Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

Rating: WORTHY!

I’m a captive audience in my car with a commute that’s not overly long, but which isn’t short either, so I listen to audio books and I tend to take more risks and experiment more with this format than any other. Consequently I have more fails with this format than any other, but it’s worth it to find the occasional gem, and one such book was this one. If there’s one thing I detest in writers it’s a sheep mentality. Instead of coming up with something original (or a refreshing take on an older theme as, say, The Hunger Games trilogy or the Harry Potter heptalogy represented), most authors, particularly in YA, jump right on someone else’s band wagon and turn out sorry clones of existing work. barf. I prefer the author who tosses out cliché and trope and takes the road less traveled, as I tried to do in Femarine, and as this author does here, which is yet another variation on the same theme I varied.

Another audio book to review - this time positively. My problem with princess stories - the kind where a prince is essentially holding a lottery for a bride - is several-fold, not least of which is what it says about the prince: he's so vacuous and shallow that he thinks he can get a suitable lifelong partner in such a critical role through this haphazard means? The other side of that coin is what it says about the princess-to-be in that she's so shallow or so desperate that she's willing to sell out for this guy she never met and will be expected to marry before she even knows him. It's truly pathetic.

That doesn't even begin to cover trope and cliché either. These stories tend to be larded with them: that the most humble, plain, and simple girl gets to win, or alternatively that the girl who least cares about or least expects to win gets to win because she's a special snowflake, and the only one who truly understands the prince.

There's also a really pretty girl who everyone expects to win, but who doesn't because it turns out that the plain-jane is prettier somehow! There's the really dumb girl who is the only one who thinks she will win, and there's a really bitchy girl who we all know will never win. There's also the truly sweet girl who becomes the main character's bestie, and who dreams of marrying the prince, but who doesn't honestly believe she will win. She ends up marrying the captain of the guard or the king's younger brother or something like that. It's tedious. It's been done to death, and any author who continues to churn out this kind of story with no variation and no twist and nothing new to offer is the really dumb girl. Any author who thinks he or she can make a trilogy out of this trash is beyond dumb.

So what I look for on the very rare occasion when I read a story like this, is what I tried to provide in Femarine: something significantly different. This audio book was such a story. It impressed me and continued to impress me because it continued to inject new ideas into this trope and thereby stirred it up significantly. There were some bits that were a touch too rambling and boring, but these were few. Most of the time it kept adding the twists to make it entertaining and engrossing.

What I liked about it was that Miri, the main character, was smart, but not particularly special except in that she learned. The value of books was am important part of the story. They actually played a role in the story and in Miri's growth, and were not just lazy short-hand used by the author to say "Hey, look how smart my character is!" Miri was always learning, and this is what made her stand out from far too many spastic princesses in other stories I've read or read about, and who show zero growth or real smarts.

I liked that the girls weren't the usual suspects in these stories, but the daughters of quarriers (and some of the girls were quarry workers themselves) in a pit which produced a special high quality stones used for important buildings in the cities down the mountain. I didn't like the 'us versus them' mentality (mountain people against lowlanders, where the mountain people were considered primitive and dumb and the lowlanders urbane and cultured), but I did like that the girls were not in fixed groups or fixed mentalities. Relationships changes and morphed, and the bitchy girl wasn't always the bitchy girl. The ending was very different from what you might expect and really turned the story again from the course you might expect.

The thing was though, that while I always feared that this story would go straight to hell in a hand-basket, I always had the feeling that it could completely capture me, and this is what it did in the end, so I recommend this for those of you who, like me, are tired of trope and ready to quit with cliché. Yes, it did have some examples still of that kind of mentality - that the girl must end up with the boy for example, but overall it was different enough and enjoyable enough, and above all unpredictable enough that I consider it a very worthy read. Or listen - Laura Credidio does a decent job of rendering the characters, although her voice was a bit annoying at times.

Lastly, one thing I don't get about this is that it's part of a series. Why? This was a great story and it was told well, and it came to a satisfying conclusion. Why did the author feel the need to ruin all that by dragging it unnaturally, kicking and screaming, into a series? Is she so lacking in imagination that she can't think of a new idea to write about? Let it be known that I have no intention of following the series. As far as I'm concerned, this book stops here!

Blood's Pride by Evie Manieri

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known that Kirkus rated this one as "highly imaginative" I would never have picked it off the library shelf! I don't think Kirkus ever met a book they didn't like which means their reviews are utterly useless. If I'd also known it was the first of a series I would have thought twice about it and definitely would have no interest in a series after listening to a small portion of this.

Bianca Amato has a charming voice and would be a delight to have a conversation with, but in telling a story like this, she sounded ponderous and slow, and the story itself moved at a glacial pace. I couldn't stand to listen to it, but had I the print or e-version, I still wouldn't have been able to stomach it, so I guess this author is not for me, and I am not for her! The only review I can give is this much: that I gave up on it at about 10% in (or slightly less).

One problem with audiobooks is that you can never tell where the prologue ends, so I ended up listening to much of it, and this served once again only to remind me why I so dedicatedly skip all such prefaces, forewords, intros, prologues and whatever. They're tedious and contribute NOTHING to a story. Enough with them already, you authors! Get on with the damned story!

This one was far too tedious to stay with. Life is short and books like this are too long and too common! Move along! This is not the adventure you're looking for!

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin Harper, and Dennis Calero

Rating: WARTY!

This is the third of three graphic novels I got from the library recently, all three of which I was disappointed with. This one is not about super heroes, but is based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story published over a hundred seventy years ago wherein a man who, shall I say, doesn't have all his ravens in a row, takes exception to the disfigured eye of his friend, and ends up killing the guy and secreting the body under the floor of his dwelling. The novel is part of a graphic series, but I don't think i will read any more of these.

When a neighbor reports hearing a scream from the house and the police arrive to investigate, the psycho guy (who goes unnamed), invites them in, confident they will find nothing incriminating, only to incriminate himself when he believes he can hear the still-beating heart of his victim and ends up tearing up the floor with the police present to witness it.

I haven't read Poe's original, so I can't make a comparison. All I can say is that this was dissatisfying and the story was changed slightly - the body in the original was dismembered, but it is not, here. What bothered me though, was the lack of inventiveness of the illustration. It seemed to consist almost solely of close-ups of the faces of the characters, with very few more removed images, and while this artwork was not bad, it wasn't that great, either.

Admittedly some guy rambling on about how his friend's eye drives him nuts isn't really something you can make a lot of, so perhaps choosing to turn this particular short-story into a graphic novel was a bad decision. As I can testify, while it's a lot easier to tinker with someone else's story and (in my case) make a parody of it, than it is to come up with an original story, it's not impossible either. All-in-all, I was unhappy with this one, and I cannot recommend it as a worthy read.

Birds of Prey Vol 2 Your Kiss Might Kill by Duane Swierczynski, Travel Foreman

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second of two disappointing Birds of Prey graphic novels I got from the library. This volume comes much alter than the previous one, and I have to say that the artwork was all-around better, but the story just as dissatisfying and even confusing. The cover art was just as bad as in the previous volume, with black canary shown emitting her "sonic scream" (what kind of a scream wouldn't be sonic?! LOL! That there's sound is implied in the noun itself. Only paintings by Edvard Munch are silent!) and in effect looking like she's put on many pounds in doing it! Again, this is one reason why covers don't mean a heck of a lot to me, not even in graphic novels.

This story features Batgirl, Katana, Poison Ivy, and Starling (not Clarice, unfortunately). Despite Poison Ivy getting the bigger picture on the cover, this story is about Black Canary aka Dinah lance, whose life is threatened. During the course of the story the team has to transport Poison ivy to the Amazon to save her life, and that's where the creepy people attack them. No really, people made from creepers. Really.

For me the story was poor and further undermined by various characters disporting themselves in fishnet, and bustiers and bikini-underwear, so it really wasn't entertaining at all. It made me sorry I'd even considered reading about the Birds of Prey in comic books at all, and it also made me want to get back to watch the TV series again to get clean! I cannot recommend this one, either.

Birds of Prey Vol 4 Sensei & Student by Gail Simone and various artists

Rating: WARTY!

Since 1996, DC comics has published several series in the Birds of Prey category which is why it's so hard to keep track of which was published when and in what order - a failing of which comic books seem inexplicably proud. The two I read, I came across by accident at the local library. One of them actually did the courtesy of announcing that it was volume two on the cover, but volume two of which series was left to guesswork. That it also called "The New 52" offer a clue, but not much of one. The other volume, typically for comics, offered no clues at all which series the story was in, if any.

I first came to Birds of Prey via the short-lived, and slightly limp, but nonetheless enjoyable TV series which came out in 2002, but which I didn't watch until quite recently. This is why I was interested in picking up these comic books when I saw them at the library. I was drawn to the TV series by two of the cast, Dina Meyer, who I've adored ever since I saw her in the movie Johnny Mnemonic based on a William Gibson novel, and Rachel Skarsten who, as later, as Tamsin in the TV show Lost Girl provided endless entertainment for me.

The TV show featured only Oracle, Black Canary (the two founders of Birds of Prey), along with Huntress and Harley Quinn and in main roles. Black Canary wasn't part of the inception of Birds of Prey in the TV series. She came along in the first episode after the organization was up and running, evidently founded by Oracle and Huntress and already with some back story. The graphic novels did not feature Harley Quinn in any kind of leading role, but did feature the other three in main roles, along with Lady Hawk.

The first of the two graphic novels I read featured specifically Oracle, Black Canary, Huntress, Lady Shiva Cheshire, and Savant, although Oracle was largely sidelined from being imprisoned inexplicably and to little purpose either on her part or on the part of her captors who were purportedly Homeland Security or some such government agency. Homeland security never made any sense to me because, fool that I am, I'd always thought that's what the FBI was supposed to be, but I seriously underestimated the power of a bureaucracy to proliferate and perpetuate itself.

This story, from the first Gail Simone era, was very disappointing, especially from a series with a female writer. Catwoman (or someone I assumed was Catwoman) is featured prominently in the lower right quadrant of the cover yet makes no appearance (not that I noticed) in the story. A half-dressed Batgirl also occupies a quadrant of the cover, hilariously catty-cornered to Catwoman, but her appearance is also limited and un-entertaining, like she's on a leash. Huntress disports herself at one point in fishnet hose as part of her costume. Seriously? I don't believe I've ever read a graphic novel wherein the artists have less respect for women than I saw in this one, and the art wasn't even that great to make a pretense of "justifying" it.

I got the impression that the cover illustrations were nothing more than a salacious come-on, and had nothing whatsoever to do with what happens inside, which is a very good reason not to pay any attention to the cover, not even on a graphic novel. Unfortunately, a glance through the interior had made it look like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out to be. In the end all it managed to be was an exploitative montage of "hot" female super hero body parts - an open crotch here, a pair of legs or breasts there. The art was less than satisfactory and very bland, so I guess it needed the titivation aspect in order to survive. If comics want to grow beyond the shadow of superannuated adolescence with which they're oft tarred, they need to grow beyond, way beyond, this schoolboy pointing and tittering mentality when it comes to artwork.

The main story, which is what had caught my eye, was about an uneasy alliance between Huntress, Lady Shiva, and Cheshire. This part wasn't awfully bad, but these women were far too well-behaved and polite to be the real characters they were supposed to be, and in the end, this blandness killed all joy of that part of the story for me. I don't want to read about a tame Huntress, a restrained Cheshire, and a Lady Shiva who is on her best behavior. Thus for me killed the story and I cannot recommend this one unless you like looking at highly sexualized cartoon characters who seem to have little to offer beyond unnecessarily exposed body parts.

Malala: Activist for Girls' Education by Raphaële Frier

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

On National Wonder Woman Day I'm not going to get into the dire gender politics and hypocrisy of a UN which proclaims a woman's day whilst rejecting a bunch of female candidates for secretary general, but it seems only right we should celebrate the spirit of this day by looking at a real-life wonder woman. Back in August of 2015 I positively reviewed I am Malala, and this version of her story, aimed at a much younger audience, is a worthy read, too. It zeroes in on the facts of her life, what she did, what happened to her, and how she survived, without going into exhausting detail. The images are colorful and enticing, and bring the reader into the story, which is an important one, and a potentially tragic one which fortunately had a happy ending.

This book even looked good on a smart phone, with the images large and the text legible. It tells of Malala's early childhood, and the conditions in which she lived, which deteriorated dramatically after an earthquake that idiotic religious flakes decided was some god's wrath! You’d have to be a complete and utter moron to worship a god which is as capricious and childish as that, and you would have to be criminally fraudulent to try to argue that this god generates cruel earthquakes, but this is the kind of extremists these people are, and this is what they were promoting. They take power not because they are right, or respected, or admired, or favored by the majority, but because they can get guns and threaten people. These are no disciples of any god of love.

Malala was lucky in having a family which supported educating girls, but the Taliban fears women, and detests equality. They're not the only whack-jobs who do so. There are many nations where women are treated in this same way, although 'treated' is a bad choice of word to describe it. Not all of these nations are condemned as they should be. Some are close allies of the USA. These people have no concept of fun and relaxation, and none of equality or parity. They are control freaks and bullies who fear women garnering any sort of power for themselves, and they started bullying everyone, not just women, but women in particular. People like this are so disempowered that they can only be 'men' when they have 'their women' as the phrase goes: barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen - and uneducated in order to keep them that way. This is something my wife joked about some years ago when she was actually barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen! It’s no joke when it’s real life though.

Malala started a blog to speak out about the problems they faced, and she soon became a local spokeswoman and representative. The Tailiban were pushed back but not far enough, and when they resurged, they cracked down just as hard, and they decided that this little girl was emasculating them. They proved this to be actually true when the only response they could engender was to shoot her three times, but she proved stronger than they, and she resurged herself to become a more effective opponent of their bruitality and cluelessness than ever she had been before. This is an important story which needs to be heard, and children are never too young to start hearing about female heroes. This little book is a great start. I recommend it.

Livia Lone by Barry Eisler

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I enjoyed this novel very much. Normally I'm not a fan of flashbacks, but though the ones here were extensive, they were done well, and were integral to the story rather than filler or back-story for the sake of back-story. The entire novel moved quickly and determinedly. There was no fluff here and no time-wasting, and no young-adult-style first person, for which I personally thank the author! This is a book for grown-ups and will make even those feel uncomfortable. Events were credible (even when they were incredible!) and organic to the story, and the main character - Livia - was amazing: believable, endearing, demanding empathy, yet not pitiful. She was a woman with a mission and she never let anything get in the way of it, yet she did not ride roughshod over others to get what she wanted. She was patient and determined and in the end her dedication paid off, yet the ending was neither sentimental nor clichéd.

I grew to like this character from the start, and only admired and rooted for her more as the story continued. She was my idea of a strong female, and not necessarily in that she was physically tough - although in this case she was. She had more than that, though: she had spine and grit, both of which she direly needed after what she'd endured, but endure she did, never letting life get in the way of being a human-being no matter how single-minded she was in service to her cause. She had a habit (nicely not over-done) of saying "Yes, that!" which both evoked her non-English past, and made her at once endearing and sad. I found myself adopting that phrase in my mind from time to time when I was just going about my daily business, it made such a warm impression on me.

Her personal story was horrible. Sold by her uncaring and impoverished parents into sex slavery, thirteen year-old Livia's only concern was for her younger sister, who was sold with her in Thailand. Only one of them arrived in Portland, USA, and for the next two decades, Livia spends her time struggling to survive what befalls her and at the same time stay alive no matter what, so she can find out what happened to her sister Nason.

Just when her path looks like it will become straight and narrow, it meanders into serious problems, but upholding her silent promise to her sister, she keeps on going, true to herself, and eventually works her way into a position where no man can overwhelm her and take advantage of her again, and that's not simply because she becomes a police officer. As a law-enforcement officer however, she can now try to track down her sister, but after all this time, will the trail have gone too cold to follow? That life and that mission is what this story is about, and it was excellent from start to finish.

The story was told well, with sufficient detail and technical knowledge to make it believable, but not so much that it looked like the author was showing off, or you felt like you were reading a technical training manual rather than a novel, which is how Tom Clancy's novels sound to me. Whether in the US or Thailand, it felt real and it entertained and engrossed, and it lived and breathed. I loved the ambiguity of the title, which sounds a bit like 'leave ya alone'. Definitely my kind of phrase! So all in all a great book, and well worth reading.

The Baker's Dozen by Aaron Shepherd

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Beautifully illustrated, this Christmas story (actually set on and around Saint Nicholas's Day, which falls in early December), tells a highly fanciful tale of how a "baker's dozen" came to be thirteen rather than the actual twelve there is in a dozen. In fact it's because bakers in the past (as early as the eighteenth century if not before) didn't want to be fined for shorting their customers so they added one more to their 'dozen' (a term which comes from the French) for good measure. No one is going to complain about getting something for nothing, right?

In this story however, a rather gluttonous woman puts a curse on the baker for giving her only twelve "cookies" (a term which actually derives from a Dutch word koekje) when she'd requested a dozen. The baker's business falls into a disastrous decline until he decides to give thirteen instead of twelve for a dozen, whereupon his business flourishes! I don't know if this is the reverse of the real spirit of Christmas in our capitalistic age, where less is more - profitable!, or if it actually embodies it!

The real joy of this story though, apart from the happy ending, is Wendy Edelson's gorgeous illustrations in full color, which hark back if not to a Dickensian Christmas age, hark certainly back to a Rockwellian one. Beautifully done in great detail and in rich earth tones, ornamented with Christmas reds and whites, the images are a joy, but you cannot enjoy them at their best in electronic form unfortunately. This is very much intended as a print book, and the tablet version breaks up the images in unfortunately and uncomplimentary ways. This is the really the kind of book you have to buy in the print version and leave on the coffee table over the holidays! And perhaps that's just as well. A little old fashioned never hurt anyone at Christmas, now did it?

Ian at Grandma and Grandpa's House by Pauline Oud

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher!

This is the story of my trip to my grandparents' house. Kidding! But I can't not review a book about a character who shares my name right? Ian is off to the grandparents for the weekend, and he packs his favorite book and his green gingham bunny. I want a green gingham bunny! He gets to his grandparents' house, which he is thrilled to visit, and he waves a cheery goodbye to mom.

Ian gets cake as his first meal. Does mommy know this is how they feed him?! Hopefully he'll have a good solid meal later and this is just a snack treat. At any rate, he gets to run it off in the park when they take curly for a walk. I'm not sure why the short-haired dog is called curly, but let's roll with it. Maybe his tail is curly? After the enjoyable walk they come home and make soup with fresh veggies! Yes, I knew there was more to this than cake! Ian gets a bedtime story and a nice nap. This is the way I like life! I wonder how the author knew?

This was fun, cozy, easy reading and a nice bedtime tale to put the little ones to sleep with. I recommend it.

Star Light Star Bright by Anna Prokos

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher!

Illustrated nicely by Dave Clegg, this is one of an educational series for young kids. This particular volume is about planets in the solar system. Others in the series are about dinosaurs, Antarctica, volcanoes, seeds, and your own back yard!

Jackson and Wyatt wish upon a star, and find themselves in a cozy spacecraft with their dog pal and a license to explore the solar system. Starting with the baking heat of Mercury, they fly ever outwards, growing ever more chill, but learning some fun facts about each planet as they go. But don't worry, they return safely and get to bed on time!

The story is simple and straight forward, with brief interesting facts about each planet, snappy enough to command attention without overloading young brains. It's got adventure and a tiny bit of danger, and is a worthwhile read for young kinds to learn about how fascinating and alien our solar system is. There's a little index at the back, along with suggested further reading, and a short fact file. Great illustrations bring the planets home to young minds and hopefully stimulate a bit of a scientific interest for later in life.

A Gefilte Fishy Tale by Allison and Wayne Marks

Rating: WORTHY!

This might sound weird (then anyone who knows me will know this is par for the course), but a couple of days ago the term 'gefilte fish' was going through my brain. I know not from whence it came. Not on that day, but a few years back, I saw a greeting card in a store that featured 'gefilte fish' as part of a nonsense good wishes recital and I blame that for originally fixating it in my brain where it's been lodged comfortably ever since.

I know at some point - and assuming I live long enough - that it's going to come out in a story. All this, anyway, to indicate why I thought it was a good idea to read this young children's book beautifully illustrated by Renée Andriani, and rhymed to perfection by the Marks brothers, er, husband wife team! Although frankly, it might have been written by the Marx Brothers.

Bubba Judy buys a jar of gefilte fish, and all is well until they get it home and find they cannot get it open. This also turns out to be jar for the course as they resort to an assortment of friends to help undo it, and all of them fail. What's to become of it? Well you'll have an interesting time finding out. In addition to the story, you get recipe for gefilte fish mini muffins, which frankly sounds disgusting to me, but maybe they're nice. There's also an original song by Wayne Marks, Margie Blumberg, and Gavin Whelehan, and a very welcome glossary for the Yiddish-challenged, which includes me most of the time, although fans of Mel Brooks movies might recognize some of these words. I recommend this one for a fun read for kids and an educational experience!

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

Rating: WARTY!

I think there are good stories to be told from roots in African folklore and mythology, but this one disappointed me by not being one of them. It began unpromisingly; then it picked up and got me interested, but too soon after that, it went downhill into tedium, confusion, and blandness. On top of that, it was a bit too whimsical for my taste.

The story is of Paama (Pah-ma) and her glutton husband Asige (Ass -ee-gay, whose name I had thought was Asike from listening only to the narration). The two are living apart, and Asige comes to join Paama in the community where she now resides. He proceeds to embarrass her endlessly with his constant need for food and the bizarre circumstances he gets himself into in the pursuit of one more mouthful. It turns out that there's a reason for this gluttony in the end, but that comes only after a long tedious separation between these two again. It was this part (the disorderly eater) which had started to recoup my interest, but it was a bit too silly and was over before I really started to think I might enjoy it.

I really didn't get this constant separation of Paama and Asige, although I could understand why she wouldn't want to be around him. I was like, "Get a divorce already!" The biggest problem for me was that when Paama wasn't looking stupid, she was looking like a doormat or a coward, running away instead of taking charge and dealing with these issues. There were African "bad spirits" taking human form and interfering with people. Paama was given a magic pestle and then some spirit came after her seeking to recover it, and the whole thing dissolved into a hot mess, and I lost all interest. In the end I found I was skimming more and more of it just to get to the end and see if anything happened. It really didn't, so I can't recommend this one at all. Robin Miles's reading and characterizations were so-so, some good and some annoying, so that didn't help. Audio books tend to be a more experimental form of reading for me than other formats, so I expect more of them to fail to capture my interest. This one was one of the failures, and I can't recommend it as a worthy read.

Change of Life by Samantha Bryant

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"the flange of a Ouija board"? The planchette, not the flange!
"experimenting on the populous" Populace, not populous!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the sequel to Going Through the Change by Samantha Bryant, which I reviewed very favorably back in August of 2015.. I have to say up front that I was much less pleased with this one for a variety of reasons which I shall discuss shortly. The story is that of some mature women who undergo changes which equip them with superpowers when all they expected was menopause or a quiet retirement. I enjoyed reading a story about more mature women for once. Such stories are rare, and well-told and engaging ones rarer still. In the first book, Patricia O'Neill grows scales on her skin. Jessica Roark discovers that she can fly - or at least float. Helen Braeburn learns that she can create fire - and survive it - and she becomes the villain of the piece. Linda Alvarez changes, rather abruptly, into a man with very unusual strength.

This novel picks up not long after the first one finishes, with the girls moving on with their lives as best they can now their secret is out. Sort of. The story begins with Linda Alvarez, now officially renamed Leonel - although why that name rather than say, 'Lyndon', is not explained. Neither is it explained why she adopts a man's name given that her thought processes are very much a woman's at this point, since she's literally a woman occupying a male body. She apparently never heard of a boy named Sue! 'Lyndon' is a boy's name with a similar sound, although it doesn't mean the same as 'Linda' does (Spanish for beautiful).

Most names which mean 'beautiful' are female names, so Linda would need to be named something like Hermoso or Bonito, neither of which have quite the same feel. How about Bo, short for Beauregard? It's just a suggestion. Fortunately, Leonel still has the love of her husband who is conveniently bisexual (at least she hopes she still has his love), and meanwhile she's training to be an agent with the government, along with Jessica, and trying to track down the villain of the previous volume.

This volume introduces a new villain, but for me, the problems with the tale too many to really enjoy it. This volume did not have the original and inventive feel of the first; there was very little action in it; it was overly long for the story it told, and it consequently moved very slowly. On top of that, we learned nothing about how or why the women changed the way they did, so there was no more depth added there. Worse, the ending was very dissatisfying, with the villain escaping, so now it's become like an annoying episodic TV series with a seasonal arc. In short, the novel embodied what I like least about series and why I do not favor them, except for a very few rare and treasured instances.

Some parts were very entertaining. I particularly liked Jessica in this one whereas I think I preferred Linda in the first. Jessica was bouncy and energetic and I enjoyed her scenes, but these were the only ones I really enjoyed. The problem as that Jessica never got to show her stuff. She was always on a leash and neither did Linda nor Patricia get let-off the leash for that matter. It was like they were being held back, and this is fine in order to build expectations in the beginning of the story, but at some point you have to let your super heroes loose, and when they're held back for the entire story, all you do is engender disappointment and irritation. At least that's how it is with me.

Overall, the pace in this volume was lethargic, and the contrast between this volume and the last, and between Jessica's scenes here and the chapters featuring other characters was very noticeable. Talking of bouncing, there was a lot of bouncing around between characters too. I felt a bit like a pinball! While the novel is commendably not told in first person, for which I thank the author, the short chapters got me invested in one character's story only to find I was quickly ripped away from that into another character's world, where I would start to get settled only to be ripped away again. It made for a choppy and unpleasant read for me.

There was a lot of telling here rather than showing as well, and some of the characters I couldn't get invested in because reading about them felt more like this was a daytime TV show than ever it was a super-hero story. I'm very much in favor of writers who offer a different take on a given genre, in this case super powers and the people imbued with them. This is why I liked the first book in this series so much, but I don't like soap operas, and this had that feel to it, and it cropped up far too often for my taste.

The story was also rather deceitful in some regards, because all these internal monologues gave the superficial appearance of delving into a character's feelings and relationships, yet in the final analysis, we never really got to see those relationships in action. Linda, for example, was fretting about her husband, who had been the dominant stereotypical male (which makes me wonder what Linda saw in him in the first place).

In this story, we learn that he's not dealing with this role-reversal, as Linda takes up a career and he feels like he's being nudged into a back seat. The problem is that all we ever get is Linda's take on it. We never get her husband's views except through Linda's mind. It's like men have no role to play in this story unless they're a problem, or a character who seems to be there solely as a love or flirtation interest. Frankly, it felt genderist to me.

The ending was the biggest disappointment because the whole story had these two women, Jessica and Leonel, training like they were building towards some big showdown with evil, yet in the end, the story fizzled and the villain escaped not though any great villainous power or devious plan, but through sheer incompetence on the part of the very operatives who had been training supposedly so diligently and capably!

Leonel was sidelined completely at the end, and Jessica and Patricia were effectively hobbled, so there really was no showdown and no real super hero moment, let alone a real team effort. I was truly disappointed having gone through a very long build-up for an ending that was significantly less than thrilling. I wish the author all the best with this series but it's not one I want to continue following, and I can't in good faith recommend this as a worthy read. I think I would have enjoyed it more had the first story been complete in itself, and this second novel been set in a new location with a totally different group of characters who underwent, perhaps, something similar to the first set. Instead we have a second volume that felt less than the sum of the first.

Miraculous Origins by Thomas Astruc, Quentin, Sebastien Thibaudeau

Rating: WORTHY!

Not to be confused with Miraculous Origins by Cheryl Black!

Taken from a French TV show and transformed into an entertaining comic book, this is the origin story of Ladybug (aka Marinette Dupain-Cheng) and Cat Noir (aka Adrien Agreste), two young French teenagers who are given their powers through jewels called 'Miraculous'. The jewels are curated by little creatures called Kwami. Marinette's, called Tikki, permits her to transform into Ladybug, complete with flesh-hugging Harlequin mask à la Green Lantern.

Adrien (I'm sorry but I can't see or hear that name without hearing Rocky calling to his girlfriend) has a similar kwami, Plagg, which I find to be the cooler of the two. Plagg is reminiscent of Hiccup's dragon, Night Fury, in the How to Train Your Dragon movie. Hawk Moth is the arch villain who wishes only to steal their miraculous and in their everyday life, the villain is Chloé Bourgeois, a stereotypical spoiled-brat who is the Mayor's daughter and a rival for Adrienne's affection. The action takes place, refreshingly outside of the USA, in Paris.

Neither of the two kids, despite working together as heroes and despite the total inadequacy of their 'masks' as a disguise - the equivalent of Clark Kent's eyeglasses - knows the other is also their classmate in school, but they work beautifully together, Ladybug coolly deflecting all of Cat Noir's advances (ironically, Ladybug has eyes only for Adrien!), and the pair inevitably, after some pratfalls, defeating the villain. The two are like an inverse of Marvel's Spider-Man (here represented by Ladybug and every bit as nimble and athletic) and DC's Catwoman. The villains are puppets of Hawk Moth, transformed into evil-doers by the butterflies he employs to deliver evil super powers to them while staying in the shadows himself. He "evilizes" them and makes'em do his dirty work for him!

Out of curiosity, I watched two of the episodes on TV. They are episodic (you can watch them in any order and it makes no difference), but they're also extremely formulaic. Someone of Marinette's acquaintance (close or not so close) has bad feelings over a defeat, Hawk Moth senses this somehow, and dispatches a butterfly to convert those feelings into super-powered evil, and Ladybug and Cat Noir have to defeat them inventively. It's pretty much the same in every episode from what I've seen, and I hope the comic book version, which seems a bit more mature, stretches and takes more risks than the TV version does.

The Amazone conglomerate wants two bucks a pop for these TV episodes, but they're free on You Tube. Sometimes I think Google is hardly better than Amazon, but bless 'em for this, so I was at least able to take a brief look. The stories I watched were amusing and very cute. I always like a good time travel story, which one episode featured, but the shows are certainly not something to which I'd become addicted; then it's not aimed at me, and it is a very successful show. This comic is the origin story. It's less "cute" than the TV show and a bit more gritty, and it's just as entertaining. The art is good - very much in the 3D computer mode rather than the traditional drawing and coloring mode. The story lines are not bad and the execution works.

When I first saw the comic I thought it was about two girls, but the blond is Adrien. I also thought the characters were much younger - middle-grade rather than older teenagers - so I was rather concerned about the sexualization of Ladybug with her skin-tight suit. It's still a problem - as it is with all female super heroes - but since she's older and Cat Noir is decked-out pretty much the same, I was less concerned about it than I was when I thought she was twelve or thirteen. At least the genders are treated equally, for what that's worth! Ladybug's costume is somewhat ameliorated by the playfully black-spotted ladybug motif, so maybe it's not so bad by comic book standards. I thought the ears and tail on Cat Noir were an interesting touch, and at least Ladybug is shown to be very much her own person and the more dominant of the two.

So, all in all I recommend this as a worthy read.

Battlestar Galactica Six by JT Krul, Igor Lima, Rod Rodolfo

Rating: WORTHY!

This combines issues 1 through 5 of the individual comics and tells the story of a character from Battlestar Galactica, the rebooted TV series from 2004. I wasn't impressed by the overuse of "cover" (or cover backing or facing) illustrations - there are six of them before the story even begins. I know this is the way it's done in comic books, so they must really hate trees! This was clearly designed for a print edition with zero concessions made to the ebook format.

I really don't care about covers, not even for comic books. It's the story which is important to me and in a graphic novel, artwork that looks like it mattered to the book's creators. Other than that it can come without a cover for all I care. It sure doesn't need three such that I have to swipe through six screens before I can start reading the story! If you want to include those, fine! Put 'em in the back where I don't have to swipe through 'em to get at the story! For a futuristic story, the e-design was antiquated.

Aside form that, the book was fun and interesting. I think it could have been better told, but following the stories of several different versions of Six was entertaining and worthwhile reading from my PoV. She was one of the most intriguing characters from the TV show, and the actor who portrayed her is currently in the TV show Lucifer which happens to be a favorite of mine. Tricia Helfer is playing another great role as Lucifer's mom!

The interior artwork was very good. Some pictures felt merely functional, like they had been rather dashed-off, but others felt like they were really cared over. I particularly liked one of the full page spreads, especially an early one featuring six in a space suit heading down to the mine she worked in, with the nighttime backdrop of the planet Troy visible through a window. I also liked the action scene where the jerk of a guy tries to rape Six when she's showering, and he learns that you really don't want to mess with a Cylon, not even one who looks like she might be easy-pickings.

We get to see several stories, all of them for one reason or another ending up in the rebirth tank on some Cyclon installation. The feeling of coming home and being among friends or family is well done, and even a bit startling given the negative impression people had of the Cylons in the TV show in those early days. Overall, I recommend this as a worthy read if you're interested in the Battlestar Galactica world, and perhaps even if you're not and might want to read a bit about it.

Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck

Rating: WORTHY!

Here's how to write a decent first person voice story! There were some issues with this, notably gratuitous animal cruelty and lack of justice, but overall the story was a worthy one and an enjoyable read and shows that once in a while, first person can be told without it being nauseatingly unrealistic. A lot of authors, not only in the YA field, could learn from this.

It's told (and rather like a reminiscence), by Eleanor McGrath of Indiana, who lives with her brother Jake in a podunk village which is just beginning to wake up to the disastrous rise of the internal combustion engine. But this isn't about ill-considered decisions, or big oil, or pollution and climate change. It's a love poem to the early automobile, some of which were awful, others of which were works of art. It's also a coming of age story - not of the young girl, but of the countryside, which was about to lose its isolation and idyllic innocence to the rape of petroleum and brute force or the carbon age, amply represented by the villains of the piece, the Kirby family, who are the only rivals in town to Jake and Peewee's garage, where you can get gas, flats fixed, and free air! Try getting that these days!

When I tell you that the story begins with a tornado, and it's not the most tumultuous event, you'll get an idea of the upheaval that's to come, when Eleanor's comfortable and happy life starts to be completely remodeled in the same way a modern vehicle's flimsy front-end is readily remodeled by an accident which wouldn't hardly even faze one of the older, solid-steel vehicles like the Stutz Bearcat which is a centerpiece of this story (you can hear that bear chasing that cat all around!).

It's not the only vehicle to get an admiring nod. All the early ones are here: the Cadillac, with it's electric self starter(!), as well as a host of vehicle you may never have heard of much less surmised existed, such as the Brush Motor Car Company's vehicle with a wooden chassis! Actually it did feature metal cross-bracing, which you will not learn from this novel, but nonetheless there it was. It helps if you keep in mind that back then, these vehicles were quite literally thought of as horseless carriages, and no one saw any reason to design them as anything other than carriages. If you look up pictures of the oldest of these vehicles, you can plainly see it.

The names are unfamiliar, too. They have gone out of business or been subsumed under modern mega-corporation names, and all the charm and individuality has been lost to convenience, cost-cutting, and shared resources. Thus we no longer have the Stoddard-Dayton, the Peerless, the Packard, the Pierce-Arrow, the Stevens-Duryea, the Apperson Jackrabbit, or the Marmon Wasp, although others, such as Chevrolet, will be very familiar, and it may be a surprise to learn that some names have a very long history.

Eleanor, better known as Peewee, for want of a more original name, is also a work of art. She's one of the most unladylike ladies you ever saw, but please don't misunderstand that to mean she's crude, entirely uncultured, or plain ignorant. She isn't, far from it. But you wouldn't want to call her a girl or talk about her wearing a dress if you didn't want a tongue-lashing. She'a feisty, capable, fearless, non-nonsense girl who has everyday smarts, and who is every bit the measure of a boy. She has no problem getting under a car and checking your brakes (which, like your steering, were not hydraulic), or popping the hood and fixing your carburetor or blowing out your blocked fuel line.

Eleanor and Jake's life really turns around when some city girls breeze into town. Why they show-up there isn't satisfactorily explained. Yes, it has to do with their idea of resurrecting the local library, but why this library in this little town? Because they heard of the tornado? We don't know. Either that or I missed it! But the point is that they encounter Jake and Eleanor when they have the inevitable car trouble. As much as we might love those old cars for their personalities and looks, those vehicles could be very unreliable, even more so than modern ones. But they were a hell of a lot easier to fix, and willing owners could do it themselves, and took pride in it. There were no complex electronics and computerized engines. The engines themselves were bare bones, and only just starting to become powerful and migrate form as little as one cylinder(!) to twelve!

As the new library takes shape, so do events, with the Kirby family trying underhand tricks to run Jake and Peewee out of business and Jake having eyes only for the ten-lap county automobile race. But things never do turn out how you plan in these stories and events take some interesting, amusing, annoying, and even surprising turns.

It bothered me that there was gratuitous animal cruelty, as I mentioned. What do I mean by gratuitous? Isn't all animal cruelty gratuitous? Yes it is, but in a novel, there can be instances of it which contribute something to the story you're telling, and other instances where the author evidently thinks it's funny to have someone cut off a cat's fore-paw, or deliberately stomp on a toad. I don't think that's remotely entertaining, and I saw no reason for it to be in a children's book.

The other issue I had was with the Kirby family. They were evil and lacked all morality, yet nowhere do they get any sort of comeuppance. Yes in real life bad people do get away with bad things. The oil corporations immediately come to mind, along with the junk food purveyors and the financial industries, and certain mega-computer software corporations, and yes, a corporation is a person so we're told, so they're bad people. But in a children's story, we expect evil to be punished, and it simply isn't here. Nothing befalls the Kirby family. Their evil pays off in the end.

It bothered me that the feisty girl was a trope redhead, and she went by the trope name of 'Peewee' but those were not major issues for me. I'd like to have seen the other issues addressed, but if I stack those against the overall story, I have to conclude that the quality of the story outweighed them by a large margin, and I have to say that I liked it, and thought it was, for the most part, a well told and entertaining read. Note that this is the second successive Richard Peck novel that I've rated positively. That one is also set in the same era and features a strong female character.

The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

Rating: WARTY!

This is purportedly a continuation of the Millennium trilogy written by Stieg Larsson, but it contains none of Larsson's material which is being held in contention between Larsson's surviving girlfriend of longstanding and his family. This "authorized" version (that is authorized by everyone but Larsson who is dead, and his girlfriend who has possession of his material) was written independently by David Lagercrantz. Once again the title has been changed from the Swedish original, which was Det som inte dödar oss or, That which does not kill us.

The volume runs to some 400 pages, but is so full of fluff and padding that, had the extraneous detail been removed, I would have read the whole thing. As it was, I read only half of it before I gave up out of boredom and disgust. If I had to read the word 'gatan' one more time in any form, I would have honestly puked. I seriously do not need to know every detail of a city in which the characters live and move, and have their being. Indeed, I don't need to know any details of it unless the details are somehow important to the story. A bit of filler I don't mind, but what amounts to paragraphs of it stuffed between the actual interesting bits is just annoying and pretentious. And there really were not any interesting bits here.

The front cover tells us this is "A Lisbeth Salander Novel" but in those two hundred pages I read - the entire first half of the novel - she barely put in an appearance, was absent for most of the early chapters, and hardly even garnered a mention for that matter, let alone actually showed up. How a novel can be deemed to be about a specific character when she not only fails to appear for more than fifty percent of it, but isn't even a topic worth bringing up, is a bigger and more intriguing mystery than the one the novel itself is supposed to relate.

The first nine chapters don't even get us beyond the first day. I know this because the author tediously labeled every chapter November 20th. I care. Any author worth their salt would have made this clear from the writing instead of having to use it as a chapter heading. Hell, put it in 'Part 1' (or part 'November 20') if you have to be that pedantic. Quit hitting me over the head with it every few pages. If I wanted to get 'being hit over the head lessons', I'd contact Terry Jones....

In short, I can't recommend this at all. If you insist on reading it for yourself, I'd suggest you skip the first 120 pages, because literally nothing worth reading about happens before then. Not much happens afterwards, but at least something distantly resembling a thriller begins around there. Unfortunately by that time, I'd lost all interest in pursuing this. I simply didn't care and had no faith whatsoever that this author could replicate what Larsson did without actually cloning what Larsson did. This novel seemed to be every bit as much of a brand new episode in the Millennium universe as the execrable The Force Awakens was a "new" episode in the Star Wars universe.

I saw the movie based on this novel - based on, but barely resembling it. If I had thought it followed the novel I would never have gone to see it, but from preview, it looked like it might be worth watching and I was curious to see how Claire Foy did. She did the best she could with the lousy material, I guess, but the movie castrated Salander and rendered her, as one reviewer put it, into a Goth James Bond. I wouldn't have been that kind. It wasn't a Lisbeth Salander movie in any meaningful sense.

I have to admit I lost some respect for Foy in that she actually chose to do this movie. It was far too Hollywood-ized and neither she nor the writers understand Salander at all. Consequently, it had none of her soul and was essentially nothing more than an attempt at a purse snatch (your purse) by the surviving family of Stieg Larsson in my opinion. In truth it's an insult to Larsson and to his memory as was the novel. I actively dis-recommend both.

November Fox by Esther Bertram

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had to DNF this novel because it made no sense and was not well-written in my judgment. It employs two voices, one of which was first person which I typically detest. Why authors do this I do not know, because very few of them do it well. I can see no rational for it here, when two third person voices would have been better. The ending (which I skipped to in order to confirm I had correctly divined it) isn't original and is telegraphed pretty well from very early in the novel so it comes as no surprise. When the ending is known, there needs to be an interesting journey toward it, but here there was not. I was bored and found myself skipping sections in order to find an interesting bit. The problem was that those became increasingly scarce the further I progressed.

The story felt like it was being told by a stalker in some regards which did not sit well with me. Erica, the narrator, is watching November Fox, a pop diva, on what appear to be TV monitors spread across a city. This was another annoyance to me, because there was zero world-building here, so I found myself very confused most of the time about what exactly, was happening, and where, and how! I started losing interest and lost it altogether when a talking elephant arrived in the cast. The elephant spoke German, so we got bits and pieces of German which was then tediously translated for us. I hate that in novels. I think if you're going to have a character speak a foreign language you need to have the character speak English and indicate the foreign nature of the tongue with a brief description up front and then an occasional reminder through the rest of the text in some form or another.

The way it was done here made it seem like we had a condescending Disney character, and it was truly annoying and felt insulting to Germans. German is an intriguing language with a fascinating (at least to me) mix of harshly masculine and endearingly feminine tones to it, and it can be beautiful to hear, but that's not how it came across in this novel. I didn't get at all why German was its language! Elephants do not hail from Germany. If it had spoken some Indian or African dialect, it would have made more sense to me.

I concede that it's certainly possible for an elephant to be born in Germany, but to have one simply show up speaking German with no explanation for it was far more of an annoyance than ever it was of interest to me. Its frequent spitting out of "Ja ja!" actually did jar and made it sound like a yahoo in terms of how brutal it was on the senses. I felt it demeaned the language, and I really didn't like this character. It was this that constituted the final straw for me, and I quickly lost all interest in trying to plod on through this book.

I wish the author, who is evidently a composer, a musician, and a producer as well as a novelist, all the best in her endeavors, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one at all based on what I read of it.

Octavia E. Butler by Gerry Canavan

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I consider this book to be a worthy read, especially for those who are already fans of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, but I have to confess some slight disappointments in it. Let it be said up front that I have never read anything by Butler! I was interested in this book because I thought it was a biography initially. Since so few women and so few people of any color other than white are active in the sci-fi genre, I thought it would be an education to read of someone who was both female and African American, and it certainly was. I have no complaints there at all.

What I had hoped for though, was more about Butler herself - her youth, her method of working, and so on. As a hopeful author myself, I must confess to selfish reasons for reading about other authors! Maybe I can learn something about how they work, where their ideas come from, how they get through the writing process of growing an embryonic idea into the finished novel - or why they fail to do so. In many ways this book did not disappoint, which is why I favor it. If you want to learn about Butler's books and her triumphs and failures, then this will reveal a lot because of the very approach which was employed, but I felt myself hungry for more about Butler herself, about what was in her mind, and how she went through the creative process. She wrote on a typewriter, and not even an electric one, which sounds primitive and frankly boggles my mind, but it was all she had in the seventies and eighties.

She was lucky to even have that, growing up as impoverished as she did. It makes a heart break to think of how many other such children there are out there who could be enriching our world with their creativity, yet who will never do so because they will not get even the sparse yet good breaks Butler had to somewhat offset the bad. This is a real tragedy. Butler had four older brothers who all died before she was born, and her father also died when she was a child. Please don't ever limit your child's imagination and creativity. Never block their horizon. Butler refused to let her own horizon be dimmed and we're better off for it, but it's sad that she's one of few instead of one of the many that there could be.

The irony of Butler's life is that it was her mother, who didn't even rate her as an author and wasn't supportive, thinking her dream was nothing but frivolous, who was the one who got that typewriter for her. She was also the one who destroyed her comic book collection when Butler was away from home on a writing course. That really struck a resonant chord with me, because my own parents did the same thing with my school books when I was out of the country for an extended period. I never forgave them for that. They did it without warning and without asking, deeming those things to be junk to be disposed of, and I lost a piece of my childhood that I would have liked to have shared with my own children, but now cannot. It was barbaric and cruel. Fortunately, life goes on in other ways.

As far as this book is concerned, in some ways I felt like I lost sight of Butler behind her novels, in a case of 'can't see the author for the trees' (in the form of print books!). So this felt more like it was a biography or an exegesis of her novels than it was of Butler herself. While looking at her through the lens of her books was a...dare I pun and say novel approach?!...I confess to a little disappointment that this method seemed to camouflage her as much as it revealed her.

That said, I found myself oft fascinated by this examination and apart from a piece here and there that I skipped, I was much more often interested in reading through and learning a bit about her thought processes, influences, and setbacks. The author of this book knows his stuff and has researched extensively. The book is packed with insights and observations. He was the very first researcher to dig into some of this material and has some very interesting things to say about it. The book also has an index, a glossary, and extensive reference end notes.

If I had a serious disappointment, it would be that the book seemed very much aimed at academics, especially judged by the language employed here. As such I feel it did a disservice to girls who are growing up in the same circumstances as Butler did: young African Americans who might have been inspired to follow in Butler's footsteps were the book written in a tone more accessible to them, but who may well be put off by the language employed here. Maybe that book still has to be written. Until then, this is what we have, and I recommend it for its worthy and needed exploration of an important author and her work.

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

Rating: WARTY!

This one sounded from the blurb like it might make for an interesting read, but all that ultimately means is that the blurb writer did their job. It doesn't mean that the writer did! This was a fail for me. It started out gamely enough as a steampunk story, but then it did a sidestep into high fantasy with gnomes, dwarfs, and trolls, and I was wondering if I'd entered some other universe. Apparently I had, This is Terry Pratchett's 40th Discworld novel, and I now have zero interest in learning any more about Discworld!

It came back to the steam punk story after too long of a while, but by the time it did, I'd lost all interest in pursuing this. I don't mind mixing up genres, but I have no time for trolls and dwarfs, I really don't. On top of this, the novel reminded me very much of Douglas Adams. I like Adams, but I don't like his fiction! I never knew him personally, but I did go to one of his talks one time and I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed, and favorably reviewed his non-fiction book, Last Chance to See about endangered species, but if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a Brit writer babbling on and on humorously and in an annoyingly self-satisfied manner. It reminds me too much of my own inane parodies!

No one in their right mind should take those seriously, and I honestly could not take this seriously. I certainly can't recommend it based on the ten percent I could stand to listen to. There's no point in stoically plodding on to the bitter end in a novel that quite simply doesn't get your heart beating, when you can ditch it and be off and running with the next one that will get your pulse up. Life's too short!

A Fish Called Blackbeard by Gillian Rogerson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was another charming young children's/middle-grade book from an author who is growing on me! Note that this is a text book - no pictures here - so while you can read it to young children, there's nothing for them to look at. Lilly desperately wants a pet, and her only hope is to win a goldfish at the fairground even if it uses up all her allowance. She finally wins with her last shot, she picks the more active of the two remaining fish. She notes a black ring around the fish's eye, she decides to name it Blackbeard after the pirate.

So far so good. But the thing is, she discovers the fish can talk, and when she talks to it, she discovers he's depressed. The other fish at the fairground was Blackbeard's girlfriend and now he's heartbroken to be separated from her! Can Lilly help her new friend? This story reveals all! I liked it. Written lightly and amusingly, it was different, fun, and inventive. It's exactly what you need to stimulate a young person's mind, and I recommend it.

Wandering Koala Rides the Phantom Coach by Jeff Thomason

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a weird and wonderful comic book done in reds, blacks, grays, and white, with fairly minimal text. The artwork is engaging, and the coloring really attracts. It begins with a way overly dominant guy leading his girl out of the movie theater before the ending because he knows how it ends and he doesn't care that his girl wanted to watch it to the end.

He tries to play up the delight of finding an early bus which is largely empty as opposed to the crowded one they would have had to ride had they stayed in the theater, but the girl isn't convinced at all. The thing is that this bus is rather unusual, as they discover when the driver, who now looks like cross between Jack Skellington from Nightmare Before Christmas, and The Scarecrow from the Batman comics and movies, will not let them off the bus. Before long, ghosts start to materialize on the bus, and this normal couple now looks to be trapped in a nightmare that seems like it will hold them prisoner until Christmas, if not longer.

I enjoyed this because of the art and the weird plot. The only complaint I had was that the images did not occupy the full screen of the tablet in my Nook app. The page occupied only about three-quarters of the screen, and if you tried to enlarge it, it became a static image which you then had to close before you could swipe to the next page. Not ideal at all, and Nook app is usually a lot better than this. It's certainly a generation ahead of the crappy Amazon Kindle app, but this makes two comics now that I've had this annoying issue with. I recommend the comic, though.

True Grit Mean Business Graphic Novel

Rating: WORTHY!

Based on the Charles Portis novel which I reviewed favorably very recently, this is a promotional graphic novel put out by Paramount Studios, and is a free download from Barnes & Noble and perhaps other online sources too. Paramount released an updated version of True Grit in 2010, this time starring Jeff Bridges in place of John Wayne, Matt Damon in place f Glenn Campbell, Hailee Steinfeld in place of Kim Darby, and Barry Pepper in place of Robert Duvall. I watched both movie yesterday and while the earlier movie was slightly more humorous, the updated version (which cost as much to make as the original made in receipts!) was definitely the better movie, and adhered more closely to the novel despite being a Coen brothers vehicle.

I guess the copyright was coming to a close, and if they didn't put out a new version of it, paramount would lose the rights to it. The art by Christian Wildgoose is very well done, although being in comic book format, it ill fits the screen on my tablet and enlarging it doesn't help because then it becomes a separate image which you cannot swipe to get to the next page - you have to close the image and then swipe! Naturally the text is too small which is frequently a problem with =e-comics. Normally I like my Nook app - it's far better than the crappy Amazon Kindle app, but it too has issues. The art is black and white line drawings.

The comic is very short and tells the story recounted by Marshall Cogburn in the courtroom at the beginning of the novel, of the slaughter and robbery at the spotted-gourd ranch. It's worth a read, especially since it's free, but I would have enjoyed a longer one more - especially if it had been the whole novel.

Evolution's Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden

Rating: WORTHY!

This amazing non-fiction book discusses "Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People" and shows how blind and stupid the religious fanatics are when they claim that homosexuality is unnatural. It's perfectly natural in that we see it throughout nature, where gender is even less of a binary matter than it is typically perceived as being in humans. Joan Roughgarden is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist who has written several books on the topics, and in this book she explores diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates, as the blurb says.

She takes issue with sexual selection, which has been a tenet of the scientifically established Theory of Evolution since Charles Darwin himself published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex way back in 1871. I disagree with her on that score, and have to point out that the book is in places, rather didactic. She has a soap box and she's sticking to it, but on the other hand, being a transgendered mtf herself, she does have an inside track! However, anecdote isn't the same as data, so beware of taking everything she says at full scientific value.

It's important to keep in mind that this is a book expressing a PoV, not a science paper, so it's written in layman's terms and a lot of it is not established scientifically, but I did not read it for that, I read it precisely for the diversity portions, and those were highly informative and quite entertaining. Note also that Richard Dawkins's popular books are, for example, written in precisely the same way as this, so there's nothing substandard or unusual about this style of writing.

While I would take issue with her theistic evolution viewpoint, I do every much enjoy her writing, and I recommend this educational book highly. It's a pity that those who most need to read and learn from it will doubtlessly dismiss it out of hand.

Watch Out For The Bears! by Gillian Rogerson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an amazingly entertaining story about the son of the man who looks after the weather. One day the weather keeper has to go out and he leaves his son, Tom, in charge of the weather huts where the weather is of course kept locked away from the bears. Everyone knows about bears and weather. Most of the time we grin and bear it, right? There is a very brief section at the end of this book where the author talks about how she came up with the idea for this story, and I found that as entertaining as the story itself. It sounds very much like the way I come up with oddball ideas for stories! And the way you need to as well, if you want to be an original and inventive writer! She sounds like a fun and interesting person.

But I digress. Tom is happy to take charge of the weather for the day and doesn't care about the bears. He's never even seen one. Unfortunately, when he went to check on the weather this, one of them was unlocked and the clouds were gone! There were bear prints! Tom has to track down those clouds or he'll get in trouble with his dad, and he does track them down, but unfortunately this marks the first of several adventures he has with those kleptomaniacal bears. Tom is industrious and very responsible though, so he pursues his task diligently and bears up well in the end. You knew he would, right?

The story was completely charming, and I enjoyed it immensely. I look forward to reading other stories by this author - several of which are free on Barnes & Noble and possibly other online outlets, even as you sit here wasting time looking at this review while those books go unattended! Get over there! Now!

Out On Good Behavior by Dahlia Adler

Rating: WARTY!

This is a LGBTQIA story set on a college campus, where Francesca Annamaria Bellisario (who naturally goes by 'Frankie', because she's queer, of course), a self-described pansexual (which does not mean she only has sex with cooking pots), is leading a dangerously promiscuous life. While 'sex' is clearly in her sexicon in bold letters, 'safe' certainly is not. Why anyone would become involved with her is a mystery, but college students are not necessarily the smartest rats in the maze - which is why they're at a learning institution, after all, isn't it? The question is, are they going to get the education they expect, or something else entirely? The target of her lust, as she dallies with everything in between, is Samara Kazarian who rooms with one of her friends. This is the story of their "courtship" and it was a huge fail for me.

I know college students are supposed to have an improbably over-sized libido according to MTV and other jock mentalities, but only half of this couple was that kind of person, The other was supposedly a smart, conservative, closet lesbian who you would think would show a lot more common sense than she does. That was one of the problems, We were frequently told how things were, but never shown.

The story was, essentially, a lesbian wet-dream with zero characterization. If we're to go by these lights, all that queers in college ever think of is sex, sex, and more sex, and that's the entirety of it! They never think of homework, or coursework, or hobbies or interests. They never expend any time in conversation which doesn't involve going to sports games or having sex. For me it was completely ridiculous and wholly unrealistic.

Frankie is purportedly an artist and truly dedicated, yet we get none of that here. The closest we come is Sam's examination of one of Frankie's pictures at an exhibition, but then it's gone and we get nothing more. Why make her an art student at all? There is of course no reason except that if she's an artist or an actor, we can stereotype her more? The story felt inauthentic from top to bottom, especially with the inverse slut-shaming (what would you call that? Slut championing?!) that's indulged in with Frankie, who can do nothing wrong. Slut championing is equally as bad as slut-shaming itself is, especially when it seems to be dedicatedly mischaracterizing all queers as promiscuous and shameless. And the idea that a retiring virgin and a slut-champion can find common ground and do it so quickly and effortlessly had to be a joke.

The only relationship Frankie and Sam had was sex. The only value Sam offered for Frankie was, judged by the writing here, a sexual one. She was better than masturbating, it seems. Frankie cared only about the depth of Sam's skin, and her ass and legs, and how beautiful she was. We never got anything which suggested that she liked Sam as a person, much less as a companion, or truly valued her for anything other than lust. That's what turned me off, paradoxically, because that's all there was to this relationship. If that's all the consenting parties are looking for, then it's fine, but I don't particularly want to read about those people, and I certainly don't want to read a bait-and-switch-hitter novel which pretends it's offering a great romance, yet delivers only carnality and literally nothing else but trope.

The saddest thing is that for all her supposed smarts, Sam never once considered discussing venereal disease with Frankie, despite knowing full-well that Frankie would quite literally screw anything on two legs and human (although despite her proudly self-proclaimed pansexualism, all Frankie ever really did was go after or lust after girls). I didn't expect a pages-long dialog about sexual responsibility by any means, that would have been boring, but the fact that not once was it ever so much as even mentioned in the 60% of this novel that I read, was shamefully irresponsible.

There was literally no exposition either. The entire novel was pretty much conversation, all of which centered on Frankie's adulterated lust for Sam. It was truly sickening, and I could not continue reading it when I fully-realized that this story was never going to mature or change. I sure as hell cannot recommend it. If you want a dumb sex romp, then this might be for you, but don't go into this thinking there's anything loving or romantic about it, or that there's a great relationship story here. There isn't.

The Frog Prince by Jenni James

Rating: WARTY!

Jenni James (not to be confused with English actor Jennifer James despite Jenni's use of words like "bum" and other 'British-isms'!) has made a career out of retelling fairy tales (think of Disney titles and you'll pretty much have half her oeuvre). She's moving on to pillaging Jane Austen next, but what the heck - if it works, then best of luck with it. She also has a series of videos on her blog (here on Blogspot) and on You Tube, purportedly telling people how to write novels.

I watched parts of some of them and they didn't seem very helpful to me. The fact is that any time you spend not writing is not helpful to your writing career, because you can attend all the lectures you want - in person or online, it doesn't matter - and you can read all the writing-advice books you want, but unless you are actually writing, you're not a writer and you're going nowhere. Have you noticed that those books on 'how to write a best-seller' are almost always written by "writers" you've never heard of, who've never had a successful novel, let alone a best seller? That ought to tell you exactly how useless those books truly are. They're like those books telling you how to get rich quick, written by people whose only wealth has come from selling those very books!

The videos are each about twelve minutes long, and one of them for example, was about sticking it out with writing and making it to the end of your novel. This is an important topic, but the video missed the mark for me. Instead of offering writing tips for making it through the long haul, the author talked about how long her hair was and what it took to grow it out so long and to take care of it.

I could see where she was trying to go with that, but it offered really nothing (unless it was crammed into the last third of the video, which I didn't watch) to help a writer get to the end, and overcome writing blocks. Full disclosure (or given that this is October, maybe it's Fall disclosure?!): the only way to do that is to write. It's really that simple. In the short term it doesn't matter if you are writing crap. It doesn't matter if it's the worst writing you (or anyone) ever did. Write on. Write to the end. Get the thing finished and then you can go back and edit it.

For me, editing is a lot easier than getting to the end in the first place, so the temptation is to keep going back over what you wrote, whether it be one chapter, or fifteen, or one paragraph, primping and teasing, and perking and polishing, but this will never, ever get your novel finished! Quite the contrary. It will prevent you from ever finishing. There is nothing in this world that can compare with putting that final period to the final sentence in your completed novel even if it's only the first draft! At least, at last, you have it done (after a fashion)!

It feels good, even if the novel isn't perfect. Once it's done, then is the time to go back over it and perk and primp and polish. But don't get lost in that. At some point you need to have a go/no-go decision which will determine if that novel is going to be submitted (or better yet published by yourself), or if it goes on the shelf and you start on your second novel instead, because the first just isn't getting it done. There's no shame in this and it does not mean you're a lousy writer. It actually means you're very smart to know the difference, and to make a wise decision about whether it works!

So if my two cents is worth anything (and it's probably worth about two cents!), then all you need to know is that if you want to be a writer, you have to write lots - and lots. And then some more. Lots more. And you have to read all kinds of books and not necessarily only novels. You have the read the genre(s) in which you're interested to see how others do it and learn from their mistakes.

No one in their right mind likes to be stuck in traffic unless they have a really good audio book to listen to, so if you get stuck at a roadblock (I'm talking about writing here!), you need to jump over it and continue on. You can come back and fix that issue later. Even if your hero is in an impossible fix and all you can offer is "and magic happens and he/she gets away," it's far better to do that and move on, and finish that novel than it is to sit for weeks stuck there not going anywhere because of this one issue.

If you don't like what you're writing, then write something different. If you're not looking forward to hacking the next chapter, write a different chapter or make something different happen. Listen to your characters! Let them tell you how to get out of a fix and where to go next. I promise you it's what your characters will do for you if you have done them the favor of writing them well.

But I digress. Majorly! You're the writer. Take what advice you think helps, ignore the rest, including this if it doesn't help. But write! Write! Write!

This novel didn't get it done for me either because it felt inauthentic and I had to DNF it. It's like the author wanted to get a traditional fairy tale told, but didn't want to write it traditionally, and rather than go determinedly one way or the other, she got stuck somewhere in between, and it didn't work. What it delivered instead was some truly jarring writing, so in the space of three lines, for example, I read three different forms of "maybe":

Mayhap her thoughts and ideals and dreams and all those things she longed for and loved—all of it—perhaps they were too simple for handsome princes to care about. Maybe....

It just did not read easily. I have to confess a personal hatred of 'mayhap' here. I think authors use it as a lazy way to try and put some authentic antiquity into their tales and it almost never works. There were some other writing errors, such as the author using "crumbled" when she ought to have used "crumpled", but those aside, the writing was not awful. It just didn't feel right to me.

On top of this the attempts humor fell flat, and the writing level seemed aimed at middle-grade even though the main characters were young adult. The amusing thing about this to me, is that in and around the era when this story supposedly took place, young children were routinely married off at a very young age, and I'm forced to wonder why so few authors have the courage to write it like it was? that would offer some historical authenticity and do a lot better than tossing in a 'mayhap' here and there, or mixing modern English idiom with antique ones and making the reading a jarring roller-coaster experience, instead of a pleasant read.

For me, the worst thing was the two main characters, because I didn't like either of them. The way they were written made then both look like idiots, in which case they probably deserved each other, but I quickly came to feel like my time would be better spent reading something else, or better yet, writing something! The problem with fairy tales is that they're pretty much all tapped out now. If you want to do this, don't, unless your take on it is going to break seriously new ground and put a truly new spin on the tale. Instead of chasing the vogue, you should try to plough your own furrow: find something new to tap and start your own trend! I wish the author all the best but I cannot recommend this one.