Andersen's Fairy Tales vol 1 by Hans Christian Andersen

Rating: WARTY!

This really wasn't worth my time or money despite being a discounted copy. Emma Fenney does a fine job reading it and employing some amusing tones and accents, but that can't improve on fundamentally boring material. There was a male voice at one point, but nowhere can I find whose voice that was, so I can't credit him. But the problem was with the stories which are not really that entertaining. Maybe kids would find more entertainment in them than I did.

The stories are as follows:

• The Emperor's New Clothes Everyone knows this story, so 'nuff said. I didn't find it entertaining.
• The Swineherd is about a prince who disguises himself as a farmhand to stalk a princess, and it turns out she'll sell kisses for baubles and trinkets. That relationship never went anywhere and the moral of the story is the king is a tyrant because rather than try and change this behavior he himself has no doubt inculcated in his daughter, he throws her out, and rather than try to redeem her, the prince abandons her. More like a nightmare than a fairytale!
• The Real Princess More commonly known as The Princess and the Pea this is another tale of spoiled brat royalty. Any princess who was so "sensitive" that she could feel a pea through several layers of bedding would be far too delicate to survive in the real world. This is just another example of how women, according to Andersen, ought to be delicate and subjugated, and put on pedestals and mattresses.
• The Shoes of Fortune also known as 'The Galoshes of Fortune', this story tells of magic shoes that can take the wearer to anywhere, any-when. This truly dickhead Councilor, Justice Knap, having argued that the Middle Ages were a better time, is transported there and takes forever to figure out what happened to him. What a maroon. Someone should have just kicked his dumb ass with the shoes.
• The Fir Tree essentially tells suffragettes they shouldn't whine about not having the vote because they might be worse off with it. It tells people of color they shouldn't agitate against slavery because life as a free person might be worse. It's dumb and ridiculous.
• The Snow Queen is the story of Satan's mirror - designed to reflect the worst in everyone. Taking the mirror up to heaven, an accident occurs and it shatters into gazillions of pieces, two of which enter the eye and heart of a boy who was nice, but soon starts being mean to the girl who's his neighbor. He's then abducted by the snow queen and apparently there's no law enforcement in this neighborhood.
• The Leap-Frog is another story about abusing women, wherein a flea, a grasshopper, and a Leap-frog, which I assume is simply a frog, compete to see who can jump highest, and the idiot king offers his daughter's hand (and presumably the rest of her body) to the winner of the contest even though not a one of the competitors is human. The frog wins. There's no word on if it changed into a prince when the princess kissed it.
• The Elderbush is about a boy who catches cold from getting his feet wet because that's how germs work, and when a suspicious old man inveigles his way into the child's bedroom, an elder bush sprouts from the teapot and the bush contains a woman. From there the story devolves into even more incoherence.
• The Bell is a bizarre and nonsensical story about children trying to learn the origin of a ghostly bell sound coming from beyond the woods near their village.
• The Old House is really about an old man, a young boy and a tin soldier. Very suspicious. And nonsensical.
• The Happy Family is about burdock and snails. I think. Hell, I have no idea.
• The Story of a Mother is about an irresponsible woman who chases after death when he takes her young child and when he offers to give it back she turns him down and lets death carry the child off to who knows where.
• The False Collar is about shaming a woman because she will not talk to an impertinent man. The man is disguised as a shirt collar, the woman as a garter, but the implications are clear: one is high up, the other low down.
• The Shadow is a story about how the lower classes ought to be executed if they try to rise above their station. I am not making this up.
• The Little Match Girl is about how a girl who froze to death from neglect is really better off dead.
• The Dream of Little Tuk is sheer nonsense from start to finish.
• The Naughty Boy is Cupid and this story is about how evil love is. Another story about an old man and a young child.
• The Red Shoes and for something completely different: another story about an old man and a young child. This essentially is a cross between the shoes of fortune and the swineherd. This spoiled-rotten girl gets red shoes and because she wears them to church she's cursed to dance forever in them. Eventually her heart bursts. It was only because she mutilated herself that she got let into heaven.

It seems that you've been living two lives, Mr Andersen. In one of these lives, you're Hans Christian Andersen, purported teller of tall tales; you have a social life, pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. In the other life, you write disgusting stories of old men and young children. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. That, Mr Andersen, is the sound of inevitability.

A Lady's Maid by Sarah Gailey

Rating: WARTY!

This was a short story I got into reading when I was looking for a sneak preview of a full length novel by this author - one I decided, after the preview, not to buy. This story is really short, only 16 screens on my phone, but I still couldn't finish it. If you wish, you can read it at: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/ladys-maid-sarah-gailey . It's described as "an original short story" and I don't know why! Shouldn't the assumption be that it's original as opposed to...what? A rip-off? A plagiarized story? A clone?! I sincerely doubt that! So why specify that it's original? I dunno. Maybe they mean it's not tied to a full length novel? Still it sounds like a stupid way to refer to it, to me.

It's described as a "Victorian comedy of manners," but to me it was so boring I could not get into it and quickly resorted to skimming. It immediately felt to me like it was going to be a sixteen page long whine that was served with its own cheese. I should say up front that the book description conflates oysters and clams. They're not the same. To be sure, they're all bivalve mollusks, but oysters and mussels do not behave like clams do. For me, this confusion is to be expected from your typical idiot book description writer. The author has little to no control over that unless the book is self-published, so I'm not sure in this case who wrote it.

I had to read outside the book to discover what it was actually about, since the opening few pages were completely confusing to me. Maybe it's just me, but I felt it ought to have been clearer what was going on, and given that it wasn't - at least to me - I had a hard time generating any kind of sustained interest in it, even for as short as it was. I gave up on it and skimmed bits here and there and was still unimpressed. I can't commend it based on my experience of it so I guess, after two strikes. I'm probably done with this author, which is sad because having seen an image of her online I was under the impression that she might write just the kind of a story that would interest me. I guess I was wrong!

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Rating: WARTY!

This was a great idea for a novel and I was about to pick up the audiobook version which was on offer for a very reasonable price from Chirp, with whom I've had great success. But! I've been down this road too many times to fall for an intriguing publisher's book description without knowing more. I know those who dishonestly write these descriptions only too well from bitter experience, so I thought maybe I could get a peek inside the cover on B&N or something to help make up my mind. It turned out there was a 'sneak preview' for free download, so I got that, thinking if I liked it, I'd go ahead and buy the audiobook, but I did not like the ebook sneak peek, so I can't commend this based on what I read of that.

The first problem was first person. I can't stand that PoV and have found very few occasion to make an exception to my distaste it. It just wasn't right for this story. It's not right for most stories, but authors are obsessed with it for reasons which escape me. In this case it made the protagonist come off as whiny and self-obsessed - as it typically does - and if there's one thing I truly hate it's a novel-length whine. The book makes Evelyn (who's called Evelyn anymore?) look far too stupid, especially given that we know right from the book blurb that her 'rival' for her husband's affection - a rivalry which Evelyn lost - is actually a clone named Martine.

Why take so long to get dealing with this? It should have been front and center; if not page one, then certainly chapter one. I know authors don't write their own book blurbs unless they self-publish; they have some idiot publisher's peon do it, which explains this description, because such people typically seem to have no clue what the book is about, so I had to wonder if the left hand of the publisher knew what the writer's hand was doing here. Apparently not.

There's really nothing up-front discussing cloning even though this is what Evelyn is apparently getting an award for! That, for me, was a blunder, so when the non-reveal comes, I imagine it's supposed to come out of the blue, but it doesn't because: Hello? Book description, and it makes Evelyn look brain-dead at best. I don't do books featuring brain-dead main characters.

There's also an actual dead character - the husband - and the blurb claims that the "Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up." What mess? Is a baby a mess now? And why reduce them to an appendage of a dead man? I don't read books that have a title which is of the style "The ____'s Wife" or "The ____'s Daughter". It's demeaning to label a woman like that, ye this one boldly pigeon-holes them as "The Caldwell Wives." Like they have no other value. So why read this? Well I started out intrigued, but that faded pretty quickly.

I wasn't remotely interested enough to want to pursue this - not even at a discount - because I'd already discounted it as a novel of interest. After this I went out and read a few negative reviews from others, and they served only to confirm my wise decision not to get into this any further than I already had. Like I said, the basic premise was intriguing, but the execution of it left it dead in the water even before the waters broke.

It was as improbable as the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The 6th Day wherein adult clones can be 'activated', programmed, and fully-functional within a very short time, which is nonsensical. Even if we assume a body can be programmed using memories extracted from a living person, it still doesn't account for getting an inert body into full physical functionality, including efficient and coordinated muscle activity, when it's being lying inert in fluid for who knows how long!

The novel also had elements of The Handmaid's Tale in that Evelyn's husband had somehow programmed for himself this tame, compliant, controllable wife (apparently he didn't like the one he had - at least not her personality, but he did like her body). It makes little sense. Why go to all that trouble when - as these stories typically portray it - he could have just found himself a more subservient girl to avail himself of, and a younger one into the bargain? Why clone a wife he evidently didn't like? I dunno. Maybe it's all explained later in this story, but I wasn't interested enough to stick around and find out.

So I couldn't get into this and have no intention of pursuing the full-length novel. I typically regret the time I've wasted on reading something so unsatisfying even if it's only a few chapters, but in this case I don't because it gave me a great idea for a novel! That said though, I can't commend this because it felt so insipid, lethargic, and so poorly done.

Danger in Monrovia by Paul Moxham

Rating: WARTY!

This book is misleading in a sense because it promises to be a 'choose your own adventure' story and that is of course, nonsensical. All you get to do in this case is to choose is one of two options presented by the author, so it's really a choose his own adventure story. It's middle-grade and the plot is about some stolen crown jewels.

I should say right up front that I haven't had any success with novels by this author. In the middle of June 2015, I reviewed The Mystery of Adventure Island and The Mystery of Smugglers Cove and I hadn't liked either of them. I therefore knew going in that I probably wouldn't like this one either, but I was still curious to see how this story worked. The short answer to that is that it didn't! And I mean that literally.

I read the first section and tapped on the link that was supposed to take me to my chosen option, and nothing happened! I tapped on the other link, again without result. None of the links worked which makes this book a waste of money! I actively dis-commend it.

The First Muslim by Lesley Hazelton

Rating: WARTY!

I am not a religious person. Not when I live in a world the worst of which we've seen in the USA over just the last year, let alone what came before it. It's been a year - and not the first over the last four - where the US's allies must have despaired over the USA, and the US's enemies must have salivated. In times like this in particular, it makes sense to me that too many people are blindly desperate for religion. Indeed, we've seen what amounts to a religious cult created since 2016 in the US, but religion itself makes zero sense to me, and it doesn't matter which religion it is. They're all as bad.

The real problem is that the prospective adherents to a religion fail to actually listen to the teacher of the religion - the founder. Why is that? The founder is pretty much always a white guy isn't it? People of color sometimes do start a religion, but women barely get a look in, and when any of these do, they rarely get far with their endeavor. That ought to make everyone suspicious! But even when the message is delivered directly from the mouth of the founder, the adherents fail to take it to heart and instead of internalizing the message, they become obsessed with blind ritual and mimickry instead of following what's been taught to them.

According to the New Testament, for example, a specific message was taught and it was delivered to the children of the House of Israel. It was never intended to spread beyond those people. Yet when Paul derailed the original message, he perverted it to apply to everyone, and spread it way beyond its intended recipients. Christianity as it's practiced in the world today bears no relation to what was originally taught. Worse, it has been spread not through love and compassion, and through turning the other cheek, but through pograms and burning of heretics. In short, the original message was lost and instead, it became a perversion of what had originally been intended.

Here's another issue with the word being given to humanity: Mohammed was, when his life began, a nobody who no-one expected anything from. He was an orphan who was passed around and adopted by various kinsmen and tribes; he was never expected to become any lind of a leader, so why was he chosen? For that matter, why Abraham? Why Moses? Instead of one of these initially obscure people, why not pick someone who is charismatic and powerful, and who can get the word out everywhere and quickly?

Why was it Abraham instead of Alexander the Great, who was a man controlled a huge amount of territory? Why was it Mohammed instead of, say, Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan who had access to a far wider territory to spread the word than ever did Mohammed. It makes no sense to me, and it's clearly the reason why so many of these religions fail to take off. For every one of them that comes to world prominence, there are scores upon scores which fail completely or which at best become a niche religion. Once in a while, one will grow and succeed (if you can call it that), such as Christianity did, and later Islam did, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule, so something is obviously and clearly wrong with this system of dissemination somewhere along the line.

And why are the religions so contradictory? All three major monotheistic religions came out of Middle East roots, yet none of the three can agree on much! If Christianity was better than Judaism - more accurate, more true or whatever its advantage was supposed to be - then why didn't the Judaists adopt it? Why do they still remain Judaists? And if Jesus was the last word, as Christians maintain, then why was Mohammed called to step up? Conversely, if Islam is the last word, why wasn't it adopted by both the Judaists and the Christians? Again, to me, it makes no sense.

There's another way in which this makes no sense, and while there are many fantastical stories in this particular book, I think it's best exemplified in the legend of Mohammed's sojourn in a cave while on his way to Medina. We're told he was chosen as a prophet to spread the true word, yet he was, as usual, rejected by his people and at one point was forced to flee for his life. According to this book he took an unexpected route to throw pursuers off his trail, and he encamped in a cave for a while. So far so good.

These behaviors are smart, and they make perfect sense if you're threatened and have no protection. They make no sense if a god is supposed to have your back. Why did his god make him run? Why didn't his god help - by for example transporting him to his destination instead of leaving him to fend for himself? We see this kind of thing routinely in religious stories - no matter what the religion is. The Bible is full of them.

But this is where this story wandered once more into the fantastical and why I quit reading at this point, because by this time it had seriously begun to feel much less like a biography that I had been seriously interested in reading, and much more like a work of fiction. We're told spiders came by in the hundreds and wove cobwebs over the cave mouth so it looked derelict, and thus he escaped attention. He had a camel to complete the journey and finally settled where the camel gave up the trip and settled down itself. I just don't get why, if his message was so important, he wasn't given more support in getting it out! Why did he pretty much have to do everything himself? And why do we see this same circumstance so often in so many different religion-founding stories?

Most seriously for me though, was that this same kind of question arose when it came to the content of the book. Obviously none of the above quesitosn were addressed, which was a problem for me, but additionally there's clearly a real story of a man's religious experience here, and surrounding that is the inevitable mythology which unfortunately grows up around these events. I don't feel the author did a good job of demarcating the two. There seemed to be far too much speculation, not over events, many of which are recorded and not in dispute, but in imputing people's motivation, and what they 'must have been thinking'.

We can guess at that of course, but we can't know, and it seemed both disingenuous and disrepectful to assume so much. This for me was the core reason why I must reject this biography. All religions have a mythology and some of it is quite beautiful, as was much of it here, but I wanted to understand the man behind the mythology, and I felt like I really didn't get a fair shot at that from this book, which is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

The Silence Between Us by Alison Gervais

Rating: WARTY!

NPR declared this book to be "eminently un-put-down-able," but that's garbage. I hate to write negatively of such a well-intentioned idea, but I read only four chapters of this before I put it down as eminently unreadable.

The first problem for me is that it's first person, which is a voice I detest. It's rarely a good way to tell a story, and for me it did not bring any immediacy or intimacy with the main character, Maya. Instead it made it even more clear what a bratty and belligerent person this 17-year-old was. It didn't bring me closer to her. Instead it drove me away from her. Had it been written in third person, it would have been less 'me-me-me' and might have made me more empathic toward her.

On the topic of voice, this is being pushed as an 'own voices' novel, although that's slightly misleading. The main character, Maya, is deaf, whereas the author is hard of hearing so it's not in the strictest sense an own voice although there are commonalities, of course. It seems like the author understands this and tries too hard to make the case for the deaf voice, as it were, and in doing so, she tends to caricature the character rather than make her a sympathetic one.

While I'm fully onboard with the own voices movement in the sense that everyone should have a voice, it bothers me that the implication of 'own voices' tends to be that no one but person 'X' can tell a story about community 'Y'. I think that's nonsense because it claims that this community, whatever it is: ethnic, nationality, disability-related, profession-related, LGBTQIA, religious, or whatever, is completely divorced from society and no one knows the least bit about it or has any interaction with it, or anything useful to say about it, which is bullshit.

Taken to its "logical" conclusion that means no one but a detective can write a crime novel, no one but a nurse or a doctor can write a medical novel, no one but a gay guy can have anything to say about a gay relationship, no one but a Chinese person can ever write a story with anything about China in it, and so on. I don't buy that. It's fiction! You can write it in any way you want. You can portray things any way you like. That doesn't mean you can't learn more from an own voices novel than you can from an outsider novel, but it also doesn't mean that no-one has anything to say about it, but the insiders. We need all perspectives. All Voices.

The biggest problem for me though, was that Maya makes no sense at all. She was not deaf from birth. She has been deaf only for three or four years because of an illness, so most of her life has been a hearing one, not hard-of-hearing or deaf. She is in a sense part of that community, but in another sense, she's not, depending on how you define it. This makes her behavior illogical at best and downright idiotic at worst, and her revulsion toward devices that can help her regain some hearing is not an intelligent or logical one. It's like she has some sort of psychological deficit - akin to people who feel their limbs are alien and want to cut them off, yet nowhere is any psychology 'own voice' brought to bear on this topic! That was a mistake.

The book description, as usual in books put out by Big Publishing™ seems like it was written by someone who has zero clue about the content of the book. It says, for example, "Deaf teen Maya moves across the country and must attend a hearing school for the first time. As if that wasn't hard enough, she also has to adjust to the hearing culture, which she finds frustrating." How can she find a culture frustrating when she was part of it just a couple of years before? A culture she has spent the bulk of her life being a part of? It's like she's forgotten her roots, or more disturbingly, is rejecting them. How can she be attending a hearing school for the first time when she grew up in hearing schools? It's a flagrant lie and the jerk who wrote that blurb is an asshole, period.

The book reads like being deaf is a cult for Maya - a fad or a thrill for her instead of what it is: a deficit as compared with what she had spent most of her life enjoying, whether she likes to think of it that way or not. We're naturally intended to hear. That's why we have the genetic mechanisms for hearing. Like I said: intelligent, consenting adults can make their own choices, but to pretend there's something wrong with being able to hear is nonsensical. Either way, it's not a one-size fits all deal. To claim otherwise is not helpful to anyone.

Also, in the quote above, what's that about Maya moving across the country? This alone made no sense since the rarified atmosphere of Colorado is not a great locale for Maya's kid brother who has cystic fibrosis. Like I said, I did not read very far into this novel because it severely turned me off, but let's suppose the family moved to Colorado for better treatment for her brother; isn't this hypocritical in a way? I mean Maya has chosen to embrace her condition, but the kid desperately needs treatment for his? I know that sounds cruel, but looked at dispassionately, isn't this what Maya is saying? She wants to become a respiratory therapist to help people like her brother, yet she rejects help for people like herself? Like I said, it made no sense and sends conflicting messages.

For someone who grew-up hearing and has had this loss of hearing experience not even for a handful of years, Maya is really bitchy, judgmental, and hyper-critical of everyone around her, and she behaves like she's a scared seven-year old rather than a supposedly maturing seventeen-year-old. This did not endear me to her and this hits the reader right from the start. She's whiny, clingy, and displays not an ounce of backbone, in complete contrast to what the idiotic book blurb claims, a blurb that seems to conflate blind obstinacy with integrity. This suggests that rather than having attend any sort of a realistic school, or even one of hard knocks, she's been positively coddled for the last two or three years. In itself, it doesn't speak highly of the school she left prior to attending this one. To me, it sounds insulting to that previous school.

So overall I was not impressed with the voice, own or not, in this novel and the writing was illogical and not appealing, which is why I didn't want to read on. I can't commend this based on what I did read of it. This is what I get for thinking a novel with a ridiculously pretentious "John Green" style title might be worth reading! It never is!

Erasing Death by Sam Parnia

Rating: WARTY!

The title of this was misleading because he's not talking about erasing death, merely putting it off for a while by learning ways to bring back people from near death by applying the latest scientific and medical advances to keep them alive and fully functional, and some of what's known is counter-intuitive. That much was interesting, and there were many parts of this book that were quite engrossing. Unfortunately the author has larded the rest of the book with so much rambling, back-tracking, historical story-telling, annoying repetitiveness, and so on that in the end, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

The book could have been maybe a third the length it is, and would then have made for a solid read, but it seemed to me like all the author was interested in doing was stream-of-consciousness direct to paper with no editing. It rendered what could have been a truly interesting and informative book into a tedious effort on my part in skimming pages until I found something new and original and engaging to read. As it is, I can't commend it at all.

Post-Human Omnibus Edition by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a collection of four books in what the author calls the 'Post Human Series' which runs to over a thousand pages in the print edition. I gave up after reading only a hundred or so. It was boring and ponderous, with thoroughly unappealing characters.

It started out bad, with a doctor, married to a woman with whom he has a somewhat awkward relationship, getting fitted with some sort of nanotechnology that enables him to hold his breath underwater for considerably longer than is practical for the rest of us. Why he got this is not explained, and how it works is glossed over, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the doctor who had given him this treatment started hitting on him! Talk about unprofessional. It just felt wrong, and I hoped this was not the tone for the whole novel.

The good news is that it wasn't. The bad news is that it got worse, but in a different way. This nano'd doctor gets put onto a special forces mission to go investigate a Chinese AI that has been nuked. Why people go there rather than robots I do not know. I mean aren't robots the ultimate post human? LOL! And are they not much better situated to explore a radioactive area than people? And if the technology is at such a level that they have nanos that can aid breathing, why not nanos that can fight radioactivity? Wouldn't that have been a wiser upgrade?! I got the impression that this novel had not really been thought through.

There are robots and drones in existence now. They've been around for a while, so why do so many sci-fi writers pretend they don't exist in the future? It's a genuine mystery to me. And yeah, I get that they're trying to include the human connection, but to me it just says that they're poor writers if they can't include robots and still have a human connection. Hell if even those wooden assholes at Disney can do it with Wall-E, and if by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples can do it with their movie script for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, your average sci-fi writer ought to be able to manage it.

There's actually a robot that goes with them, but it seems that was for no other purpose other than to go rogue and wipe out the entire team except of course for this one doctor, who is apparently put into hibernation because of his injuries and during the ensuing years, his wife marries this guy's rival. How that works given that he's still alive and they both know it is rather glossed over, too, yet this guy never once thinks what a callous bitch she was. Instead, he pines for her and wants to kill the other guy.

Consequently they put him back into hibernation and no one seems to think there's anything wrong with him being treated like that. He wakes up later right before the facility he's in is attacked by the powers that be, because it's deemed to be an illegal technology center. This guy, having had all these enhancements against his express consent, is now shipped-off to a parallel universe where he can fly like superman. I'm sorry, but I gave up right there because this was too stupid for words, and so boring as to be sleep-inducing. I cannot commend this trash which is wrong in so many ways, and so poorly-written.

The Mystery of the Missing Heiress by Carrie Cross

Rating: WARTY!

This is the third in a series of which I've read no others - and have no intention of doing so since I didn't like this one. I made it through only two chapters before I gave up because of first person voice and poor writing. This is a Nancy Drew wannabe novel and while admittedly that bar is low, this novel failed to clear it.

The story is supposed to be about an evidently spoiled-rotten Skylar whose parents have moved her into a mansion, which of course automatically has a mystery. Skylar finds a clue written in code in a jewelry box, which inexplicably "opens the door to a world of danger."

Skylar is supposed to discover a "shocking image" that "glows in the beam from Skylar's black light" Why the author is so afraid to use the term 'UV light' I don't know. 'Black light', which is a contradiction in terms, seems to be her go-to phrase, but the thing is that if Skyler were so smart, she'd know that blood doesn't glow in UV light, so the image is not done in blood, but something else - so not really shocking! Forensic scientists can only make blood glow in UV light by spraying the area with a substance like Luminol.

The book blurb tells us that there are poems in Xandra's diary - which naturally Skylar uncovers - and which contain clues to the location of a key, but why would Xandra - the murdered heiress - write clues in her own poems? Was her memory so bad that she couldn't remember where she left the key? If so how would she remember that she'd left clues in her poems? LOL! And how would she ever solve them?! None of this makes a lick of sense at all. Neither does the idiot book blurb when it asks: "Can the team determine how the heiress went missing...before Skylar suffers the same fate?" because we know this author isn't going to kill off her cash cow. Duh! There's no danger to see here. Move along.

Fortunately, I never made it that far because the first person annoying voice irked me, and the stupid description of Skylar's first day back at school - a school she had already been attending - was written like this was a brand new school where she knew no one! Barf. Also the ridiculously caricatured school bully nonsense was a major turn off. I know this isn't aimed at my age range, but come on! I've read a sufficient number of decent middle-grade novels to know that it's perfectly possible to write an intelligent 'grown-up' book for kids instead of playing to every lowest and most childish denominator an author can find. I can't commend this garbage at all.

Nineteen Seventy by Sarah Cradit

Rating: WARTY!

This is another series DNF for me. The story was so obscure, so disconnected and so intent upon going nowhere except to show us some really dumb-ass people doing stupid things that I lost all interest in it after only a few chapters. It was awful. I sure as hell was not about to read even one volume of this let alone seven! The idea is that there are seven siblings and seven volumes, and the books run from 1970 through 1980 with the year 1971 missing, as well as the seventies after 1976.

The youngest sibling is a prophet we're told, and she reveals that one of the main Deschanel siblings will not leave 1970 alive. This, the author thinks, will lure you into reading all this crap to find out who dies. I didn't care, but I'll bet the publisher is salivating over the promise of profits form this prophet if they can sucker people into reading all seven volumes. After reading a part of the first I could see the future too: all seven volumes will be as boring as this: rambling endlessly and going nowhere. The early chapters read like a bad Jackie Collins novel - and yes, I know that's a tautology.

At the risk of repeating myself, it didn't help that the writing was not so great, either. I read at one point that one of the male siblings, "drew the same girl he'd just finished on into a deep kiss, all tongue, hoping to transfer some of her juices back to her and avoid terrible breath later." WHAT?!!! This is a woman writing about a guy who had just gone down on a girl, and was now kissing her thinking that his mouth wouldn't stink if she licked it clean of her vaginal secretions? Seriously? I think that actually may have been the last straw - or certainly close to it. I forget exactly where and what it was that decided me that I'd had enough of this crap.

Why do female authors do this to their fellow females - even fictional ones? I cannot understand it, but Cradit gets no credit for this garbage.

Elsewhere I read, "wrapped her arms around her father's shoulders, because already at eight she understood all men, even one as confident and assuming as August Deschanel, needed validation. Even when you had to be dishonest in the offering." So at least the author isn't gender-biased: she insults both men and women equally - near enough. Another instance was "The drama in your life is going to kill you," Irish Colleen harped," No, Irish Collen isn't Irish, her name is actually 'Irish Colleen" - and no, she doesn't play the harp despite the harping reference. She is harpy enough without it.

This was awful; the story-telling poor, and the charcters completely unappealing. I actively dis-commend it.

Fables by Aesop

Rating: WARTY!

Aesop was a slave in Greece about two thousand years ago, although exactly when he lived is unknown. His 'fables' were passed on orally until maybe three centuries after his death when they finally came to be written down, so no one knows how many (or even if any for that matter) of the ones we attribute to him today were actually related by him. Like most people I guess, I had heard of the fables without really being aware of what they were, and had the vague idea that they were short, moralistic tales, which is a pretty accurate view of them, it turns out.

When I got a discounted audiobook from Chirp and was able to actually listen to these for the first time, I was sorely disappointed with them. They turned out to be the biggest bunch of claptrap I've ever heard. Not only should Aesop be renamed Mr Obvious, his tales are ridiculous, stupid, clueless, and idiotic for the most part with very few that were interesting to me. None were really instructive. I did get an idea for a fictional work of my own out of this so it wasn't a total loss, but more ideas for fiction I don't really need that much! I'm never going to be able to write all the ones I've already had.

When I say ridiculous, I'm not talking about the fact that they involved animals doing unnatural things or talking, or interacting with humans. That's perfectly fine if you're telling a good fantasy. No, what I'm talking about is the content of the stories themselves. You'd have to be a Trump supporter not to already understand the point of most of these stories, and just like a Trump press conference, many of them didn't even impart any knowledge at all. I found them so ridiculous as to be amusing at times, but in the end I never made it to the end: I DNF'd this because it was so pathetic. I can't commend it as a worthy read. Quite the opposite.

Elisabeth Samson Forbidden Bride by Carolyn Proctor

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is a book that sounded interesting from the description - although there were some issues I had with it, such as this woman proudly proclaiming her wealth (which was measured in slaves), like it was some sort of an achievement rather than a shame. Given that she was the daughter of a woman who had been a slave you might have expected some empathy there, but I read none in this novel based on the life of this woman who lived in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The book is first person which is almost never a good voice, and in this case it makes the main character seem even more self-centered and self-absorbed than she would have in third person. Additionally, the novel is too Americanized, has too modern of a sensibility, and a total lack of empathy for the slaves this 'wealthy' woman owned.

As you might guess from the title and the description, the book was far more about her romance than ever it was about the ethics of what she was doing with that life. I had hoped for better. I'd decided to give it a try and see what the author had done with it, but quite quickly discovered that I was not pleased. The story is truly humdrum and offers little in the way of interest - at least not for me.

It’s of a woman who might have been a fine business woman, but who apparently has the ethics and integrity of a Donald Trump - someone who I hope to never read about again after January 20th. For example, I had multiple problems with this part: "At nineteen, I myself already owned the coffee plantation Welgemoed, which is doing quite well, along with two hundred slaves which are my own personal property, not the plantation’s. A sense of well-being touched me when I thought of Welgemoed."

I confess I'm not sure how that distinction works: the slaves are hers, not the plantation's, when she owns the plantation, but that's not the point. This woman, Samson, has a sense of well-being knowing that she has personal ownership of 200 slaves? Frankly that made me sick, and turned me right off her. It should have made her sick, coming as she did from a family that were slaves in past generations, but evidently that impinged on her considerations not one whit. The fact that she apparently sees nothing wrong at all in this contradiction in her life is mystifying to me and apparently the author was uninterested in exploring it.

Now it may well be that this is exactly how the real Samson felt, but the fact of it - or at least the fiction of it in this book made me dislike her intensely, and it strongly dissuaded me from wanting to continue reading. At one point, for example, I read, "We employed a slave to walk a few meters before us and beat the ground with a palm frond to frighten away snakes." That's so cold and callous. If this is even remotely the truth of how she was, why should I give a damn about what happens to her or what her personal troubles are? I have to wonder why the author would include something like that. Is she deliberately trying to make her character unlikable?

The fact that the author uses meters is particularly problematic because Elisabeth Samson died in 1771 and the meter wasn't 'invented' until the early 1790s! Samson would have used an archaic Dutch measure, such as an el or a rod or most probably a voet, which is pretty much the same as a foot (the Dutch word voet means foot). The book description claims that the book is "Rich with emotion and historical detail," but quite obviously, it isn’t. I detected little of either.

It also has the occasional oddity. For example, there was a sentence which made no sense to me: "Isaac is not happy with Liesbeth’s a particularly evil neighbor who is known to have slain one of Quackoe’s slaves." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Liesbeth and Quakoe are characters in the novel, but the sentence makes no sense. Maybe that indefinite article needs to be removed?

As that quote a few paragraphs back revealed, one of the early properties owned by Samson was Welgemoed. That's the name used in the book, but in Dutch, the word means 'good cheer' - that's what the property was called. That's how Dutch speakers would hear it. I don't imagine the slaves would think of it that way, but the owner undoubtedly did, so given that it's a much more evocative (and hypocritical!) name in English, why use the Dutch term, like it has no real meaning? At another point I read that slaves were "strolling towards the back of the plantation house to the keuken house." Keuken is the Dutch word for kitchen (think 'cookin'!), so why not use 'kitchen'?

This capriciousness in employing Dutch words in some places and not in others was seemingly quite random. It made for an oddly unsettling reading experience and overall it didn't work. The book felt far too American and not Dutch at all. Note that Suriname is on the northeast coast of South America and was a Dutch colony. The Dutch got it in exchange for the English getting New York City after a war. The official language in Suriname today is still Dutch, although many natives speak a lingo called Sranantongo. Why there was not more of a Dutch flavor to this novel, I do not know.

I have a problem with authors who do not seem to realize that words - even people's names and place names - have actual and real meaning and they therefore carry power. So in the same way the Dutch term for kitchen was used in place of the English, the English term 'manumission' or derivatives of it were used frequently in the novel.

The term which was popularly used in the middle of the nineteenth century, but not so much before or after, comes from Latin via French, and it relates to freeing slaves, but it’s far more of an American term than it is a Dutch word. The Dutch equivalent is 'vrijlating', a word which also saw a spike in usage in the mid-nineteenth century, but nowhere is that term used in this novel. It’s like this American author, rather than tying Samson to her Suriname and Dutch roots was deliberately trying to divorce her from them, and Americanize her. For me this spoiled the reading experience and rendered it very inauthentic.

How Samson was in real life, I don't know. I honestly doubt I would have liked her had I met her, but the cold attitude she evidently had toward her slaves in this work of fiction was quite off-putting. I read at various points very early in the novel things like: "La Vallaire sent for something more potent than mope, and also some slaves to fan us as the breeze had died down."

Carl Otto is the man Elisabeth supposedly loves, but at one point he outright states, "He may kill as many Negroes as he pleases...as long as he pays the five hundred florins a head." The text adds, "Carl Otto is always quick to present the logic of a situation." But that's not logic, that's mercenary callousness, and the fact that this is the cold jackass that she loves made me see there was a lot wrong with Elisabeth if she evidently sees nothing wrong with what he has said there. And the Dutch used guilders, not florins as such.

Maybe that's really how Elisabeth Samson was, in which case she deserves no respect whatsoever, no matter what she did for marriage. I can't credit a woman for liberating herself when she owns 200 slaves and is proud of it. I don't want to hear how she was a product of her time. She was a woman who had slavery in her recent past, and yet she felt nothing for the slaves she personally owned? I mean if she felt bad for her slaves she could have freed them all and hired them as workers, but she apparently did not. She was apparently not a good person regardless of her marriage endeavors, and this author neither feigns painting her in any endearing strokes nor does she offer any kind of commentary on her appalling attitude toward slaves. If, frankly my dear, she doesn't give a damn about her slaves, then why should I care a jot about her?

I DNF'd this book because it was not for me, and I honestly can’t see any thinking and feeling person finding anything romantic about it, the way it’s written.

Simply HTML5 by eBookLingo.com

Rating: WARTY!

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

I’m not sure who wrote this or what they were trying to achieve with it, but frankly it was a mess. Regardless, it's a shame the actual authors didn't get a mention. Anyway, I read this as I typically do, on my iPhone, and the layout was really bad. The contents list occupied no less than sixteen screens and was so poorly laid out that it was useless for any practical purpose. I checked this out on my iPad for comparison and it was only marginally better on that.

The layout of the book itself wasn't much of an improvement, with one topic running into another in a way that was messy and confusing. There seemed to be no overall plan and there was a lot of repetitiveness. I wondered if this was another example of a book being written as a print book, with the ebook version being tossed in either as an afterthought or as nothing more than a means of allowing reviewers such as myself, who don’t merit print versions, to at least see it. If that’s the case, then it did them a disservice because it was a mess and, I assume, poorly represented the print version.

The contents table was a prime example, because it was supposed to be tappable - in that you could tap on a heading and go there, but it had a long series of periods leading from the section title to the page number. Page numbers are irrelevant in an ebook. All you need is the link to tap on, but the links were so close together and so close to the edge of the page that you were more likely to swipe to the next or the previous screen than to go to the chapter heading, or you were equally likely to go to the chapter heading before or after the one you thought you were tapping. It could have been a lot better.

The HTML examples used in the book consisted of the HTML text first, then a green and white divider, and then the HTML as it would be seen on a browser (specifically in this case FireFox 80.0.1). I used 84.0.1 to test some of these examples and ran into issues with them – notably the ‘draggable’ attribute, which simply didn’t work. Other attributes did work. Some of the examples, though, made no sense. At least not to me.

Let me just say at this point that I’m far from an expert HTML coder, but I do use it on my review blog. I don’t go in for anything spectacular or fancy, but I’ve been doing it a long time, so I do have experience and I do understand the principles well. I also have some amateur programming experience in other languages, so I’m far from a newbie at this, but as I said, by no means an expert. I pass this information on just to say that my problems with this are not from a lack of familiarity with this sort of thing.

So when I read this: "HTML attributes values are generally case‐insensitive" and then just a couple of paragraphs later: "In HTML the tag and attribute names are not case‐sensitive but most attribute values are case‐sensitive" that's not my lack of understanding, it’s a direct contradiction! If it had been just one or two things, I would have thought little of it, but I kept on encountering problems of this nature.

For example, I read later, "Now their are some HTML attributes that are called boolean attributes." The word 'their' should be 'there' (there's no there, there! LOL!), but that wasn't the real problem. The problem here was the poor description and the examples. I read, "A boolean attribute when placed in an HTML element represents a true value, and when not placed in an HTML element the boolean attribute represents a false value." If it’s not placed, it’s not an attribute? Well duh! It just seemed pedantic and too wordy.

The book doesn't explain this, but a Boolean value, named after George Boole, is an either-or, a plus or minus, a 'yes' or 'no'. It’s one or the other with nothing in between. It’s the way digital computers work: everything to them is a one or a zero (or technically a low voltage - like four volts - representing the one, or an even lower voltage - 2 volts - representing the zero), but the examples given don't make sense. After several examples of this type: <div itemscope=itEmScOPe>This is a valid HTML boolean attribute. </div>, we get a last one like this: <div itemscope="true">This is NOT a valid HTML boolean attribute. </div>, but this is precisely the same as the others - text within quotes! How is it any different? It’s not made clear what's being said here, and this whole section ends with: "I think you get the point of what is a valid and not a valid boolean attribute from the above example." No, I actually didn’t!

In another example, demonstrating the use of the paragraph elements, the code showed this:

Here is an example of the HTML<p> element below. <p>This is the first paragraph.</p> <p>This is the second paragraph.</p>

Which should work fine, but the example output showed this:

This is the first paragraph. This is the second paragraph.

Note that there's no paragraphing at all - it’s two sentences in the same paragraph!

Here’s just one more example: <p>The misspelled word <u>pharoah</u> should be spelled pharaoh.</p> This is valid HTML code and should result in the word 'pharoah' being underlined, but the example they showed for the output was this: The misspelled word pharoah should be spelled pharaoh. In other words - no underlining!

It was this kind of problem combined with a seemingly haphazard approach to teaching the reader how to use HTML that turned me off this book and made me DNF it. There is a need for books like this, but this one seemed too scattershot to really teach things in a logical and meaningful way. I think instead of the host of tiny unconnected examples it offered, the book should have oriented itself around creating a whole web page, but doing it in step-wise fashion, each new section of the book focusing on one aspect of HTML, and each adding new things to the overall page, teaching the reader how it all works as it goes.

In that way the reader could have created one page, stored it on their computer, added the new bits to it as they went along, and enjoyed watching the page grow in their browser. In this way they would have created something that worked, and that they could see improve as they went along. They could then later adapt it for their own purposes if they wanted, being confident they knew how it all worked, instead of typing in seemingly random bits of HTML which do only unrelated things, contributing nothing to any organized, overall web page design for the reader, who see zero growing from all their efforts.

But that's just me. I like the step-wise and the logical for books like this, and this one seemed to dissipate too much effort on going every which way without trying to build a coherent whole out of what was being taught. It’s for these reasons that I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Why Balloons Rise and Apples Fall by Jeff Stewart

Rating: WORTHY!

Life is short and books are long - if not within the covers, then when referring to how many books there are otut here int he world demanding to be read!

That's why I'm glad this was a short, fun book about physics. I could have happily continued reading had it been longer. It's an easy read and makes concepts quite clear - for the most part. There were a couple of times I had to do a double take, and while I don't for a minute profess to be a physicist, the things seemed off to me. I shall mention those below, but overall, this book was well-written, fun, and entertaining, with a nice sense of humor running through it and plenty of readily understandable explanations about what are, let’s face it, often difficult concepts to get one's mind around.

The book has a series of short sections, starting with asking what physics actually is, and each covers a different physics topic. Nothing important is left out, not even relativity and quantum mechanics, so if you want a basic grounding in physics, this is a great place to begin. It covers: astrophysics, electricity, energy, forces, heat, magnetism, matter, motion, all delivered well and educationally without straying too far into technical jargon or obscure explanations.

I ran into a problem on page 55 in a boxed section discussing an experiment by Dutch philosopher and mathematician Willem Jacob 's Gravesande, who experimented with dropping brass balls onto a smooth clay surface and measuring the depth to which the balls penetrated the clay, deriving a formula from it. Émilie du Châtelet made subsequent use of this, but she gets no mention in this book. The author talks about the brass balls falling at different speeds, but as he points out in this same book, acceleration under gravity is constant regardless of the weight of an object! So speed would seem to be far less relevant than mass in this case? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seemed odd to me.

The other issue I had was on page 92, where the author was discussing inflating balloons. He said that once a balloon is inflated and sealed, the pressure inside equals the pressure outside, but I for the life of me could not see this. The air in the balloon is under pressure - it has to be to inflate the constricting rubber (or whatever) of the balloon skin. If it equaled what was outside, then surely the balloon wouldn't sink to the ground as they typically do, but float at whatever height you set it? Again, maybe I'm missing something here, and maybe it’s purely the weight of the rubber that's causing the balloon to sink rather than the extra weight of the compressed air inside, otherwise it would float, but it seems to me that the pressure inside has to be greater. If it were less, the balloon would rise, surely? The author seems to admit this himself a paragraph or so later when talking about hot air balloons.

But whether this is a mistake of some sort, or whether I'm up a gum tree takes nothing away from the overall quality of the book, which I commend as a worthy and educational read.

The Witch Hunter by Nicole R Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

It occurs to me that every novel is really a two-in-one. There's the novel the title suggests to a potential reader, and there's the actual content of the novel which the reader ends up wading through or swimming in as the case may be. When I see a novel titled "The Witch Hunter" I expect it to be about witches. I don't automatically think, 'Oh, this novel is about vampires'. But believe it or not, this one is. Hence my distaste for it. Vampire novels suck, and not in a nice way.

I blame myself entirely for this. The novel has the word 'saga' on the front cover, which is a huge no-no to me, but nevertheless there are doubtlessly some older books I have in my collection that may sport this logo, or even a newer book or two that may have bypassed my admittedly lax screening process and made it into the collection without my properly registering it. This is one of those books, quite evidently. And it predictably sucks.

The first problem is that we have vampires who are decades old, yet who do not remotely behave like they've lived that many years. I have yet to encounter a vampire who does. Vampire stories are completely unrealistic to begin with, but even setting that aside and buying into this world for the sake of a good story doesn't actually get you a good story. Who knew? All it gets you is one that's entirely, ridiculously, unrealistic even within its own framework. This, in a nut sack, is my problem with vampire stories.

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The second problem is the vampire tropes. No one is willing to try anything new so all vampire stories, including this one, end up sounding the same. Boring. This is my other problem with this particular one: it was boring from the off, and I quit after only five percent. I confess it's all my fault for even starting to read a novel with the word 'saga' on the cover, but based on my small sampling, this is warty.

Cold Press by David Bradwell

Rating: WARTY!

This backlog of reviews is defintiely more nagative than positive, I'm sorry to say! I've been away from Britain for so long now that I like to read a good Brit novel from time to time, to reconnect in a relaxing way that doesn't involve airports and rental cars, but this really wasn't the escape I'd been hoping for. I think any novel that has to announce itself on the cover as "A Gripping British Mystery Thriller" has some sort of an identity crisis. It's also listed as "Anna Burgin book one" which means a series, and so I'm usually not interested, but I started reading anyway and I got what I deserved.

For reasons unknown, it's set in London in 1993. London I can understand. 1993 not so much. I'm not a fan of novels set in the past, but I let that slide. Investigative journalist Clare Woodbrook is working on an exposé of police corruption, specifically of Detective Chief Inspector Graham March. Now you know from this that when Clare goes missing it's March who's going to be looking for her, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. Predictable.

Clare of course took off one afternoon for a secret meeting and despite Danny being her investigative assistant, she tells him nothing about this 'risky venture' she's embarking on, Clare's a moron. Her behavior is predictable in a story like this, and realistically, it makes no sense. Danny has a 'flat mate' - someone who shares an apartment (called a flat in Britain) with him - who is a " feisty fashion photographer" named Anna Burgin - the one of the series title. She doesn't appear until chapter five and when she does, there's an abrupt shift to first person - a voice I typically detest and a shift in voice I abhor.

That was when I quit reading because I was already sick of this dumb book by that point and first person voice just made it ten times worse. It's like shifting down from third gear to first. Obviously there's no reason to ever do that, and it turned this novel into a grind for me. I can't commend this based on what I read of it. I sure wasn't about to read some 300 pages, let alone a whole series of it.

Underground by Chris Ward

Rating: WARTY!

The premise for this book sounded interesting, but I could not get into it at all, so I didn't get far before I DNF'd. This is based on what I did read. To be fair it's not aimed at me but at a much younger readership; even so I've read many books in that age range before, and enjoyed a lot of them. This one just didn't get there for me because it came across as stupid - with stupid characters in a future dystopian London doing stupid things for no apparent, let alone logical reason. And when I say logical, I mean from their perspective, not from mine.

That's when I felt I could no longer buy into this premise. It was too much of a leap from these characters, none of whom I liked, to what the author evidently expects them to do. Plus it's yet another trilogy where a single volume could tell the story, so no thanks. Some publishers and authors seem to think it's fine to take three times the money from a child to a story that could have been fitted into one volume if it had been told right. I don't like that kind of mercenary approach to children's books. Or any books. That's why so many of mine are available for free, especially during covid times.

For those who're interested, the premise is that this young girl Marta Banks is the leader of a group of young kids who take reckless rides hanging onto the speeding tube trains on the London Underground (London's subway system). How this worked I never could figure out from the sketchy description given in the opening pages of the book, which describes it as a wooden "clawboard." I have no idea what that is or even if it's a real thing that I'm supposed to know about for the purposes of reading this. Well, newsflash, I don't!

So I was at a loss as to what they were actually doing. At first I thought maybe they were using some sort of a sled which they somehow hooked on to the train as it went by, but it made zero sense to me. After I re-read it, it seemed more like they were just hooking onto the side of the train, and then jumping off, but the whole thing was vague and too stupid for me to waste my time on trying to figure out.

One of the guys fails to 'make the jump' and when they go back to see how he's doing, the text reads, "Paul was huffing like an old man trying to start a car...." Ignoring the age-ism here, I don't know how old this author is, but what is it he thinks is involved in starting a car? These days (and this novel is set in the future recall) it invovles involves pressing a button, but there was a time, way, way back, that it involved rotating a crank handle plugged into the front of the engine. I can imagine if someone, old or not, had been doing that fruitlessly for some time, they might be huffing and puffing, but in the future why would anyone be doing that? This is where I quit reading this.

The book blurb claims that Marta is "a girl who risks death every day in the abandoned underground stations of London," but if the stations are abandoned, why are the trains still running? Is it just a few stations that are abandoned? Why? I dunno. The authors doesn't tell. How did the kids get in there? If they break in and are not supposed to be there, why are they not reported by the train drivers? Or are the trains automated and have no drivers? In which case why aren't the kids reported by the passengers? The train has windows. If it's purely freight, why the windows? I got this impression this wasn't too well thought through, and that impression seriously dissuades me from continuing on in a novel - any novel.

Some people might argue that I haven't read enough of this to review it, but they're wrong. If you start reading a book and immediately it starts turning you off reading it any further, then that's a review in and of itself. I'm not telling anyone not to read this; I'm telling you that I didn't like this book, and I told you why. Deal with it!

The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand

Rating: WORTHY!

Here we go! New Year, new plan. Why or even how it takes 26 hours rather than 24 for everyone to gather in the new year is baffling to me, but I love it because of that! For my part, my efforts from here on out will be to my own material rather than to reviewing the work of others. I began this review blog in the hope that I would achieve two things: the first was to learn from analyzing the work of others, and the second hope was that others might be tempted to read my work based on the sort of reviews I put out.

I tried to avoid merely championing my own writing, but I was not shy of mentioning my own work if it was relevant to what I was reviewing. While the first hope was realized in that I did get some good insights to how and what I wanted to write, the second was not. I guess people have no loyalty to writers these days and I can't blame them. You gotta read what trips your trigger!

What I learned was more of a negative than a positive, in the sense that I knew exactly what I didn't want to write. Everything else came from that and going forward, I intend to travel that same path and build on it, with a diversion here and there. One of these diversions I'm going to be setting up for publication today, although it won't actually be available until later in the month. In fact today marks the setting-up of three books all of which will be published this month. Hopefully this is symbolic of a work ethic I will embrace this year and beyond. Once again I embark upon a voyage in the Weal Sea!

But to this review, which is short and sweet, just like the book! This audiobook was read beautifully by Jane McDowell. It was short, yet replete with information about foxes. Most of it is of the British "red" fox, but it covers foxes in general, with specific examples from different parts of the world, and in doing so it imparts an overall picture while giving engaging and fascinating details of a fox's life in Britain. There's so much to learn about this misunderstood member of the dog family.

The author, a mammal ecologist who has studied foxes for many years, challenges many misconceptions about these mammals while educating the reader to the realities of it, which are much less scary and far more charming. In additional to revealing an extraordinary story about what foxes are and are not, and how they live and move and have their being, including their contributions to the environment, she also discusses how we might move ahead successfully together with them through neither vilifying nor holding foxes in adoration. I commend this as a worthy listen.

Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

Rating: WARTY!

For my very last review of 2020 before I take a well-earned break after fifteen straight months of 33 reviews a month, I'm sorry to report that it's a negative one! I don't even remember how I came to get this book, but now having read some of it, it seems to me that this is very much a rip-off of the BBC television serial Torchwood, specifically the fourth season, Torchwood: Miracle Day which was transmitted by the BBC in the summer of 2011, as well as on Starz in the USA. This novel trilogy was first published three years later, in 2014.

Like in Torchwood, death takes a holiday, with people failing to die even though they have a terminal illness or are 'killed' in battle. In this novel the reason is that 'Death' is looking for his cobweb bride and won't collect another body until he finds her. No one apparently has any idea what that means, nor does 'Death' enlighten them, which seems ridiculous to me. Thus the beginning of the novel describes - in the most disturbingly graphic terms - illness and horrific battle injuries, which turned me off. A bit of that to establish the story I can read, but when it seems to go on forever, and ever more graphically, I'm not a fan.

From there it devolved into a rambling story that seemed to go nowhere, switching characters almost as much as it switches paragraphs, and I lost both track of it as well as interest in it. I DNFd it, and I can't commend it based on the portion of it that I could stand to read.

Goodnight, Santa by Dawn Sirette, Kitty Glavin

Rating: WORTHY!

For my very last children's christmas book review of 2020, I can't think of a better one than this one. This sports a light-up Moon - which isn't as impressive as it sounds, but is activated by a hidden pressure button on the cover. It also has a battery accessible (and turn-off-able!) module at the back, so there won't be a time when it runs down and becomes useless.

What I loved about this book, and what put it over the top as the best one I've seen this year, was the silhouette illustrations by Glavin, which are beautifully done; the book is worth getting just for those alone. The girl and her plush toy want to say goodnight to Santa, and end up taking a rather magical and Moonlit stroll through the winter landscape saying goodnight to everyone but. It's a fun and inventive book and I enjoyed it.

Merry Christmas, Mouse by Laura Numeroff, Felicia Bond

Rating: WORTHY!

Mice are always a lot more enjoyable in books than in real life aren't they? The mouse here is called Mouse and previously appeared in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie which sounds like fun just from the title. Mouse is intent upon decorating the tree and enjoys counting as he does it, so this Christmas story educates as well as entertains. And it's cute! It's a colorful pasteboard book written by Numeroff (she does the counting, get it?!) and illustrated by Bond, Felicia Bond.

Here Comes Santacorn by By Danielle McLean, Prisca Le Tandé

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another pasteboard book with glitter on the pages no less, and in it, the reindeer have colds and are unable to pull the sleigh. Fortunately, there's the Yulicorn who sports a candy cane striped horn, and who can help. The Yulicorn can pull Santa's sleigh by herself, as the rhyming text by McLean explains and the sweet illustrations by Le Tandé nicely demonstrate. A fun Christmas fantasy.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: A Christmas Activity Book

Rating: WORTHY!

No one gets credit for putting this together which is why I tend not to review books of this nature, but it's Christmas, so here goes, this once! This is exactly what it says. Most of the sixty-some pages are coloring pages, but others are word searches, or puzzles or of the word-scramble and 'find your way home' sort, and it includes everything from the old Christmas animated cartoon: the North Pole (which in reality is melting fast, so get it while it lasts!), the Island of Misfit Toys, and the Bumble, as well as Rudolf and Santa, and the misfit elf. And it comes complete with five colored pencils sporting pencil toppers of the main characters. This will keep your kids occupied while you get at the egg nog and the Christmas movie! Or even take that nap!

Merry Christmas, Baby by Dubravka Kolanovic

Rating: WORTHY!

Part of a " Welcome, Baby" series, this one is another colorful pasteboard book about Christmas for young 'uns. There's a shrinking concentric set of holes through the cover and the first few pages, colored in green and red, and inviting inquisitive chubby fingers to poke around and explore. The book is essentially a series of cute animal images with minimal text. It's a great way to introduce a growing and curious infant to Christmas traditions, if that's where your culture leans. Even if it isn't, it never hurts to educate a kid about traditions celebrated by others, which was the aim of my own The Very Christmassy Rattuses book for young children. We seriously need some inclusivity right now.

The Snowiest Christmas Ever by Jane Chapman

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a sweet and nicely-illustrated color pasteboard book about a family of bears, the children of which wish for snow, and that old adage about 'be careful what you wish for' comes into full fruition as the house is almost literally inundated with snow. It comes in the windows, through the door, and down the chimney, but in the end, the family manages to cope and enjoys some play and some sledding. It's a cute and fun story for young kids who like snow or who might never even have seen snow but would like an idea of what it's all about. Of course these books never tell you about the downside: how cold and dangerous it can be, but that has no need to be a part of this story!

Never Say Spy by Diane Henders

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first in a series. It’s one of those annoying series where every single title has a keyword in it. Often the keyword is the improbable name of the main character, but in this case it’s 'spy'. Tedious. What's the fear here - that readers are so shallow or so stupid, or both, that they can't recognize this book is by the same author as that book? Personally, I don't write for people that stupid. Even my children's books aren't aimed at adults who are so lacking in basic mental wherewithal. You don't have to be particularly smart or highly literate to read my books, but you do have to have a functional cortex.

The plot is that "middle-aged Aydan Kelly" is mistaken for a spy and then evidently becomes one since this series runs to another dozen novels at least. It's one of those wishful thinking deals, especially when the main character is pretty much (give or take a few) the same age as the author. But note that age: the main character is 46. There's nothing wrong with that until something happens in the first chapter which I shall shortly get to.

I actually applaud the desire for an author to promote an older woman as a main character in something that's not a pure romance story or one of those tedious multi-generational stories, or the even more tedious 'old friends reunion' stories where a tragic or dangerous secret is unleashed! The problem is that this is a series starter and a first person novel, which sets it up to fail in my long and bitter experience with these things, because a series is essentially the same story told over and over again with a few tweaks. I know it's beloved by authors, because they can lazily recycle the same characters and plots, and by publishers who can vacuum up the profits from their hopefully addicted 'users', but first person is worst person for me, and I have a problem with series unless they're really well done.

Case in point: the story begins with Aydan waking up from some sort of unconscious state to find herself with a paramedic standing over her. Yet her first person voice description is perfectly fluent and natural with no memory gaps or confusion. This is why first person truly sucks as a descriptive voice for a novel. It’s completely unrealistic and nauseatingly self-centered. I began skipping sections of this from almost the first page because of the tedious predictability, although kudos to the author for having a doctor introduce himself with "I'm Doctor Ross" rather than the absurd, "My name is Doctor Roth." No, dipshit, your name is Roth. Your title is Doctor. No, I don't cut slack for crappy writing, especially when I'm already annoyed by the first person voice. Recently I went through my unread print book collection and summarily tossed out everything that was in first person even though I hadn't read it because I was so profoundly sick of this voice!

The book description isn't typically written by the author, but it's often written, it would seem, by some moron who hasn't even read the novel. That has to be why this one claims that Aydan is a bad-ass, yet she's still wearing her wedding ring despite her husband having gone two years before. That doesn't translate to 'bad-ass' to me. Where I quit reading this was in the first chapter when - seeing a guy who is described insultingly as 'beefcake' come out of her trunk and into the car, bearing a gun - Aydan slams on the brakes and dives out of the car, which has already begun moving again, and rolls away as the car continues on downhill. No. Just no. This woman is 46, remember? She's not an athlete. She's a bookkeeper. This is not to say that no bookkeeper is fit, but this one 'flung' herself out of the car as it was 'picking up speed'? Was she on some of that speed I wonder? It was far too improbable. No. A bad ass would have disarmed the guy and demanded an explanation from him. This woman is not a badass. She's an idiot.

The stupid book description also has it that this woman has a penchant for profanity, but a search of the book, out of curiosity, revealed no use of any four-letter words other than 'shit'. So profanity is a lie. Maybe the text claimed she used profanity such as where it read, 'after a few moments of heartfelt profanity", but there isn't actually any, other than that one word which is used many times. So again, book description misleading. Which I resent. I gave up on this because it’s not up to my standards for a good read, and I will not commend it based on my introduction to it. I'm done with this author.

Shades of Treason by Sandy Williams

Rating: WARTY!

The most memorable thing in this novel was the short sentence, “You burn, I burn, Ash.” Ash is the abbreviated last name of the main female character. I don't think the author realized there was unintended humor in writing that. Or maybe she did. But it seemed emblematic of this novel: one I had begun to like, but which by fifty percent of the way through had devolved into such a dumb-ass romance that I couldn't stand to read it anymore.

Thoughtless phrases like the one mentioned above littered this novel, so even as I started to like the main character and started to get into the story, these still brought me up with a short sharp stop every now and then. At one point, I read, "The second grabbed her arm, the arm connected to her dislocated shoulder." If it’s dislocated, it’s not connected, and vice-versa. I know what she's trying to say, but there are much better ways of saying it that evidently went unexplored there.

Another laughable line was: "She kept navigation on manual, took the controls, and banked away from the Obsidian." Spacecraft don't bank. Aircraft bank because they have to. Spacecraft don’t. Again, thoughtless writing. Another was a Star-Trek-ism: "She was as still as a Caruthian deer." On Star Trek (I don't even watch it any more, but unfortunately the memory refuses to fade) they were always talking about 'planet of origin-Item' as an indivisible pair. It was laughable. Same here. Why a Caruthian deer? Why not just a deer? Do Caruthian deer turn to stone when they become still - à la a weeping angels from Doctor Who? I doubt it. Just 'a deer' would have been fine. You don't need to specify the planet it came from because such a reference is both pretentious and meaningless. And poor writing. One last one: "You’re anomaly is unresponsive, Commander." She doesn't mean 'you are anomaly'; she means 'your anomaly'. Again, inattentive writing. As writers, we’ve all been there, and one of these once in a while is forgivable, but so many of them were too many.

In terms of the story itself, the anomaly is Lieutenant Ramie Ashdyn, or Ash for short. Nowhere in the 50% I read is an anomaly actually explained. It references a certain type of person, but how or why they're considered anomalies I cannot tell you because the author couldn't tell me. This genetic condition (or whatever it's supposed to be) appears to render them into a super soldier or spy or whatever is it they choose to do. Why does this happen? I don't know.

So anyway, Ashdyn is an anomaly and of course even more anomalous than others because of her attitude. I enjoyed this to begin with because it made her badass - that is until fifty percent into this story, when the romantic bullshit between her and her commanding officer became far too big a part of the story and entirely inappropriate for three major reasons. The first of these was that he was her commanding officer - her superior, her authority figure, and therefore this was entirely wrong. The second is worse, believe it or not. This superior officer - who she referred to as 'Rip' - were given unnatural mental control over their subordinates through the use of some sort of compulsion brainwashing, which meant these subordinates were unable to refuse a special type of command the officer could issue. The command could be anything, but when issued in the right way, they had no choice but to obey it. In short, they were slaves. Again, having sex with someone under that kind of control is entirely inappropriate.

The third reason was simply ridiculous, and I guess I should have paid more attention to the 'Shades of' portion of the title here. While it's a gray area, I do take full responsibility for my lack of focus here. Ashdyn has been off these special meds she takes and so is extraordinarily weakened (because she's an anomaly). On top of that, she'd been tortured for an hour, including having too-tight manacles on her limbs, and having at least one finger deliberately broken as well as having some device that causes extreme pain, but not damage, applied to her head several times. She'd been in a fight - both physical and using weapons - had stolen a space transport and crash-landed on the nearby planet, hiked in her increasingly weakening state through a forest, and then been forced to roll down the side of a canyon in order to escape being shot. In other words, she wasn't beaten, but she was battered and bruised, cut and damaged, with lord knows how many broken ribs and pulled muscles, and at the end of her string.

After all of this, and while washing off in a river - during which of course she has to get naked in order to get 'properly clean', as does her finely-chiseled and muscular superior officer - she's entertaining sexual thoughts about him - all her injuries and pain completely forgotten. This is the woman whose fiancé betrayed her, yet she has zero thoughts about that guy: not a sliver of a longing, or a regret or anything, and yet now she's suddenly lusting after this rugged commander for whom she's had zero feelings until he all-but beats up on her while she's manacled. I understand that later she has sex with him. But thankfully, I didn't read that far. I'd like to invite the author to abuse herself to the same extent she dictates that her female character gets abused and then see how sexual she feels after it. My guess is that her answer will be 'not bloody much'.

I can see a guy writing bullshit like this, but a female author? I don't get it at all. It’s entirely inappropriate and all it achieves is to turn what was shaping up to be a fine and strong female character into the wilting violet star of a cheesy Harlequin southern romance. It’s barf-worthy. This novel is warty to the max and I don't see where it can possibly go that's intelligent after this. Wherever that turns out to be, I don't want to go there with it. Half of this was too much by half.