Insect Superpowers by Kate Messner, Jillian Nickell

Rating: WORTHY!

This book seemed rather obsessed with ants, but that aside it was a worthy read for any child who wants to learn fun and interesting stuff, learn more about insects, or be a bit grossed out. We're talking about supersonic assassins, decapitators, green bolts, malevolent mimics, aphid imposters, false flashes, weight lifters, mutant grasshoppers, shells of steel, machine gun butts, vomitizers, glue shooters, evil architects, fungus farmers, sonar smashers, super stings, pirate queens, and jaws of doom!

I defy any kid not to be interested in something in there! Illustrated in fine style by Nickell and written breathlessly by Messner, this book is sure to appeal to your kid. Or you. You can pretend it's for your kid. Really. It's ok. I won't tell. Honest.

Strapless by Deborah Davis

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an intriguing biography of two people who intersected when one painted the portrait of the other, and the portrait was deemed scandalous. This result had very different effects on both participants.

The artist was John Singer Sargent. You may well ask why he wasn't named John Artist Sargent since he couldn't sing a note. I asked it, but the book never answered. That's books for you. Moody as hell.

The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Both were American ex-pats, she having moved to France with her mom after the Civil War, and he having moved there to study art. She married a banker and became a much talked-about celebrity despite being merely a socialite. He became well-regarded after having successful exhibits in the annual Paris art Salon.

The thing was that this was in an era where no one blinked at endless classical nudes, and portraits were common. The scandal came about because of one curious thing: Sargent painted Gautreau with one thin strap of her gown partway down her arm. Yes, that was it. And this was in France! And she never really recovered from it. Sargent felt so bad about it that he hid the portrait away for thirty years letting hardly anyone see it. Now it hangs in the Met in New York where anyone can see it. Six years after the original, someone painted an homage to it, and no one blinked an eye. This is why I don't have a lot of regard for art critics! LOL!

The book was well-written and went into a lot of detail about various people's lives and the relationships between the two main characters and other well-known people of the era. It may be too much detail for some, not enough for others, but for me it was fine. I confess I did skim a bit here and there where it was of little interest to me, but I read avidly for most of it. I would have liked to have read more about Singer's art: his techniques and so on, but the author seemed interested only in the size of his canvas! Someone should tell her it's not the size that matters, but what you do with it! That aside, though, I did enjoy it and commend it as a worthy read.

If We Were Gone by John Coy, Natalie Capannelli

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Written by Coy and illustrated finely by Campannelli this book begs us to pay attention to what we're doing to the planet. Does it need us? No! We need it. Humans, even for as many of us as there are now, make up only a ten-thousandth of Earth's Biomass yet we've wiped out over eighty percent of all mammals to say nothing of other classes of life. And still, hunting is legal. The last time CO₂ was this high, humans hadn't even evolved. if all of Earth's history was compressed into a year, then humans wouldn't show up until after teatime on December 31st. That's how late we came ot the party. That's how little Earth needs us!

This book discusses that. Coy's incisive text and Capanelli's excellent (and slightly depressing, I have to say!) artwork depicts how little we would be missed if we disappeared. In fact, from the planet's perspective, right now it would be better if we did disappear. But this book isn't a manifesto to ban humans; it is a plea for humans to wake up and hear those chimes at midnight, and do something to help Earth before it's too late. We need it, and we're going to harm ourselves if we don't do something soon. I commend this book as a dire warning and a worthy read.

I Came From The Water by Vanita Oelschlager

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is an odd book because it comes from a personal account by the author of meeting the young boy who is the subject of this story. Told to her through a translator, it makes a great tale of survival during the Hurricane, named Jeanne, which hit Haiti in September 2004 causing serious flooding and other issues in the city of Gonaïves, which is tucked under the south coast of the northern promontory of Haiti.

The problem is that I have no way of telling if this is true, and neither does the boy. This is the story he told, but there's no way of learning now how well he remembers it, or even whether it may have been augmented by suggestion or by his own imagination over the years. While I have a good opinion of this author and have positively reviewed many of her books, I have to express doubts here. She makes no mention of interviewing anyone who might have recalled finding this boy, which to me calls the reliability of the story into question.

Everyone loves an inspirational story, but all I can say in this case is that it sounds highly improbable, and while it may be true, presenting it as a modern Moses story based on a child's hearsay alone is taking things too far for my taste. Children's minds and memory being as malleable as they are, I have to doubt this and frankly wonder about the motive of a writer who presents a story like this. Because of all these doubts and misgivings, I cannot rate this as a worthy read.

All of a Sudden and Forever by Chris Barton, Nicole Xu

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had never heard of the survivor elm until I read this book. For all I'd read and seen about the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Building in April of 1995 in Oklahoma city, no one ever mentioned this. That bombing seems so long ago now, and has been so overshadowed by so many things since, that it's easy to forget what far too many people cannot: that 168 people died and left behind them loved ones whose pain didn't end that day with the loss of a life, but began instead.

The elm was almost cut down because it was damaged so badly, and embedded in its branches and trunk was forensic evidence: shrapnel from the blast. But it survived and later, people noticed it blooming. When it fruited, the seeds were collected and cultivated and passed out to those who needed them. Those seedlings grew and sprouted their own harvest, and so the progeny of this tree have spread everywhere now.

The tree itself has become a memorial, and this book is a memorial to that tragedy and the tree that survived it and gave hope and solace to others. This book is tastefully and respectfully written, tells a great true story, and is beautifully illustrated by new artist Nicole Xu who is very talented. Her work can be found online and is a treat to see. I commend this book fully.

A Girl Like Me by Angela Johnson, Nina Crews

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a rip-roaring lion of a book in which young women of color stand up for their right to be whomever they want, and we've never needed that more than we do now with a groping, misogynist of a racist president in office backed by a bunch of weak, white old sheep of 'men' in his party and yes-men of that same aged hue in his cabinet.

Defying the nay-sayers, who tell her she can't fly so high, or swim so far, or climb so strongly, the girl at the heart of these stories carries on not out of rebellion or defiance (that comes later when she goes to by a new cape!), but because she knows without a doubt that she can do do the very things others would have her believe she can't and deny her the right to even try. This is affirmative action at its best! I loved this book, the photo-collage illustrations, the powerful text and the strong females who inhabit this world. Angela Johnson and Nina Crews? You rock!

Mexico Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

So another in the Tiny Traveler's series, and if it seems like I'm choosing ones just to annoy the racist president of a certain country I assure you that's not the case....

This one follows the same pattern as the other two I've reviewed today (China and puerto Rico). It features about a dozen colorful illustrations with local language words for various items, places, and customs depicted, and each page contains a search item. The books are bright, engaging, interesting and very educational. Like the other two, I commend this whole-heartedly.

What if Soldiers Fought With Pillows? by Heather Camlot, Serge Bloch

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book may be a little pie-in-the-sky, but it offers some true stories and some basic truths. Every other pages asks a seemingly silly question, such as what if battle grounds were soccer fields and spectators cheered for every team? Or, What if Navy SEALs balanced balls on their noses? Or what if innocent civilians could be airlifted by music?

When you read the accompanying story, each only a few paragraphs long, you realize that the question is not only not as silly as it initially sounded, but is in fact rooted in a real event. Clowns, rappers, children, and even circus performers have helped to bring peace to troubled areas.

Of course, not every idea is always happy. The question about battle ground and soccer fields talks about the success of the Ivory Coast soccer team in Africa, and how friendly soccer games led to a ceasefire. It carefully ignores the reverse situation where a soccer game ended in two nations going to war (between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969). Of course, the underlying causes went deeper than one soccer game, but it's still a fact of life.

But that's not the focus of this book - and rightly so. Instead it chooses positive as did the people whose stories are told here, and that's the right way to go and a useful and inspiring lesson for children everywhere to learn from and emulate. Our president should read this book! I commend this as a worthy read.

Puerto Rico Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Another fun book in the 'Tiny Travelers' series. This one covers your president's most favorite place to hate (after Africa) - Puerto Rico! That's one reason I chose to review this! Anything he hates, I tend to love - apart from Amazon that is! Once again it's a series of about a dozen beautifully-drawn and gorgeously-colored illustrations, each of which imparts a little knowledge of the location, and a hidden treasure to find.

There's a website and a club to join for anyone who chooses, or you can just stick with the fun books, the poetic descriptions, and the joyful attitude. Either way I commend this as a worthy read!

China Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book is both an educational trip through China, whose new year - the Year of the Rat started the day this review was posted, so 新年快乐 (shin yin kwai luh - that's happy new year in Chinese)!

The book consists of about a dozen pages of brightly-drawn and nicely-illustrated images of various places and landmarks in China along with happy kids visiting them. Each has interesting facts, along with Chinese words, their English translations and pronunciation, and a hidden treasure to be found.

This book was a fun treasure hunt and an educational trip. I commend it.

Hidden Picture Puzzles at the Zoo by Liz Ball

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is definitely a book for curious kids with sharp eyes and lots of patience for detail! There are some ninety pages of line drawings packed with hidden items and the guide to those items is included right there in the drawing so you don't have to leave the page to check. If you have the print book (my review copy was of course electronic!) you can also color in the picture after you've discovered the items.

Some pictures are single page, others are doubles, and each depicts a different scene in the zoo and contains fun facts about the animals. Those are, as usual, mostly mammals, but some of them are not so common - such as capybaras and tapirs. There are some birds, reptiles, fish, and amphibians included.

This will be a fun book for any kid who likes to play detective.

A Kid's Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals by Vicki Whiting, Jeff Schinkel

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is an easy and straight-forward way to entertain your child - let 'em loose in the zoo...but not just any old zoo: the zoo of the imagination where they get to draw animals all day long. The drawings included in here, by Jeff Schinkel, along with step-by-step instructions and the space right there in the print book to emulate the examples - run the gamut from...well not A, but Bee to T for tiger (or tarantula!), and include an insect or two, a mollusk, a gastropod, and the aforementioned arachnid. Predictably, most of the animals are mammals. I'm not going to say it's a crock, because that would be a misspelling, but there is one dangerous reptile, and one cute fish to horse around with, but no birds.

That said, the animals that are included are quite diverse, and easy to draw even for the inexperienced and lacking-confidence because of the guides to follow. There are hints and tips, and outlines to add faces to existing drawings in one section. Some of the animals are the entire thing, others just faces, and on that score, there's a section with head outlines, and a selection of practice faces full of weird expressions that your kid gets to copy in the blank spaces. There are cats and crocodiles, gorillas and koalas, rats and reindeer. In short, plenty to provide practice skill and the confidence that comes with it.

I think this is a fun and useful book for any budding artist.

Mission ot the Bottom of the Sea by Jan Leyssens, Joachim Sneyers

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I have to express disappointment in this book. While on the one hand it does have colorful illustrations by Sneyers and it does tell a true story of underwater exploration in the newly-invented 'bathysphere ('bathy' meaning deep - something the book fails to educate on), the sins of omission are too great to let them go.

The exploration depicted here makes it look like it was all men all the time. There is brief mention of Else Bostelmann as an artist, but it makes no mention that she actually went underwater herself at one point - not in the bathysphere - but with a helmet on to make an oil painting, sitting on a chair on the bottom! I think that's at least worth a mention, but worse than this was the complete omission of any mention of Gloria Hollister, which was part of the expedition and who also took some trips down in the bathysphere herself, setting records for deepest dive by a woman.

While I can get with the idea of a book which educates about exploration like this, I can neither commend nor even condone one that seems dedicated to relegating the female contributors to mere support roles. Young girls need to be allowed to understand that they can do anything the men can do and this books fails disastrously in that regard. It also fails in the publisher's seeming lack of understanding that making it clear that women were involved is a selling-point for female audiences. This books seems like it's a boys-only-club edition, marginalizing the female contributions.

Let's Explore Bread by Jill Colella

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a fun and useful book of less than thirty pages, full of good advice, exploration, and a recipe for bread bears! Who wouldn't want bread bears?! I fell in love with the title to begin with, but the content is equally of value.

Using bright photos for illustration, the short texts describe bread in many varieties and how it's used; there's an experiment you can do, and then comes the bread recipe and that's followed by the bread bear recipe!

It would have been nice to have a word about nutrition content, and whole wheat versus white, things you can add to bread - such as nuts and raises, for example, and also about gluten and gluten-free. Not everyone can enjoy bread as it's so routinely offered in stores, so that felt like it was an opportunity missed in educating as to why baking your own is important, but that aside, this is a fun way to gat kids interested in baking and in eating healthily, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Spending and Saving by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

In this third book from the Mary Lindeen collection, the author discusses what to do with all the lovely lucre you've earned from providing the goods and/or services form various careers which were discussed in the previous two books I reviewed today! The others talk about the kinds of opportunities for earning, and what goods and services actually are. The book employs short texts and big colorful photos illustrating the text and tuns to around 30 pages.

It discusses how money is earned and what uses it's put to. There are some things which have to be bought, and others which we choose to buy for fun or entertainment. Some money is spent, and some is saved. The book admirably makes it clear that once the money is spent, it's gone. Children might not grasp that the first time they think about spending, especially if they're some of the kids I see in the grocery store from time to time! Race, circumstances and income are things which kids don't worry overmuch about, so it was nice to see a diversity of people in this book, as it was in all three books I read in this series.

Because the author is a former elementary school teacher, she has wisely set up in the back of the book, a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. I commend this as a worthy read!

Goods and Services by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is another in a series about how people earn and spend or save money. This one goes into some detail (it's about 30 pages long) concerning how people make things to sell (which are the goods), or how they offer a service, and this is what makes the world go round. And here I thought it was simply inertia from the formation of the planet! Just kidding!

The book is colorfully illustrated with photographs and features a diverse 'cast' of people who are growing or making things to sell. It talks about how goods are supplied (from near and far) and transported (trains, and boats, and planes!) and how some services are free, but others cost money.

At the end of the book there's a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. The author is a former elementary school teacher so she knows how this works. I commend this as a worthy read!

Earning Money by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a sweet book about how people earn money: through providing goods and services. Another volume in this series, which I shall also review, explains just what goods and services are, and a third book, which I shall review as well, explains just what to do with that money once it's earned!

Using short text and large colorful photos illustrating that text, the book, with commendable diversity as its watchword, shows a variety of people, such as a farmer, a nurse, a teacher, who pursue different careers to earn their money. The book describes how people can earn in different ways: by providing a service or offering goods, and describes how varied jobs can be: quiet or loud, clean or messy.

We learn that children can also earn money from doing chores (providing a service) or making things (those brownies looked awesome!). The book is short - some 30 pages or so - and very colorful, filled with different people from all walks of life. In the back there's a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. It could be fun to get a bunch of kids to set up a shop together, and offer work and services for cash (Monopoly cash, of course!). They can learn about real life and about managing money. On which score, stay tuned - there are more reviews to come!

The author is a former elementary school teacher so she has this covered! I commend this as a worthy read!

Sing Freedom! by Vanita Oelschlager, Mike DeSantis

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Here's another from the Oelschlager oeuvre, this time illustrated by DeSantis. The story is a true one: of the singing victory of the Estonians over the overbearing Soviet Union as it was known back then (but it was really all Russia). Estonia (called Eesti in Estonian) is one of the Baltic states, and it sits between the other two (Lithuania and Latvia) and the sliver of Baltic sea that separates Estonia from Finland. After World War 2 (like one wasn't more than enough), Russia began subsuming the smaller European nations along its border, and trying to grind them under its heels into subservience.

Estonia was one of the 14 such nations that resented this and always sought to recover its own identity and freedom. They did this in many ways, but in part, it was achieved through a five-yearly festival of song, where they rebelled by singing a nationalist Estonian song, which the Russians did not like. The Estonians would not give up and in the end, they found their freedom during Mikhail Gorbachev's reign.

This book tells a colorful and enjoyable story about this great and peaceful success, and is well worth reading.

Bonyo Bonyo by Vanita Oelschlager, Kristin Blackwood, Mike Blanc

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This begins a stretch of some seventeen children's non-fiction books I shall be reviewing! Deep breath and off we go!

I've had a lot of success with Oelschlager's books, and this was no exception: it was a lot of fun, as well as informative, and interesting book, beautifully illustrated by Blackwood and Blanc. It's a mini-biography of a young boy who was living in Kenya in Eastern Africa, a country lying just below what's known as the horn of Africa. The boy's name is Bonyo Bonyo, and he loved to go to school That's not a given in Africa. Even if you can find a school, you may have to pay to go there.

These school fees may be cheap compared with what a paid education in the US costs, but people are impoverished there, and even what we consider to be a trivial amount in the US can be an insurmountable obstacle in the so-called third world. This is why we can do a lot by contributing even a little to charities which help with people in such situations. Bonyo had a hard time, and had to travel a long way to get his education, but he was determined.

He did so well in school that he got a chance to go to a college in the USA. All he needed was the airfare! Yikes. That was hard to come by, but through work and donations from friends and well-wishers, he eventually achieved his dream and became a doctor, and now he runs a clinic on his home town and also a practice in the USA. Spoiled as we are for good food, clean water, and a free education in the west, it's easy to forget that others are not so fortunate. It's sad that our millionaire president is too selfish and simple to grasp this. This book is an important reminder to those of us who are open to an education.

The book mentions a college in Texas, not a college in Ohio. While I can find no confirmation of the Texas college attendance, I did find an article online that lists the college he attended in Ohio as an osteopathic college. Such is not exactly a complete medical education. Osteopathy can provide some knowledge of human physiology, but it has only a limited application: to bone and muscle health. It's really not a lot of use for the great diversity inherent in practicing general medicine. In a way, it's a bit like chiropractic (and I could tell you a sorry tale about that!), but at least it wasn't homeopathy! However, that's not so important in a children's story because the take-home message here is one of enduring and triumphing, of courage and persistence, which Bonyo exhibited in spectacular fashion. On that basis I commend this as a worthy read.

If... by Sarah Perry

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the 25th anniversary version of this book of which I was completely unware until I got an email about it asking if I'd like to review it. It sounded good to me, and now I'm happy that I did because this book is beautiful, and amazing, and it's lots of fun. My kids would have loved this too, when they were younger. They probably still would.

The book, some fifty pages long, asks a question and then illustrates it in gorgeous detail and bold colors. The cover illustrates one of the internal pages, which asks "What if leaves were fish," and shows a branch with some fruit and a bunch of shoaling green fish! There are pages showing slumbering dogs as foothills, butterflies as clothes, flying cats, hair made of mice, worms on wheels and dreaming meerkats. The author, in a small section at the back, invites the readers' imagination to run wild, using her illustrations, and combining them or making up stories about them - or dreaming up your own.

This was an amazing, sweet, fun, and wonderful book and I highly commend it.

The Last Single Girl by Bria Quinlan

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those 'Desperately Seeking Validation' kind of stories, where a woman has a deadline before which she absolutely must find a guy, or her life will be in ruins. If done right, it can be entertaining. The Norwegians demonstrated this in a Christmas TV series called Hjem til jul (Home for Christmas - English dubbed on Netflix) which was hilarious and enigmatic at the end, but in the USA land of the trope, there are far too many of these stories that make women look desperate, or stupid, or pathetic, or all three. While I am quite sure there are women (and men) like that, I don't subscribed to the cliché that a woman must have a man (or vice versa, or any mix of the idea).

It can be fun to read one if it's well done, but those are few and far between. This one started out in the fast lane on the freeway to Tropeville; then it seemed to be turning itself around a bit and rather than ditch it, I became interested. Unfortunately, it all-too-quickly took a U-Turn and continued right back to Tropeville, so I did ditch it. I am not a fan of reading novels about stupid women or patently ridiculous situations.

Sarah was purportedly hitting the point in life where all her friends were becoming involved with guys. What? Every one of them had been dedicatedly single to this point and she'd never head to deal with this before? Stupid and unrealistic. The trigger here though was that their New Year's Eve 'girls night out' was being sabotaged because the stereotypical queen bee of their group had decided everyone should bring their man on New Year's Eve, and hang those who didn't have one. Rather than ditch the bitch and find a group of female friends who were more akin to her own situation, or simply go alone and maybe meet a guy there, Sarah buys into this incarceration of a relationship, and in order to recruit a guy, she signs up to this online dating service. This is where Le Stupide began to kick in big time.

She sets up five guys to meet, and makes two dates with the first two at the same location and within a couple of hours of each other. Rather than be honest and tell the first guy that she only has an hour or so because she's meeting someone else, she lets their conversation run on and on until the second guy shows up. He happens to be best friends with the first guy and both of them ditch Sarah because they have some idiot pact never to fight over a girl. What fight? There was no fight here! Neither of them had any claim, much less 'ownership' of the woman they had both literally just met. Yet off they go! Morons.

The guy who Sarah meets in the café, the owner, starts commiserating with her about her fate. It's obvious at this point that he's going to be the one she ends up with, but Sarah is too stupid, no matter how long this goes on, to see that he's interested in her and instead keeps pursuing these rugged guys she thinks will match her. Guy number three is a single dad who forgot to mention this in his profile and shows up with three badly-behaving kids because his babysitter canceled on him. Guy number four is married and his wife shows up and blames Sarah for her own stupidity in sticking with this jerk of a guy. Actually I think that guy was the one who wrote the book blurb, because he sure can't spell 'frenemy'!

So, in short, no. Just no! This was badly-written and larded with trope and cliché, and it makes women look like losers and idiots. Why a female writer would do this kind of thing to her own gender, I do not know, but it's more insuting to woman than is porn, and it's nowhere near good enough for a 2020 vision.

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Rating: WARTY!

After a prison break in a small town, during which masses of convicts get loose and ransack the place, literally raping and pillaging, two years pass and not a single one of the dirty dozen escape planners has been caught. Abusing grant money aimed at rebuilding the town, local police detective Leah Hawkins, with the sanction of several town leaders. is commissioned to go after those men, not to bring them in, but to execute them. Therein lies the problem. Since those idiots at Kirkus called this book 'superior', I should have avoided it like the plague, but I didn't know their opinion at the time, so I gave it the old escapee try, and it fell short. There was too much luck and too many improbable in it. The more I read, the more it took my suspension of disbelieve and mangled it.

I'd been hoping for better, since the main character seemed like she might be interesting. She wasn't. Worse, she was boring. The biggest problem she had was that there was no problem that she had. Everything went her way all the time and never was she in any real danger or any kind of jeopardy. Despite the apparent dismal failure of the FBI to get a handle on even a single one of these dozen escapees in two years, Leah was able to track the first one down in no time at all - living in his mom's old house. Seriously? The FBI didn't watch the place? The same thing happened with escapees 2 and 3. They were found hanging out with friends or relatives who were known to the police. No one checked these places? The FBI didn't watch them?

One of these friends operated a fake ID factory, and Leah was lucky enough to discover a trash bin that apparently had not been emptied in two years and therefore had new names with old faces on driver's licenses and so on, leading Leah to a California location where she was able to get three of them in one fell swoop. Seriously? An illegal operation not once emptied-out incriminating trash in two years? Bullshit. Never did this executor Leah call out to these guys and offer them a chance to surrender. Never did she alert other cops or the FBI to their location si they could be brought to justice. Never once was she drawn-on first, and forced to shoot to defend herself. Time after time, she simply and cold-bloodedly murdered them, despite there being nothing in her history to suggest she would be that kind of person, nor was there any real triggering event which set her on the road to becoming a serial killer. And in the end she paid no price for her own crimes.

It was too much to take seriously. I can't commend this book at all.

The Gifting By KE Ganshert

Rating: WARTY!

This is a supernatural story about a world where science rules and supernatural belief is frowned upon, but where, of course, this one girl has inherited from her grandmother the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Naturally no one told her she has this power, and she thinks she's going crazy. Because this is YA, she is of course completely and unrealistically ostracized because of this one freak-out she has when she and some fellow teens are playing with a Ouija board.

I don't normally read stuff like this, but it's been a while and this one seemed quite interesting; unfortunately, it immediately seemed to be going down the same road to Tropeville that YA writers all-too-often follow like a bunch of blind sheep. This author appears no different, sporting the usual YA fear of being different, and thereby ironically becoming in a real way, the very character she writes about!

The book was a free loss-leader for a series, but I can't generate interest in a series that's written this poorly and with so many clichés in it. It's YA, and in my extensive experience is already a mark against it. Worse, it's in first person, a voice which often irritates me far more than it entertains me in stories.

It seems to be a rule of YA writing that everything is black and white: there can be no room for gray areas or nuance in these stories. Consequently, Tess is so ostracized that her family leaves the area and moves to Northern California where, her parents say, there's an institute that can help her. Her parents must be rolling in money because this whole transition takes only three weeks from Tess's incident to abandoning their old house and moving into a new one! Wow! Privilege much?

The author describes the move: "we jettisoned across the country." That makes zero sense. 'Jetted across the country' would have made sense or even, "we jettisoned ourselves across the country." Earlier she'd written something about 'Judo chopping' her brother for some remark he'd made, but Judo is not a 'chopping' sport. If she'd said 'karate chopping' that would have meant something, but not with Judo, which is a throwing sport a little bit like wrestling. It's not hard to get these things right, and you have to wonder about a writer's dedication when simple mistakes like this are so readily made.

The author makes no secret of the fact that she's something of a born-again believer and her bizarre detestation of science comes through in her writing and spoils the story which felt a bit like she was preaching a sermon rather than relating an entertaining tale of the supernatural. It's so strident at times that it's off-putting and it ruins her writing.

It wouldn't have been so bad if she wasn't so very wrong! Those who believe in these things, talk about having faith because it's not something science can measure, but this is bullshit. If the supernatural world (which I do not believe in, by the way) purportedly has any impact on the real world, then in order to do so it must cause change in the real world in order for it to act or to be detected, and that's something science can measure, quantify and study. There never has been any such evidence.

The believers themselves admit this by repeatedly - and throughout history - making excuses for their god's total absenteeism and inaction! They talk all the time about how we must act. "God helps those who help themselves," they cry, which sounds truly selfish to me, to say nothing of utterly lacking the very faith believers profess they have, but this small part is true: because we help ourselves, no god ever has to do anything! LOL!

That conveniently explains away why no god ever shows! And how we browbeat ourselves: if we succeed, then it's a god's success! If we fail, then it's our failure! How pathetic is that? The Old Testament is full of stories of the ancient Hebrews fighting foes. No god ever helped them to win. This for a supposedly peace-loving religion, but whenever the Hebrews won a victory, it was because they were the chosen people blessed by a god. Whenever they got their ass kicked it was because they were unworthy sinners and direly needed to repent. I call horse-shit on such self-serving and deluded lies.

The fact is that Bible and other religious literature throughout the world is rife with stories describing how people did the work that the god really ought to have done! They did this precisely because there was no god to do it, and this same 'epiphany' runs rampant today! If there were such a thing as gods, we would never find ourselves in the position of always having to do the work! This and the complete lack of any positive evidence for a god or an afterlife is why I do not believe. I'm sorry that writers like this one do not have a sounder scientific education; if they did, they would not make the mistakes this author has made.

But this isn't a review of the author, it's a review of the book and that is sadly lacking. As I mentioned, it's far too full of trope and follows far too many other writers telling pretty much the same story with a tweak-tweak here and a twerk-twerk there. What I long for is the story that steps off that worn-out path and dares to tread where no author has gone before. This novel wasn't anywhere close, and I could not continue reading it. I can't commend it based on the portion I did read which was a recipe for disaster: one more half-baked than well-done.

Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola

Rating: WARTY!

This novel was mentioned in a biography I am reading, and which will be reviewed in the near future. I found it interesting, because it's an historical novel that was written at the time, so to speak, and therefore had a lot of authenticity even though it's fiction.

The only problem is that it was written in French and I had a modern English translation, so it lost something in that, and there was some confusion about what to translate. Naturally, the names of people and places remain in French, but while on the one hand they maintained the French currency: sous, centimes, and francs, they translated measurements into imperial. I didn't get that! Did the translator think American audiences are so dumb they can't figure out what a metre is?

The story started out interestingly enough, with 20-year-old Denise Baudu arriving in Paris from the country, and finding herself with impoverished relatives. She is quickly forced to find work, and ends up as a sales assistant at a huge department store named Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise). Here she is subject to such persistent cruelty from the existing assistants who seem to universally torture her, and deride her that the reading became tedious. It felt like reading a modern YA novel!

My ebook reader told me there were over a thousand screens, and I had made it barely to the halfway point when she got rather unjustly fired from her job. Maybe the story picked up after that, but by that point I was so uninterested in pursuing it that I had not the heart to keep reading. I really didn't care what became of Denise.

On the one hand she was cruelly abused, but on the other she was a profoundly stupid woman who let her profligate brother walk all over her, and she simply isn't the kind of character I'm interested in reading about. Seeing no sign of any real change in circumstances by the half-way point, I quit and decided to try something else that might entertain me better. Life is too short to put up with dissatisfying literature!

So I'm done with Émile Zola, and I cannot commend this novel based on what I read of it.

The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

Rating: WORTHY!

This book sounded quite interesting and although it wanders from the octopus often to delve into other topics, it always comes back to the main one and overall, despite an issue or two, I enjoyed this audiobook, read by the author, and commend it as a worthy read. It's for the most part well written, although a bit sentimental and anthropomorphizing at times, and the author has a pleasant and enjoyable reading voice.

The story covers her falling in love with the octopuses (octopods if you must, never octopi), at the Boston Aquarium, and since they're so short-lived - the Pacific giant octopus, which is the mainstay of this book, lives only for four years or so at most, and is biologically programmed to die after caring for the thousands of eggs that she lays. In the main, there were three of these animals discussed throughout the book: Athena, Kali, and Karma, but others were also touched upon - sometimes literally!

At one point I had to question the purpose of bringing these animals from the wild into a zoo to be put on display. There was this one relatively young octopus they named Kali, who featured in a large part of the book. Overnight, she managed to get out of this new tank she'd just been put into that same day, and she died of dehydration and suffocation on the floor at night.

There was a small gap in back of the tank where the water pipe went in, to keep the water refreshed, and she somehow squeezed through that. You have to wonder how intelligent these critters really are when they deliberately leave a safe environment to go into the open air through a two- or three-inch gap. The thing that really bothered me though, was the sheer number of accounts in this book, of this kind of thing happening repeatedly, affecting one species after another. Frankly it was irresponsible of the captors of these animals not to have seen to their welfare better than they did and I'm sorry the author didn't seem angry about it. She was more like, 'Oh well, there goes another octopus. Bring a fresh one in.' It's a little cruel to phrase it like that, but honestly, that was sometimes how it felt to me.

Obviously caring for animals is not an exact science, and things can go wrong. I can imagine if these animals were kept by private owners there would be all kinds of stupid and thoughtless mistakes made and animals dying, but this is the Boston Aquarium staffed by seasoned professionals and the number of incidents was disturbing, like for example, when this electric eel got from its tank into a neighboring one where it electrocuted two prized fish in that tank.

Seriously, did these people never consider keeping the tanks completely isolated from one another? Keeping secure lids on them? At least giving a nod and a wink to Murphy's Law? The saddest thing is that it felt like none of them learned anything from past experience and were therefore condemned to repeat their mistakes. This is incompetence, plain and simple. I sincerely hope other zoos and aquaria take more care.

I can also imagine that Kali's death was an emotional moment for the author after she'd bonded quite strongly with this particular octopus, but the rapidity with which she moved on to Kali's replacement, named Karma, of all things, rather cheapened her mourning period. It was at that point that she put some stuff in the book aimed at justifying going through this parade of wild-captured octopuses.<./p>

She talked about the value of the education that the aquarium does, but she never said a word about pollution or climate change and whether or not the educational experience, for whatever it's worth, that random members of the public get in seeing these animals in captivity, ever really translates into any concrete results in terms of public awareness and support for combatting climate change, or pollution, or in increasing environmentalism.

The absence of something like that undercut the value of her words, because without knowing if that works and produces results it seems fatuous indeed to me to be so devil-may-care about capturing these animals from the wild and then seeing them die in foolish and thoughtless ways. Neither does it do any good to educate people that the giant pacific octopus is really cute, interesting, and harmless if they don't connect its habitat with a polluted and warming ocean. I found that annoying and inappropriate.

I had to ask myself why they aren't breeding these octopuses and repatriating their offspring back to the ocean, or using the bred-in-captivity offspring to populate zoos instead of capturing more from the oceans. That would help to make up for those that are dying in captivity, but she didn't say a word about that either! Overall I got the impression that she was so enamored of the animals that her thoughts really were not free enough to stray very much into the bigger picture, which was truly sad.

That said, the book was educational, although it could have gone a lot further, and it was entertaining. It gave me more of a picture of what's involved in maintaining an exhibit in an aquarium and in how octopuses interact with novelty - including humans sticking their arms into the tanks. It said a lot less about what I was interested in: how intelligent (or dumb!) these animals truly are or what efforts are being made to measure and test that intelligence. I'd hoped for more. This was very much a puff piece - a PR exercise for octopods - but I was reasonably satisfied with what I got, so on that basis I rate it a worthy read.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is one of several l've seen come out recently picking over the bleached bones of The Wizard of Oz. Rather than re-write that story, this one comes in as a prequel, detailing The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. It's also not aimed at children by any means: it's very much an adult novel. The witch is named Elfaba from LFB (Lyman Frank Baum) and is born, after her mother was raped, with green skin and is much despised. Way to make a pregnant woman who was raped feel like her child might be worth keeping, Maguire. She meets Glinda when they both go off to college and Glinda is presented much more as an evil witch there than is Elfaba.

But I tired of this quickly. The writing did not interest me and I gave up on it before getting very far. Life is far too short to stick with a novel that doesn't grab you from the off, so I let go and moved on. I can't commend this based on what I read of it. It was slow and uninteresting and offered nothing to engross me.

Pussey by Daniel Clowes

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this graphic novel via a movie called Ghost World, which I really enjoyed. Once I discovered it came from a graphic novel, I requested that and this one to follow up. I am sorry to report I was disappointed in both. This one appealed because it promised, in the blurb (and we all know how blurbs lie) to be a satire about the comic book industry. It failed. I should have guessed from the title that it was going to be a fail, but I'm always hopeful that my more cynical and pessimistic side will be disappointed. In this case it was not.

The blurb for this one claimed it was "A vicious satire of pop culture and the commerce of art," and claimed it was "a brutal and scathing peek into the insular, pathetic world of the comic book industry," and also that it goes about "mercilessly skewering the business and medium of comics, bouncing from art to commerce to culture high and low." Well, none of that applies.

It's actually a puerile male-centric view of life that has little or nothing to do with comics. The artwork was scratchy and ugly, and the overall look was far too busy to be pleasing to the eye. Often there was more text than art, which makes this in some parts more like an illustrated novel than a graphic one. The story wasn't funny or interesting and I quickly gave up reading it. I can't commend it.

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this via a movie called Ghost World, which I really enjoyed. Once I discovered that had been derived from a graphic novel, I requested that from the library along with one other work by this same author. I am sorry to report I was disappointed in both. The sad truth is that I often am disappointed by the written version of something I first encountered via TV or movies. I'm always hopeful but the hopes are too often dashed!

Ghost World, the movie, told an amusing and entertaining story about two disaffected high school grads who seemed to have neither volition nor ambition. These girls were drifting through life without goal or direction. One of them, Rebecca, was the more motivated of the two and was slowly moving toward living in her own apartment. These girls had been friends forever and the apparent aim was that they would share the apartment, but the other girl, Enid, was a complete slacker and rather unpleasant at times. The thing is though, that the movie made them seem like friends - even like sisters in that they were always there for each other even as sometimes, they fought or even screwed each other over.

The graphic novel wasn't like that at all. The artwork was unpleasant, and the meanness of Enid, the main character of the two leading characters, was a turn-off. She wasn't likeable at all and the ending was perfect in that she disappeared. In the movie the ending was amusing in that she disappeared. She was prickly in the movie, but you could at least see where she was coming from, and feel some sympathy for her. The comic made no mention of the two having any idea of moving into an apartment together.

There was no relationship in the graphic novel with the character played by Steve Buscemi in the movie. There was no ongoing relationship with the guy who sat at the bus stop on the route that had long since been closed. All of these things made the movie human and enjoyable, but all were glaringly absent from the graphic novel. In short, the movie was almost a different story, only tangentially connected with the novel. The move was the better for it. I'm done with Daniel Clowes.

Witch by Elisabetta Gnone, Alessandro Barbucci, Barbara Canepa

Rating: WARTY!

Written by Gnone, with art by Barbucci and Canepa, this series is about a group of girls who find out they're the guardians of the tediously trope elements of Air, Earth, Energy, Fire, and Water. Had I realized this was a Disney series and that the creators had been denied ownership by the Disney Dictatorship, I would never have picked it up. As it goes, I was pleased that I had paid nowhere near full price for this. This volume was misleading, because although it says Volume 1 on the cover, reading more closely, which like an idiot I did not do, this volume 1 is part two! Then why not call it volume 2? Or episode 2 or something?

Well, it turns out that would breech the comic code whereby you're not allowed to know where the fuck you are in a series if you come into it as an ongoing concern. For some reason publishers are determined to make it as hard as possible to figure out exactly where you should start and in what order you should proceed. Endless rebooting of a series, reinventing it, retconning it, rebooting previously dead characters, endless returns of long-beaten villains, and all that crap are some of the reasons why I'm seriously losing interest graphic novels unless they really are one-off, stand-alone stories.

Nevertheless, this one did look interesting and was on close out, so I figured I had little to lose beyond a couple of bucks. I started in on it hopefully, but now I wish I'd spent the money on ice cream instead! So I was misled by seeing 'Volume 1' and overlooking 'Part 2 of Nerissa's Revenge'. That was my bad, and so this was not the first volume, but somewhere in the series. Despite that it wasn't hard to get into; it's just that it wasn't interesting. Instead of getting into the main story about the magic and all that, this volume wandered off into girlish drama, moodiness, and bitchiness, and it was tedious to read. I can see that crap in real life if I want to. I don't need to read about it in a graphic novel.

I have to add a note here about how disappointed I am with Canepa's art. Not in this book, but I've seen other examples and for a female artist to draw sexualized and exploitative images of young females like she does in some of her work is inexcusable.

But back to this book. I should have guessed with Disney that it would not be anything worth taking seriously, but you live and learn and the more I learn about Disney the less I like about Disney. Obviously this novel isn't aimed at me, but I don't think this kind of thing shoudl be aimed at anyone. It's possible to write a story that, while directed at a certain segment, is interesting enough to appeal to a wider audience, and also plays tot he strengths of the core audience, not to it's weakness, tropes, and clichés.

Authors who don't recognize this, risk becoming a niche item. Not that Disney cares. They can spit authors out and bring in new ones on a whim, and they have the legal power to kill lawsuits brought by those same authors without even losing their stride toward another ten billion dollar year, so why on Earth would they care? This graphic novel sucked.

Van Life by Nicolette Dane

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"So we're effectively on the lamb?" Should be lam without the B! They're not actually riding a baby sheep!
"Off near the hollow and it's vast decline," No, not 'it is vast decline', but 'its vast decline' the vast decline belonging to it.

I saw this author listed in a daily book flyer I get and the title she had on offer was interesting, but it was only listed as being available at Amazon. Why authors limit themselves and sell their soul to Amazon like this I cannot for the life of me begin to grasp, but I won't do business with Amazon, not even if the book is free, so I looked on B&N for it and that one wasn't there, but this one was, so I decided to try it instead.

I was disappointed, so I guess I won't go and read the other book even if it becomes available through an acceptable outlet. The writing felt simplistic and amateurish and the descriptions of sexual encounters were laughable, the author squeamishly refusing to use real words for body parts and instead inventing absurd terms, such as "pink pellet" for clitoris. No, not 'terms', 'turds'! I'm sorry but I can't take any writer seriously who does that.

The story is about this woman named Julia who gave up her corporate life to travel around the country (USA of course, because everyone knows that there cannot possibly be any story worth telling that occurs outside these jealously-guarded borders). She drives an old van which she's slowly fitting-out with amenities such as a table, a solar panel so she can have fridge, a shower, and so on. She picks up temp jobs from time to time to finance her travels, but occasional part-time jobs such as a couple of afternoons a week in a bar hardly seem like they would earn her enough money to finance this kind of lifestyle! It would barely pay for gas, let alone food and any kind of other needs; however, I was willing to let that go for the sake of a good story.

At one stop in a town she's visited before, temping in a bar, Julia encounters a woman named Robyn who is upset because she just got laid off from her job. They sit and commiserate and get slightly drunk and Robyn goes back to Julia's place (she's housesitting on this occasion, as well as the bar job), and they end-up in bed together having unprotected sex. In short, they're idiots. You know it wouldn't hurt a writer, the story, or the readership, to put in a brief line about sexual histories there, or at least offer some sort of a nod and a wink to the fact that having sex with a stranger is potentially dangerous and even life-threatening!

More fool me, but I even let that go. This was made a lot easier by the fact that the descriptions of their intimate encounters I took to skipping because they were so boring. As you have to realize, the two of them end up traveling together. Robyn's justification is that she has to go to North Carolina to come out to her parents, because she never admitted to herself that she was a lesbian until she met Julia. I'd say she was bi since she had a fiancé prior to meeting Julia, but you know it's illegal to have a bi character in a novel like this. It has to be all or nothing, right?

Anyway, they set off on the journey and after encountering a seedy guy in Wal-Mart while shopping before turning in for the night, someone tries to break into their van, and Julia shoots him with this .22 gun she carries. So the assumption is that it was this guy they met. I began wondering if it was in fact Robyn's surprisingly placid, accepting, and compliant ex-fiancé who was the troublemaker here, but I could not be bothered to read this story long enough to actually find out.

So these idiots, instead of reporting this incident to the police, take off for the mountains, which again, shows how stupid they are. They end up camping in some national forest area. The next morning, Robyn walks down from their camp site to sit and watch the sun come up, but the description of this makes no sense. In order to get there to see that sunrise, she would have had to have walked downhill on a narrow trail in pitch darkness. Maybe she took a flashlight, but it doesn't say so. The author gives no indication that it was dark at all! Neither does it say it was still dark when Julia goes down there slightly later, to meet her. Despite the sun not yet having come up, there's no hint that Julia had to find her way in darkness or semi-darkness either!

After both of them are together down there, the author writes: "all while the sun moved up in the sky and began ushering the early dawn into the blue morning." I'm not sure exactly what she means by 'early dawn' coupled with 'blue morning', but to me, 'early dawn' means that Robyn went down there in complete darkness and at best Julia went in twilight, yet neither had a flashlight? This was really thoughtlessly-written. Clearly the author wanted to evoke a feeling, but she failed because she didn't actually put herself there and think through exactly what it would have been like. Either that or she conveyed it really badly! It was at this point that I said enough is enough.

I had let so much slip by that it became the straw that finally broke this camel's back. Based on these observations and negative feelings, I cannot commend this one as a worthy read. I've read some really good LGBTQIA books, but this was nowhere near good and I'm not even clear as to what kind of an audience a novel like this could be aimed at. Hopefully not one as stupid as the main characters in it!

How to Outline My Novel by Sussi Leclerc

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
"Lie to his teeth" - should be lie through his teeth!
"Some characters live double lives like Peter Parker doubling as Spiderman, Bruce Waine and Batman, Buffy Summers the vampire slayer, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde..." Couple of spelling errors in there (Wayne, Jekyll)

That's a great name to have: Sussi Leclerc, who I assume is a French author who did her own translation or maybe wrote it directly in English. It's good English for the most part, a hell of a lot better than (pardon) my French, but I have to say I found this book wanting in several areas. The thing is that while I was intrigued by the premise of the book (which curiously the disclaimer depicts as a work of fiction!), I've never heard of her. I'm far from an encyclopedia of author names, but I've reviewed well over three thousand books on my website and I'd never encountered this name even tangentially. When I looked her up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, I could find literally nothing she had written except a couple of books on how to write novels!

I have to wonder about a person who has no literary track record (unless all her work is in French and not available through two of the major outlets in the English speaking world), yet who promises to tell how to write a novel or, in this case, how to outline one. This seems to be par for the course for this kind of book though: they're always written by people you never heard of. It's very rare to have someone who is well-known - like Stephen King, for example - write a book about writing novels. Not that I'd read his, not being a fan!

If you go online and search for similar topics, such as 'how to write chapter one' for example, you will find the web is also populated with authors you may never have heard of offering advice (replete with cussing and foul language in one case, I'm sorry to report!). Maybe I just have it backwards and maybe those who write novels that become beloved are the worst teachers, and those who have apparently sold none are the best at explaining how to write something. That seems off to me, but what do I know?! I do know I shall never write a 'How To' book, rest assured!

But this is why I was intrigued and decided to review this particular one. Who knows? Maybe I can learn something. I'm always ready, but I should say up front that I'm not a fan of such books, because while you're reading endless books or attending lectures, seminars, and taking courses about writing, you're not actually writing anything yourself!

I'm a fan of reading, in great variety, what others have written and hoping, by a process of osmosis or something, that I can absorb into myself something of what made their book work, and maybe bring it out of me when writing something of my own. This has the same problem I mentioned above though: while you're reading, you're not writing! The thggn is that reading, these days, can be done anywhere, even on a ten-minute visit to the bathroom, or while waiting for a doctor's appointment, or on your lunch-break at work, if you have ebooks on your phone.

You can listen to books while driving, while cooking, while gardening, while exercising, and so on. You don't even need audiobooks to accomplish this these days since your phone will read an ebook to you; not ideally, but it works! At least on an iPhone. It's called VoiceOver and it's a pain, but once you learn to work with it, it does a decent job. The thing is though, you really need to spend at least as much time writing as you do reading.

The other problem with my technique is that one's own work risks becoming nothing more than a sorry clone of what others have written, and that's the most boring writing of all. I mean how many competition-based dystopian trilogies did Suzanne Collins inadvertently spawn when The Hunger Games became a thing? How many tedious vampire vs werewolf novels were tragically spewed-out in the wake of the twilight abomination, which for me signaled the imminent twilight of original novel writing? Such novels are tedious, and the thing is that neither Collins nor the woman who wrote that other novel and who shall remain nameless for her crimes, were copying anyone else (although you can argue that Collins was channeling Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, and the other story was in many ways a rip-off of Stoker's Dracula, but I'm not going to take that detour here.

So the real problem in reading lots of books is that you may fail distill something original from what you've been reading, and end up copying rather than learning the ropes. There is nothing worse than the tired parade of cloned YA novels we've seen over the last decade or two, and I feel that this is a weakness with this particular book, because it seems almost entirely focused on YA material, and in trying to set out rules for writing your own work, it's still playing into that same trope - rather like writing by numbers. That said, you can't simply write any old thing and expect people to embrace it as a literary masterpiece no matter how well it may be structured, because the sad truth is that far too many readers are like sheep in mindlessly buying into the clone publishing industry which rests entirely on woolly thinking.

I was right about this book teaching me something though! I quickly learned this startling revelation: "The main point is the antagonist wants the same thing as the hero, the exact same thing, only he means to get it the wrong way." I'm sorry. I don't have a degree in literature, but didn't Voldemort want to crush non-magicals whereas Harry Potter wanted to support them? Didn't the shark in Jaws want to eat people and the sheriff wanted to save them? Same for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park...and Hannibal Lecter for that matter. And is it so obvious that McMurphy wanted exactly the same thing as Nurse Ratched? Not! I'm sorry, but this struck me as completely off.

The book quickly launches into a series of chapters explaining what needs to happen in the matching chapters of your novel: chapter one should do this, chapter two that, and so on. The author does warn earlier in the book that your mileage may differ, and that in consequence, you may want to change things up a bit to match whatever it is that you're writing, but this 'by rote' (or in this case 'by wrote', maybe?!) approach seems to me to be problematical if people follow it too closely. I felt it was the wrong approach, and risked the reader writing far too rigid a novel in trying to follow this plan, at the potential cost of spoiling what otherwise might have been a free-flowing work of art.

For me this was a weakness. What if your chapters are shorter or longer? If your book has fifty short chapters then surely you can't accomplish the same thing in chapter one that the author advocates here. In such a case, you'd need to calculate the ratio of chapters and try to figure out what proportion of the book you need to get to before you can apply the specific chapter rules listed here. Percentages of the distance through your book would have been a wiser choice. The author did employ these a couple of times, but why not more often, I could not figure out; it would have been less rigid and made a lot more sense.

For me personally, the book advice was made worse by the steady diet of quotes from YA novels. I'm not a huge fan of YA although I've found many books in that category that I've enjoyed. The problem is that I've found far too many more that are precisely what this author appears to be advocating: pedantic cloning of what everyone else has done, and that makes for the most tedious reading material because your novel will sound exactly like every other YA novel in the genre, and what's to differentiate it then? This is not good writing and it sure as hell isn't going to lead to great literature (in the loosest sense of that word).

The author seemed to rotate around The Hunger Games (which I liked), Divergent (which I personally detest), Hex Hall, which I rather liked, but which isn't well known, The Coldest Girl in Cold Town which I've never heard of, a novel by a male author who I shall not identify by novel title or by name because I detest pretension in writing, and Daughter of Smoke and Bone which I liked.

There were others which I'm not listing here because they were mentioned less, but they suffered precisely the same problem: nearly all of them were YA! You will note that the bulk of these I listed are trilogies or series. Even though I liked the beginning volumes of Hex Hall and Daughter of Smoke and Bone, I never actually finished the series in each case because I grew bored; so despite liking some of them, it was annoying to have them constantly brought up.

Worse than this though was that these were all used in a positive sense. There were no negatives in this book! There were no examples of how not to outline your story or how to outline it in a non-standard way and still achieve the same effect. It was like this arbitrarily-structured pattern was the only way to go and I disagree. So do many other authors as judged from the huge variety of stories that are out there.

In this 'How To' book, there was no adjustment for example for short stories, novelettes, or novellas, nor was there any overarching view that could be taken if your novel is written as part of an arc - a trilogy (god forbid), for example. Naturally, you should write each volume with the same basic rules in mind, some of which are espoused here, but if your story is to stretch over three or (god forbid) more novels, then doesn't your overall outlining need to encompass those volumes too? That's a major reason why I found this so strange, to talk of only one volume and then use volume one of a trilogy as an example! It made no sense to me because volume one of any series is nothing more than a prologue. None of that was addressed here.

On a technical note I have to say that the copious quotations from the works listed (and others) and which I quickly took to skipping, were all done in an odd way. Instead of having the text inset to signify it was a block quote, the quotes appeared to be set in shaded squares. Maybe this would look fine in a print book, but in an ebook they didn't work so well. It was exacerbated on my phone because I always set my ebook readers to be a black page with light text rather than the other way around - a white screen with black print.

I do this because it conserves the battery, but it can produce very odd effects in books which try to go any way other than plain vanilla in their layout. What my mode of viewing did to the quotes from these various books was to set the background to little squares of pale gray, and the text to white, making the quotes pretty much illegible. As it happened in this case, this suited me: it made it easier to skip them! Note that these quotes gave major spoilers, so you might want to skip them too if you haven't read the book in question and plan on doing so.

In general the book felt like it had far too many persnickety rules and regulations, and it was far too 'busy' in appearance, making for an unpleasant read. I didn't like the approach it took, and I found it to be too set in its ways. So, while I wish the author all the best in her career, for these and other reasons listed, I have to say I was disappointed in the book, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Thornfruit by Felicia Davin

Rating: WARTY!

The cover if this book is misleading because it shows the title as two words whereas in the book itself it's a single word. Shame on the cover designer. I loved the title just like I loved the idea of the book - a fantasy LGBTQIA story. Not common, and the uncommon is what often attracts me even when it's a magical fantasy, which normally doesn't attract me. I have to say I was disappointed with it though, particularly with the non-ending. I knew going into this that it was the first of a series, and me and series do not get along. There have been very few series that have made sense to me or kept my interest, but I do live in hopes of finding another that I will enjoy.

Alas it was not this one. It's depressing to be so often disappointed. The main problem is that the story really went nowhere and took its sweet time doing it, so all we got was a prologue, not a real story in and of itself. It ended on a sort of a cliffhanger and I can't forgive an author for that. Not when they say, "Hey! Pay for another book and I'll tell you the story I promised to give you in this volume. Screw that! It's too mercenary for my taste and I despise authors who do that. There was also far too many characters popping in and out of the story to try and keep track of, and they began to run into one another and become indistinguishable after a while.

Although the series name, "The Gardener's Hand" did not register at all because it had zero whatsoever to do with this volume from what I could see, I liked the title because it perfectly encapsulated the story of these two girls who meet in the fantasy land. They were an interesting couple to begin with, and for a while I was falling in love with them, but the more the story dragged on with nothing really happening, and it seemingly going nowhere, the more disillusioned I became, and in the end I honestly didn't care any more what happened to these two girls.

Despite intriguing me and leading me to read this novel, the book blurb, I have to say, lied! It begins by claiming that main character Alizhan can't see faces, but that's not true. She sees perfectly well, but she can't make sense of people's emotions from their faces. There is a real medical condition similar to this, called Prosopagnosia, but Alizhan doesn't quite suffer that. Her problem is that a face is simply a blank arrangement of eyes, nose and mouth, and she can read nothing from it. She can read minds though, so the blurb did get that right. Evreyet Umarsad aka 'Ev', is the other main character. She has no special talent and no friends because she's part Adappi - meaning her father is from Adappyr, and her kind are not well-liked. She lives with mom and dad in her mother's homeland close to the large port city of Laalvur.

Alizhan works as a professional thief and mind-reader for a city leading "family" headed by Iriyat who seems to have a soft spot for Alizhan, who has no idea of friends either until she begins to connect with Ev, and the two are drawn to each other. I liked that their relationship was a slow burn to begin with, but the more I read of the story the more I realized that this burn was so slow that it was nothing more than a fizzle. It goes nowhere in this volume, and I was truly disappointed that they failed to make a better connection than they did. I expected more and resented that the reader was denied this. That, the slowness of the pace, and the non-ending, are why I cannot rate this as a worthy read.

This is a problem with series. What ought to be said in one volume is puffed and padded, and spread out over three volumes and it becomes a tedious read. That's exactly what has happened here. The whole plot is of Iriyat's experiments on kids who are just like Alizhan despite her apparent attachment to Alizhan herself. It should not have taken a whole novel to get there and it really dragged at times. Just when I thought something was going to happen, or change, or move, we got served more of the same, and the story went into the doldrums again, becalmed with no wind in the sails. It was annoying and was certainly a case where 'rock the boat' ought to have been the watchword. I can't commend this and I'm done with this series and this author.