The Self-Love Revolution by Virgie Tovar

Rating: WARTY!

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

Subtitled "Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color," I'm not sure this book was really radical except in the author's expression of the sentiments which have been expressed before, so this brings nothing new to the discussion other than the author's personal reminiscences. Virgie Tovar sounds like she might be a fun person to know and to hang with, but the book has the habit of coming off as strident and preachy at times. It was very outspoken and opinionated and while there's nothing wrong per se with that, and even though I sincerely support the book's larger aims, in the end I couldn't bring myself in good faith to commend this as a worthy read because it contains a little bit too much of anecdote as opposed to hard hitting facts, and I felt that this often undermined the author's arguments. It also has some misleading information.

The book assumes a specific audience, so it's like I wasn't invited to read it, and while I understand that it's important to target your readers, it felt weird to me to read: “I was a little older than you are—about twenty-five—when I did this.” No! She's nowhere near older than I am! That wasn't a big issue. It was amusing, though! The same kind of thing happened when I read: “‘No’ wasn’t a serious part of my vocabulary until I was, like, twentyone. It totally changed my life in the best way. I’m kind of jealous that you get to learn this before I did, but I’m glad I get to be the one who tells you about it.“ Nope! But fine for her intended audience even if it felt a bit exclusionary.

One of the real problems I had with this book was that it's all about being non-judgmental, and I support that aim fully, but even as it was saying this, the book itself sounded very judgmental at times. For example, in one part I read, “Some people talk about inheritances, like a piece of property or a really nice pair of earrings or your great grandmother’s silverware or your weird auntie’s salt and pepper shaker collection.“ Isn't describing your relative as ‘Weird auntie’ judgmental? I mean based on the fact that all we're presented with in evidence is her collection of salt and pepper shakers, that doesn't strike me as anywhere near sufficient to convict her! It felt like a case of "Pot, meet Kettle!"

On that same topic, I read, “I had a really big crush on my classmate (classmate's name redacted by me - Ian)...He only liked skinny girls and he was really mean to me.” The problem with this is that we have only the author’s story here! That's not to say the author is making this up, but there's another perspective that we never get to hear. Suppose she had this crush and was making herself obnoxious about it? I'm not saying this is true, but the way this anecdote is told, it leaves the person relating it open to the accusation that perhaps the recipient of this crush may have considered that for her, 'no' didn't mean 'no', and found that only rudeness could repel her unwanted attention.

Maybe that's the case, maybe it's exactly as the author reports; more likely, it's somewhere in between - six of one and half a dozen of the other, as they say. I don't know, and this is why this goes back to what I said about the evidence offered here being personal anecdote a lot of the time. Without a larger sample, it's really hard to exclude biased reporting and it makes it difficult for the author to defend herself against an accusation that she has a personal gripe - which still would be valid, but which would also serves to undermine her making a larger case.

As to misinformation? At one point the author writes: "I didn’t know about all the research that says that skipping meals is bad for people.” Yet nowhere is 'all the research' cited or referenced. Again, we have personal anecdote. I would have agreed with her if she'd said irregular habits (whether in regard to eating or to sleeping) are bad for you, but skipping over-indulgence is actually shown to be a good thing and is supported by research! The Harvard Health Blog is hardly a peer-reviewed science paper, but it discusses such papers and I'd take their word over anecdote. This article:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156
supports reading I've done elsewhere which argues convincingly that intermittent - i.e. regular short fasting - is actually good for your health as long as you eat healthy meals along with it and don't go overboard with the fasting part of it. The author of this book rejects any kind of fasting out of hand, saying at one point, “‘Fasting’ is not a good idea." But we all fast when we're asleep! That's why the first meal of the day is called break-fast! It doesn't hurt to have a period of time - other than when you're sleeping! - during which you avoid food, and eat regular meals the rest of the time. It's not hard to do and it pays dividends (now that's a personal anecdote!). I'm not a Muslim, but I tend to eat very minimally if at all during the day whether it's Ramadan or not, and to eat whatever I like in the evening - but let me qualify that by saying I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and little junk food. All I can say is that it works for me.

While I completely agree with the author that most diets - especially commercial ones and fad diets - are completely worthless - most people put the weight back on and many even gain more weight after than they had before - not all attempts to lose weight are failures. What's a guaranteed fail is dieting like the author says she did: ”When I was eighteen, I attempted a more drastic version of my sixth-grade summer diet. I decided I was going to try to eat nothing— maybe a spoonful of food a day.“ Now honestly, that’s not a diet, that’s just rank stupidity, but because you make a truly dumb decision when you're eighteen doesn't mean that all attempts to diet are stupid. It's just as judgmental to abuse people who wish to diet as it is to judge people who choose to love their body as it is.

Another example of a personal opinion injected into this work is “Food is good, not bad.“ Seriously? It honestly depends on the food. If you chose to eat nothing but cheesecake all day, every day, then yes that 'food' is bad. Choosing to eat healthily isn't ever bad, but the author assumes all food, all cravings, anything you want to put in your mouth is equal and that's dangerously misleading.

The author rightly decries the fashion circus and the cosmetic mega-business, but she conveniently ignores the agribusiness-industrial complex as you might call it, which is dedicated to selling us calories and doesn't give a damn if those calories come as sugary, fatty or salty foods, all of which are unhealthy if not controlled. In a study of almost 6,000 Coronavirus patients, ones with poor outcomes nearly always had underlying conditions, and 41% of those fatalities were at least in part because the patient was obese. Body positivity is the only smart way to go, but that doesn't mean becoming willfully blind to health considerations.

Yes, the author gets it right in that your body does need sugar. It does need carbs. It does need fat. The issue she conveniently ignores is that your body doesn't need the massive quantities of these things that we can readily get from junk food today. Here's where a good science education comes in handily, specifically the science of evolution. During most of humankind's history, it was hard for us to get these things (sugar, fat, salt) in our diet, so our bodies craved them because getting enough back then was the problem and a craving helped to satisfy that important biological need by driving us to seek out such important parts of a naturally restricted diet.

Here and now, in 2020, we do not have any problem at all getting all the sugar, fat, and salt we could ever dream of. That doesn't make it healthy to continue to crave it and eat it every chance we get. Quite the opposite. It's dangerous and unhealthy to suggest all food is equal and we ought to feel free to eat as much as we want, of whatever we want, whenever we want. It's downright irresponsible and this was the main reason why I started turning against this book even thought I would dearly have liked to support it.

The author claims that there have always been fat people, and she's right in a limited sense. What she conveniently ignores though, is that there has been a fat epidemic over the last half century or so. Obesity rates among US adults, for example, have pretty much tripled since the sixties:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228640/

This is something new and different. It's not business as usual as the author claims, but we're in danger of complacently letting it become so. What changed is still being argued over, but the easy access to cheap calories - and bad calories - i.e. those coming from junk food promoted by food manufacturers who spend millions lobbying Congress and the senate - is one leading candidate for bringing about this change.

The author claims that “We actually all know how to eat right.” but we manifestly do not. No one is born with the inbuilt instinct of how to eat right. That's something we learn - or do not - from our parents or guardians, our family, our peers, and from movies and TV, from advertising, and increasingly from social media these days where there are paid influencers for everything, and they don't always make it clear who is paying them to promote whatever it is they're pushing. Without having a solid foundation in healthy eating from the off, we're doomed to fail at whatever it is we think we're succeeding at or embracing.

At one point the author mentions “the white standard was the one I felt more pressure to meet” But nowhere is this explicitly defined. We can divine from reading elsewhere that it's intended to be a slim pretty female, but slim pretty females come in all races. They're not just white. This is a racist comment that seems to have roots in the author's own personal history. Again it's a personal anecdote, not the result of an impartial study.

She was on more solid ground when she was talking about how much of what people of color have traditionally been subjected to has been white: the movies, TV, and so on, but that depends on what you choose to watch - and it is a choice. A person who listens to a particular type of music - say country - might conclude there's a white standard whereas someone who watches rap is forced to conclude that there's a black standard. The same goes for watching many sports, such as football or basketball in particular. The encouraging thing is that there's a bigger diversity of media now than there's ever been so it's not quite as bad as it was, and we can personally choose what to accept from it and what to reject. Anyone who truly loves their body will realize this, and take all this promotion with a pinch of whatever.

That said, there is still a long way to go. An article on Huffpost:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.huffpost.com/entry/why-do-young-girls-hate-their-bodies_b_57f4cf08e4b0ab1116a54ca9/amp)
titled "Why Do Young Girls Hate Their Bodies?“ has (or had when I copied this URL) ads showing rail-thin women modeling clothes! That’s how hypocritical we are. A better and more positive article is this one:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/articles/2018-07-30/what-do-women-with-positive-body-images-have-that-others-dont

In terms of the general appearance of this book, the publisher once again seems to have allowed an author's book to be put directly into Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion mangle, and out came a noticeably garbled text. Fortunately it was legible for the most part if one ignores the random colorization of the text here and there, but there were issues with headers being interspersed with the text so that I read, for example, the following: “...but when she wasn’t in bed she’d be running around with uncorrected proof...” Now that's amusing, but the 'uncorrected proof' part is the page header which ought to have been removed well-before this book was ever allowed to become Kindling, which is what Amazon typically does to text.

In another section I read, “I never got more compliments from others than when I was Healthy and thin are not the same thing. starving myself.” I think 'Healthy and thin are not the same thing.' was intended as a heading, and Amazon managed to interleave it with the body of the text. That same heading was repeated right after this as well. Way to go, Amazon, you clowns! Not that Jeff Bezos, who has profited from COVID-19 to the tune of $24 billion so I read yesterday - while millions of Americans are now out of work - actually cares.

I personally have zero time for Amazon and I refuse to do business with them. I don't care that it likely costs me book sales. Someone has to take a stand and put quality over profit. Just remember that unless your text is pretty much plan vanilla, Amazon will dice and julienne it in very inventive ways, and especially if it contains images! Hopefully if this particular book is ever issued as an ebook, these problems will be fixed. This was an ARC after all.

So in conclusion, I support many of the sentiments expressed in this book. I dream of the day when perceptions, attitudes, and opinions change. I just don't feel this book will help as much as I wish it would. I felt the sentiments could have been expressed better and with a less blinkered perspective. We do need to be less judgmental and more supportive of people who are, in the author's word, 'fat', but we need to be wise in how we convey this information to people to help them wisely choose their course ahead, rather than brow-beatign them to accept 'my way' or offering them the highway as the only alternative. BTW, fatphobia isn't really a good word, although it's obviously gaining currency. The actual term is Cacomorphobia, even if it probably sounds worse! I wish the author all the best in her career but I can't support this expression of it for the reasons I've cited.

Peak Plague Mystery by SA Fearn

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This story appealed to me because it's one of the very, very few set in my home county (not one of the home counties!) in England. I'm not talking about books that mention Derbyshire. Jane Austen seemed to have a fondness for it, and Chatsworth House, in central Derbyshire, is often used as an outdoor reference for a country manor in those period films. The only other novel I can ever recall reading was one I read years ago about vampires. This one is nothing like that, although it deals with something quite deadly, and very real: something that's popularly known as Bubonic plague - although it can surface in two other forms , or simply, The Black Death!

Contrary to popular perception, this plague did not die out in Medieval times. It's still very much alive and well. Over a thousand people get the plague every year. Just last year (2019 as this is written) two people died of Pneumonic plague in Mongolia. At least since the year 2000, there have been cases every year in the USA. Derbyshire had its very own outbreak at a place called Eyam (pronounced 'eem' which is located in the Derbyshire Dales, close to the area where this novel is set.

To my knowledge it's not been since in Britain since then, but in 1665, Bubonic plague was transported from London on a roll of cloth that was infested by the vector of the disease: fleas. It began to wreak havoc on Eyam. Untreated with antibiotics, plague can have a 60% mortality rate and Eyam wasn't a very large village. It still isn't, with a population of around a thousand. The saddest case I think, is that of Elizabeth Hancock. She somehow managed to remain uninfected. Perhaps she had a natural immunity, but her entire family: six children and her husband, died in the space of a week. I've visited their graves.

This novel is set in the Peak District, a beautiful area in the northwest bulge of Derbyshire. Four young friends take an interest in the strange death of a girl who was at the time of their own age, but from a few years before. The death was ruled a suicide, but Adam, his sister Chloe, and their friends Adele and Jonathan start to realize that Rebecca Johnson did not kill herself. She was murdered in a cover-up. Now the four of them are at risk because of what they know!

Call me biased if you like, but I enjoyed this story. It's adventurous, original, educational, engrossing, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Don't Mess With This Witch by Liz Lorow

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata:
“...not a plant like a Fichus or Gardenia.” A fichu is a square of lace used to preserve modesty on low-cut gowns in the 18th and 19th century. I believe the author meant ficus.

“I had no control over a porcupine wandering into my neighborhood in rural England. They live there." No, they don’t! Britain has no porcupines! There are porcupines around the Mediterranean, but southern Europe is as far north as they get. Britain has hedgehogs which are unrelated to porcupines and much more cute. I had a couple as pets growing up there.

“...he flexed his bicep.” Doubtful! Biceps, yes, bicep? Not so much! I don't see how you can have a character who almost chides someone for not using 'whom' and then doesn't know that the bicep is only one part of the biceps which is the muscle that gets flexed! In another part of the novel I read, "Recommended? By whom?" Seriously, no one but the most pretentious people use that in speech, and you certainly don't hear it from a 16-year old in juvie.

“You’re itching is driving you crazy” - confusion of 'your' and 'you’re'.

Reading this book was like a roller-coaster in terms of my wanting to rate it a worthy read, and not. I kept changing my mind and I had multiple issues with it. In the end that;s what decided it. I read the thing the whole way through - except for the epilogue (I don't do epilogues or prologues) and I didn't hate it and in general the writing wasn't awful either, and I enjoyed some of the characters, but in the end, there were so many issues that I can't in good conscience rate it positively.

I like stories where a team gets together to achieve an end. I just published one myself, so I was a bit disappointed that what seemed to be a team forming here ended-up not becoming one. On the other hand I liked the main character - for the most part. She was smart and amusing and strong, which is a big plus for me, but countering that were the parts of the book where she was effectively infantilized by the trope YA guy named, of all things, Logan. I could have done without him. So that's the way this story hit me all along - one time I was up for it, the next I was having grave misgivings about it.

At one point Logan, the main character's love interest, says, “I was raised to respect and protect women." This turned me off the story because it became yet another YA story where the girl is the maiden in distress and the big tough guy is the white knight coming to save and protect her! Genevieve, the main character, needed no one's protection. I can see a guy saying that - guys do say those kinds of things, but the fact that there was no push-back from Genevieve was what was wrong. We need to get past this idea that women are universally weak and helpless and in every case, need a strong man to take care of them. It's that kind of thinking that leads to abuses: putting women on a pedestal on the one hand and slapping them with the other.

In another instance, I read, "Logan leapt to his feet and extended his hand to help me up." Again this suggests Genevieve is the weak one who needs the help. I know some people might view this as merely being gentlemanly, but unless you have a later scene where Genevieve extends a hand to help Logan up, this bias against women being capable of taking care of themselves is really an abuse. If Logan respects women, why does he constantly treat them like they're always in need of help? It felt sexist, especially in this case, given how powerful Genevieve truly is. In another instance, Logan said, "I don't want you going anywhere without me...Someone needs to be with you to protect you." Again with the infantilization. it was almost as nauseating as how many times characters rolled their eyes in this book or the incessant number of times Genevieve opened or closed her eyes. It was like she was doing that constantly!

Her power was also an issue in that she felt rather like a 'special snowflake' - like she never had to work for a thing; everything she tried to do was a great success, powers came to her just when she needed them, and she always had the right spell for the job despite her evidently substandard education on the topic. It was a bit too much. She never had to struggle for anything.

I liked the idea of witches in juvie. That's what drew me to the story in the first place. It was different, original, and interesting. The students were captive, but they were expected to follow an academic schedule - and they had a surprising amount of freedom, but their magical powers were somehow suppressed so they could not use them - and yes, these witches seemed more like magicians than witches. Not that the book description helped, since it wasn't at all honest in describing what happened: "Now the administration needs Genevieve’s help to find a student/inmate who escaped." No, they don't! They never asked her to do that. She did it all by herself!

That didn't detract from the story for me, but it does reinforce my own tack in avoiding Big Publishing™ because the people who write the back cover blurbs seem never to have actually read the story they're describing, and worse, the people who illustrate the front cover seem never to have read it either. I know those who do not self-publish have little say in their covers or book blurbs, which is why I pay zero attention to the front cover when deciding which books I want to read. They're highly misleading, and I laugh at authors who have dramatic cover reveals because they're so pathetic and juvenile. In this case, the cover showed a young woman with straight black hair, yet the antagonist in this novel has wavy brown hair. I honestly don't see how you can confuse the two. I guess it wasn't edgy enough for the cover photographer, huh? They'd rather misrepresent it.

But enough about the cover. I read a book for the content, not for the pretty picture on the front. One of the first issues I had with this, other than the silly trope of having spells cast in rhyme, was the fact that this juvenile witch detention center had an off-limits library! What? Why? Why would they put dangerous books in a detention center that could potentially enable these witches to escape? It made zero sense. A regular library? Yes! An off-limits one? No!

Though this wasn't a high-school, another issue (other than purloining 'muggles' from JK Rowling and changing one letter to make it somehow 'different') was the trope high-school bully, in the form of a teacher who routinely brutalized the children by subtly undermining their education, and using their failures to add months onto their sentences. I know there needs to be a villain in these stories, but this felt like lazy writing, with a teacher having that much power and evidently no review or oversight. It just felt like too much.

One of the issues I have with magical novels is that the authors tend not to think things through and truly envision what a world with magical powers would be like - even one where magic is kept hidden from the public). With few exceptions, they tend to have the world be exactly the way it is today, just with the addition of the magicians, or witches, or whatever, and it really doesn't work very well.

For example, in this story, there was a section where Genevieve says, “At least I didn’t live in Centralia, Pennsylvania. That town is deserted because of a coal fire that’s been burning underground since nineteen sixty-two." This is true. In fact recently, there was an article on CNN's website that talked about a stretch of abandoned highway there which has been literally covered in graffiti and has become a tourist attraction, but the authorities are covering it up because it's not safe for tourism.

So far so good, but this novel isn't our world: this is a world where there are witches with powerful magic, and yet none of the witches have been out there to try and stop the burning? If you're going to reference real-world events, then then it seems to me to necessitate a witch's perspective to go along with it. Why haven't the witches stopped the burning? Do they not care? Can they not do it? To suggest there are immensely powerful witches and yet this fire still burns, like the witches frankly don't give a damn, leaves a hole in the story for me. I think you really need to address why witches didn't make a difference. Or not mention the situation at all.

There was an instance where Genevieve is trying to hide behind a pole and I read, "I had to become invisible - something I’d never tried before, or skinnier - something every witch has tried with varying success.” This felt like body-shaming - that witches are universally overweight, or think they are. This felt like something that could have passed unmentioned, or if you have to mention it, then maybe say some witches have tried it. To call out every witch and suggest they're overweight or have a poor self-image felt like an awful thing for a female author to do to her fellow females.

So while this writer can write and tell a decent story in general terms, for me there were far too many loose ends and examples of thoughtless writing for me to rate this as a worthy read. I wish the author all the best in her career, because based on this one, I think she has some good stories to tell, but this particular one was too hobbled with issues to fly and sad as it makes me, I can't commend it as a worthy read.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Rating: WARTY!

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

I simply could not get into this novel at all. I loved the title and the idea, and even the cover photograph, which was exquisite, but the actual text seemed so rambling I honestly could not follow what was going on.

It began perfectly fine and I was really getting into it as these two women, approaching middle age, were evidently conducting some sort of casual lesbian relationship even as one of them seemed to be desperately searching for a man to latch onto. The other seemed quite happy with the status quo, but evidently her friend was uncomfortable with living out the rest of her life like that, or at least felt she ought to have more, and was trying to talk her lover into finding a man herself.

From there it seemed to quickly explode into a score of different directions with characters popping up out of nowhere and I lost track of who was who and what was what. The writing style seemed like some sort of free-association, stream-of-conscious affair which completely lost me. I would have been happy to have read a whole novel about those two women and no one else, but they became quickly buried under the other characters, in whom I had zero interest, so I gave up reading it. I can't commend this based on what I read of it, even though the beginning was remarkable and quite captivating.

Modern Kogin by Boutique-Sha

Rating: WORTHY!

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

It's been a while since I've reviewed a crafts book on my blog so this was not only an interesting one to look at, it's also long overdue that I look at one! Subtitled, "Sweet & Simple Sashiko Embroidery Designs & Projects" this books draws upon an ancient Japanese tradition, kogin-zashi (hard G, long I in the kogin, short I in the zashi), which was essentially mending fabrics that have begun to wear thin. During the Edo period, in the Tsugaru region, citizens were forbidden from wearing cotton (made form the cotton plant, of course) and forced to wear linen (made from the flax plant), which wore out more easily, necessitating repairs. These skills though, went a step further, and simple darning evolved into techniques of decorative art that adorned all kinds of creative items.

This book addresses that aspect of the art, listing well over 20 projects:

• Butterfly Brooches
• Square Brooches
• Scarf Pins
• Circle & Oval Brooches
• Geometric Pattern Barrettes
• Button Hair Ties
• Memento Box
• Kogin Hoop Art
• Coffee Bean Sampler
• Floral Sampler
• Holiday Ornaments
• Elegant Ornaments
• Snowflake Pin Cushion
• Argyle Pin Cushion
• House Coasters
• Indigo Pot Holder
• Square Coasters
• Diamond Placemat
• Beautiful Bookmarks
• Framed Brooches
• Classic Coin Purse
• Gusset Pouch
• Zippered Pouches
• Kogin Purse

Additionally, the book details techniques, equipment and materials, and offers many hints and tips. I confess I was not quite in agreement with the layout of the book, which listed all the projects with a photo up front, but then referred the reader to page x where the actual instructions were given for that particular project. It would have made more sense to me to include the instructions with the illustration.

But perhaps this is a book not intended as an ebook, but a print book, with the ebook merely distributed to reviewers like moi! The formatting of the ebooks was, as usual, largely mangled by Amazon Kindle's crappy conversion process, which does not handle well anything that's not plain vanilla text. That;s one reason I refuse to do business with Amazon, but the text was legible, so I hope this is intended to be a print book or at least that the ebook version will be revamped before publication. While there was a link from the content page to the relevant project, there was no link from that project to the indicated page, and no page numbering to find one's way there.

But these are minor considerations when compared with the beautiful end-results one can get, and so I commend this book as a worthy read.

Scullion by Jarad Greene

Rating: WARTY!

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

I guess me and writers named Greene with first initial J, are not destined to get along. I quit reading this about four fifths the way through because it wasn't entertaining me at all. I kept hoping something would happen or that it would get better, but it never did, and I felt resentful of the time I'd spent reading it when I could have been doing something more fulfilling. When I picked the thing to review I'd thought the two characters on the cover were women who worked in the scullery of a castle, but only one of them is.

He gets kidnapped by trolls who mistake him for the other person on the cover who is actually a female warrior. Apparently trolls are really stupid mistaking an accidental headscarf for real purple hair, but the trolls are not consistent in their stupidity which made the device rather flimsy.

There were half-hearted attempts at humor. Despite this being set in medieval times, they have modern amenities and outlooks - but these fell flat on me. The story felt confused, with far too many characters coming in like Keystone Cops and filling up the panels without much of an introduction to set the stage. I lost track repeatedly as to what was supposed to be happening or why people were doing certain things (and not doing other things that seemed far more logical in the circumstances), and I decided this was not for me. I can't commend it at all.

Mara the Space Traveler by An Leysen

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Here lies another children's picture book mangled by Amazon! I cannot understand at all why any publisher would want to release this in a Kindle version, not even just for review. If there's one thing that Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process does with utter reliability, it's that it totally mangles anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons reason I refuse to do business with Amazon. The Kindle version of this was chopped, shredded, julienned, and sliced and diced until the story was out of order and made no sense. Even on a iPad, the images were reliably out of order and sliced in half, and not vertical so they would have at least followed the pages, but horizontally, so it was impossible to read. Some of the text was so small that it was blurred out of legibility.

Fortunately, in both Bluefire Reader and Adobe Digital Editions it looked perfectly fine. Originally published as "Mauro de Ruimtereiziger" by Belgian artist and writer An Leysen, this is now available in English. It's beautifully illustrated (in the non-Kindle versions) and tells the thought adventure of Mara, who travels in a helicopter-like spaceship to a distant planet inhabited by little reptilian creatures of the forest. Their habitat is being threatened by the thoughtless and selfish sun-king who is drying up everything and turning it into desert under the guise of providing sunlight to everyone. Mara manages to defeat him by engaging with the water dwellers, and then she's off to another adventure!

This story was short and gorgeously illustrated, and very charming. I commend it as a worthy read.

Ella Has A Plan by Davina Hamilton, Elena Reinoso

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is the second book I've enjoyed by this team of writer Hamilton, and artist Reinoso. Told poetically, this story features Ella, who has a problem in that cousins Taye and Jade just do not seem to be able to get along. The last thing Ella wanted was to have her mom's big day spoiled. She consulted mom about it and mom referred her to great grandad Frank, who had a similar problem many years before and solved it in a highly original manner.

Before she can learn what that solution was, Ella finds herself having to quickly come up with one of her own, which she does, and it works a treat I love a story with a strong female character. Young Adult authors could learn a lot from reading this book! LOL! I commend this for a fun story, sweet text, and engaging illustrations.

Mop Rides the Waves of Life by Jaimal Yogis, Matthew Allen

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Mop is the nickname of a young surfer dude who has some issues with his fellow kids. Written by Yogis, and illustrated charmingly by Allen, the short book tells in a straight-forward way of how Mop learned to be more mindful of his behavior and his reactions to the behavior of others.

I've said this before many times and I feel compelled to say it again here: I honestly cannot for the life of me understand why any publisher would want to release a picture book in a Kindle version, not even just for review. If there's one thing that Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process does with utter reliability, it's that it totally mangles anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons I refuse to do business with Amazon. The Kindle version of this was mangled. Even on an iPad, the images and text were out of sync, although the images, amazingly, were at least not sliced in half like they had been in an earlier children's book I reviewed, but still, in this case, parts of the text were omitted altogether in Amazon's crappy Kindle app.

Fortunately in both Adobe Digital Editions and in Bluefire Reader, they appeared fine, and with the correct text next to the picture it related to! So I was able to follow Mop to school, watch him play four square (whatever that is! I'd never heard of it!) with his friend and get into an argument during which he pushed his friend into the sand box. One has to wonder where the teacher supervision as during this time! But his anger issues are not improved by his giving vent to them, so during a surfing trip with his mom - which was a nice touch - he learns a valuable live lesson, and he turns his life around before it gets out of control.

I've read a couple of (grown-up) mindfulness books myself recently and so I can understand where this is coming from and get with it. It's a good idea and a useful tool for managing potentially difficult or troubled children, and I commend this as a worthy read.

Plastic Soup by Judith Koppens, Andy Engel, Nynke Mare Talsma

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I cannot for the life of me understand why any publisher would want to release this in a Kindle version, not even just for review. If there's one thing that Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process does with utter reliability, it's that it totally mangles anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons I refuse to do business with Amazon. The Kindle version was chopped, shredded, julienned, and sliced and diced until the story was out of order and made no sense. Even on a iPad, the images were reliably out of order and sliced in half, and not vertical so they would have at least followed the pagination, but horizontally, so it was impossible to read.

Fortunately I have more than one reader app option, and in both Adobe Digital Editions and Bluefire Reader, the book was beautiful: colorful, the illustrations charming, the text brief but informative, and the story well done. The story, written by Nederlander Judith Koppens, and Andy Engel, and illustrated by Nynke Mare Talsma, whose middle name appropriately means 'sea', is of course, the appalling amount of plastic that's in use today, far too much of which gets into the ocean.

It not only gets there in the form of bags and bottles and other large items, it also gets there - and this understandably isn't covered in this story - in the form of micro plastics, some of which is even now probably in the table salt you have in your kitchen. It's a disgrace, a menace, and a health hazard for every living thing, and everything we can do to educate and warn about this is to be commended, which is why I commend this as a worthy and educational read.

A Quick & Easy Guide to Consent by Isabella Rotman

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I enjoyed this graphic novel aimed at advising people about consent. This would be a great book to have lying around when you bring your date home, assuming we ever get back to normalcy in life after COVID. It's smart, comprehensive, inclusive, and educational, and if I had one complaint it would be the language level. This might well get the message across to avid comic book readers, but the language in use here seemed rather 'hi-falutin' - rather more at intellectual end of the scale than perhaps where it needs to be, and as such, it might well be over the head of many people who are the audience this comic truly needs to reach.

That said, it covered a huge swathe of consent - what consent is, how it can be given, what it means and more importantly, what it doesn't mean, how it's given, what's behind it all, how to approach what might be a difficult conversation, and on and on. It's all done in a friendly chatty manner. It truly is well-written, with the above-mentioned caveat, and the art is wonderful. I commend this as a worthy read. Some millionaire ought to buy the entire print run of this and give them away at appropriate venues! Not that there are any such venues at the moment, but you know what I mean.

Wave, Listen to Me! Vol 1 by Hiroaki Samura

Rating: WARTY!

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

Me and this graphic novel ebook did not get along at all. There were several reasons for it. The first is the fiction that "This book belongs to:" with my name and email address, when the book never has or ever will belong to me! It's set up as one of those so-called 'social DRM PDF' books, but it's never actually a download, so if you close your browser before having read all of it, it's gone, and you have to go back to Net Galley to get it back again. It's not social at all. It's anti-social and falsely criminalizes reviewers who do not get paid for this, but do it out of the goodness of their hearts. I've never shared a review book, and have no intention of doing so, and personally I'm going to to quit requesting for review any book that employs this system in future.

Another issue is that the book is almost 200 pages long, but this format offers no way to navigate it quickly. If you want to get to page 196, you have to continually swipe the screen bottom to top since this vertically scrolls. It's a nightmare when writing a review and trying to find a specific page to verify something. It won't allow any fast scrolling, so if you stop swiping, the pages stop scrolling.

When you get there, you're greeted by this: "The success of this book depends on influencers like you..." Good luck with that after my experience! Once at the end, the fastest way to get back to the beginning is not to swipe again, but to close the entire thing and re-download it from Net Galley. The fact that it is faster that way is the very definition of insanity gone wild.

The next issue is that this is a manga, but it doesn't start from the back and read to the front as these typically do. It starts from the front, but then the pages are backwards, as compared with the western way of reading, so instead of starting at top left, you have to start at top right and read right to left. Not being an avid reader of manga this is a chore I have to keep reminding myself of, but it's manageable. What really irked me though was the rampant racism of the illustrations.

When Scarlett Johansson was picked for the role of Motoko Kusanagi in the live-action Ghost in the Shell there was an outrage because the character was perceived as Japanese. I agreed with that outrage. I was also outraged that because she gained notoriety for her role as Back Widow, she became the go-to girl for a host of other action movies, leaving other, capable actors of assorted ethnic backgrounds locked-out of those roles. On the one hand I can't blame an actor for wanting to ensure their financial security, but Johansson has a net worth of well over $150 million and she had a steady movie career long before Iron Man 2 came along, so I have to wonder about someone who repeatedly takes roles that other, less financially comfortable actors could admirably fill.

But I digress. The point is that here in this comic book we have every single Asian portrayed with western features. I have to ask: where is the outrage? I'm quite used to the huge-eyed and pointy-chinned representations of manga characters, but these were drawn realistically, and with some skill, yet not a single one of them was Asian despite all of them having Asian names and the entire comic book being set in Sapporo, which is the capital city of Hokkaido, an island which is part of the State of Japan. For me this is wrong. What are they afraid of - that readers might be turned off a book because it has fur'ners in it? That might apply some forty percent of the people in the USA who support a clearly racist, bigoted, and divisive president, but it doesn't apply to people like me who enjoy and welcome diversity in our reading.

The content page of this comic was rotated ninety degrees for reasons unknown. It was in landscape mode even though the entire comic other than that was in portrait format. So anyway, the comic is about a woman named Minare who is pissed-off with some guy, and vents about him to a stranger in a bar. Rather than give her a look and move carefully away from her, the stranger invites her to his radio station and records her venting on air, and she becomes a celebrity. This is a tired plot that has been done many times before and this version brought nothing new to the story. In fact, for me, it was confused, rambling, and incoherent, and I lost interest in it very quickly. I can't commend it based on the third or so of it that I could stand to read. Sadly, there far too many loudmouthed jerks who become celebrities in real life without having to read about them in fiction. I can not commend this as a worthy read.

Single That by Acamea Deadwiler

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I agreed very nearly 100% with everything this author said, and where I disagreed, it was merely a matter of nuance. This is a short, but forceful book by a strong female author, and I commend it fully. The only real issue I had with it was that Amazon's crappy Kindle-creation process will, guaranteed, mangle anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one reason I flatly refuse to do business with Amazon. I encountered similar issues in several Net Galley advance review copies I downloaded yesterday. More on this anon.

Subtitled, "Dispelling The Top 10 Myths Of The Single Woman" I would heartily recommend this to every young-adult novel author, and every romance author, and many adult novel authors along with a good many movie and TV show writers because they simply don't seem to get it and in the vanguard when it comes to promoting the myth extolled in the seriously-misguided Neil Diamond song where he sings, "Girl, you'll be a woman soon; soon, you'll need a man." Um, no! Doesn't work that way and there's nothing wrong with that!

Don't get me (or the author!) wrong! This book isn't about eschewing men or hating them, or deliberately living life without them. It's about choice: a conscious and informed choice not to need one. It's about being fine with one or without one, and that there's nothing at all wrong with women who get along fine without men as readily as they get along with them. It's not about celibacy or asexuality. It's not about past trauma or being shy or domineering. It's not about taking a vow.

Someone who has been fine without a permanent man by her side for years may well find one she's perfectly happy to settle down with, and marry. or she may not ever feel a need to do that. But the fact is that it's her choice and none of anyone else's business. We're all human, but we're not clones. This is simply about choice and individuality. It's about being the designer, architect, engineer, maintenance staff, and captain of your own life. Anyone who thinks there's something wrong with those who desires such agency is a moron. Period.

The author covers these topics:

• Single
• That does not mean Desperate
• That does not mean Lonely
• That does not mean Jealous
• That does not mean Sexually Frustrated
• That does not mean Unrealistic
• That does not mean High Maintenance
• That does not mean Bitter
• That does not mean Crazy
• That does not mean Hard to Love
• That does not mean Broken

The author does a great job of explicating these thorny issues. When she wrote, “To be admired only for my appearance is not admiration at all. It’s objectification.” I almost cheered out loud. I can't for the life of me think why she didn't actually mention books, comic books, movies, TV shows, and advertising that routinely treat women this way, but this was her book, not mine.

Sometimes her wording was a bit obscure to me, but I was rarely left in doubt about what she meant. Sometimes there were sentences that to me were nonsense not because I disagreed with what was being said, but because the sentence literally made no sense such as:

“There are no probably won’t like what’s absolutes.” I think something got mangled there! This also raised a frequent formatting issues. The word 'absolutes' in that sentence was on the next line. This is one of many examples I found where the formatting of the book was lacking. For that sentence, I have to blame the author - or editor! For the formatting, I have to blame Amazon. And maybe the author/editor! But it's no huge deal. As writers, we've all been there! Presumably the final print edition will have these wrinkles ironed out.

There were several cases of missing hyphens, such as “all-handson-deck” and “onenight-stand." There were some oddball cases, such as the use of “Cadillac’s” where no apostrophe needed since it was merely a plural and not a possessive. Apostrophes like that are way over used! One sentence read, “This is far from a state reserved for scorn women.” Scorn was wrong. I wasn't sure if she meant scorned or scornful, or something else. Another sentence read, “But it’s easier to designate this a female trait and slap it on to any woman....” I think 'onto' was called for there.

There were times when I felt the author was too kind to her critics! At one point I read, “Since I don’t really know this guy I can’t say if he’s good or bad.” On that I had to disagree! Any guy who would post to a chat group: “Camey . . . you need some good DICK . . . which will inspire you to write a different kinda book.” Is a bad person period - and potentially dangerous too. I'm not a huge fan of pet names. Maybe the author likes to go by Camey, but personally I'd prefer the full glory of Acamea. It's a strong name, reminiscent of Academia!

This book is obviously aimed at a US audience, and I confess I don't have her take on Thanksgiving: “Thanksgiving dinner can be tough.” I didn't grow up in the USA, so the annual holiday is meaningless to me, although the four-day weekend is great! But I don't even experience that at Christmas, not even when I was single. Maybe I'm selfish with my time, but I always have things I want to do that don't require company. It does mean I fully understood her because when I was single, I had times when friends would all-but beg me to join them for Thanksgiving dinner evidently out of fear I would die of loneliness if I were by myself, and so I allowed myself to be brow-beaten into it, and then spent the whole occasion trying to gauge how soon I could leave and get back to what I really wanted to do (writing, or maybe a movie, most likely!) without seeming to be rude.

On the topic of formatting, there were many instances where the text would jump to the next line, mid-sentence, or where the next paragraph wouldn't be indented like all the others were. There were too many of these to track, but like I said, these are relatively minor formatting issues, and do not detract from the force of the author's important and powerful message. Overall, I loved this book, felt it deeply, and I commend it highly.

Transmission by Morgan Rice

Rating: WARTY!

This was a middle-grade novel about a terminally ill thirteen-year-old who discovers he can receive messages from a dead alien culture. At first he thinks it's just hallucinations, but it becomes more and more persistent and finally he talks his mom into taking him to the SETI institute where it gets confirmed that he's really receiving genuine messages. The people who are studying the transmissions had been unable to understand them until this kid got involved and made sense of them simultaneously making sense of his visions.

It sounded like an interesting and definitely 'off the beaten track' premise, which is what attracted me, but the story was a little bit too juvenile and simplistic for my taste. I gave up on it about halfway through when the kid learned that the aliens had sent a sort of a time-capsule to Earth. The coordinates that the aliens gave were in Columbia, in South America, but the US people went there - with armed soldiers, yet - to pick the thing up apparently without saying a word to the Columbians, leading to a stand-off with the Columbian army.

This was exactly the sort of Trumpian bullshit that's lost the USA a lot of international friends - this sense of self-entitlement and USA über alles. I wasn't exactly brimming with enthusiasm over this story to begin with, but that was far too much to allow: sending troops uninvited was tantamount to a declaration of war and to present this in a children's novel as thought it was perfectly acceptable behavior, and then get aggressive when the locals showed-up and objected, was entirely wrong-headed and seriously poor writing.

This novel could have been written much more wisely than this, and for me it was the last straw. I can't commend this as a worthy read and I'm certainly not about to read a whole series like this. I should have stuck with my instinct which is to reject out of hand any novel that has 'saga' or 'chronicles' anywhere on the cover!

Elemental Thief by Rachel Morgan

Rating: WORTHY!

Read wonderfully by Arielle Delisle, this audiobook was delightfully not a first person voice book. The story was entertaining, original, and engrossing. It fell apart rather at the end with main character Ridley Kayne doing some dumb stuff, but overall I enjoyed the book despite it being part of a 'chronicles' series. I'm allergic to books that have 'chronicles' or 'saga', or 'epic' on the cover, and I typically avoid them like the plague, but this one was a very rare exception. It was not sufficiently exceptional though, to make me want to pursue this series. This one volume was quite sufficient.

Ridley and her father live in a world where elemental magic is all around, and it used to be employed by experts to make the world a profitable and enjoyable place, but a decade or so before the story begins, there was a foolish experiment done with the magic, and it caused the system to go haywire - rather like Earth is going haywire right now with climate change, caused by thoughtless, stupid, and selfish human activity. Yes gas guzzling SUV and pickup truck drivers: I'm looking at you. Although you're all amateurs compared with Big Business Republican Complex.

Since Ridley's father was a magical jewelry maker, his family has been leading a semi-impoverished life and though Ridley attends a high class academy, she's shunned by the children of the rich and elite families. Why her father can't continue making jewelry and just not using magic to do it, goes unexplained. Apparently he's retreated from that into selling antiques. That part of the story could have happily done without the trope shunning and bullying. It's so over-traveled in YA stories, and in this case it contributed nothing to the story at all, so why do it? It was just thoughtless and bad writing.

Of course since this is a standard YA story, you know Ridley is a special snowflake. Her magic comes not from nature, but from within herself because she's an elemental. People are supposed to wear a small metal device in their skin which prevents them from employing magic. People without such a device can be identified by drones, and they can be caught and punished, but Ridley cannot wear the amulet. Since the magic is within her, it's like she's allergic to the special metal in the device. She carries it instead, on chain around her neck - illegally so, but it prevents the drones from classifying her as an illegal magic practitioner. Why having this sitting on her skin rather than just under it works for her goes unexplained.

Ridley witnesses a murder but doesn't go to the authorities. She and her father are trying to keep a low profile and Ridley is also a thief - stealing from the rich to help the poor, and using her magic to break into the apartment homes of the rich and famous. But when her friend Shen is implicated in the murder in a doctored drone video, Ridley has to take action. Her situation is complicated by the fact that Archer (yeah, seriously, these characters were named Ridley and Archer), the trope antagonistic rich kid discovers that she stole a figurine from his family home, and now demands she get it back because it's involved in a life or death issue.

So while on the one hand I did like this and commend it as a worthy read, I had multiple writing issues with it, all of them rooted in the fact that it relies far too much on idiotic YA trope garbage instead of stepping away from that. It could have been a much better story, and this is why I'm not interested in pursuing this series. There were several things to dislike even while enjoying the overall story.

One of them was that Ridley really isn't a strong character. She ought to be, given what she does, but she's far too subservient to Archer and you just know there's going to be a romance there, which makes little sense given the reasons behind why she dislikes him so much. I don't like weak female characters - not when they're the main character. I don't mind if they start out weak and find strength as they go, but it seemed like just the opposite was happening here!

On top of that there's the ridiculous trope of having her father call his seventeen year old daughter by a pet name (Riddles - barf!). That happens way too much in these stories. Maybe some readers like it. I don't. If Ridley were two or four years old, then yeah, go with it, but when she's seventeen? It just makes her father look like an idiot and it demeans and belittles your main female character.

On top of that, Ridley didn't seem like she was very smart or inventive. She has this huge magical power on tap, but she never even considers using it to solve her mysteries: to retrieve the figurine, for example, or to destroy evidence that could expose her and many other magic users, or to prevent herself and her father from being kidnapped at one point.

If this had not been a series, experimenting with her magic might have been brought forward and made her a much more interesting character, but precisely because it's a series, this kind of thing - assuming it enters the story at all - is going to be farmed out over far too many volumes, and it will be weakened, and diluted into meaninglessness, undermining the while story and devaluing her character. This is one huge problem with series. I mean, what child wouldn't have experimented with her magic? Yet we're expected to believe that Ridley never did. That makes her dumb. The very antithesis of a special snowflake and an inherent contradiction which devalues the story.

There's one incident where she reflexively saves Archer's life by employing am impressive magical feat, but when she and her father are confronted by these kidnappers, she can't do a damned thing. Why not? It wasn't consistent. Does she love Archer, whom she professes to hate, more than her own father? Is that why she could help the one but not the other? It was little things like that which turned me off the story enough, that I don't want to read any more of this series.

One amusing thing is that with the audiobook, you can speed up the reader's voice and get through it faster. I didn't crank it up to the point where it sounded like a chipmunk is reading it, but my adjustment did, in this case, make the narrator's voice sound a touch waspish and snippy when conveying Ridley's behavior and speech and it was hilarious.

She sounded so frenetic and it amused the hell out of me. Maybe it's just me and my warped sense of humor, but there was this one point where Ridley was explaining about getting an extension to a school project and she said, "I asked for a week's extension, so he gave me a week's extension." I honestly don't know what it was about that, but it made me laugh out loud.

There were other, similar instances that amused or made me LOL, too, so that helped get through this novel and it was something I could not have done were this an ebook or a print book. Maybe I would have ended up not liking the book in a different format, and I sure as hell couldn't have read it in the car while driving! One takes ones little joys where one can, right? Especially in this tragic era of viral plagues. Anyway, I commend this as a worthy read.

The Deep End by Julie Mulhern

Rating: WARTY!

This story was first person, a voice I typically detest, but even so I decided to give it a try. I ran into a major problem immediately and gave up on it at once, not wanting to tempt fate and read on in the faint hope it would improve. The story began with the main character strolling out to the backyard pool for a morning swim, and somehow she fails to notice a dead body in the water until she dives in and swims right into it? Was she blind? Did she keep her eyes closed until she dived into the water? It was, quite simply, bad writing and if I start out by reading that in the first few paragraphs I'm sure-as-hell not going to waste my time reading on under the delusion that it will get better. Certainly not in first person I'm not! I can't commend this one, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

Archangel by Sharon Shinn

Rating: WARTY!

After a hundred pages or so of this huge tome of a fine-print novel, I really didn't feel like I'd be very happy trying to read several hundred pages more if the first hundred are not doing much for me. The story had potential I think, but I feel it's been wasted and I'm not a fan of this meandering and waffling style of writing.

The premise is a world set in Biblical times, and in which angels interact with humans in ways the Bible never talked about. The position of 'Archangel' is due for a change of tenure, and Gabriel is up for it. For reasons which go unexplained, he's required to get him a human bride, but one designated by "the god."

Having failed to find his bride at the location he was told she would be, he begins a search for her, but can't find her anywhere. The village has been destroyed - and was razed several years ago, which begs the question as to why he was directed there when there was no 'there' there! That question, again, goes unanswered, at least in the portion I read.

It made zero sense because everyone in Gabriel's angelic circle is chiding him for not getting off the mark and finding his bride earlier, but if he'd done that when the village was still extant, then she would have been a child bride! Seriously? If he'd waited, as he did, until she was old enough to marry then her village was gone. What the heck? It made no sense at all. I don't think the author thought it through.

In another pov, we discover that she, Rachel, is a servant for a family which is organizing a wedding to which Gabriel has been invited. This is where he meets Rachel, purely by accident, but instead of following Gabriel's search and showing him meeting up with her, the author chose to skip to her life as a servant and ramble on about that, before bringing that to a jarring halt while we're forced to back-track to a documentation of Gabriel's fruitless search.

This held zero interest for me and as gar as I'm concerned, was a complete waste of trees. They'd already met at the end of the previous chapter! Why force a flashback on us? It contributed nothing to moving the story forward - quite the opposite in fact. It held it up and I react negatively to dumb writing choices like that. I'm not a fan of pointless flashbacks.

On top of this, what's wrong with this match up? A young woman to an antique angel? I mean let's face it Gabriel's been around since the dawn of time, so why would he have any interest at all in a juvenile human female? That said, Gabriel hardly has angelic thoughts. He doesn't come off as an angel at all, but as exactly how he's portrayed - a regular human male in his thirties or thereabouts. It was bullshit.

It's like that asinine 16-year-old Isabella falling in love with the hundred year old Edward. if she;d been legally an adult and he'd been half his age that would be one thing, but how is it remotely going to work given their massively different life experiences? I'm not one who denigrates May-December relationships; far from it, but in this case it was way extreme, and even more-so in the case of Gabriel and Rachel.

Why would someone of his antiquity and background have any interest at all in a woman who must have seemed like an infant to him? I'm not taking about physical appearance, but about mental compatibility. They would have had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common! Just yuk, and ugh, and blecch!

I never did get why it was so hard for him to find her if it's been divinely ordained that he and she are to wed and sing praises to a god at a ceremony. It made no sense to me, and I quickly decided I wasn't about to expend any more time reading another several hundred pages of this kind of writing. I ditched it and moved on to something better. Trust me, there's always something better! I see no point in wasting my valuable time on something that simply isn't doing it for me, and so, based on the portion of this that I did read, I cannot commend it as a worthy read, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

The Black Room by Luke Smitherd

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a free portion of a novel from Barnes and Noble. Set in England, it turned out to be the start of a novel the author is apparently still writing. He put the first bit out for free, as a teaser for the rest of it, for which people will pay, of course. He hopes. It's a bit like writing a series and putting the first volume out for free. Unfortunately I'd mistakenly thought it was a whole first novel of a series so I was a little surprised that it was so short and ended on a huge cliffhanger until I realized what he'd done! He has several rather frenetic screens of explanation at the end of the excerpt.

This story was downright weird, which is why it appealed to me! I like 'em when they go off the rails or jump out of the rut of most novels, so that was a big plus. This one is about this guy who wakes up in a darkened room and all there is in there, is a screen for him to look at. Very soon he realizes that the screen is the view out of someone's eyes - a young woman's of course, since he's a young guy himself.,/p>

He's apparently in her head - literally, though the interior isn't anything like he might have imagined it would be. As time passes he learned not only more about her, but more about the place where he's confined, which is distinctly strange. He's naked and rather afraid of the darkness that surrounds him so the whole experience is freaking him out almost as much as it does her.

He can't communicate with her at first, and when he finally manages it, she does freak out. Apparently she had issues with voices in her head a while before, and now she thinks her insanity is returning, but eventually they start a working relationship and the guy manages to convince her that this is real and not her own twisted imagination, so they embark on an effort together, to try and figure out what the hell is going on.

That's about where it ends. The story was interesting, but I don't know if it's interesting enough to make me want to read more. I might pursue this. I can't deny I'm intrigued to find out where that premise goes, but at the same time I'm afraid it's going to end up being a dumb story and I'll regret wasting time reading it! LOL!

However, based on this excerpt, I can't do other than rate it a worthy read. It was engrossing and it did keep me reading. The ending was not an ending, so that was a let-down. It's also a very British novel, so for me it wasn't a problem, but some of the lingo might fox non-Brit readers. That's not a negative - just an observation.

I'm not a reader who thinks the only novels worth reading are American or set in the USA, so I delve around and read anything that's of interest no matter where it originates or who writes it. Others may find this one eminently readable because of its 'Britishness'. Or you may find, as I did, that this author uses 'whilst' way the hell too much! Regardless of all that, I commend this one. Besides, it's free, and short, so what do you have to lose, apart from a bit of time?

The Akhenaten Adventure by PB Kerr

Rating: WARTY!

This book, a part of the 'Children of the Lamp' series, did not agree with me, which perhaps is no surprise since it's not aimed at me! The thing is though that I've read many middle-grade novels and enjoyed a lot of them. This one, not so much. I finally got around to it after it had been sitting quietly on my print book shelves forever. Maybe that should have been a tip-off! But the story - some 350 pages long - took an almost forever to get moving, and it made little sense.

It tells you right up front - or rather right in back, in the book description - that the non-identical twins in the story, Phillipa and John (John Gaunt believe it or not - at least the author left of the O'), are djinni, aka genies. Why then drag the story pointlessly on for fully a third of its length before this is revealed to the twins? In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling had it revealed to him that he was a wizard before page 60, and that book was shorter than this one. So why the delay? I have no idea. It seemed ridiculous to me since it was already known what they were.

The problem, and this is only a theory, but the problem as I see it is that writers get lethargic when creating a series and drag everything out to fill lots of volumes so they can stick it to the reader for the cost of yet another novel in the series. It's not about entertaining the reader and giving value for money; it's about putting in the least effort for the maximum reward, and Big Publishing™ encourages this big time, of course.

Shame on such writers. Shame on such publishers. This is one of many reasons, and with few exceptions, that I detest series and why I self-publish. Writing is what's important to me - not milking money from people, especially in times like this with ten million people - and disproportionately minorities, teens, and women - out of work.

The kids meet their uncle Nimrod (yeah, really!) in a dream they have while having their wisdom teeth extracted, and they persuade their parents to let them fly to London to visit him. Why London? I don't know: a Harry Potter 'Brits are cool' diversion? It was pointless.

Why not have their Uncle living in Egypt, which is where they went next? Arab-phobia? It felt rather bigoted to me to have the story be about a race of people whose name is of Middle east origin, and then deny that derivation by starting it in the US and then moving it to London with the Middle East coming in third. But this is another problem with novels and too many movies. If it ain't USA, who cares? How small-minded. And how mercenary.

So the story was slow. Worse, it was not particularly interesting or original, or adventurous, and it didn't draw me in, make me like or even respect any of the characters, or make me want to read beyond about half way, which is more than I ought to have read, for sure. I can't commend this based on what I read of it.

The First Sister by Linden A Lewis

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is the first in a trilogy ("The First Sister"). The thing is that there was nothing on Net Galley to indicate this was part of a trilogy. I would probably have not requested it had I known, because I've had little success with YA trilogies. But you work with what you have, so here goes! It was described as "Combining the social commentary of The Handmaid's Tale with the white-knuckled thrills of Red Rising." I did not like The Handmaid's Tale, and I'm not familiar with Red Rising at all, but the book description interested me, so I went ahead and selected it for review.

Unfortunately, and this is doubtlessly because it's a trilogy, the book took forever to get going and moved at a lethargic pace, while paradoxically doing next to nothing in terms of actually starting in on a story. Combine this with the multiple PoVs, all in first person - a voice I despise - and a tedious audio diary transcription from one of the characters who was unimaginatively named 'Hiro', and it seemed that the characters in this book were conspiring to irritate and bore me.

First person is so two persons ago, and very quickly I lost all interest in Hiro's non-story anyway. I began routinely skipping their sections. Even so, I made it only to 25% of the way through before I was forced to DNF this novel as a cause infâme, which is the opposite of a cause célèbre. Life is too short to spend it on stories that don't inspire, excite and engage. Your mileage may differ. I hope it does. It would be a sad world if we all liked the same things.

My first real problem was that I didn't buy into the scenario where there would be, in the future, a religious order of sacred prostitutes, nor was any help given to the reader as to how this had even come about. Instead we were simply presented with the fait accompli of a going concern. and expected to run with it. For me it was too thin, especially since the author was surprisingly coy about what exactly it was that these women did. Apparently there were three only on this entire troop ship, one of whom was reserved solely for the captain. The other two evidently had their work cut out for them, whatever it was.

The whole point of volume one of a series is that it's a prologue. I don't do prologues and I don't like volume 1's for that very reason, so it was ironic to me that this one told us so little about the world we're in. The comparison to Red Rising may or may not be apt. I can't speak to that, but personally I'd feel insulted were my work to be compared with someone else's like mine is a poor clone rather than something original, but as long as we're making comparisons, for me, a better one is to Star Trek, and it's a negative one, I'm sorry to say, because Star Trek has this same problem. In this story, just like in Star Trek, we have people doing everything, with not a robot in sight.

What happened to all the robots? We have them today in volume and they're getting better and better. So what went wrong? Was there a robot plague and they all died out such that there are none for the military and so human cannon fodder is required as usual? And on that score, why are there no sex dolls in the future such that women are required to serve as something for the men to masturbate in? But why would men prefer that if the women aren't very attractive? At one point in chapter 3, I read this: “She’s handsome for a woman." I'm sorry but WHAT?!

Again, we have sex dolls today and they're becoming more and more lifelike, but while they're a long way from being remotely human in any way, this story takes place well into the future. And still: no sex toys? It doesn't work without some sort of explanation as to why there are none and so there have to be actual humans in servitude to men - and on a ship captained by a woman?! Naturally there has to be human interest, but the trick of writing a good human interest story is to set it in a realistic future and still make it work. This future felt artificial and sterile. Humans are still doing all the fighting in person? There are no robots? No drones? No AIs? It didn't work for me.

Why would these women voluntarily have their vocal chords disabled or removed or whatever it was they had done with no explanation as to why, and give up their voice? Isn't a voice part of a good sex life? Obviously these women were not allowed to just say no, so their voice would have been useless for that, but why were they denied any expression of pleasure, whether real or just faking it? Women are fighting right now to have a voice, and yet in the future it's gone? Why? How did it happen? In the portion I read, that question got a Trumpian response: no intelligent answer, just redirection and deflection. Why would adherents of a female-oriented religion, with a goddess at its head, put themselves in physical service to men? We get no answers - not in the 25% I read. I needed more than this novel was apparently willing to provide, and that's one of the reasons why I began writing myself, so maybe it's not a bad thing!

As the book description tells us, "First Sister has no name and no voice." Even without a physical voice, she could still have set herself apart and showed some backbone, but she did not. Perhaps she grows a spine later, but will she also grow integrity? She's lacking that, too. She was so pathetic to me in that first quarter of this novel that I couldn't bear to read any more about her. I've read too many real-life stories about people in her position who have shown their mettle. I'm not interested in a fictional one who doesn't appear to have any, let alone know where to find some and I'm not about to read three novels where one would do in the faint hope she'll get some in the end.

When I open a new novel I'm always hoping to be shown something new; something different; something I've longed for without, perhaps, even realizing it. I've read many novels like that. Sadly though, I've read many more that were not like that at all: ones that took the road most traveled instead of least. It's nice to be surprised, but that didn't happen in this case. While I wish the author all the best in their future endeavors, I can't in good faith commend this particular one as a worthy read based on what I experienced from it.

Fly Girls by Keith O'Brien

Rating: WORTHY!

Fly Girls details the lives of a handful of early female pilots back when air travel was new, largely experimental, and very dangerous. The story of these people proved to be highly engaging. My only disappointment was the lack of images - it would have been nice had there been a pic of each of the pilots covered in the narrative, but of course that's the price we pay for listening to an audio book! I don't know if the ebook or print book has such images, but pictures can be readily found online of both the pilots and the airplanes.

The book is subtitled "How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History," but it never really made it clear who these five were. That picture only emerged slowly over the course of the book. The blurb, which usually the author has nothing to do with, identifies them as Louise Thaden, Ruth Nichols, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Elder, and Florence Klingensmith.

It was paradoxically Earhart, not a great flyer, who got the lion's share of the story and Klingensmith who got so little. The blurb was highly inappropriate, too evidently written by a guy and breathlessly describing Thaden as a studious pilot, mother, and wife, although why 'mother and wife' were in there is a mystery. Have you ever read of a male pilot being described as a 'father and husband"? I haven't. In the same blurb, Ruth Elder is described as "gorgeous." Why? She looked like most other women of the 1920s did! But the question is, was Chuck Yeager or some other male pilot ever described as gorgeous? I don't think so. This is a serious and ongoing problem with Big Publishing™.

Other than that, the only real complaint I'd have was this one section which rambled on endlessly about this guy Cliff Henderson, who was instrumental in setting-up air racing back then when it was a new and exciting thing. Why the author chose to go off at a major tangent with him in particular, I do not know. Many men were mentioned, of course, including some air pioneers with renowned names like Beech, Curtiss, and Fairchild, with a few details given in each case, which is entirely understandable, yet none got the treatment Henderson did. I guess it's hard for some authors to leave all that research unused, but it was annoying and it felt inappropriate and rather insulting to the five women and the other female pilots about whom this book was purportedly written.

Other than that, the writing was good and engaging, although perhaps fanciful here and there, the author claiming to know what these pilots were doing, and thinking and saying when clearly that could not have been the case. In some cases there were diaries and newspaper reports and so on, and books (Amelia Earhart wrote one) which supplied authentic and interesting information, and O'Brien did his research, but I've never been a fan of fictionalized accounts creeping into an otherwise non-fiction book.

One of the most interesting sections (aside from Earhart's cross-Atlantic trip) was the 1929 Women's Air Derby. This was of course re-named the "Powder-Puff Derby" when that jackass, so-called comedian Will Rogers disparaged it as such, and the newsmen got hold of the story. The race was from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland over several days. Despite disparagement from men, out of 20 pilots who began it., only six failed to finish, which is pretty impressive in an era of relatively untrustworthy airplanes and multiple technical issues.

One competitor died when her plane lost an argument with gravity. She apparently had engine trouble and was trying to set down on a flat area close by a river, but ended up crashing. She'd evidently tried to use her parachute, but deployed it so late that it didn't even have time to open before she quite literally hit the ground. Her name was Marvel Crosson.

Amelia Earhart was in that race, but came third. She would have been fourth had Marvel not crashed. The men who organized it put all kinds of obstacles in the way, such as telling the women the airplane had to have horsepower 'appropriate for a woman'. One of the contestants, Opal Kunz, owned and flew a 300-horsepower plane that was disqualified as too fast for a woman to fly, so she was forced to find a weaker one! There were incidents suggestive that maybe some of the women's planes were sabotaged - like when one woman discovered gasoline had been put into her oil tank in place of oil, and so on.

One of the biggest critics was a man named Haliburton - yes that one - who founded the company that Dick Cheney had ties to, and that has a string of issues tied to its name including some during the mid-east conflicts. Haliburton was convinced women didn't ought to be flying at all - that they ought to be home having babies - and probably barefoot and in the kitchen! He likely would have died of apoplexy had he lived until 1993 when Jeannie Leavitt became the first female fighter pilot. She was the one who trained Brie Larsen, the actor, so she could pretend to be a fighter pilot in the Captain Marvel movie. Shades of Marvel Crosson!

This book was sad at the end. Of the five girls the story covers primarily, Amelia Earhart disappeared without a trace, as most people know, but the other four, despite typically accomplishing more than Earhart did, are far less well remembered and most are equally sad.

It's not a spoiler to relate the historical record: Florence Klingensmith died young, in a crash. She demands a movie be made about her life, feisty daredevil that she was. Ruth Nichols almost died in a crash and spent the last few years of her life depressed and in pain from assorted injuries until she committed suicide. Ruth Elder also attempted suicide, but was discovered in time, and she went on to live up to her name, dying at the age of 75. Louise Thaden seemed to be the only one who escaped those problems, perhaps because she had a happy marriage and children, and she died last of all in 1979. As I said, it's a real shame that Earhart is better remembered than any of the others; all of them deserve to be remembered.

Despite its sadness, and despite how angering it is that these women were constantly kept down and demeaned for their gender, I commend this book as a worthy read. It demands to be read. People need to know how far we've come and then maybe they'll better understand how far we still need to go.