got away with it!). There he was doing well until he ran afoul of the other boy who worked there, and he ran away. Right as he was heading into the territory of death and starvation, he was taken under the wing of Fagin's crew, but after a blundered robbery, Oliver ended up in jail.

His luck does not desert him however, and he's cleared of charges and semi-adopted by a book-seller where he flourishes (and blots!). For unexplained reasons, Fagin forcibly recruits him for a robbery, but once more it goes wrong, yet Ol's luck still does not desert him. Instead of being arrested, he's adopted by the family he tried to rob, who actually turn out to be related to him! This kid has four-leaf clovers growing out of his ass!

I know some people have down-graded this for racism, and by our standards it does sound a bit racist, but I don't believe we should judge a book written almost two hundred years ago by our standards. By all means comment on the standards in use, but judge them? What would be the point now? Let's consider this racism. From what I listened to, it consists entirely of identifying Fagin as "The Jew" throughout much of the book as opposed to simply naming him Fagin or, perhaps, "The Thief" (or "The Prig"!). The thing is that I got no sense that Dickens was actually using the term "The Jew" in a derogatory sense any more than he would have been had the character been Polish and he'd referred to him as "The Pole," or any more than Agatha Christie is abusing Poirot by referring to him as The Belgian. Yes it's derogatory to use today, but the way Dickens used it was simply a convenient (if inappropriate by our lights) short-hand and I don't think he saw it in any other light. At least I didn't get that impression.

Overall, the writing left a lot to be desired, and there were far too many fortunate coincidences. Plus, Ollie is a bit of a Mary Sue. I can't recommend this based on what I listened to. Hopefully my take on the life and times of this era will be better - assuming I ever do get down to cooking-up a decent plot and writing it!

Transformed: San Francisco by Suzanne Falter, Jack Harvey

Rating: WORTHY!

Well I have posted fifteen reviews today. That's a personal record for me and a warning never to get so far behind again! LOL! This was an amazing story set in the LGBTQIA world of San Francisco, and featuring four main characters, one of whom is a religious nut-job who is planning on unleashing a sarin attack on a gay event to teach all those sinners a lesson. How such a lesson would be internalized by dead people is a bit of a mystery, but religion is not big on logic, and the parallels with the nightclub slaughter down in Florida recently were both chilling and sobering for me.

There's no end of religious nut-jobs, and the hypocrisy of Christians who purportedly preach love, but actually spew hatred is as staggering as it is entirely unsurprising given the brutal content of the Bible and the bloody history of Christianity. if oyu don't believe me, check out this link on CNN's website: "Hey, are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?" Sacramento, California, pastor Roger Jimenez said from the pulpit the Sunday of the shooting. "No, I think that's great. I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight ... The tragedy is more of 'em didn't die."

The main villain here is named, hilariously, Randy Peter Tytus. I had a hard time taking that seriously, I confess. Ego te absolvo. Thank you father! Randy hails from the loins of a psychotic religious dad who runs a church of hatred which is very possibly modeled on a certain "church" which delights in harassing gays, but Randy's problem is not that he's very likely homosexual; it's that he can't face this truth, and can't deal with his reality. His 'solution' is to poison others with chemicals, mirroring the way his own mind has been poisoned by his father and his religion.

Arrayed against him is a startling trio which consists of Charley, a CIA operative who is temporarily suspended from duty because of some irregularities with taxes and expenses. He's a female to male transgendered person who is rather anguishing over whether to pursue what several reviewers have termed "bottom surgery"! I find this term odd and misleading. He's not, of course contemplating surgery on his ass, but on exchanging his vagina for a penis. Charley meets two females and through this acquaintanceship, a vital trio is formed.

The first member is an ex-navy lesbian police sergeant named Frankie. The second is a pseudo celebrity known as "The Society Dominatrix." Pamela has moved to SF to get away from the publicity on the east coast, but seems hard-pressed to shed it, despite changing her name to Electra. Some reviewers have described her as professional dom, but in fact she was just having fun with the husbands of some of her acquaintances. She doesn't become a professional until she starts to embrace who she really is and become Elektra in more than just name.

I must say I found the character names a bit clichéd! Frankie and Charley? Elektra? That seemed a bit over the top for me, but all four of these main characters are in pain in one way or another. Frankie is mourning her deceased wife, and struggling with corruption in the SFPD, a struggle which has put her in the sights of the corrupt powers-that-be, so she's been benched on trumped-up 'charges'. Charley is struggling with the loss of his job and with his indecision about when or even whether to undergo further surgery. Elektra also suffers loss - her daughter won't speak to her, and she's away from her comfort zone. Randy is simply a dangerous mess. I've seen some reviewers complain that this story needed to be "punched-up" with intrigue and sub-plots and what-have-you, but for me, it was perfectly told exactly the way it is. This is not a movie, and trying to write it like it was a screenplay would have been entirely wrong and would have destroyed it for me.

I'm not averse to a good action-adventure, even one with clichéd slo-mo departures from explosions which always seem to have a disturbing (and polluting) amount of gasoline in them, but this is not that story. This is much better. Watching these people move and interact, and grow and coalesce was wonderful, and poetic in the way it came together. It was a real pleasure to read and I wouldn't change a thing about it, except maybe to have given Frankie more of a role. She really took a back seat to Charley and Elektra, but since this was named Transformed: San Francisco, I wonder if it's to be the start of a series of 'transformed' novels set in different cities.

It wasn't all plain sailing. There were some issues, such as sentences like, "In the meanwhile, the final glory hole of hell he would personally reap upon the blasphemers was nigh." That made no sense whatsoever! Maybe this is what oyu get when ytwo writers are editing the same novel! LOL! I think it would have been better worded: "In the meantime, the final Hell he would personally wreak upon the blasphemers was nigh." I wonder if the authors actually know what a 'glory hole' is - or more to the point, whether Randy knew what one was and would ever use that term, even in his own mind. At another point, I read, "Thy will be done, not mine, he incited." I think the authors meant 'recited', but these are minor considerations and every author trips up with the language now and then, so they didn't bother me.

Overall, this story was excellent, I loved it and read it with appreciation and warmth, and I recommend it.

Don't Bang the Barista by Leigh Matthews

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
We both put down out drinks, serious for a moment.

I loved the title of this novel, which was a LGBTQIA novel full of drinking, smoking, over-caffeination, shallow relationships, and irresponsible sex. I expected better, especially since one of the characters was vegan. Given everything else she was into it made her sound so fake. I certainly hoped for better, but it never came. Kate is a lesbian who is a year out of a five year relationship, and she's not dealing. In fact, given how she is, I strongly felt that she had been like this before the relationship broke up and that's why it broke up, so I was not on her side from the off, pretty much. She has this recent acquaintance named Cass, and it's pretty obvious from the start that this is nothing more than the trope girl-too-stupid-to-know-her-best friend-is-the-love-of-her-life, which has been done to death and this version offers nothing new, not even the LGBTQIAngle. What it does tell us is that Kate isn't really very smart or very deep.

She has this ridiculous idea that it takes a third the time to get over a relationship as you spent in the relationship, so after five years, she considers that the year she's spent alone isn't sufficient. She's a moron. You can't put a time limit on it as though everyone is exactly the same, and reacts in the same way, and has the same circle of friends. Some people have good support groups, others don't. Some people are resilient, others not so much. The bottom line is that it takes whatever time it takes, but you have to make an effort. Kate simply isn't. She's wallowing. How her friends - of whom she has many, put up with her is the real mystery here.

The barista is Hanna, and Kate hooks up with her and has sex without getting to know her, and without even having had a date with her (not to speak of). This whole scene (which is, be advised, quite detailed) felt completely fake and hollow to me, because on the one hand these two have made out and felt each other up on the dance floor without asking, for goodness sakes, yet here in the privacy of Kate's apartment, when they are both essentially mauling each other, Hanna is asking for permission every step of the way - to removing her sweater, her pants, her bra; then she's feeling her up again on the way to the bedroom without asking. It felt like it was written by (w)rote (hah!) instead of by means of the author really thinking this through. I didn't get this asking permission, and then letting a discussion of their sexual history simply slide right on by. Either they're responsible or they're not. They can't be both.

This thing with getting together with Cass completely undermined the "appropriate approach to sex" motif, too. Cass is, quite frankly, a stalker, who has designs on Kate, but for some reason despite her supposedly being open and direct and straight-forward, can't ever bring herself to tell Kate how she feels, or to show her. Instead, she decides she's going to break up Kate and Hanna before they're even an item, warning Kate off her, following Kate to the club when they have their first date, and then forcing herself onto Kate and kissing her in sight of Hanna, and thereby causing a rift between them. Kate needs to ditch Cass at once. This girl is a trouble-making creep and her behavior is unacceptable. And these 'girls' are in their thirties for goodness sakes! They should know better.

The really weird thing (like this wasn't bad enough already) is that this was in a lesbian bar, yet not one of the other women in there comes to Kate's aid (when Cass grabs her) to ask her if she's okay and if this attention from Cass is OK. Instead they laugh at her, like she's some bi-curious hetero who's strayed beyond her comfort zone, or she's a newbie and therefore deserves no better treatment? So much for a sisterhood. This was horrible. I sincerely hope the Vancouver queer scene isn't remotely like it's portrayed here. It would be truly a scary one if it were.

Kate's friends are really no better. Not one of them is really interested in advising Kate about finding a quality relationship. Every time they talk about Hanna, it's along these lines: "you have this hot barista who clearly likes you." I'm sorry but lust ≠ like. With friends like these, who needs enemas? But Kate is the real piece of work here. She is going to a movie with Hanna, then invites her friend Em along, then it becomes obvious Hanna is going to pair up with Em, but Kate is too stupid to see it, yet when she goes to the bathroom and (oh what another coincidence) encounters her ex, Janice in there, the two of them start making out in the bathroom. Seriously? At this point I can't stand Kate and really don't like anyone else in this group at all. "I really never had been the kind of woman to hook up with people in washrooms." Really? Look in the mirror, Kate. that perfidious puss you see looking back at you? It's nothing new and it's you all over, not a lover anyone with an ounce of integrity would want around them.

Kate is evidently not very smart. despite her many winters in Canada, she evidently owns no gloves, so we read, "It was freezing out this morning. I tried to keep my hands in my pockets as much as possible." We get oddball lines like, "Oh, I don't drink. Thanks. I've got some weed though." At one point we read of Kate and her ex, "We'd never used protection when we were together, having been tested and monogamous thereafter." Yet now she;s having potentially unsafe sex with Hanna and considering it with Cass, who herself sleeps around routinely?

The writing really left a lot to be desired. For example I read this: "So you're still shtupping her?" followed quickly by:

"And, what, you're trying to get a little of her inner peace are you?"
I contorted my face into an expression of disgust as Hanna apologised (sic).
"Too far, sorry.

What, asking about 'shtupping her' wasn't already going too far?

I really wanted to like this but I simply couldn't. it was badly written and unpleasant to read. I can't recommend it. I think this author has a good novel or two in her. It's just not this one.

The Miracle Girl by TB Markinson

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"Have to!" when "Have too!" was required.
“You’re little spy has been busy. Is it Avery?” should have read "Your little spy..."

Not to be confused with The Miracle Girl by Andrew Roe, or Miracle Girl by Keith Scribner, or the Miracle Girls manga series, this novel is an LGBTQIA story about two women working in the dying newspaper business. JJ Cavendish, the woman of the title, is assigned to try and save the ailing newspaper in her home 'town' of Denver. She hasn’t been home in twenty years and has mixed feelings about it, especially when she discovers that her old love is working for the very newspaper she's now in charge of. Claire has evidently become the mother of a young child in the intervening years, as JJ discovers when they reconnect.

It seems pretty obvious that Claire and her 'husband' are separated, yet she doesn’t relay any of this to JJ, and the latter is evidently too dumb to figure it out or to even ask, which begs the question as to why she's in charge of anything, and especially why a news organization! I prefer stories about smarter women than these two, although this novel wasn't atrocious by any means. It does misrepresent itself somewhat in the blurb (but then what professionally published novel doesn’t?!).

Take this, for example: "Mid-afternoon office romps abound in this romantic comedy while also focusing on what it takes for a newspaper to remain relevant in this age of social media." It’s not a romantic comedy. There's no humor and no comedy unless you count a comedy of errors. And it does not remotely "focus" on the newspaper. It’s all about JJ and her physical pining for Claire. And it’s first person, which doesn’t help. As I read it I was constantly skirting along the border between, yeah it’s an okay read, and I detest this endlessly self-absorbed whiner! This should have been a third-person novel as should the majority of novels. This asinine addiction to first person stories is laughable, especially here.

The blurb asks, "Must JJ lose everything in order to gain a life more fully her own?" and I don't even know what that means. What she's risking is losing the woman she wants to be with, but she's managed perfectly fine without her for two decades. She's hardly risking everything. And how is her life to be fully her own if she's so utterly dependent upon Claire? The sentence made zero sense, but is typical of book blurb writers in the world of Big Publishing™.

JJ is inconsistent as a character. On the one hand she's used to taking charge, and running things, which means knowing how and when to delegate, yet when she wakes up one morning with a painfully stiff neck and back, and can’t reach up to the shelf in a pharmacy for a heating pad, she thinks, "There was no way I would ask a clerk for help. I never liked to ask for help." This again broadcasts how stupid she is. It’s not a good sign, especially when she's the main character and talking to you in first person.

Apart from the whining, the novel was written quite well and I thought I would enjoy it, but it became too much when these two women began behaving like clueless teenagers in each other's company and the whole story about saving the newspaper was effectively put on the back burner if not forgotten as these two pursued each other like rabbit sin high rutting season. The sex scenes were not even interesting or original, and it all became a joke, so I ditched it around forty percent in. No, I do not want to read another story about women who have nothing but sex on what passes for their mind any more than I want to read one about men who are in that same frame of mind. I cannot recommend this one.