A Killer Closet by Paula Paul

Rating: WARTY!

This novel promised sufficient differences from the usual female-centric murder mystery (no cupcakes or coffee-bars here) that it sounded very appealing, but in the end it proved itself to be so lacking in credibility and so full of trope that it turned me off. The best part about it turned out to be that one, it was not first person voice, for which I heartily thank the author, and two, it was very short - only one-hundred fifty pages or so, again for which I offer thanks, otherwise I might have had to DNF this one.

The main character, Irene Seligman is essentially blackmailed to leave her comfortable and rewarding life in New York City to move back to home town Santa Fe, New Mexico, because her mother is a cruel parasite. Despite her job being that of an assistant district attorney, she abandons that "prestigious job" completely for no reason that we're given, and opens a very upscale designer clothing consignment store. This abrupt and dramatic switch in career choice made absolutely no sense to me because it had no roots or background, but I was even willing to let that slide in the hope of a good story. Unfortunately I didn't end-up with the bargain some of the shoppers in the store got!

The morning she opens her brand new store, Irene discovers a dead body in one of the closets. I was willing to run with that, but by the time I reached the end of the novel, I had seen no reason offered as to why this body had been left in her store. The store was locked and someone had to pick the lock or use a duplicate key to get in there and dump the body. It made no sense and didn't fit with what I later learned of the perps. Maybe I missed the explanation, but I didn't miss that despite the victim having evidently been killed elsewhere and dumped here the scene was described in a way that suggested the murder was done right there. How that worked is an unexplained mystery, and there were too many of these in this novel.

This novel is one more example of how the cover artist never reads the novel he or she is illustrating for, and ends up drawing a cover which bears no relationship whatsoever to the events. The cover shows a woman in a purple skirt with what look like Christian Louboutin's on her feet and wearing something white around her torso. She's lying in a relaxed fetal position on her left side. Here's the description of the corpse from the very first page of the novel:

The dead woman sat with her legs straight out, her upper body leaning against the wall. She was dressed in blue silk Prada pants. She wore a brown silk jacket, also Prada.

In other words she looked nothing like the cover. This is why I ignore covers when picking a novel to read. They're meaningless and irrelevant. They have no respect for the author, because the author routinely has little or nothing to do with the cover unless they self publish.

The problems didn't stop there. Here is the description of the woman's appearance: "The woman herself had been an attractive blonde." I'm sorry, but what does the fact that she's attractive have to do with anything? Would the murder have been less of a tragedy if she'd been an ugly brunette? I seriously don't think so! So why describe her as attractive?

If it had been written in first person, this might have made some sense because some people do think like that - that a murder is more tragic if the victim is pretty, but this was not first person. The other side of this coin is Irene's later observation of her aging mother. "Seeing her now in the bright light without her makeup, Irene thought she looked every day of the seventy years she’d lived." So we have an announcement here that without make-up, women are ugly, especially when they're older women, who quite obviously from this should never put their face out in public without a pretty mask of make-up to hide it behind. How cruel can you get?

But Irene's behavior never did make sense. She used to be an assistant DA, yet everything she does here gets in the way of the police investigation. She repeatedly ignores, for example, direct orders for the police and thereby risks contaminating crime scenes. Her behavior is inexcusable, and not something a DA would do. There are ways to force her, by good plotting, to do these things if they're necessary to the story, but none of that was in evidence here. Consequently, Irene simply looked like a stupid, interfering busy-body who was betraying her entire career training, and doing it for no reason whatsoever.

Perhaps it's needless to say after that, I did not like Irene at all, and I loathed her mother who was one of the most clueless, vapid, and vacuous characters ever to disgrace the pages of a novel. In fact I don't think there was a single character I did like in this novel. All the women are presented as gossiping busy-bodies. All the men are macho or boyish in one way or another. There's nothing in between. None of the characters was interesting. It was pretty obvious from early-on who the villain was and who the good guy in disguise was.

Irene's painfully obvious love interest was right out of the young adult trope stockpile: "He was tall, and he had blue eyes set in a square-jawed, high-cheekboned face and a boyish shock of blond hair that fell across his forehead." Barf. He's randomly referred to as "J.P." or "P.J." like the author couldn't decide which she preferred. That needs to be corrected before this goes to final print. I know that advance review copies are disclaimed as an "uncorrected proof" but that, in this day and age, is no excuse at all. We do not live in an age where people write novels out by hand or laboriously type them on a typewriter, and then the type has to be set in leads in a literal galley tray and painstakingly corrected. We have search & replace. We have spell-checkers. We have grammar checkers (although I don't recommend Microsoft's, which sucks). This doesn't catch all errors by any means and I sympathize with authors having to read and re-read their work, believe you me, but we ought not to be seeing mixed-up initials.

There's a lawyer who is nothing but an obnoxious stalker yet Irene seems to have no problem with him despite his pushy nature and the fact that he inexplicably knows everything about her despite having literally just met her. He flatly refuses to accept that "No!" means "Hell, no!" yet she doesn't find this remotely suspicious! She puts it down to living in a small town, yet Santa Fe, with a population close to seventy thousand is not a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business. This guy is a creep and still Irene allows him to drive her home. She's an idiot.

At one point, there's a golden opportunity to discover the identity of one of the villains because she actually came into Irene's store, make a purchase, and pays with a credit card, yet never does Irene have the smarts when she later learns this woman is bad news, to go back and look at the receipt and report her identity to the police. She must have been an utterly lousy assistant DA.

Irene makes no sense, especially as someone with DA affiliations. She is very reticent about giving information to the cops despite him asking questions about the corpse discovered in her closet. She repeatedly reminds herself not to tall him too much, and there's no reason whatsoever for her attitude. Yet later, again for no reason, she spills her guts to someone else with a load of unbidden and extraneous information: "She didn’t tell me anything about a struggle. She just called and told me she’d found a building and used the money I wired her to pay the first month’s lease. She said she got a good deal on a building that had been vacant for several months." Again it made no sense.

At one point, against expressed police orders, Irene decides she must visit a location out of town (instead of simply telling the police about it), but instead of going right then, when her store has been forcibly closed because of the dead body and police investigation, she puts off the trip until another day when she has to leave the store full of valuable merchandise in the care of a brand new hire whom she doesn't know, and who is supposed to be part-time. She doesn't even tell him she will be gone. He has no keys to the store and isn't told she will be away, yet he manages to open the store with no problem! Maybe he's the one leaving the dead bodies?! LOL! Seriously, this made no sense, and this novel was full of this kind of out of left field inexplicable behavior.

In the end, not remotely liking the main character and finding the story repeatedly making no sense, I cannot in good faith recommend this one.

Kris Longknife Defender by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WARTY!

This is the last volume of the Kris Longknife series I ever intend to read. It's been a long run and I enjoyed some of the earlier volumes, but as the series dragged on, the stories became more and more formulaic and less and less interesting, more trudging and more boring. I don't know who his editor is, but Mike Sbepherd is still using the wrong words here and there (like amend when he needed append, for example).

This one, volume eleven, was better than the previous volume, but nonetheless tedious. Nothing happened for most of it. The big battle took place in the last twenty pages of a 370 page book, and was by rote and uninventive, so in the end this volume was just like the last one: a prologue for the next one where, I presume (although there are never any guarantees in this series) there will be a final showdown with the belligerent alien race the humans have encountered, and on their home turf. That makes two successive prologues. I am not a fan of prologues and I skip them as a matter of habit. I'm glad I'm now done with these.

For the first time in this series that I really found myself skipping and skimming, especially during the pathetic and amateur "romance" scenes between the now-married "Jack" and Kris, who despite being this Mary Sue commander who never loses, still needs "Jack"'s protective arms around her to feel safe.

Most of this tedious book was about logistics, with the occasional light fight with roaming belligerent alien ships to leaven it not much. There was their rescue mission to locate the other ship which had escaped the previous battle, and the search and rescue was performed like an afterthought despite all the pompous posturing about "leaving no one behind". Seriously? One of the things which turns me off this series is the jingoism and bullshit infallible military pomp.

The worst part about this book though, was that the humans had no problem whatsoever raping and pillaging the alien planet for resources. Yes, they were short of food, and they needed materials for the fight (this is the first book in the series in a while - perhaps since the first one - where the title actually described the overall story!), but this doesn't excuse the takeover of the benign alien planet with little regard for the locals. It made Kris & crew look far more similar to the belligerent aliens than to decent human beings. And they're still stripping gas giants for "reaction mass" to power their ships. Apparently they have learned nothing from disasters on Earth from poor management of resources, from reliance on unsustainable resources, and from pollution and contingent climate change!

I didn't get the issue with the food. The author is evidently telling us that in several hundred years of expansion into space, the only technological advances humans have made are all tied to militarism, and none to human comfort. Space-farers in the future will still have to haul food supplies with them evidently, since they have no means whatsoever of manufacturing food on-board their spacecraft. They still have to wholesale slaughter living things on random planets they pass to get 'fresh meat'. Shepherd seems not to grasp that a planet's ecology is tightly interwoven. Things do not evolve randomly, but in step with the environment and with other living things. The chances of humans being able to actually digest things which have grown on alien planets is highly questionable at best due to a crucially differing biology and genetic roots.

One thing the author did mention here, if only in passing was the pointlessness of considering trade to be an option over interstellar distances. I've raised this issue in several reviews of space-opera style stories, and finally the author agrees with me, but it's passed over too quickly evidently for him to realize that everything he's written previously about trade between planets is negated by the few words he typed out here. I rest my case.

I can't recommend this, and I can't recommend the series overall unless you want to turn off your brain and just have some dumb-ass and very light reading. That might work, but even then you have to face the formulaic nature of the stories which are, until the last few volumes, simply the same story told over again with slightly varied situations and actors. Even for the last few volumes, they were largely the same when you get right down to it. It's tedious to keep reading of the same situations, and hearing the same conversations, the same pat assessments, the same stock phrases all of which appear to be tied to American ancient history (as it would be in these novels), and seeing the same characters in different guises, and hearing the "homespun wisdom" of the old timers spouted endlessly over again.

The one character conspicuous by her absence over the last few volumes was Vicki Peterwald, because she was being spun off into her own series. This doesn't account for the fact that she was bonding with Kris after being mortal enemies, yet now seems to have reversed her course, so I am curious about that, and I have one volume of her series which I shall also review, but I have to confess right here that I'm not holding out much hope for it. We'll see!

March Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell

Rating: WORTHY!

It's easy to think this is water under the bridge now, but it's just as hard to believe that even as recently as the 1960's (and beyond) there was hateful segregation and discrimination based on skin color. It was there nevertheless, and this graphic novel tells the story of one man's perspective on the efforts of himself and others to overthrow it. Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale of segregated buses, segregated education, segregated drinking fountains, segregated rest-rooms and segregated lunch counters. He was there at the protests and organized many of them.

Congressman John Robert Lewis worked with Andrew Aydin who at the time of publication at least in 2013, served in Lewis's DC office handling media and telecommunications, and with Nat Powell, a graphic novelist, to recount Lewis's story of his childhood, early upbringing, his striving for an education, and finally his involvement with civil rights and with Ghandi-style peaceful protests and passive resistance. It cost these people their comfort, their dignity at times, and it brought them physical violence, but they stuck with it, their numbers grew, and they won out in the end. The sad thing is that they should never have had to fight at all, not even passively.

It's just as important now to recall what they did and what they won, when police profiling and white-cop-on-black-citizen violence seems repeatedly to flare-up in the news, as it was for these people and their white supporters to take a stand against this evil and outsmart it. That's precisely why this novel isn't water under the bridge and why it, or something lie this if you chose a different publication or medium to refresh you mind on this topic is eminently worth your time. In this particular case, the artwork is interestingly done in black and white, which only serves to highlight the divide that still exists in so many ways.

I have one interesting and amusing coincidence which happened when I opened this to read it and I think it's worth relating. The image colors were reversed when I first started reading: the white page was black and the black line drawings were white! At first I thought it was a glitch in the download, but then I realized that my iPad was set for night reading, which reverses the colors and conserves battery power. I recommend it, but when I realized what had happened, I thought, "How poetic this is!" And what a great shift in perspective this gave for my starting to read this novel. I found myself switching the back-lighting as I read, so different sections came to me in reversed colors. I recommend you try it when you read it. It never hurts to get a kick in the head and realize we're on two sides of the same coin and we either make it together or we have no currency.

Flunked by Jen Calonita

Rating: WORTHY!

This audiobook was read appropriately by Kristin Condon, who failed only with some of the the male voices (making them sound obnoxiously fake as some female readers can do I'm sorry to report). Otherwise she was very easy on the ear and got most of the voices spot on for me. I liked this story out of the gate for the fact that it was humorous and quirky, but after a while it started to flag. It was nice to get that good feeling to begin with though, because I haven't had a lot of success lately with audiobooks. I have to say that I tend to take more risks with audio than with other books, since I get them for free from the library and I'm willing to give anything a try for some good company on a longish commute to work each day. The downside is that I tend to fail a greater portion of audios than I do print or ebooks. In this case, this one made it under the wire!

I can see a lot of ties to the Harry Potter series here, which might irritate some readers. I could see Professor Snape in the Evil Queen, who is a teacher whose sister is also in the school and is a trouble-maker and a bully, so I guess it's more of a cross between Snape and Malfoy. Also, it was a boarding school (in this case a reform school), which featured rooms and hallways that changed - apparently randomly - like the staircases in Potter. There was also a forest from which the students were forbidden and which houses giants and "Pegasi"!

The author evidently doesn't realize that Pegasus is an actual name in Greek mythology; not a species, but a god sired by Zeus himself! If you want a species name, then maybe it should be something along the lines of Equus volantem. In short, there was a lot of copying and this author made no more effort to make it make sense than did Rowling. Why for example in Potter, was a children's school situated near a highly dangerous forest? Why was there no magic keeping kids out? Why do hallways randomly appear and disappear? As with the staircases in Potter, what was the point other than to put a weird quirk into a story of a magical world? Of course this is exactly what it was for, and younger readers don't have a problem with it. Older ones might.

The characters also bore similarities. There was a flighty female like Luna Lovegood, and she even had a name ending in 'a': Kayla. The main character is Gillian or Jillian. it's impossible to tell with an audio. I shall employ the latter spelling for now. She was sent to Fairy Tale Reform School for a third strike theft offense. The third leg was a 'jack-me-lad' kind of a guy whose name was actually Jax (or jacks, or something like - short for Jackson), I'm sorry to have to report.

That name (Jack) is way-the-heck overused in fiction. Normally that's a deal-breaker for me because I expect my authors to have more imagination and inventiveness than to go immediately to a stock character name like that. I flatly refuse to read any more novels which have a main character named Jack. In this case I let it slide because he wasn't the main character, and he wasn't too irritatingly competent and macho. Also I really liked the warped take on fairy-tale land which the author had concocted here, and I loved the wry view of life the kleptomaniacal main character adopted.

The magic was illogical, which may sound strange thing to say of a book about fairy-tales and magic, but if you're going to create a world where everything is apparently free - as in a magical world - then there's no reason at all to have impoverished characters. That always stuck out like a sore thumb in the Potter series. Why was Ron's family poor when they were excellent at magic? If they could transform a goblet into a rat, they sure as hell could transform lead into gold, yet they were always down at heel! Why were Ron's clothes shabby when it was so easy to do some sort of reparo spell and fix them? Why did anyone work when they could get everything they wanted from magic - and at no cost? None of that made any sense at all!

The alternative is to have rules - to make spells only work in a certain way or entail a cost to perform, and that didn't seem in evidence here any more than it did in the Potters, but Jillian's family had no magic, and resented those who did - who could, for example, magic up several pairs of shoes which her father would normally have made - so he was robbed of the work. This at least gave Jillian her motivation for theft. Additionally, some of the teachers seemed a bit on the stupid side I have to say! Why, for example, did they believe Jillian's lie that Jax was sneaking out of an upper storey window after curfew, on the flimsy excuse of looking for Jillian's lost Journal out in the grounds? The lie was so obvious and so out-of-left-field given Jax's actions that it made no sense they would let such a bogus claim slide. That kind of thing aside, I did enjoy the opening sequences: they were funny and a bit different, and made for an enjoyable listen. I liked this one and intend to listen to the second in the series.

Kris Longknife: Furious by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe

Rating: WARTY!

Finally I arrive at one in this series that I haven't read before, and I discover this one is the worst novel yet - completely boring. Quite literally nothing happens in the entirety of this novel except that Kris - finally it would appear, and after nine-and-a-half novels - loses her virginity. At least I assume that's what's going on here since there's been nothing but high-school quality pining up to this point for her entire life, and especially between her and Jack the jock. otherwise this is nothing but a book-length prologue for the next novel in the series, which is the last one I intend to read. I will post that review later this month.

The plot, that Kris is now a wanted person for crimes against humanity (not one of which can evidently be enumerated), makes zero sense, especially since she was appointed to a specific post in a specific location. Anyone who wanted to find her knew exactly where she was, so the warrant out for her arrest was a joke. On a whim, she then busts out of there and goes AWOL, returning to the very place where she's most wanted - by her family to keep her out of trouble. There's no truly valid reason whatsoever for her to go there. She spends the first half of the novel on the run, and quite literally doing nothing but hiding. It is so BORING. If I hadn't committed at the start of this year to post a review of every one of the first eleven in this series that I have on my shelf, I would have quit this one half way through and read no more of a series which, notwithstanding that I positively reviewed several of these books already, including the last volume, has been going steadily downhill for some time.

Longknife is not only a special snowflake, she's also a Mary Sue. The amount of fawning over her "royalness" is excessive in your average volume, but here it was worse than ever. It was sickening to read it. No matter what she does, it's right, and good and true. She never makes a mistake, and everyone is either doting on her or trying to kill her (and those latter people are in the minority). She surrenders herself to one of the planets which has an arrest warrant for her and becomes a heroic figure to the entire planet's population, all of which are Japanese. This author cannot come up with an original society to save his life's work. An earlier novel had them on an Hawaiian planet. Now we go to a 100% Japanese planet which actually has a royal family which embraces her as one of their own. The Japanese, like the Hawaiians. are patronized and stereotyped. It was truly pathetic to read.

Where did the Japanese royalty come from? Were they elected like Kris's own King (which is how she became a "princess")? Why would the Japanese elect a monarchy which is evidently spoiled rotten? How does a whole planet get to be taken over by one small nation and one tiny culture (and one which at present doesn't even have a space program that involves sending humans into space)? You could take the entire series and set it in the future and confine it to Earth and have exactly the same stories. Space isn't needed because there's nothing out there in these stories which isn't rooted in Earth culture and Earth history.

And what's with the subtitle? Furious? There is no fury here at all. Kris kicks a wall at one time but otherwise there's plodding and endless fantasizing about jack which never goes anywhere despite Kris and he having endless hours together. She's always whining about having no time to pursue the romance, yet we read frequently of time spent traveling between jump points in the spacecraft, and idle time awaiting on other things happening. What. they didn't want to get jiggie together then? I think the author is in love with his character and wants to keep her for himself, which is why she never gets laid - to speak of! LOL! In short, this story truly sucked and I am so glad I have only one more to read before I'm done with this ride.

Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd

Rating: WARTY!

Audiobooks for me are a lot more experimental than print or ebooks, because I am a captive audience for an hour each day when commuting, so I tend to try a lot more risky or uncertain material, and sometimes this pays off with a gem here and there (mostly there), but more often I find I don't like the book, and I can't stand to listen to it all the way through. Fortunately, these are all library books, so I haven't wasted any money. There are assorted reasons for my dislike, and this one had two of the major three (first person voice, poor writing, and bad narrator).

This one started out on the wrong foot by being first person PoV which I typically cannot stand. I know a lot of people like this voice, but I'm not one of them. If I see it in a print book at a library or a bookstore, I immediately put it back on the shelf no matter how interesting the blurb made it sound, because I know it's far more likely to piss me off or repulse me in some other way, than ever it is to please me. It's a lot harder to reject such books when they're ebooks (unless they happen to offer a sneak preview), and it's impossible to determine this with an audiobook unless you listen to it, or can find a print or e-version you can sneak a peek at.

The first person voice is wa-ay overused, especially in YA novels, and is rarely used without imbuing a feeling of fakery to me, and in this case simultaneously invoking severe nausea. The reader here, who has the charming name of Sile Bermingham (which if pronounced phonetically and sloppily, actually sounds a little bit like the way people who live in Birmingham, England, say it: Buhrminum - wasn't unpleasant, but the tedious, endless first person was boring as hell given that she wasn't narrating anything of interest and obsessed with trivial details instead of larger pictures. The story started out well enough with the main character fleeing her foster home, which actually didn't sound at all bad, purportedly heading back to Ireland, but she somehow never got there - not in the portion I could stand to listen to - and the story became lost somewhere along that convoluted road.

The second biggest problem was that having got me all interested in the escape, the author then harshly slammed on the brakes (gimme a break!) and went into endless flashbacks about the character's previous life, which is a big no-no for me. By all means slip in a detail here and there, but to info-dumpo the whole thing when it was largely irrelevant (except as a trigger) to what she was currently doing, brought the story-crashing down and was an insult to the reader. From that point on, I was frankly never quite sure if I was listening to the flashback portion or the current story portion. Worse than this, all the flashbacks achieved was to convince me that the main character, the self-titled 'Solace' was a whiny, brattish, unpleasant person who deserved nothing better than she got. if the flashback portion of her life is that interesting (which it wasn't) then why is the author telling that story instead of bouncing back and forth like a pinball? I quickly gave up on this one, and now you know why. Based on what I listened to (and then skimmed through), I can't on good faith recommend this at all.

My T-Rex Gets a Bath by Chloe Sanders

Rating: WARTY!

This one is nicely illustrated and poetically written, but I felt it was shy of where it ought to be for several reasons, so I can't recommend it. The dinosaur is a very popular pull for kids because they are in many ways so alien and threatening, but they are also extinct, and therefore not really a threat! They're safe. But they're very different from mammals, so the idea of using one as a model for bathing and brushing teeth one didn't work in my opinion. Reptile and Dino dentition is very different from ours and their skin is nothing like ours (and we shed in different ways!).

I know you can argue that kids don't care or don't mind, or that this is a minor thing, but I think it's never too early to start educating children in small ways about similarities and differences between us, and that both make for interesting companions and great friends, and I think this was a case where similarities would have been more educational and more accurate. I thought the toothpaste illustrations were charming, but so would kids. If they read this, they're likely to want to try toothpaste painting themselves, which is fine in the right place and at the right time if you can afford to waste a tube of toothpaste, but it's not something you want them thinking about or trying to emulate at bedtime!

Also the tooth brushing aspect of the personal hygiene story while well-intentioned, failed for me because of the way it was presented. It was turned into a race between the boy and the T-Rex as to who could finish first, which is hardly conducive to a good brushing! Squirting water and splashing in the tub is going to earn you a wet floor and eventually, rotting floorboards if you're not careful! That's not to say that bath-time can't be fun and there can be no squirting or splashing, but it felt like one more straw of irresponsibility on the camel's back of good sense and moderation.

The really weird thing about this book was the paragraph-long disclaimer in the back! This ran to the effect that every effort has been made to ensure that the information in the book was accurate and complete, in both text and graphics, but the author and publisher do not warrant it because of the rapidly changing nature of science, research, known and unknown facts and the Internet?! That just sounded weird. I wonder what new information is going to come out that might tell us it's unwise to wash and brush teeth?

Maybe publishers have to put this in because some idiots have tried to sue them over things in the past, but it seemed strange - and slightly depressing - that you can't even put out a kids book without a disclaimer. Oh well. But even that oddity aside, I can't recommend this one.

Look Behind You by Sibel Hodge

Rating: WARTY!

This one is first person which I detest, and which made the story read like a parody from the start because it was combined with such overly dramatic language that it would have turned me off right away had it not made me laugh so hard. In the first few screens I got, "Hot, acidic bile burns my throat." Bile is actually alkaline. Stomach acid is acidic. "Hot stomach acid burns my throat" would have been perfect. The bile quote made me think that this author was so desperate to make this gripping that she simply went way over the top without any idea where she was going or what she was doing to her little melodrama. It doesn't work. She does it again shortly afterwards with, "heartbeat thumps wildly". No, a heart may thump wildly. Or a heart may beat wildly, but a heartbeat is already a beat. It's already a thump.

This kind of melodrama continued with lines like, "I fight the urge to vomit again. I gulp in deep breaths of stale air. In. Out. Come on; breathe. In. Out. Don't panic. Think!" and "I cram a fist in my mouth to stop from yelling out. Hot tears slide down my cheeks. I have to get out of here. Somehow. But my head . . . oh, my head", and "Fingers of dread squeeze my insides. Fear slices through me." Seriously, I was about ready to quit but then the girl escapes her confinement so I decided to stay with it a bit longer. I made it to forty percent before the bad writing and the painfully obvious plotting nauseated me so much I couldn't stand to read any more.

Check this out:

'I was kidnapped.' My eyes water as the full realization of everything that's happened sinks in.
Her mouth falls open. 'Kidnapped?'
I can only nod, tears streaming down my face. Even to my ears, I know how it sounds. Crazy. Ridiculous. Who would want to kidnap a suburban wife and teacher?
'Right. Well, I'd better add calling the police to my list then, too....'

Seriously? A bedraggled woman obviously in trouble, is picked up on the roadside by a driver - a female driver at that - and no one calls the police? Bullshit! This story was quite simply not credible, and the woman was portrayed as stupid to the core. Everything is clear to the reader before the character ever grasps it. She is pathetically dumb and slow. I'm tired of reading stupid stories written by female authors who seem intent upon making their main female characters dumb as they can. Stop it! Stop it now or quit writing, for goodness sakes! I actively dis-recommend this novel.

Skeen's Leap by Jo Clayton

Rating: WARTY!

I really liked this novel when I started it. It was fresh and things were happening, and the main character, Skeen, was not only older than your usual character in this sort of novel (sci-fi/fantasy) which made a refreshing change, she was strong, capable, fun, interesting, and engaging. That lasted for the first third of the book! The next sixth dropped precipitously into the doldrums and began to trudge tiredly, and I eventually lost all interest in pursuing the story. I found myself skipping several parts that I found uninteresting, in particular the stories Skeen told, but I continued reading in the hope it would perk back up to its original quality. It didn't, and by the half-way point I decided I could find something better to do with my reading time.

I noticed an error or two, but not many, in the text, such as "Skeen sat in the saddle watching all this activity with interest and some impatient." That last word ought to have been 'impatience'. In another instance, I read, "And he didn't want to hear her fell him how it excited her." Clearly that should have been 'tell him', not 'fell him'! As a writer myself I recognize that errors like this are things a spelling/grammar checker might not catch and as such, are the bane of every writer's life! I can readily forgive a few of those if the novel is otherwise a worthy read.

In addition to this, there were some oddities, such as Skeen's use of a made-up cussing language. She persistently describes one character, Tibo, as "Tibo that baster." I originally assumed it was meant to be a euphemism for bastard and meant to be pronounced bass-tuh. Pronounced as base-tuh, it's a word that describes a person or thing that bastes - i.e. moistens meat as it roasts! Curiously, 'baste' also means "to sew with long, loose stitches"! Hmm! Maybe the author meant that instead? Unfortunately Jo Clayton died in 1998 so no one can ask her! If she hadn't used any made-up words, I would have taken it for the 'loose stitching' definition, but because there were other made-up words, it was impossible to know what she meant! That's worth keeping in mind if you're a writer.

In another instance I read, "...a mountain could fall on her and she'd not bother waking." This is less of an oddity than an interesting exercise in speculating how you would write it. It's obvious what the author means, and you can argue that if that's the case, she did the job just fine, but the way she expressed that idea felt wrong to me; clearly if a mountain fell on you, you'd be dead and not wake-able - except as in a funeral wake! I'm not sure if that's what she meant to say here. Again, it's worth thinking about as a writer. No phrase in unimportant. If it is, it probably shouldn't be in the novel! But again, things like this are not deal-breakers for my enjoyment of a novel. The writing was, however!

I did love the off-hand and playful chapter titles, such as this one: "A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY OF DULL TRAVEL. WE'LL SKIP ALL THAT AND GET RIGHT TO THE NEXT EXCITING BIT." The novel was full of such titles (and other sentences) like this, and it was one of the things which won me over and drew me into the story in the first place. Another item of interest was Skeen's trusty sleepy-dart pistol. That in itself isn't new - in another novel series for example (Mike Shepherd's Kris Longknife series) which I'm reviewing this year, those weapons are used frequently, but in Skeen's story, the idea is slightly different. The darts are not metallic, but made of ice which is coated with the narcotic agent. She never runs out of darts, we're told, because there's always water around, yet we're also never told how she coats them with narcotic since we never see her do this. Maybe it's all done inside the pistol and all she has to do is slap a cartridge of narcotic in there and load it with water and she's good to go.

On the TV show Mythbusters, which I admired very much, they once explored whether or not a lethal bullet could be made from ice and discovered it could not. The friction and heat of the discharge melted the ice or made it so fragile that it wouldn't travel any distance or impact with any penetrating force. There's a reason bullets are typically made from heavy metal like lead! In Skeen's case, she does not use bullets, but darts fired with compressed air, so the author even talked her way out of that, which was nice to read. On an aside topic, Mythbusters also showed how powerful water is at stopping a bullet. They fired bullets into a swimming pool which slowed them down so much that they were not lethal after only dozen or so feet. On another show on Netflix, called Street Genius, host Tim Shaw demonstrated how weak a Magnum pistol is when firing through water balloons. The water really took the power away from the "most powerful handgun in the world" big time.

But the problem with this story, as I said, was that it died before the half-way point and the author failed to resuscitate it. Skeen, who was a light-footed (as well as light fingered) solo operative became bogged down with people and stuck in a single location, from which the only move was to another single location (on board a ship), and the story became likewise bogged-down so badly it effectively ceased to move for me. Even so I was prepared to press on for a while to see if it would perk up, but then I was hit by a scene involving rough sex with Skeen and a traveling companion and it simply turned me right off, because what had been a strong, independent, and somewhat heroic figure was now rendered into a weak, dependent, and needy woman, and I lost all interest in reading about her. I can't recommend this based on the first fifty percent.

Civil War Ms Marvel Vol 2 by Brian Reed

Rating: WARTY!

I picked this up thinking it was a part of the younger Ms Marvel series, but it isn't. It's part of a pompous, self-described "Marvel Event" wherein each main character in the Marvel "universe" gets a volume about their actions during the super hero civil war, as depicted in the 2016 Captain America movie. This one, unfortunately, was not about the teen Ms Marvel to whom I've really taken a shine, but about the older Ms Marvel, who is a different character, and I liked neither it nor her. There was a teen in the form of Araña, who evidently goes by other names too. These heroes are obsessed with names! LOL! Plus there was the usual problem of graphic novel creators not having the first clue how to label their product, so I got this without realizing it was volume two!

The story was spotty, being broken up into disconnected episodes rather than forming a coherent whole, and it really was not entertaining. It embodied all that I dislike about graphic novels, and almost nothing that I actually do like. It felt like the authors wanted to press-gang as many Marvel super celebs into it as they could, but it meant no-one got any decent air-time except the most boring one, and Ms Marvel came off looking like a prize jerk in her behavior. It wasn't entertaining, and although the art by de la Torre, Wieringo, and Camuncoli was good (sorry there are no first names. I don't know these artists, and the library edition I got had obliterated their names with a UPC sticker!)

Carol Danvers, aka Ms Marvel (and other names) sides with Iron Man in enforcing the Super Hero Registration Act. She teams with Wonder Man (which seems like a dumb name for a hero, to me, but then none of the names are that great when you get right down to it). Ms Marvel literally tears apart a family when she takes Spider Girl (who has several freaking names, I forget which one she was using here) into custody, literally pulling her out of the arms of her young daughter. I was already starting to dislike this version of Ms Marvel before this point, but this and the ridiculously long, drawn-out fight between the highly vindictive if not psychotic alternate universe Ms Marvel and her vendetta against Rogue was the final straw, I was "Check please, I'm done here!"

There was too much thrown in here and it offered little sense and made for a poor reading experience. I think I even saw a kitchen sink in one frame. I cannot recommend this one at all.

Young Avengers Mic-Drop at the Edge of Time and Space by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie

Rating: WARTY!

Having been thrilled with Marvel's "Ms Marvel" - the teen version, not the absurdly disjointed, brutal "Civil War" version - and having really enjoyed Marvel's Runaways, I made the mistake of thinking this success could continue. I brought home the first three volumes of the Young Avengers. Was that ever a mistake! The series is boring, ridiculous, bland, and nonsensical. Fortunately, I brought them home from the library and not from the bookstore, so I didn't waste any of my money on these. See my review of volume one in this series for some background.

This series features the bizarre "Hulkling" (Theodore Altman), the childish "Kid Loki" (Loki Laufeyson), the ridiculously named "Marvel Boy" (Noh-Varr), the absurdly named "Miss America" (America Chavez), the completely pointless "Patriot" (Elijah Bradley), the only one with a decent name, "Prodigy" (David Alleyne), the unfortunately named "Speed" (Thomas Shepherd), and the inappropriately named "Wiccan" (William Kaplan) who has nothing to do with the religion of Wicca.

Volume three was pretty much a clone of volumes one and two, which featured pointless and unentertaining traipsing through other dimensions by these supposed heroes, fighting, and eating breakfast. There was no story. This was garbage. Period. The baton was dropped. Nothing else.

Young Avengers Alternative Culture by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie

Rating: WARTY!

Having been thrilled with Marvel's "Ms Marvel" - the teen version, not the absurdly disjointed, brutal "Civil War" version - and having really enjoyed Marvel's Runaways, I made the mistake of thinking this success could continue. I brought home the first three volumes of the Young Avengers. Was that ever a mistake! The series is boring, ridiculous, bland, and nonsensical. Fortunately, I brought them home from the library and not from the bookstore, so I didn't waste any of my money on these. See my review of volume one in this series for some background.

This series features the bizarre "Hulkling" (Theodore Altman), the childish "Kid Loki" (Loki Laufeyson), the ridiculously named "Marvel Boy" (Noh-Varr), the absurdly named "Miss America" (America Chavez), the completely pointless "Patriot" (Elijah Bradley), the only one with a decent name, "Prodigy" (David Alleyne), the unfortunately named "Speed" (Thomas Shepherd), and the inappropriately named "Wiccan" (William Kaplan) who has nothing to do with the religion of Wicca.

Volume two was pretty much a clone of volume one, which featured pointless and unentertaining traipsing through other dimensions by these supposed heroes, fighting, and eating breakfast. There was no story. This was garbage. Period. No culture in evidence!

Young Avengers Style (something) Substance by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie

Rating: WARTY!

Having been thrilled with Marvel's "Ms Marvel" - the teen version, not the absurdly disjointed, brutal "Civil War" version - and having really enjoyed Marvel's Runaways, I made the mistake of thinking this success could continue. I brought home the first three volumes of the Young Avengers. Was that ever a mistake! The series is boring, ridiculous, bland, and nonsensical. Fortunately, I brought them home from the library and not from the bookstore, so I didn't waste any of my money on these.

Why graphic novel series creators are so dead-set on confusing their readers, especially ones who come late to a series, and are so insistent upon dedicatedly keeping potential readers and fans in the dark about which volume is which is an enduring mystery. Is it really so hard for the publisher or the cover artist to take the perfectly logical, helpful, and simple step of putting a number one on the front cover of volume one? Or would they much rather waste people's time and money? Is it so hard to put a short text reading "Collects Issues 1 through 5"? I guess it is, because the designers here found it far less demanding to put "Style > Substance" on this cover. What does that even mean? Style is greater than substance? It doesn't mean Style over Substance, because that's not the symbol they used! Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. The title doesn't even apply to the story within, which is more like Silage > Frustration.

The goodreads page for this makes it crystal clear how confused the publishers are. The title there is listed as Young Avengers, Vol. 1: Style > Substance (Young Avengers Vol. II #1). Seriously? Someone is very confused and I think it's the graphic novel creators/publishers! Say what you mean, mean what you say. It's that simple.

So, for the uninitiated, Young Avengers was created by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung to appeal to a younger audience than comic books evidently do, and features teen characters who are essentially unimaginative rip-offs of more mature and established Marvel characters from The Avengers. Some of these teens are offspring of unholy unions between mature "super heroes" although since none of the "super heroes" ever have sex (or swear! LOL!), it's quite a mystery as to how these offspring were actually conceived. It's not even possible genetically.

Our closest relative on Earth is the chimpanzee with which we share nearly all our genes, yet it's not possible to conceive offspring between humans and chimpanzees even if you could find some low-life chimp who would be willing to volunteer to have sex with an ugly and disgustingly bald human! It's sure as hell not possible to conceive with someone from a different planet. Not after millions of years of divergent and unrelated evolution. Maybe super-heroes have super-eggs or super-sperm?

Evidently the original launch of the Young Avengers was so unsuccessful that it had to be relaunched in January of 2013 by Kieron Gillen who wrote the tedious text, and Jamie McKelvie who did the average art. There's nothing of interest here. Nothing thought-provoking. Nothing engaging. The stories are disjointed and bland, even where they make any kind of sense. There is often little connection between one panel and the next let alone between one part of the story and the next. None of it made any sense or provided any entertainment.

This series features the bizarre "Hulkling" (Theodore Altman), the childish "Kid Loki" (Loki Laufeyson), the ridiculously named "Marvel Boy" (Noh-Varr), the absurdly named "Miss America" (America Chavez), the completely pointless "Patriot" (Elijah Bradley), the only one with a decent name, "Prodigy" (David Alleyne), the unfortunately named "Speed" (Thomas Shepherd), and the inappropriately named "Wiccan" (William Kaplan) who has nothing to do with the religion of Wicca.

The first volume puts the team together despite the team supposedly having been put together earlier during the Heinberg and Cheung era. We get to know nothing about the characters except what we're begrudgingly told, which is very little, so not one of them seemed like a real person to me. They have no personality. In the end, these "heroes' were only their powers, and their power seemed entirely restricted to fighting and mischief - oh, and and eating breakfast. Boring.

The only other thing which featured was that there were a couple of gay or bisexual guys, and those felt like they'd been put in there for no other reason than to ride the LGBTQIA bandwagon. They had nothing else to offer. None of these characters did. Loki was pathetic. Miss America had one trait and one trait only: violence. Not one of them had a life outside of their little clique. it was like a pathetic high-school melodrama.

So what was the story? There was no story. The entire volume was the same as the next two volumes in the series, which consist of pointless traipsing through other dimensions, fighting, and eating breakfast. There was no story. This was garbage.

Ms Marvel Last Days by G Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona

Rating: WORTHY!

This volume exemplifies one of the things I complain about with graphic novels. It's a good story, but I got it home from the library only to discover that I'd already read it as part of a different volume. Frustrating? Yes! This is why I refuse to buy these things because you never know when you're going to wind up with one you already read as part of a compendium, or under a different cover. What's with this insane obsession with variant covers? Spend more time on improving the art in the panels, and the hell with the wastefully time-consuming extra covers! The story is also incomplete - in this volume and in the compendium. There is no conclusion. Instead of it diverging into a short story about Spider-Man, I'd rather have had the original story concluded.

The story begins with a planet appearing in the sky above Earth. This has been done in Doctor Who and other stories, and none of it makes sense. A planet that close to Earth, even in another dimension, if it's appearing through some sort of dimensional rupture, will exert a massive gravitational pull on Earth, just as earth will on it, and life on both planets would be destroyed. That this never happens in these stories is testimony only to the poor science education the writers have. It makes the story completely unrealistic.

That gripe aside, I really liked the rest of the story because it pretty much abandoned the lie-destroying planet motif and got down to more personal business, and Ms Marvel entertained, as she typically does in these issues. I've read only one volume in this series which has disappointed me, and although some of Ms Marvel's behavior, particularly towards her would-be boyfriend, is inexcusible, G Willow Wilson tells a good story and Adrian Alphonsa illustrates it perfectly.

Ms Marvel Vol 2 by G Willow Wilson

Rating: WORTHY!

Here is yet another volume in a series where I've been disappointed by only one volume so far. I'm not a fan of series, so that's quite a compliment from me! I thought I'd read the first three, but this volume pops up in between two of the other volumes I read and favorably reviewed. Is it so very hard for the creators of a graphic novel series to actually put a number on the front cover so readers can readily identify in what order they should pursue the series? Seriously? What is the big freaking deal with being so cryptic that it's impossible to know where to start a series without engaging in some real research? Graphic novel series creators are frustrating as hell! It's doubly frustrating to bring home two volumes from the library and discover that they're really the same volume, or that one volume is a compendium which incorporates the other. This is why I refuse to buy these things, because you end up with more than one copy of the same story.

That off my chest, I did enjoy this volume. The art was good, and the story engaging. Also, it filled a few holes in the earlier stories I'd read. Kamala falls for a new guy - one who shares her religion and her interests - only to rather predictably, I have to say, discover that he's working for the dark side which is employing him to recruit her. Naturally, and predictably, she refuses, but rather than return to her buddy who has stood by her side throughout, she rejects him, too, with a weak story about how she can't be involved with a guy while she's wedded to her super powers and her need to fight evil. Tired tropes assemble! That, I felt, was poorly done and made her look callous and irrational. She's already involved with this guy anyway, even if not romantically. This does explain why he's moved on in a later volume and begun dating someone else, but Kamala cannot whine about it, after the way she treated him!

That dislike dealt with, I was pleased with her in other respects, especially as she continues to grow and learn new ways to use her shape-distorting powers. All in all, and despite my distaste for her "romantic" behavior, I did like this volume and I recommend it as part of this excellent series. The story was - apart from the non-romance - as well-written as ever, and the art by Elmo Bondoc, Takeshi Miyazawa, and Adrian Alphona was the usual entertaining, colorful, and amusing standard.

The Rivalry: Mystery at the Army-Navy Game by John Feinstein

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't read series, and worse, this book is a complete lie if judged by the blurb. I know authors don't get to write their own blurbs unless they self publish, but the outright lie is a bit much even by blurb standards. I didn't realize this was number five in the "The Sports Beat" series. It read more like number two. If I'd known it was part of a series, I would never have read it - or in this case listened to the pedantic voice of the narrator (who was the author himself, so it's hardly a surprise that the reading was as bad as the writing).

I know it's not aimed at my age group, but the blurb outright lied about it: "John Feinstein has been praised as 'the best writer of sports books in America today' (The Boston Globe), and he proves it again in this fast-paced novel." If that's the case, if he's the best, there must be some lousy, lousy sports books out there. Either that or the Boston Globe is full of shift, to use a football term. No, this novel is anything but fast-paced. It begins with two flashbacks, so it's actually negatively paced! It's supposed to be about events during the Army Navy football game, but that game does not start until the final twenty percent of the novel! In the first third of it, literally nothing happened except that I got teed off (and not in a golfing capacity) by the incessant use of "Susan Carol" which is the first and middle name of one of the main characters. Seriously? No one ever calls her Susan or Sue? She should sue!

She's a fourteen-year-old female sports reporter for a big Washington newspaper. I'm not even going to get into the improbability of a teen female sports report in a major newspaper reporting on mens' sports - not that a fourteen-year-old female couldn't do it in theory, but that she would never be allowed to do it in practice in an adult men's world, and if she did do it she'd be jeered, insulted and abused incessantly by dickhead males. It happens all the time for a lot less than a female presuming to "trespass on male Astro-Turf."

As I mentioned, this story revolves around the annual Army and Navy game which is attended by the president and so Stevie and "Susan Carol" are following a Secret Service agent around. I get that this story is aimed at sports fans, but it's all sport (including the two flashbacks) and no mystery, no thrill, no cut to the chase, no fast-pace, and no thing to hold interest. You would get more thrills from reading a sports almanac or a stats book. I skimmed this one and missed the mystery - that's how pathetic it was, and I refuse to say anything good about a novel this badly written and this boring.

The Midwife by Jennifer Worth

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second of two memoirs I'm reviewing this month. The other was Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash. I have to say I'm not a fan of this kind of book but as it happens. I enjoyed both of these. This one I got into through the TV series which was made from it (and named Call the Midwife). I really enjoyed the series, which is set in Britain in the late fifties and early sixties, and I wanted to read the book (the first of three) because of the TV show, but I have to confess I was very skeptical since book and screen rarely mesh well.

In this case it was not a bad experience, so despite it being a memoir, and despite it being a book from which the show was derived (and which I saw first), I enjoyed the book as much as the show. Do please note though that, as is the wont of TV and movie, things have been modified, re-ordered, compressed and combined so while in general, the two follow each other quite well, there are some notable differences here and there (mostly there), some of which were a bit jarring. Obviously the book is canon in this case, so I accepted the book version without question or issue.

Having said that, one problem I have with this kind of book is the ostensibly crystal clear recollections of the author. These are events which happened some forty years prior to the book being published! I can barely remember anything from even five years ago except in very general terms, especially when it comes down to supplying the kind of detail I was reading here. I could fill-in details from various memories, but that's not the same as reporting what actually happened or faithfully recording the surroundings in which events took place, and it's sure as hello not recalling actual conversations.

I know in this case that the author made notes in a professional capacity about her visits to her 'patients', but those would not have carried detailed descriptions of people (outside of medical requirements), and their homes and possessions, and certainly not verbatim recollections of conversations, so I have to wonder how much of this is accurate and how much is fantasy. Maybe she kept a diary, but she makes no mention of making diary entries in the narrative. It doesn't take from the power of the story, because I'm sure the essence of it is quite true, and she did make many visits to some of these homes and grew to know the environment very well, but I keep wondering about the details, especially given how faulty people's memories generally are. That doesn't stop it from being captivating and from being an entertaining account of what things were like back then in her world, so I won't harp, carp or warp on that. Ha! English! Why is that last one an 'or' sound and the others not?

The TV show begins with Jennifer first arriving at the medical convent, whereas the book retains this until chapter two, throwing us right into her work in the first chapter. The order of events isn't just changed in this one place though. Events are quite mangled in some accounts in the TV show as compared with the book. For example in the show, Jennifer is depicted letting her childhood friend Jimmy crash at the convent in the boiler room for one night, whereas in the book, this happens when she was a nurse prior to joining the medical convent, and it wasn't just Jimmy, it was he and several friends who had failed to pay their rent.

They were housed in a drying room in the attic of the nurses accommodations for several months, and had to climb an exterior ladder late at night to get in, and leave very early in the morning to avoid running into nurses or worse, the strict and severe sisters who were in charge of the nurses. Some of this is augmented by later events though. In the show, the story appears to be the kind-hearted and loving Jimmy being callously turned away by Jennifer because she was in love with a married man and could not get over him, whereas in the book, Jimmy appears to be much more of an irresponsible young man without whom she's better off. The married man, conversely is made to appear much more irresponsible and more of a user than the book, in which he figures very little, depicts him to be.

One event in the TV show related to eclampsia, is a combination of two separate events in the book, one of which is recounted as a recollection rather than a current event. Billy, the odd-job guy a the convent is largely confined to one chapter in the book, but is spread throughout various episodes in the show. The story of the Spanish woman, Conchita, is compressed and rather more dramatized in the show. The chapter on her in the book is different and charming, although she still had twenty four pregnancies by the age of forty-two, which is shocking to us, but from the account, was very much everyday life to her. She must have been a startlingly strong woman. Finally, in the book, Jennifer's growing religious leaning is made more clear than it is in the TV show.

I have to say that the stories slid a bit in quality towards the end - they seemed much more hum-drum, almost as though they were being summarized and tossed in for a page count that being truly warm and/or memorable events, but perhaps I was also becoming more inured at that point, so the last few chapters weren't as captivating for me, but overall, I really liked this book and I recommend it as a worthy read.

Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first of two memoirs I shall be reviewing this month. The other was The Midwife by Jennifer Worth One is a regular chapter book, the other is this one: a graphic novel in which the artwork is rudimentary. It looks like pencil and crayon, and so it looks like a young kid did it, but the thing is that it works for the story and I enjoyed it. This is evidently a memoir about a summer girls camp which Maggie attended and developed a crush on one of the older girls. The story is by parts hilarious and tragic, fun and disturbing. The disturbing part is that anyone would send their young, impressionable daughter to such a psychotic place! But she survived and lived to tell the tale, and it was a most engrossing tale. It's over 260 pages, but it flew by, and I recommend this one.

The Rocketeer The Complete Adventures by Dave Stevens

Rating: WARTY!

I had mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand the story and artwork were pretty decent: well drawn and credible adventures for the period in which it was set. But on the other hand, the "hero" Cliff Secord, aka The Rocketeer, was a complete dick - or perhaps more in keeping with the era, he was a dashed cad and an utter bounder, don't you know!

There were also issues with the plot given how advanced German rocket technology was in World War Two, the issue ought to have been the other way around - the Americans stealing it from the Nazis (which is what they did after the war was over) - not the Nazis looking to steal it from Americans who were way behind them technologically!

Cliff Secord may have been heroic in his actions regarding his rocketeering activities, but I can't get past his jealousy and his OCD behavior towards Betty who was a loyal and decent friend and partner. He treated her abominably, and he never showed any sign that he was about to change. Worse than this, Betty repeatedly came to heel no matter how she was treated. On that basis, I can't recommend this graphic novel at all.

Rooted in King of the Rocket Men from the late forties, and Commando Cody from the early fifties (separate stories about different men who happened to wear exactly the same outfit!), I could have understood this if it had actually been written in the forties or fifties, but it wasn't. It was created in the eighties, so there really is no excuse for Cliff's domineering behavior or for Betty's meek, submissive acceptance of it. I've never seen the movie that came out of this, so I can't comment on that, but I can't condone a modern comic book in which the purported hero treats women this way.

I've seen reviews which try to white-wash this comic by appealing to the fact that it was an homage to Betty Page, but this doesn't excuse the treatment of this woman nor does it excuse a semi-naked Page every few pages, which does nothing to advance the story. I've also seen reviews which suggest that if only Stevens had been allowed to perpetuate these stereotypes, he would have had a chance to mature the characters, but the fact is that he had the chance in this series and he not only failed to address it, he also failed to redress it. The person who really needed to mature here wasn't Cliff Secord, it was Dave Stevens.

Mystique Ultimate Collection by Brian K Vaughan, Jorge Lucas, Michael Ryan, Manuel Garcia

Rating: WORTHY!

Originally created by artist David Cockrum, Mystique's "real" name is Raven Darkhölme, although she has many aliases, and no one really knows squat about her actual name, or her origins or how old she is - it would seem she's at least a century which begs the question as to why she would be interested in anyone of her own apparent age unless she simply wanted to get laid by a young stud. Like Logan, otherwise known as Wolverine, her youth is preserved by her mutation. In Logan's case it's his healing ability. In Mystique's case it's through her shape-shifting, so she sure doesn't look like she's a centenarian.

Being contrary, she rejects the use of the name 'Raven' in this volume, and is going about her routine business of assassinating people who harm mutants, when she finds herself about to be terminated. At the last minute (because rescuers never can be punctual), she's rescued by Magneto, which is a surprise to her because she thought he was dead; however, it's not Magneto, it's Charles Xavier. He's merely projecting Magneto into her brain in order to win her trust and effect the rescue. Well, he fails!

The deal is that he wants jobs done which he doesn't want tied back to him or his mutants, and Mystique represents the perfect undercover agent to carry out his wishes. If she were not wanted by every nation on the planet (except one!), she would have rejected his deal out of hand, but having a lifelong interest in self-preservation, she decides to throw her lot in with him at least for the time being especially since his wishes happen to coincide with her aims for once.

She begins carrying out ops for him which are rooted in the assassination of Prudence, an X-men undercover operative. Prudence was on the trail of a viral agent which has the power to kill everyone who has been inoculated against smallpox, which includes the entire US military, along with medical professionals and a host of other people. Smallpox is a horrible disease, and this mutant version is a huge threat. Mystique takes up the baton and flies with it. She's cool, exciting, inventive, resourceful and every bit the embodiment of a strong female character that I like. Plus she can literally kick ass. Her foes are a match for her (almost!) and the plots are pretty decent. I really enjoyed these stories.

This graphic novel had some truly breath-taking art between chapters done by Mike Mayhew, and though it was superlative, it wasn't so different from the regular panel art that it made me feel cheated as some comics do. Overall this novel was very well illustrated by Jorge Lucas, Michael Ryan, and Manuel Garcia. That George Lucas sure gets around doesn't he? LOL! I've been watching a show on Netflix titled Life which is about this cop who returns to the job after twelve years of false imprisonment for a triple-murder he didn't commit, and the name of the producer is Loucas George! You can't get away from the guy!

One thing I liked about the art is that it seemed a little less "sexploitive" than comic book art all-too-often is where a female character - super or otherwise - is concerned, so I appreciated that. That and the overall quality of the art and of course the excellent stories were what made this a worthy read.

Girl, Stolen by April Henry

Rating: WORTHY!

Nicely read by Kate Rudd, I felt that this novel exemplified my problem with first person voice precisely because this was not written in first person! It would have been obnoxious to me if it had been first person because there was a bit too much info-dumping and lessons on being blind, and these were told rather than shown. It was written for a younger audience than I represent, but sometimes it felt like it had been written for a middle-grade audience than a YA one.

That said, and the occasional annoyances aside, for me it was eminently listenable as a third person story. I applaud April Henry for that! It started out very strongly and really drew me in. Then a bit later towards the end, it started going slightly south and I remember thinking, "Oh no! Here we go again!" but it rallied and came back strongly at the very end, so I'm very grateful to the author for that too, and happy to rate this as a worthy read (or listen!)!

The main characters are sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, the daughter of a Nike executive, and Griffin, the boy who kidnaps her inadvertently when he steals the Cadillac in which she's sleeping when Cheyenne's step-mom goes into the pharmacy to pick up her antibiotic prescription.

Griffin is heading out of the mall parking lot when Cheyenne makes her presence known, but he's not about to stop and let her go so she can report him and describe him to the cops. It's then that he learns she's blind. Still he doesn't stop, but he assures Cheyenne that he will return her to a safe place for pick-up by her folks when it gets dark. Unfortunately his dad and two jerks who work for his dad discover that she's actually the daughter of a rich man, and decide to hold out for a ransom. As the negotiations go on, Cheyenne realizes that she needs to escape or she'll end up dead, and although she's grown a relationship with Griffin, she doesn't feel she can trust him to help her. She must go it alone.

There were some issues (as other reviewers have pointed out) such as the question of why money seemed so important to a family which seemed to be doing pretty decently from their chop-shop business, but I didn't let that bother me. Avarice is the only motivation some people need! The biggest issue for me was the story coming to a screeching, jarring halt near the end, when the author decided inexplicably to give us a couple of chapters of Griffin's history! She'd had the entire novel in which to do this during conversations between Griffin and Cheyenne, yet she halted the whole story just when it was getting really exciting and dumped it all right there. I skipped it and didn't miss it. The ending was good enough however, for me to forgive that and recommend this story overall, as a very worthy read.

The Devil Went Down to Austin by Rick Riordan

Rating: WARTY!

Though it was read quite competently by Tom Stechschulte, and though it started out reasonably well after a slightly rocky first couple of chapters, this audiobook soon devolved into endless family politics with very little of interest to me happening, so I started skipping and skimming, and then quickly gave it up as a bad job. Life is too short to waste on stories which don't grip you. I skipped to the end before I dropped it off back at the library and discovered, not to my surprise at all, that the main suspect turned out to be not the real bad guy, and one of the guys I'd encountered briefly earlier, who I'd tagged as a possible main villain was actually the villain, so no real surprises at all.

This is apparently number four in the "Tres Navarre" series, that name (the first part of which is pronounced 'Trace') being the name of the main character. If I'd known that before I picked it up, I'd not have picked it up. As it was, it looked like it might be interesting, and it was a story set in central Texas, but it really could have been set anywhere and remained the same story (with local details changed of course), which meant it wasn't really about Texas. It was a stand-alone - that is to say, as far as I could see I didn't feel I'd missed anything by 'starting' this series at number four. On the other hand, I didn't really feel I'd missed anything when I DNF'd it, either!

I liked the idea of the PI coming to Austin to teach literature for the summer (although he actually does no teaching!), and that this brother is a software engineer who is in trouble with his new anti-virus app, but neither of these things really played a large part in the story except as a rather flimsy background.

Most of it (at least the parts that I listened to) was boring. There was far too much extraneous detail, and far too much tedious twisted family history which some readers might like but which turns me off a story. For me it made a stodgy dough of a recipe which the occasional nice turn of phrase did nothing at all to leaven in the long-run. Based on what I did listen to, and the uninventive ending, I can't recommend this one. Maybe Rick Riordan should stick to his Percy Jackson series?

Cedric the Shark Gets Toothache by Kay Carter

Rating: WARTY!

The cover has it right: there is no apostrophe in "Gets", but the interior of the book has the apostrophe throughout. That, coupled with the fact that sharks effectively have their teeth on a conveyor belt and routinely replace old ones which fall out, with brand new ones rolling to the fore, never would actually need a dentist, and the wrong number used when referring to "candy" as "them" on one page meant that this story started out badly in my view. It wasn't a disaster, but I just felt it could have been better written and offered a lot more than it did, and as such I can't recommend it.

Obviously you can’t lecture young kids or go into great detail about tooth decay and so on, but I think there are less simplistic ways you can tell a story like this which will resonate with young children and make a better case. The human body craves fat and sugar from a period in our distant past when such things were hard to come by. Now they're in everything and it’s much harder to direct your kids away from harm while still trying to let them feel that they're not pariahs amongst peers who get treats and drink sodas and so on.

As someone with a sweet-tooth bequeathed to him by rather irresponsible parents, I've fought this all my life, and I would have liked to have seen a more educational and better-nuanced story. I’d like to have seen the point made that copying what everyone else does isn’t necessarily smart, and that while too much candy is definitely harmful, a little bit here and there as a treat or a reward, alongside regular dental visits and routine dental hygiene is not the embodiment of evil!

The story was colorful and definitely made the point that brushing teeth is important, but I think it could have been much improved. That said, this is part of a series, and there are other stories in it which might tell a better tale on thier respective topics.

Extra Credit Epidemic by Nina Post

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"What will be doing on the phones?" (missing 'we')
"quiet, hereas if the media got a hold of it…" (whereas?)
"Van take the two steps down into the scoring pit and Taffy handed him a jacket from a bag." Wrong verb tense: 'took' required

This young-adult story began like it might be headed into science fiction territory, but it wasn't - it was just a really strong start to a fascinatingly fresh novel about a high-school senior who is anti-social and bordering on OCD, and who is obsessed with working in epidemiology which is, according to Wikipedia, "the study and analysis of the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations."

The student, with the unlikely if not hilariously sweet-toothed name of Taffy Snackerge evidently has some good reason for her behavior, but this isn't really discussed in the novel except for hints that she was always this way. She has awesome parents who are out of the picture only because they're away travelling, so they play very little part in the story. Taffy is therefore home alone, and although she doesn't wear skirts, she does believe in skirting the rules at school which is, you just know it, going to get her into trouble with the prissy vice-principal.

One of the science teachers, Van Brenner, used to work for the local epidemiology department until they downsized, and now he's teaching science at the school and advising Taffy despite, or perhaps because of her rebellious streak, as she mounts her own investigation into a salmonella outbreak. The problem is that Brenner wants her to work with two other students, one of whom is a bit of a princess, so Taffy perceives. The other is a guy who apparently won't stand up for himself, and who really doesn't like science, yet Taffy is forced against her will to form a team with them and nail down the source of this minor outbreak of sickness which the local health department seems unable to pursue.

The first issue is that they all think they should use Taffy's home as their base of operations. They have calls to make to pursue their investigation of the incipient epidemic, but in this day and age of ubiquitous cell phone use (and each of these kids has one), this sounded lame to me. Why do they need to be at anyone's house?

This was a minor irritation - and nowhere near as irritating as the fact that the author evidently feels that italics have been for too long out of work, and absolutely loves to employ them at every opportunity. That itself would not have been so bad, but Kindle's crappy conversion process for their smart phone app rendered every italicized word in a smaller font and very faint, making it really hard to read. Additionally, it doesn't italicize superscripted words, so when I read "1^st Offense: Minimum Two Detentions," all of it was italicized except for the 'st' after the number 1 (and the 'nd' after the two and so on). Fortunately, the story started out so strongly for me that I was quite willing to overlook these issues.

It was this strength and power which carried the story all the way to the end for me. Taffy is a go-getter and flatly refuses to let any obstacle stand in her way, including a vindictive vice-principal who has more vice than principles. She forms a relationship with the other two despite her dysfunctional social qualities, and she even begins learning how far out on the edge she is as she's slowly, but surely reeled back in by Taylor, with whom Taffy forms more than a friendship. Both Taylor and Gabriel are characters in their own right and don't let taffy hog all the center stage. The whole story is beautifully done, with smarts, with humor, with a sly sense of the absurd, and with a really good story underlying it all.

I would really love to know what triggered the author to come up with the idea for this one! It's been a long time since I've read anything like this, and this was a welcome breath of fresh air after reading what feels like far too many stories of late which start out well and go to hell. This one had everything I look for in a novel, including a truly strong female main character, and a curiously endearing title. I'm not a fan of series, but I would definitely read a follow-up novel about Taffy & Co if there ever was one. I recommend this one unreservedly.

I Love You! by Calee M Lee, Tricia Tharp

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another of those novels that shows just how pathetic Amazon's crappy Kindle app truly is. I got the Nook app edition form barnes & Noble, and this is a young children's book which talks about how much a child is loved. It has the advantage of being readable through the text, or listenable, so your child can enjoy this even when you can't read to them right that minute. Tricia Tharp's artwork is simplistic, but elegant, and perfect for young children.

There's a bilingual edition, and it strikes me that it wouldn't be hard to make this multi-lingual, so I have to ask why the voice of choice is female. Don't males love their children? I do! There is, however, a facility whereby you can record your own voice and save it so that you can play it instead of the stock voice included, so whenever your child listens to this, they can listen to it in your voice - or in the child's own voice. I think this is pretty cool. It doesn't replace sitting your kid on your lap or tucking them into bed and reading to them personally, but it will do at a pinch. It played well and was readable on my smart phone, so it's not like you have to rush out and buy a pad for it, either. I recommend this.

Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd paid attention to the blurb, I would never have read (or more accurately, listened to) this novel. The blurb on Goodreads begins, "John Green's The Fault in Our Stars meets Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park." They quite evidently have no idea whatsoever how that prospect would turn my stomach. I detest John Green's novels, and thought that Rowell's Fangirl was a truly sad disaster.

This novel, OTOH, has no relationship whatsoever to any of those pretentious and flatulent piles of drivel. I don't get why Big Publishing™ is so intent upon demeaning their authors by rendering them into clones of other authors. How insulting can you get? This is why I self-publish, and that may rob me of a few advantages, but anything is better than putting up with that crap - with having insulting and misleading blurbs that treat readers like morons, and having someone else effectively own your property at least in terms of how it's presented to the public. Screw that for a game of tin soldiers!

This novel stands apart from those others in many ways, and I did like Rebecca Lowman's narration (refreshingly this was not a first person PoV disaster) but in the end, it proved to be no better that he volumes to which it's been compared. I think the author's problem was that she could not make up her mind what the hell kind of a story to write, and tried to make it all things to all people. As such it was a serious fail and ended-up ill-serving her original purpose, which evidently was to show that people with disabilities are really just like the rest of us. Well duhh! The problem with her approach was that instead of showing us two challenged people who were otherwise just like the rest of us, she chose to show us two people who were really, in the final analysis, jerks. They were unlikable, irresponsible, clueless and ill-fitted to decent sociable society. Ironically, it frequently seemed like they were made for each other

Matthew is in many ways worse off than Amy. He has a richness to his OCD that's worthy of Howard Hughes, intent upon a disturbing level of personal hygiene and an inexplicably paradoxical compulsion to touch and count things he passes. The saddest thing about his condition isn't that he has it, it's that he's had it in this school system for years and no one has offered him a lick of help for it. The teachers in the school are quite obviously morons who ought to be fired. Matthew's mother is hardly better. That was one of the problems - the novel takes place in a bubble formed by Matthew and Amy, like the rest of the world doesn't exist. Absurd!

Matthew finally does get a species of help in the form of Amy, who has the questionable idea of hiring fellow students to be her companions at school in place of her regular adult companion/facilitator. This leads to her opening up and living a life quite unlike she has before, and it also brings herself and Matthew into regimented proximity. That's not to say it's all plain sailing, though; much of it is painful and ailing.

This idea of using fellow students gets her what she wants in terms of making 'friends' although the value of the friendship is highly dubious, but as other reviewers have pointed out, the author fails to explain how these people substitute for her adult aides who did a heck of a lot more for her in terms of caring and personal hygiene than ever the students do. It's like the messy little bits are swept under the carpet, but it really wasn't that which bothered me. It was that the real dysfunction of these two characters wasn't OCD or cerebral palsy (what an awfully antiquated name that is! Can medical science not do better than that to describe this condition?). The real dysfunction here was that both Matthew and Amy were unlikable jerks who treated each other shabbily on Matthew's part and appallingly on Amy's. And this is a romance? No!

The latter honestly did not deserve anyone like Matthew who, as mis-focused as he was at times, at least wanted to help her. She just used him, and despite the author telling us repeatedly how smart Amy was, what she showed us all-too-often was what a complete dumbass Amy was. I didn't like either of these characters and gave up on a novel that had started out so well and then fell apart. I cannot recommend this.