Beta Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WARTY!

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

This book represented a prime reason why I do not like series. I loved Alpha Bots - the first in this series - and quickly I glommed onto the sequel thinking it would be as much fun as the original was, but the sorry truth is that it was the polar opposite, and I DNF'd it due to the complete lack of humor and the appalling violence which hit hard and was totally unnecessary, and it came right up front. It was such a contrast to what I'd experienced in the first volume that it felt like a whole different story. I quickly decided that this was not for me. I guess I should have known that a series titled "The Womanoid Diaries" couldn't be good - not all the way through.

In the words of Chrissie Hynde, who was no pretender: don't get me wrong! One of the reasons I dislike series is that they're essentially cookie-cutter repeats of the original, which often is merely a prologue. I don't do prologues. Where is a series to go? It's the same characters often facing the same issues and it's boring, and it's lazy writing.

I like very few series and the ones I tend to like are ones that maintain a freshness throughout: enough of what I liked in volume one to keep my interest, but a different sort of story. Very few writers can nail that consistently. Thus you might think I'd go for this sequel here because it is so different from the original, but for me it was too different and not in any good way.

Yes, there was violence in the first volume too, but the story eased into it and it felt natural in the context of the fiction: the victims were 'deserving' and main character Cookie was completely adorable throughout - even heroic. I did not like her one bit in this second volume. She was a different person altogether. I decided I did not want to read any more about someone who had essentially changed from being an original, engrossing, assertive, and fun character, and morphed into a psychotic serial murder. No thanks.

The writing seemed lacking, too. It didn't have the same 'oomph' in this volume. It felt tired and clichéd and had lost its sparkle. One thing I noticed just in my relatively short read was this: "With Tabitha's knife in hand, I hid in his blind spot and waited on the gunnel for him." The author doesn't seem to grasp that the gunwale (pronounced 'gunnel') isn't the deck - it's the part of the ship's hull that surrounds the deck - the part that the passengers traditionally lean on when the ship is departing and they're waving to those on the dock. If Cookie were standing on the gunwale she'd be particularly visible, not hiding! It's not a story killer, but that wasn't the problem.

The violence in the second volume was not remotely defensible, not even in the context of this fiction. So what if these were Russian SWAT team? That makes them acceptable victims of the Mansonian violence that Cookie perpetrates, none of which was actually necessary? Cookie had been quite happily avoiding surveillance under the river, but somehow, I guess, these people had tracked her. How, I do not know, but instead of simply going back underwater and avoiding them, Cookie decides to single-handedly take out the entire squad. And not to dinner.

Where she hoped to go with that approach, I don't know. What - these were the only police in the entire city of Moscow and after she kills them she's scot-free?! It felt like the author was trying to emulate a male writer instead of being herself as she was in volume one. There's a reason I read more female writers than male and for me, this author undermined that reason with this writing. Being a strong female character doesn't mean you're a hard-bitten man with tits. I'm sorry for those who've been misinformed on this score, but it doesn't.

The other problem with this 'opening scene' was Cookie's sexual attraction to the lone woman on the boat that she eventually climbed onto, out of the river. It felt predatory - like badly-written male-authored exploitation novel. Cookie is supposedly pining for the fact that her one true love, Wayne, from the first novel, has been taken prisoner. She's mentally tired and down, and is now facing the threat posed by the encroaching SWAT team, yet Cookie is thinking only of how hot the 'chick' on the boat looks. No. Just no.

And what about that with Wayne being captured? Cookie abandoned him! Yes, he told her to go, but is Cookie no longer a strong, independent character? Has she no agency? Can she no longer make her own tactical decisions like she did in volume one? Is she now enslaved to Wayne like she had been to 'Normie' at the beginning of the original novel? This approach cheapens and demeans her. It's a backward step that undermines everything she achieved in the first volume.

The macho slant in this novel made for truly unattractive, unnecessary, and sadly unpleasant reading and seemed to me to betray the whole raison d'être of the first novel. It turned me right off Cookie and by extension, the story she was telling, and I couldn't bring myself to even finish that one part, let alone read further. I can't commend this based on what I read, because it's the very antithesis of what I expected and not in any good way.

Alpha Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is one of the most original, entertaining, and amusing stories I've not read in a long time. By that I mean it was an audiobook, so I didn't even have to read it - I just sat back and listened - and laughed my ass off. There were some minor issues with it, but nothing to take away from the brilliance of the story and the hectic way it was told.

On top of this, the reader, Laci Powers, was awesome in the role and really put soul into the story and life into Cookie, the main charcter. I'm not a series fan, but I did secure the sequel to this before I even finished the first volume which is highly unusual for me. I remain nervous about sequels, and rightly so, because I did not enjoy the sequel at all. I'll review that next.

Be warned that this first volume pulls no punches, and is as explicit with language as it is with sex talk, which is to say there's a lot! That was one of the most amusing parts for me: to hear the naïve and softly-spoken Cookie talking so frankly and cussing like a sailor as she became liberated from her servitude, but this may bother other readers. I enjoyed her liberation, and I think it was made all the more amusing by Laci Powers's take on the character, too. The subtle snipes the author frequently took at male chauvinism and the genderist world order were wonderful.

Cookie Rifkin is a life-like AI robot designed to emulate a woman and to be servile and submissive to men, specifically her husband Norman. She's a gynoid if you will, but in the books they're referred to as womanoids. The thing is that, in New Stepford (get the reference?!), there are no human women, just human men. There are no children either. None of the womanoids think this is odd, that is until Cookie starts a book club with four other womanoids (Chrissy, Isabel, Paula, and Rita, all of whom have their own stories to tell), meets Wayne, finds her freedom, and becomes a startling rebel. Frankly, I think the story would have been even more powerful without Wayne. To me he was an annoyance, but this is what we have here.

The story begins innocently enough in a small homage to The Stepford Wives (and note to some ignorant reviewers: that was a novel from the same author who wrote Rosemary's Baby long before it was ever a movie!) where Cookie is wakened - and eventually woke - by the bed shaking and realizes that her husband is masturbating. This inexplicable and unexpected event in Cookie's life is what sets her off on her trail of discovery and eventual insurgency.

After meeting Wayne, Cookie encounters Maggie, who appears to be some sort of slacker police officer, but the more Cookie learns, the more she realizes that not everything in New Stepford is as it seems at first sight, and her encounters with Wayne and Maggie are not accidental. There is much more going on here, and over time, Cookie and her friends learn what real networking is, and they're not so much going to eat the forbidden fruit as overturn the entire apple cart. But it's not going to be a smooth ride by any means.

As far as problems are concerned, I said they were minor. There are times when Cookie's 'functionality' is described in ways that make her seem fully human, and at other times makes her seem very robotic, so this to me was a paradox; like for example she seems to eat and drink and breathe although she seems not to need to do any of that. The author never really went into any of the details of how she worked which was fine to begin with, but later, when Cookie learns how to upgrade herself, she seems much more robotic than she did when the story began, so it felt a bit like the rules of the world were changing, and this was a bit confusing, but it wasn't enough of a problem to detract from the story for me.

Also the upgrading is a bit problematic in another way. I don't want to give away spoilers, but in a way it's reminiscent of a time travel story where something goes wrong in the past and it would seem perfectly simple to just go back before that time and nip the problem in the bud, but the author makes up some arbitrary rule why that's not possible and it spoils the story for me. In the same way in this story (which involves no time-travel let me be clear!) Cookie's upgrades seem endless, but when she could have used a relatively minor upgrade to get her out of a tricky situation, she seems not to think of doing the very thing that could solve her problem. This rather demeans Cookie's agency and her inventiveness.

It made for a bit of a deus ex machina situation at some points and a 'Cookie has to be dumb not to think of that' at others, with problems being very easily solved at times, whereas at other times, they seemed insoluble by using the same convenient means. It was a bit inconsistent. I was enjoying the story enough that I let that slide, but this may bother some readers. Additionally, there is no real LGBTQIA angle to this story. There's a tease here and there, like the author is intrigued by Sapphic stories, but is too afraid to explore one for herself; so this is essentially hetero all the way

Overall though, I highly commend this story as beautifully done, entertaining, amusing, and even educational. I'm just sorry the sequel was a different thing altogether.

Super Cool Tech

Rating: WORTHY!

While there is a slew of production staff listed for this hardback print book, there is no one writer or group of writers listed unfortunately. Way to disenfranchise writers! The book itself is pretty cool, although it's somewhat out of date bow as any print version of a book such as this must be the moment it hits the bookshelves.

The one I read was published in 2018 and takes the form of a rather thick laptop computer, opening the same way (as a calendar rather than as a book). The cover and the ends of the pages are silver and the whole effect is pretty neat. It's published by the DK arm of Penguin. Or should that be the DK flipper?!

Inside is well over 170 fully-illustrated color pages divided into sections covering Play, Move, Construct, Power, Live, Future, and Reference, which is a look into a much more speculative future. The topics covered are games machines, holography, electric cars, space-travel, large machines, innovative buildings and homes, artificial intelligence, environment, and an assortment of other, high-tech or adventurous gadgets, items, and technology life choices.

The coverage is shallow, but varied and interesting, and it's definitely stimulating, especially to a younger reader, although it's not aimed specifically at any age range. I commend this as a worthy read. It was interesting to see what's come to pass and what's not made it based on what this book talks about as cutting-edge technology, and it has more hits that misses depending on hwo far it projects into the future.

Fever, Feuds, and Diamonds by Paul Farmer

Rating: WORTHY!

Read decently by Pete Cross, this audiobook was short, to the point, and highly informative. Farmer talks about the 2014 epidemic of Ebola that assaulted Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, but the roots of the problems reach far back beyond that into almost ancient history - that of the exploitation of Africa beginning with a conference in 1884 that resulted in some 90% of America being "owned" by European powers by the turn of the twentieth century. Slavery may well have been considered over by then, but in effect it really wasn't. The location of it was merely switched back to Africa instead of remaining visible in Europe and the Americas.

Farmer does an excellent job of digging beneath the scary news headlines of the ravages of various diseases on the African continent, particularly Ebola, the most nightmarish of them all, but he never loses sight of the victims of this horrific outbreak, or of what truly caused it to be so devastating. As the book description says, he rebuts "misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly" and "he traces West Africa’s chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice.

Books like this one ought to be required reading (or in this case, listening!), especially in times like these when a world-wide and equally scary pandemic is affecting everyone, everywhere, from all walks of life and socio-econiomic backgrounds. You will never view African epidemics in the same way again. I commend it.

Map of Shadows by JF Penn

Rating: WARTY!

In this, the first book of the Mapwalkers Series, Sienna Farren inherits her grandfather's map shop when he's murdered. Yes, this is the tedious trope "You're a wizard, Harry" kind of story, where a kid is raised in complete ignorance of their supernatural power. Nonetheless, it seemed like it might be a worthy read, but I was quickly disabused of that quaint notion.

Despite it being crystally-clear from the off who the villain is here, no one, least of all Sienna, who of course is a special snowflake with legendary powers, can see it. Wouldn't it be nice if once, the one with the special powers is actually smart and perceptive? No such luck here.

Sienna learns that she can 'map walk' - that is, can go to places in time and space using maps - and her "specialness" is that she can even do it based on nothing more than a map in her head. The villains are people who use the skins of other map-walkers to draw their own special maps and of course there's a 'shadowland' that they want to open the borders to - and of course Sienna is the only one who can stop them.

Despite having zero training or even any clue what she's doing, Sienna exhibits heroic powers from the off, and despite landing in the HQ of the villains, wherein several vital skin maps are hung on the walls, neither Sienna nor her companion - an experienced map walker - think for a split second of destroying or of taking these maps, to limit the powers and abilities of their enemy.

It's a no-brainer, but these two girls evidently have no brains. It made me want to quit reading the story there. While I don't mind a good story about someone who starts out dumb and wises up, I really don't appreciate stories by female authors about dumb women who start out dumb and bask in it throughout the story, consistently making bad decisions that even a moderately intelligent person in real life would avoid like the plague.

The story seems to revel in how gory and stomach-churning it could be, and that along with the fact that it really had no saving graces, and was larded with trope characters exhibiting predictably idiotic behaviors forced me to DNF this after maybe a third of it. I can't commend it based on what I could stand to listen to.

Murder and Baklava by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

I made it to the 43% mark in this novel before I grew so sick of it that I couldn't stand to read anymore. No murder or anything like one had occurred by that point, and all the book had been was a rather poor tour guide of Budapest and Gyor. If I'd wanted that, I would have read an actual tour guide. I wanted a cruise ship murder and didn't get one! I'm reasonably sure there was one, but I was too bored to want to keep reading until it happened.

This is why I don't read these 'cozy' murder mysteries. First of all there's nothing cozy about murder and secondly, if anyone complains about my non-reviews, I can point them to this (and several others) where I did read all or part of the story and it was just as bad as I'd feared it would be. Many pages of this book were devoted to the author advertising all her other work, to a rather gauche and annoying degree. The story doesn't start until page 15. The contents is simply a list of chapter numbers (CHAPTER ONE, CHAPTER TWO, etc) which are tappable to get to the chapter, but then you can't tap back to the contents, so you're stuck there! I don't see the point of any of that.

I should have figured that a novel with a dumbass character name Like London Rose (apparently no relation to Tokyo) wouldn't be worth reading, and it wasn't, but this is the main character's name, and she's apparently going to have a series of endless murders which makes me want to run from her cruises rather than join one of them. Who would want to go cruising on a cruise line known for slaughtering passengers every cruise? The very premise is ridiculous.

Anyway, this is one of those cases where London ditches her fiancé and goes on the cruise as the social director, a role for which she frankly seemed inept to me. We learned precious little about each character, except for the one I am sure is on the chopping block for this cruise: an old, frail, and persnickety woman named Mrs Klimowski or something along those lines, who was obnoxious and who had an annoying toy breed dog which I am sure gets adopted by London at the end.

What we learned most about was the male interests London had, which were predictable and boring, and I had the sneakign feeling that one of them would be the murderer, but that's really just a wild guess. If London does adopt the dog, that would be another reason to ditch this series. I rarely read series and I won't look at one which features a pet on the cover or as a 'sidekick' to the 'sleuth' - in fact I won't read a murder mystery which has the word sleuth in the book description, because it sounds so pathetic and promises nothing save predictability and tedium.

The thing that really bothered me about London though, is that her last two boyfriends had each lasted a year despite her having zero interest in them. One has to wonder why she was even with them and that fact that she was, essentially, with them under false pretenses, makes me wonder both about her character and her smarts. In short, I didn't like London at all. That's another reason not to pursue this series and was one of the factors in my ditching this volume early.

This is yet another dumb-ass 'mystery' where someone entirely unqualified somehow seems to think it's incumbent on them to prove their innocence, but no! It's guilt that must be established, and unless a criminal investigation finds sufficient evidence to arraign you, you need do nothing save supply any information you may have about the crime that you're asked to do, and stay the fuck out of the investigator's way! It really is that simple! Anyone who doesn't do that is an interfering busybody and should be charged with impeding a police investigation! This book sucked majorly and the saddest thing about it all is that I was not surprised at all.

Two Minute Mysteries Collection by Donald J Sobol

Rating: WARTY!

This is an amalgamation of three volumes that Sobol published starting in 1969, the final one coming out in 1975. Readers may know him better for his Encyclopedia Brown series which was extensive and which ran from 1963 to 2012. I've never read any of those, and I'm disinclined to do so after reading these stories, which are short, but rather violent, and often so simplistic, or so arcane, or so out of date that they're really not very entertaining. The book contains some 200 of them and my understanding is that many of these were actually in the Encyclopedia Brown series originally.

Each story covers only two pages in print, with the solution to the mystery printed (for reasons which escape me) upside down at the bottom of the second page. All of them are solved by Doctor Haledjian who hands-down beats Hermione Granger for being an insufferable know-it-all. He's obnoxious, and no one person could know all that he supposedly knows about every little thing. Worse than this though is that he's in every story, and nearly all of them are murders and robberies, which makes me highly-suspicious. How come so many serious crimes occur around Haledjian?! LOL!

The mysteries are of the nature of, for example, a guy supposedly entering a house from a freezing outdoors and claiming he saw a thief, and Haledjian calling him a liar on the basis that the guy's eyeglasses would have misted up as soon as he entered the warm house, and therefore he would have seen nothing. I'm serious, that's what they're like - all of them, except, for example, the ones which require you to know in detail how the old Pullman rail sleeping cars are organized, and so on.

Another example is where this guy wants to impress a girl so he hires a professional boxer to come on to the girl and then 'knocks him out' to impress her. The girl sees through this because the guy's eyeglasses, which he placed in his coat top pocket prior to fighting, survived the encounter unbroken despite the prize fighter delivering several body blows. The idea is that the eyeglasses must have broken, but that's not necessarily true. Even if they were hit, they might have survived and there was a relatively low chance that they'd be hit anyway, since a boxer would be punching to the abdomen and solar plexus rather than high on the chest. Despite that, this girl, who is all starry-eyed after the fight, suddenly rejects the guy (as she rightly should, it must be said) not because of the improbability of this wimpy guy surviving an assault from a prize fighter and then knocking him out cold with one punch, but solely on the basis of the eyeglasses being intact!

Another case of trapping a criminal hinges on the confusion between Anchorage - the port city in Alaska which contains almost half the state's population - and anchorage: that state of a ship being anchored somewhere, but Haledjian's persistent mistake is his flawed assumption that everyone knows the correct terminology for everything and routinely uses it in everyday interactions. He idiotically believes that everyone has his own knowledge pool, but had I heard this same thing, I would have assume Anchorage, Alaska was being referred to because most people don't say 'at anchorage', they say 'docked' even if that term is not strictly accurate! Again, for me it was really weak, and such a case would have been thrown out of court were there no other corroborative evidence.

In another case, Haledjian's idiotic incriminating evidence is that no railroad man would have said "twenty minutes after three," but instead would have said, "three-twenty," which is patent bullshit. His second line of devastating evidence is that no resident of San Francisco would ever call it 'Frisco. Again, had this case been tried on the basis of those two lines of 'evidence' it would have been summarily dismissed.

Another case hinges on a guy - who is dying of a stab wound - coming out of the house and telling Haledjian "Water" which shortly convinces him that this guy Scott is the guilty party. His 'reasoning' is that he learned from Scott that this guy was left-handed and consequently had all of his faucets switched so that the hot and cold water come out of the 'wrong' faucets as compared with the standard arrangement. Let's ignore the fact that this person being left-handed offers no rationale for switching faucets and put it down to the guy's eccentricity. What convinces Haledjian of Scott's guilt is that when he rushes into the house to get water (instead of immediately calling for an ambulance) he gets hot water rather than the cold he expected.

Haledjian realizes that Scott must have run the hot water to wash blood off his hands and this is why hot water came out immediately rather than taking time to warm up, and that therefore Scott is the murderer! If that's the case, why didn't the victim say "Scott stabbed me!" instead of offering the asinine cryptic clue 'water' and hoping Haledjian would make the labyrinthine connection? It's horseshit of the same stinking hue that Dan Brown created in the idiotic The Da Vinci Code when he had a dying man running around creating cryptic clues when he could simply have left a note explaining that a mad monk killed him, and asking in the note for Robert Langdon to contact his granddaughter!

So while I thought these would be entertaining, they were overall more annoying than anything. Once in a while there was an interesting or an entertaining one, but those were too few and far between for me to find this a commendable read. Maybe it would make a good bathroom book - you can always use the pages if you run out of toilet tissue! But as for me, I DNF'd it.

Thief Trap by Jonathan Moeller

Rating: WARTY!

The idiot librarians at Goodreads, who are useless in my experience, have this author listed under two names - one of which is Jonatha Moeller! Not that I hang out at Amazon-owned Goodreads, but I noticed this when I was looking the author up online for this review!

The novel is book one in the "Cloak Games" series - not that the book cover will tell you this. Having the cover say it's a 'Cloak Games' story is not the same thing as saying it's a prologue to a series, which all volume ones are. I don't do prologues or epilogues. The prologue is chapter one, the epilogue is your last chapter and should be numbered as such. Deal with it, authors! That said, at least this volume did not leave you hanging off a cliff at the end, and it did tell a story, so there's that. But I have to wonder at the series name: is 'cloak games' meant to try to siphon cachet from The Hunger Games?! I don't get what it even means otherwise. But it's nothing remotely to do with any Hunger Games scenario.

This was an audio book read by Meghan Kelly (not to be confused with Megyn Kelly) and there was something about her voice that didn't work for me. It didn't seem to ring true for the character for one thing. I'm not sure if that was the whole thing, or if it was just her tone or what, but I failed to be completely at ease with her reading of this book. The voice constantly took me out of suspension of disbelief.

That's only one problem though. The biggest problem was not the reader but the writer. Also, that front cover illustration? What was that? I go by a book's description and pay little to no attention to covers, but once I had this I noticed that this particular cover is so inappropriate, I have to say something about it. Normally this is not on the author because they typically have nothing to do with covers unless they're self-publishing, but this novel came through Amazon's Create Space, so it is self-published. But note that there was nothing on that cover that had anything at all to do with the main character or this story!

There is an alternate cover which also has little to do with the main character's actual abilities, but at least that one isn't a picture of a woman's torso - ignore her brain because female brains are clearly unimportant - and this woman has a leather skirt that's hardly more than a belt, and she's pulling a - what is that: a light saber from a sheath? No. This character does not do light sabers! The cover not only completely misrepresents this character, it also appeals to the lowest common denominator. Shame on whoever decided this was a 'good cover' for a novel. Maybe I should pay more attention to covers in future - and reject stories outright which have cover versions like this even if the description sounds interesting?

Ah, the story! It made little sense once I actually did get to it. The premise is that in 2013 (why then I do not know), a gate to another world opened, and Elves used their magic to conquer Earth, crushing all resistance before them. There is nothing about the takeover other than this and a rather salivating description of how the entire US federal legislature - and the president - were publicly executed. Since then Queen Elf has ruled.

The idea, I suppose is that the rest of the world suffered likewise, but the story is so US-centric - as usual - that the rest of the world may as well not exist. Nothing else is said: nothing about why the elves came, or about how the military fought back, or whether there's an active guerilla war against the occupation. Yes, we hear vague mentions of rebels, but it's so understated that it may as well not be mentioned at all.

We do learn that in the shadow lands where the elves evidently emerged from, modern weapons do not work. Since the elven swords do, I'm forced to assume that the problem isn't metal, but chemical, yet humans, who are chemically based, can live and fight in the shadow lands very well, so WTF? The other edge of that sword is that firearms do work well here in our world, so how was it the elves where able to win so easily? Nothing is said about any of that. If it was due to their powerful magic, then why do elves need humans at all?

This is a problem with this story which supposedly takes place 300 years after that conquest - yet Earth hasn't changed a bit! it's not even run out of oil! The problem lies in that one elf, Morvilind (it sounded more like Morvellan to me in the audiobook) has taken in human Nadia as his thief in residence - sort of. He trained her from a young age to work for him, giving her fighting and thieving skills, and teaching her some rudimentary magic. Why was this necessary? He's an elf. He has powerful magic; so why does he need a human thief? No explanation is given for this and Nadia never questions it despite questioning everything else.

She works for the elf because he's working a cure for her kid brother who has 'frost bite' - that's not what it's called, but I forget the actual name. Frost fever? The elf tells her the cure takes 20 years and if she fails him, so will the cure fail her brother. She never questions this! He also has a vial of her 'heart's blood' whatever that is, which gives him power over her. She has six more years to serve, but for some reason she never looks ahead to try to figure out if she can get free of Morvilind after her time is up, or if he will still force her to work for him.

Her big trial comes when she's tasked with stealing a magically-protected 'old Earth magic' tablet from a collector. This was when the story went seriously downhill for me. The male love interest for Nadia is telegraphed from several light years away. It's so obvious and she is so doting on him, it's pathetic. it turned me right off this story or any others like it and anyhtign else by this author.

Now we're told that she's supposed to be this expert thief with all kinds of mad skilz, but as soon as he shows up at the party where she's planning to steal the tablet, she subjugates herself to him in all things and is constantly reminding us of how hot and muscular he is. There's the inevitable 'let's kiss to distract the opposition' moment that is so trope it's pathetic. Is this some sort of authorial wish fulfillment? I dunno, but it's tedious.

Predictably, they succeed in their respective quests and they part with him in her debt which is ridiculous if entirely predictable. That's the end of the story and I have no desire whatsoever to pursue this series in any form. I can't commend it as a worthy read because there's too much trope and too many holes in it.

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book read competently by Emily Woo Zeller. The story is of two childhood friends, one of whom, Aveda Jupiter (note that this is her superhero name), grew up to be a renowned - if spoiled rotten - San Francisco super hero, whereas the other, Evie Tanaka, who also has a power, had such a traumatic experience with it when younger that she tamped it down and is happy - so she thinks - to play sidekick to her friend. On the one hand Asian superheroes is a good thing, but on the other, Asian stereotypes is a godawful thing.

I don't know if the author did this on purpose, but Aveda backwards is 'a diva' (near enough!), and it suits the character perfectly. Other parts of this story were amusing too, to begin with, and I liked that the 'super villain' approach here was something off the beaten track, but I DNF'd this about halfway through because I grew sick and tired of the ham-fisted and telegraphed from ten miles away 'romance' between Evie and the macho-muscled guy who also worked on Aveda's team. Their codependent relationship was the exact opposite of romantic and once again we get a novel where sexual diseases seem not to exist - at least they don't with regard to people talking about them before diving into sex. Also I didn't like the 'Jupiter' part of the hero's name. What was that all about ? Rip off Watchmen much?

There was another problem with this, too, and arguably it was the biggest one. Evie was far too weak and servile for my taste. She just annoyed the hell out of me. She did begin to rebel, but it took her half of the novel before she even remotely started to get pissed-off with the truly shitty way she was treated by Aveda. This is a toxic relationship and Evie needed to get out of it, yet no one is advising her along those lines.

I know these guys a have a long history together, but that made it harder to understand how Evie had been so subjugated for so long. Plus Evie's oft stated desire is to be normal - no superpower - but if she's that into it, why the hell doesn't she get out of the superhero life and find a "normal" job where she's not stressed, and get that life for herself? Her show and tell are completely at odds with one another.

Also we're told like fifty million times that Evie is shut-down with regard to sex (again due to her traumatic experience), and despite it being entirely possible that she is in fact asexual, this is never addressed. Instead, people are all along essentially telling her that she needs to get laid. Do I actually have to say this is the wrong approach? Not only that, it's entirely insensitive to anyone who actually is asexual.

This shut-down of Evie's inexplicably turns to rampant explicit (be warned) passion with almost no overture. The book is very mature (or immature depending on how you view it!) in a lot of language use and explicit situations, so it's not your usual PG-13 YA book The characters are all in their twenties, but appear much younger if judged from their behavior and speech patterns. It's like they're a bunch of stalled frat boys instead of super hero team. Evie also has a kid sister who is thoroughly obnoxious and pays no price for her attitude or her behavior. It's wrong. Worse though is that this teenage kid has a drinking problem that no one takes seriously.

Starting early in the story Evie is forced to step-up from side-kick to hero - or rather, hero impersonator - since (aided by a glamor from another guy whose super power is magic) she has to stand in for Aveda when the hero is injured and doesn't want to show weakness in front of her fans. It's all about fans and rather than care about what TV or news media might say, everything in this story inexplicably hinges on some chick who writes a blog and is so two-faced about it that it's not even a secret, yet no one ever calls her on her manic approach to blogging about Aveda, not even Evie, who is supposedly so protective of Aveda and her reputation.

No matter what the blogger "prints," the team continues to suck up to her and give her exclusive interviews. It was just stupid, and ridiculous to present her as the only voice in town worth listening to. Her big blog story (as this kicks off) is the zit on Aveda's face. Yeah, if this were really a young teen book, I could see that flying, maybe, but no, this is a grown-up book (supposedly), and it just felt stupid and thoroughly inauthentic, especially since it just went on and on, entirely ignoring what she'd just done to save the city. If that had been used as an example to show shallow, but mixed with other reports, that would be one thing, but it would seem that shallow is all this novel has on offer. Despite my really wanting to read this initially, I was about ready to kiss-off the story right there when finally the zit meme was done with, so I kept reading. More fool me.

Naturally Evie's latent power starts surfacing as her impersonation of Aveda drags on long past it's sell-by date, and there's a conflict, but by this point I was so tired of the poor writing and Evie's complete lack of a backbone that I couldn't stand to read any more. I moved on to a middle-grade audio book, and liked that significantly more even though it too, had problems. I guess I should have realized from the title 'heroine' as opposed to 'hero' that this novel would be all wrong for me. Not that I'd prefer to read a book about guys, but it bugs me that women have to be heroines, whereas the guys are heroes. Why not all heroes? Why does the female have to have a specially reserved title? She can't be a hero? And before you jump on that, the word 'hero' has no gender, or if it does and we go by the earliest use, it was the name of a priestess!

So in short, this is a big no: it isn't ready for prime time, it tells the wrong story, misleadingly so given the book description, and it's poorly written.

The Adventurers and the Cursed Castle by Jemma Hatt

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook that has 'series' written all over it, although there's nothing on the cover to indicate that. It's aimed at a young middle grade readership, and while I didn't think it was particularly good, it wasn't awful either, so I'm rating it a worthy read because it's not bad for the audience it's aimed at. I just think it could have been better, but the readers who go for this sort of thing are probably not as discerning or critical (or whatever!) as I am.

The story was read pretty decently by Ciaran Saward, and involved a couple of cousins, Lara and Rufus, going to stay with their great uncle at his 'castle' which is a crumbling old mansion on the coast in Cornwall, an English county that's right at the tip of south-western Great Britain. Naturally there's a 'pirate treasure' angle to it, involving an antique relative of the family, but it's not really pirate treasure, it's more like artifacts from ancient Egypt which were purloined or otherwise appropriated and were, for reasons which go unexplored, hidden away in secret location. None of this made any sense to me, much the less the byzantine cryptic clues which the kids, of course, solved.

On the down side, I felt a great educational opportunity was missed here because we learn little to nothing of Cornwall, or of the era in in which the adventurer who originally hid the treasure lived, or of Egyptian antiquities. Naturally no kid wants to read a novel that sounds like a boring and lecturing textbook, but there are plenty of ways for a skilled writer to incorporate some educational content, especially in a treasure hunt where some knowledge of history and customs can readily be made a part of the hunt, and I was sorry those opportunities were missed.

The story is a bit like a Dan Brown for middle-graders, and my problem with that is that I've never bought into this kind of 'cryptic clue hunt' because they're so far-fetched, and it makes even less sense that a small group of kids would be the subject of one incredible adventure after another, as a series of these would demand. Of course, young readers don't care about that! But cryptic clues are silly and cheapen a novel for me, and the improbability of the whole thing is like those cozy mysteries that take place in a little hamlet where the murder rate would make even a seasoned Chicago cop tremble!

No one who is dying of stab wounds is going to work out cryptic clues for Dan Brown's protagonist to solve. He's going to at best write a short note asking the protagonist to contact his granddaughter! That was truly laughable. That same sort of short-sightedness inhabits this story in that the elaborate hiding of the treasure and then the distribution of multiple cascading cryptic clues makes zero sense. Who are the clues aimed at? Why did the guy who initially had the treasure not sell it and enjoy the proceeds for himself, otherwise why did he even steal it in the first place? Did he really believe his clues would be readily soluble two hundred years hence - or even ten years hence? That takes a lot of faith!

That said, it's a reasonably fun adventure for the target audience. The younger boy, Rufus, was just annoying to me, and the girl seemed a bit lacking in oomph. The older boy Tom was also quite flat, but the story itself was innocent enough and fun enough that young middle graders will likely lap it up, so this is why I commend it as a worthy read. It's not for me though, so this series, if there is one, ends with this volume for my purposes.

Sex with Ghosts by Ion Light

Rating: WARTY!

The premise for this story was really intriguing and instantly attracted me, but the writing, spelling, and formatting quality was appalling. This was a free - well not an ebook - it came as a text file! I had to convert it to to an ebook in order to read it on my phone which is my normal book reading device.

The story started out fair enough. This guy Jeremy has the ability to will into existence anything he sees in a picture in a magazine. The story didn't mention things he sees on TV or in movies, or other media, which was disappointing. He seemed not to have experimented much, although there was a very brief mention of something to do with Polaroids and that was about it - at least in the 25% of this I could stand to read.

The things he generates through this method are real while they exist, but they are impermanent, and they disappear as soon as he sleeps, or when the object is encased in lead (or 'led' as the author insists upon writing it). He can make money through, say, materializing a diamond ring and pawning it, but he also seems to have some sort of an income of which we learn nothing in the portion of this novel that I read, so Jeremy is very much a mystery.

Not only can he create objects and machines from the pictures he sees, he can also manifest real people, who sometimes are mere shells of people, and other times much more autonomous. While he claims to have explored this, we’re told - not shown - it, so in the quarter of the novel I read, there was no such manifestation or interaction, nor any sex, I might add.

I wasn't as concerned about that as I was about the author's naming his novel with a title which fails to describe the content accurately. It felt like bait and switch to me. I don't mind sex in a novel if it's reasonably and realistically done, and it;s not gratuitous, but if you offer it and don't deliver it, it's nothing mroe than bait and switch, and it may alienate oyur readers. Also, when you then fail to deliver on any good sci-fi and start instead lecturing your readers on your own personal world view, you quickly lose my interest.

The one woman who shows up in Jeremy's life (based on the portion I read), is named Tory, and she claims to be a witch. We never get any of Jeremy's magazine creations to see what they're like or to run any sort of comparison between them and her. Nor did I learn why she shows up, or has such an interest in him, or even how she learned about him, and he seems to have no curiosity about any of these questions, which makes Jeremy a thoroughly boring charcter, as is Tory herself.

Jeremy also seems to be able - unintentionally - to shut down electronic devices, yet he's able to will a motor vehicle into existence and drive it, so why he doesn't screw-up the electrics and electronics of a car or an airplane he wills into existence, yet does this to other stuff went disappointingly unexplained. This kind of thing bothered me. It felt like lazy writing or inattentive at least. The whole novel went downhill about a quarter of the way in when it felt like the author was lecturing us about his personal pet peeves and his favorite things rather than getting on with telling a story. Until then it hadn't been too bad, but that turned me right off and I quit reading it at that point. Maybe the questions and issues I had are answered later in the novel, but I had no interest at that point in reading on to find out.

The problem with this novel is that it seemed to me rather like it might be more of an exercise in authorial wish-fulfillment than in a good-faith effort to tell a story, but even then it felt like the author got off-track about a quarter the way in, and lost the thread of what had been quite interesting until, then despite some issues. I kept reading, hoping he would get back to the story, but he didn’t seem interested in going there, which is why I gave up on it.

There were a lot of formatting and grammatical errors in the text. Here are a few that I noted: "Caucasian, bald, go-t beard" (should have read, 'goatee beard' - or just 'goatee') "Farah Faucet" (Fawcett - why she gets a mention rather than someone more recently popular seems to speak volumes about the author!) "Give me a brake" (break!) "DnD" as opposed to the more common (and more intelligible) "D&D" for Dungeons and Dragons. "The wanded him down" (They) Character Maria becomes Mary at one point in the story Scotish (when Scottish was intended, but probably should really be just 'Scots'). "I get carried away sometime." (should read 'sometimes') "people in harms way (should be 'harm's') There's a character named Shuri whose name is usually but not always shown with a lower cased 'S'

As far as writing is concerned, the author put in a awful lot of 'he said she said' in conversations. Of course a long conversation between two or more people can be confusing if it’s never identified who is saying what, but you don't need to put 'said' and asked' after every quoted speech. This author did, and it was really irritating and made the text sound like machine-gun fire. Below is an example (with the actual content of the speech removed and just shown as two sets of quotes: ""), and only the identifying parts are left in, so you can see what I mean. What's shown below is otherwise unaltered:
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory asked.
"" Jeremy said.
""
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy asked.
"" Tory asked.
""
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory asked.
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy said.
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy said.
""
"" Tory said.
"" Jeremy asked
"" Tory asked
"" Jeremy said
"" Tory said

Boring! There are creative ways to improve on this without having to employ the robotic he said she said metronomic approach. One thing the author wasn't big on was description and scene setting. Too much of that can be a distraction and lead to a rambling story, especially if it’s not germane to the story, but a little judicious description here and there really helps, and it can also be employed to break-up the rigid tick-tock of a back and forth exchange like this one.

Given the issues and the fact that the story completely and unapologetically derailed itself a quarter of the way through and became a lecture, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Palace of Lost Memories by CJ Archer

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook - evidently the first of a series although I did not realize that going into it, which annoyed the hell out of me. The 'After the Rift Book One' label on the book cover was hardly intelligible in the ad offering the audiobook for sale at a discount, so I didn't notice it. I picked up the book because it sounded really interesting. Had I known it was first in a series I probably would not have picked it up because I would have known that it was inevitably a prologue in which no mystery was solved and the story would have gone nowhere beyond world building. Very few series really get me interested in following them. Typically, they're too long, too boring, and too unimaginative and derivative. I don't want to read the same story over and over with nothing but a few tweaks in between, which is what series are for the most part.

With a title about a palace of lost memories a reader naturally expects something mysterious and a resolution, but neither appeared. The story moved excruciatingly slowly and had way too much dillydallying, and instead of a mystery it came across as a romance, which I for one didn't appreciate at all. Nevertheless I kept listening in the hope that something interesting would show up to explain why all the denizens of the palace had memories which had been blanked prior to the point when the palace showed up. I never got that, and the story ended rather abruptly without even addressing the lost memories portion of it. It was teased several times, but it never was really discussed and it sure didn't get resolved because this is a series and the author has to stretch it out to milk the readers for as much cash as she can. I do not appreciate that, and I do not support books like that.

The book began - and despite being first person it was read pretty decently by Marian Hussey - with the mystery of a large place suddenly arising out of nowhere with no sign of anyone building it. That ought to have caused a sensation of curiosity and even fear among the locals, but inexplicably it didn't. Everyone just seemed to accept that this was normal despite the story having done nothing to introduce or establish any magical elements or precedents.

What was even more odd though was that no one seemed to have ever heard of this king or his palace or at least knew nothing about him. It was like a magical palace plopping down from nowhere was a normal thing in this neighborhood. What, no one owned the land it appeared on? No one had an issue with that?! No one - not even the local nobility - knew anything about the king or his past so they could fill in the blanks for the palace personnel?

The only mystery that this story focused on was that of a Lady - the king's fiancée, evidently - being poisoned and the only person who could cure her was the father of the main character, Josie. Josie was a midwife with physican skills who assisted her father, a doctor, but who was, as we were constantly reminded, ineligible to be a doctor herself because she was a woman. This is how Josie lucked-in to become a persona grata at the palace, yet despite her frequently coming through for them with treatments and cures, the king never once upped and changed the law so that she could be a doctor. That was something I'd expected to happen in this story, and I was disappointed that it didn't.

The other oddity about the novel was that Josie and her father were supposedly well-known and liked in the town which at times seems like a village and at others like a city. For example, despite being beloved and knowing the town like the back of her hand, at one point Josie perceives that she's being followed and runs off, switching directions randomly to escape and ends up lost in a very sordid part of town, where apparently no one knows her and she doesn't know this area at all! It made no sense given the cozy view of the 'village' we'd had before. Worse, the guy who is following her is purportedly not a bad guy, yet he doesn't lift a finger to help her in her predicament. Again, it made no sense.

The book description, evidently once again written by some dickhead who never read the book claims, "In the search for the truth, Josie is drawn deeper into danger, and the answers she seeks might shake the very foundations of the kingdom." No, she's never actually in any danger until the very close of the book, and that's resolved before you can even start to feel concerned for her. Besides, she's the main character and she's also telling the story in first person, so how can anything harmful possibly befall her? That's one more reason why first person is typically a fail for me. And nothing happens that even remotely threatens the very foundations of the kingdom. Once again, the blurb lies.

Add to all of this the rather dull characters and it makes me want to yawn. Josie's love interest, Captain Hammer may as well have been a hammer for all the emotion he exhibits and Josie is hardly any better, showing herself not to be smart, but to be impulsive and foolish as often as not. It's not someone I want to read any more about, and I lost any interest I'd initially had in the mystery of the lost memories. Do I want to keep reading a series that fails to actually address the main topic the series is supposed to be about? Do I want to be led by the nose, continually betrayed by an author who baits one thing and switches the entire story to another? No! I can't commend this as a worthy read at all.

Black Annis: Demon Hunter by Aubrey Law

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first in a series (Revenge of the Witch) and I'm not typically a series fan, but this short novel did have some interesting aspects, and I am a fan of going off the beaten track, so this appealed to me. That said, I have mixed feelings about whether I'll pursue it beyond this story, which is in effect (as are all first volumes) just a prologue. I'm not a fan of prologues either, and I typically skip them!

The story is a bit of a rip-off of an English legend so why it's set in the US is a mystery. Apparently no novel is worth reading unless it's US-based! I don't subscribe to that, but the premise for this one intrigued me. Rather than go out snatching babies from their homes and eating them as the legendary Black Annis does, this Black Annis is a demon-destroyer. She doesn't do this out of any sort of altruism however, but through a desire for vengeance on her tormentors and captors after having been kept in hell for four hundred years.

How she survived compos mentis during that time is rather skipped over, but Annis's survival trick in the carnal world is to take over a new body whenever she's done with the old one. She does this by finding someone who is evil and simply inhabiting their body, thereby putting an end to their evil reign. There's no clear word on what happens to the old bodies which Annis discards. How this behavior got her into hell is also rather danced around. After her break from hell though, and through a misunderstanding, she inhabits the wrong woman (that is, an innocent rather than a guilty one) and she manages to escape from a sex-slavery den with that woman's lover. Their new relationship isn't carnal; it's fraught with danger since demons do not stop hunting her.

This was one thing which made me hesitant about reading another volume. Do I really want to read another book about violent slaughtering of disgusting demons? One volume is usually more than enough of that sort of thing, and the problem with series is that by their very nature they're derivative, repetitive, unimaginative, and therefore boring, if not sickening. My jury is still out on whether or when "I'll be back!" Part of the problem with series and one which was exhibited here quite strongly, is that the first volume is all-too-often mistakenly used as the workhorse in building the world in which the series will take place.

I got the feeling that this was like the opening stage of a chess game, with key pieces being moved into place. The problem as that I was hoping for an actual game, and I never really got one. The story never got past the opening gambit. This is a problem. I wish more writers of series would actually give you a novel to read and enjoy, and they would worry about filling out their world in subsequent volume rather than try cramming their entire set-up into the first volume so all you get is world building instead of a satisfying story. This story was okay, but it wasn't as rewarding as it could have been had the author put more into it. It wasn't really a whole story, so that was a downer for me.

The writing in general was good. There was only one real writing issue I can recall, and it was where Annis and her friend were breaking into a vampire residence which had armed human guards, and one of the guards had instructed another guard to kill Annis and her friend. In the end, it was the guard who got shot, and I read, "Hey, aren't they gonna know you just killed that guard?" Well yeah! The guard had been instructed to shoot them , so the other guard was expecting to hear two shots, not one! Why they would think the shot would give anything away was a mystery. The question that was asked ought to have been "Hey, aren't they expecting two shots?" So, it could have been better thought-through, but it wasn't a disaster.

Be warned that the descriptions are quite graphic and the language isn't restrained at all. That's what gave the book authenticity for me, because it if had gone with a PG-13 take, it would have sucked, and sounded so hollow and pathetic. But there are only so many descriptions of vile demons, and only so many ways of killing them that I can stand to read before tedium sets in. This is why it was hard to see where this book would go from here and still manage to keep things fresh and entertaining - and interesting. There was nothing in this set-up which made me desperate to read on and find out what happened to character X or situation Y, although I did like the general tone of the story.

So overall, I consider this a worthy read, but I'm skeptical about future installments.

Tentacles and Teeth by Ariele Seeling

Rating: WARTY!

The problem with this story is that it was too improbable for me to get into at all, so I never made it beyond the first few pages. I don't mind fantasy, but for me, it has to be reasonably realistic - at least within its own framework, and this was not. The idea of a tentacled organism on dry land doesn't work for a variety of reasons - which is why we only see animals with tentacles in the ocean. The idea of what is, essentially, a giant 'kraken' taken right out of Pirates of the Caribbean, which is as big as a small house, and which has teeth and can move with frightening speed on dry land is nonsensical, so it turned me right off, but it got worse.

There was no explanation given for where these creatures came from, why they came, or how they arose. It was like the author was simply cribbing directly from the Pacific Rim movies and her hero Askari seems like a female adventurer from some video game - like Zelda, for example - so there's really nothing original here. I can see how an author wants to create scary beasts to make obstacles for her hero's quest, but the problem I see quite consistently in these stories is that these creatures are either of this nature: 'fish out of water' animals that make no sense (which was almost literally the case here), or improbably giant or mutant versions of existing animals. It's rather tedious and it too-often doesn't work. The thing is that there are plenty of real and scary organisms from Earth's past that with just a minor tweak or two will work admirably. You don't need to delve deeply into the ridiculous to get the effect you're after.

I didn't read far enough to see this myself, but after I decided this novel wasn't for me, I read some reviews by others and they were saying that the story is essentially one of each chapter being a new monster this girl has to escape or fight, and despite supposedly being the best warrior, she always seems out of her depth and needs help. This unimaginative and tedious metronomic rinse and repeat approach to story-telling made me glad I wasted no more time in reading further. I can't commend it based on the admittedly little I read. And Aerial Ceiling (near enough!)? Is that a real name? Maybe it is but it seems highly suspect, to me!

Dating Nashville by Ann Maree Craven, Michelle MacQueen

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum: "Some things were bound to change, but others never did not." What the hell does that mean, exactly?!

Is this Dating Him #1 or Discovering Me #1? Who knows. Maybe it's discovering me dating him? This story, which borrows heavily from MTV's Faking it 'comes out' as one about a huge rarity: a gay country singer, but the truth is that there's a score of gay and lesbian country performers already out, so this isn't exactly a hen's teeth situation.

It was a huge fail for me not because of that though, but because so much is telegraphed all the time that it feels like déjà vu all over again reading it. It's not so much telling instead of showing as broadcasting instead of showing! On top of that, the behaviors described for assorted people in the story were not remotely realistic, and worse, the main relationship was thoroughly inauthentic and the two main characters essentially, were dicks. Which I guess is appropriate!

The story is set in a bewildering world of people. I assume each of these gets their own story that has been or will be told in other novels which the publisher and authors clearly want you to spend your hard-earned money on. Not me. I'm done and I managed only about 25% of this before I tired of the nonsensical story. The idea is that rising country star "Becks" is an older friend of a guy named Nikki who is having a rough time with his bi boyfriend. Well, deal with it Nikki! He's bi and he's young. It's going to be a while before he settles on anyone - assuming he ever does. The thing is that the two of them (B&N, not N & boyfriend) have never had a relationship other than as distant friends and Becks has had virtually no contact in two years since his career began taking off.

So neither one of this pair has even thought about any sort of intimacy with the other, yet one night when playing a concert, Becks sees Nikki in the audience looking upset while confronting his boyfriend who is with a girl. This is the boyfriend that Nikki already has given up on, so we're told, so the upset seems fake at best. Becks's behavior is even more so since he jumps off the stage in the middle of his concert and kisses Nikki, thereby exposing him to publicity, which is the last thing the younger man craves.

Despite Becks not being that big of a star (which was why he was playing that venue rather than a large, packed stadium), we're expected to believe that the media world explodes, that paparazzi are everywhere demanding answers, and his recording company is demanding he run with this gay aspect because it's trending. I'm sorry but this is horseshit. None of it makes any sense. If Becks is such a huge star, his recording company can hardly hold him to ransom over this, and if Becks is such a rebel, why does he so meekly fall into line? He's not even that big of a star, so who cares about his domestic trivia, really? The story is all over the place and it doesn't gel.

For the most part it was written decently in terms of good English, although the story wasn't where it needed to be. One oddball thing I read stuck with me: "And you know as well as I that gay is just a label." Um... I'm not sure what the authors are trying to say here, but I am sure they could have worded it a lot better! So all in all - or all in one quarter anyway, I can't commend this.

The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Rating: WARTY!

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

I really need to quit reading stories where the description has it that this novel is "Story X meets Story Y," where X and Y are well-known novels or movies. Rather than represent the best of the referenced stories they're supposed to mash-up, such books as this always seem to exemplify the worst of them.

Unfortunately this one is in first person which is worst person for the most part. I do not like first person stories because they're far too "me me me." If you get a good author and a decent main character narrating, it can work, but this main character, Delphine, was not a nice person and she was completely unlikeable. It became ever harder to listen to her whiny voice and endless self-absorption which is only one reason why I DNF'd this.

The fact that Delphine smoked didn't help. I have an aversion to characters who smoke, and it seems like a bad idea to have your character be a ballet dancer and smoke. That's not to say that no ballet dancer ever smoked (or had any other bad habits), but I think an author needs to ask questions like: "what are we promoting here?" and "do I really want my readers to detest her?" I'm not sure the author considered those questions in imbuing Delphine with the traits she has, while simultaneously trying to have it that she was who she was.

Quite honestly, I don't really like to watch ballet performances, but I do appreciate the work the dancers do and the sacrifices they make, so maybe that's why I like a good ballet story, or documentary of which I have read and seen many. This one isn't such a story.

On a point of order (or maybe en pointe of order!) let's take that term - dancers - for example. Despite the novel's title, the term 'ballerina' is traditionally one that is reserved, in ballet, for exceptional performers, and the title étoile for a real star. None of the three main characters in this novel, Delphine, Lindsay, and Margaux (who may as well not be in it for all she contributes) is a ballerina much less an étoile. They are danseuses, which admittedly would not make for such an appealing title.

These three dancers are at the Paris Opera Ballet School, although for all that counts in the story, they could be ballet dancers anywhere, really. This never really felt like a French novel, and I was kicked out of suspension of disbelief more than once, for example when at one point the author tells us "There's no real word for creepy in French" (try glauque).

This kind of thing wasn't helped by the body-shaming employed at least at one place (I DNF'd this novel so I can't speak for all of it) when I read, "A ballerina is a perfect woman. Thin. Beautiful. Invisibly strong." I agree with the third item, but thin and beautiful are abusive and were completely unnecessary. Again, this story is in first person, so this was Delphine making this observation, but it spoke badly of her as a person and turned me off her even more than I already was. Yes, there are thin ballet dancers, but how they get that way is a whole other story that's barely touched on here, where all danseuses seem to be cookie-cutter clones of one another with no room for personality or individuality.

There was also a confused section which read "This one looked like it was from the early 19'60s:" where it seems like the author had written '60's and then added the century and forgot to remove the apostrophe. A minute problem, but still one more problem. Maybe that will be fixed in the final copy.

On top of all of this were the endless flashbacks in the story. I'm not a fan of flashbacks, especially not extensive ones, and even more especially not when these diversions didn't really have divisions from the current story - certainly not by chapter - nor were they truly separate as entities since the flashbacks were imbued with the present day perspective, and the present day sometimes had Delphine recalling significant things from the past. It became, at times, hard to remember where we were in time, and this only served to dissolve the story into an ungodly and tiresome mess.

It's one thing to tease a mystery from the past, but when it's teased out over scores of muddled pages of sometimes tedious text, that's just irritating to a reader. I made it through fifty percent of this and we were no nearer at all to getting even an inkling of what this big faux pas was. That's when I gave up, during yet another uninformative story-halting flashback, and I said the hell with it! At that point, I was so frustrated with the story that I really didn't care anymore what happened or who it happened to, or how much it hurt. I'm done with this! It was that bad.

If this novel had been more concise, had focused more on ballet and less on trivial drama, and had told a better story instead of mindlessly meandering and holding up a tease that was probably only going to be a disappointing letdown anyway, I would have been onboard with it, but as it is, I can't commend it as a worthy read. It was time to jeté-son it and move allongé to something more divertissement.

The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. This is the first audiobook I've had from Netgalley and it worked flawlessly in their app, playing through my car audio. I shall definitely look for more audiobooks from them.

This was a multi-performer audiobook featuring Scott Brick, Dion Graham, Johnny Heller, JD Jackson, Steven Anthony Jones, Käthe Mazur, Carol Monda, Paula Parker, Maggi-Meg Reed, and Simon Vance. With the exception of Johnny Heller (who I do not like as a narrator) and Simon Vance, who I know is British, I'd never heard of any of these people, but there wasn't a Scot among them at least as judged from the voices. Most sounded American which for me took away from the entire story.

I know Shakespeare himself probably didn't hire Scots to perform this back in the day, but he did not live in an age of #OwnVoices! Neither was there any real Scots music. Normally I'm not a fan of music in audiobooks - unless the book happens to be about music and the audio contributes positively. Otherwise, I'd rather have just the voices. The music is an irritation, especially here where it contributes nothing and does nothing to add atmosphere.

The real tragedy of Macbeth though, is that this play doesn't remotely represent the actual story of this Scot - Duncan, King of Alba - which is a game of thrones all of itself. Macbeth didn't murder Duncan unless you want to loosely label Duncan's death in battle, fighting Macbeth's forces as murder. Macbeth didn't descend into madness but took the throne after defeating the rather paranoid Duncan in battle and he ruled for almost two decades before being killed in battle himself. His wife is barely mentioned in history and certainly didn't pursue the evil path laid out for her in this misogynistic work of Shakespeare's. But let's side-step that somewhat thorny issue and consider this as a work of art.

When looked at in that light, the main problem is that this is a poorly-written play. Its brevity is the only good thing about it. I know Shakespeare is all-but worshipped, but not by me. I do agree that he came up with a nice turn of phrase here and there, but most of his work is ripped-off from others, and is tedious to listen to, and way too flowery. If we today had never heard of these works, and someone wrote his plays now, exactly as he has written them, they wouldn't have become renowned at all. For the most part they would have died the death if not been laughed out of town, and they would never have been heard of again. What does that tell you? I don't really know why he rose to such heights, but I think Shakespeare is way overblown.

Nonetheless I was interested in listening to this since, while I have attended some Shakespeare plays live, and seen others done as movies, my only experience of this one had been via a comic book story, Toil and Trouble by Mairghread Scott, Kelly Matthews, Nichole Matthews. I reviewed that as a worthy read some two or three years ago. I'm sorry to report disappointment in this audio effort, though. The prevalence of American accents rather took away from the suspension of disbelief, especially Heller's which just irritates me, I have to say. But the play's the thing and even the Americanization of this might have been tolerable had the play itself not been so god-awful! I'm sorry, but it was. It was lousy.

The best exemplification of this for me was in a speech at the beginning of Scene 8, wherein Siward learns that his son was killed. Here's the exact quote:

Ross: Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt: He only lived but till he was a man; The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed In the unshrinking station where he fought, But like a man he died.
Siward: Then he is dead?

Seriously? That's just one example. I'm sorry, but I cannot stand that sort of stupid writing unless it's done purposefully in a parody, say, in which case it would have been funny.

The entire play, mercifully short as it is, is one long tedious ramble like this, with florid language over-used and no real poetry at all. It's entirely unrealistic and inauthentic, and it's a chore to get through. The over-acting and Americanization of it did nothing to help. There was a bigger and better story to be told here and Shakespeare missed it, while George RR Martin seems to have had a much better grasp of this sort of thing! I cannot commend this audiobook as a worthy listen.

The Girl Who Stole an Elephant by Nizrana Farook

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This novel for middle-graders was light and entertaining and a decently enjoyable read. It took off at a great pace and was highly entertaining, but toward the end I have to say that it seems to lose track a bit and began to flounder, and the ending itself wasn't exactly thrilling, but overall I found it a decent read for the intended audience.

The story is of Chaya, a young girl who is an accomplished and shameless thief, but she uses her spoils to help out people in her local community. She finds she's bitten-off more than she can chew though, when she actually steals jewels from the queen herself, and ends up accidentally getting her best friend jailed as the thief. She rescues him and makes her escape on the king's prize elephant, and the adventure gets wild!

There were a few minor issues I had with the writing. Amazon's Kindle process is well-known for turning books into kindling. Why people continue to support Amazon and its practices, I do not know. I guess capitalism has a lot to do with it. As an example of what I mean, at one point I read this:

"You can see him, and then we’ll leave." He kept
53
looking at her from time to time."

As you can see, the page number (53 in this case) is incorporated right into the text. Kindle will not convert text properly unless it's the plainest vanilla. You cannot have headers and footers in your book when you let them convert it. Trust me, if Amazon's Kindle can screw up your text, it will gleefully do so. And you sure as hell don't ever want to let them kindle your images. This is one of many reasons why I refuse to publish with Amazon or have any truck with them or their Goodreads website.

There were other problems, such as misplaced backgrounds for the chapter header numbers. There was another example of kindling here, where a whole line was mashed together:

you.” Aroundthemthementalkedandlaughedandmunched their food,

I also read some seemingly anachronistic text, such as, "He’s been fired, Chaya." which not only sounds way too modern for the story setting, but you don't 'fire' a military guard! At another point I read,

"Orders?" said Chaya. "From whom?"

Some writers cannot get out of their own way, it seems! I know that 'whom' is technically correct here, but no one actually says 'whom' anymore in real life, unless they're really pretentious. That just jumped out at me as being inauthentic, especially since Chaya isn't exactly a language scholar!

But these are relatively minor quibbles and while you cannot cure a kindling of a novel, many of the issues hopefully will have been fixed in the final published version. The important thing is, like I said, that I enjoyed the story, the earlier parts and the beginning of their jungle adventure more than the last, I dunno, third or so? It seems like the king's men had a much easier time of tracking Chaya and co. in the jungle than reality would support, and I could have actually read a whole novel about Chaya's thieving exploits, but overall this was fun. I really liked Chaya. She did become a bit of a boor at times in the jungle, but despite her failings she was a strong female character and I'm all for those. I enjoyed this story. It was fresh, different, and entertaining for the most part, and I commend it as a worthy read. I'll be keeping an eye open for future Nizrana Farook novels.

Girl Warriors by Rachel Sarah

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a book consisting of short bios of 26 young female climate "warriors" and how they came to prominence. No, Greta Thunberg isn't one of them, but she gets a lot of mentions! I think the author wanted to shine the spotlight in other directions for a change and there's nothing wrong with that.

The girls are as follows. They're in the same order as in the book, but I'm not actually sure if there is any order with regard to how these names appear. Each item in the list contains the nationality and very briefly, something they're known for. I don't list their ages because that's not as important as what they've done. One entry consists of two sisters, so there are only 25 listings.

• Daphne Frias, USA - voice against pollution
• Saoi O'Connor, Ireland - climate striker
• Maya Penn, USA - fabric recycling
• Selina N Leem, USA - rise in sea levels
• Elsa Mengistu, USA - national director Zero Hour
• Catarina Lorenzo, Brazil - coral reefs
• Ridhima Pandey, India - climate change awareness
• Isha Clarke, USA - green new deal
• Hannah Testa, USA - plastic pollution
• Haven Coleman, USA - human-caused changed
• Lilly Platt, Netherlands - plastic pollution
• Ayisha Siddiqa, USA - greenhouse gases
• Melati and Isabel Wijsen, Indonesia - plastic pollution
• Kallan Benson, USA - climate awareness
• Shreya Ramachandran, USA - water shortage
• Jamie Margolin, USA - founder of Zero Hour
• Imogen Sumbar, Australia - fire risk
• Bella Lack, UK - climate impact on wildlife
• Malaika Vaz, India - endangered animals
• Mabel Athanasiou, USA - waste reduction
• Elizabeth Wathuti, Kenya - tree planting
• Sarah Goody, USA - environmental activist
• Vanessa Nakate, Uganda - drought
• Haile Thomas, USA - healthy eating
• Isabella Fallahi, USA - youth voice

One thing that I immediately noticed is how prominent the USA is in that list. It's sad that there couldn't have been greater diversity - not in skin color or ethnicity, but in which nations these people represent. 60% of them are in the USA, and while some of those have ancestry or are immigrants from other countries, it's still sad that a nation with little more than 4% of the world's population gets the lion's share of this story especially when the US contributes a lion's share of pollution.

What - there are no activists in China? There's only one representative from the same Pacific islands that are going to be impacted hugely forms ea-level rise? There are only two in Africa, which as a continent has low emissions, but is suffering a great impact from climate change. The USA, which has actively sought to destroy environmental agreements and legislation over the past four years, swallows the Earth's resources and causes pollution wa-ay out of proportion to its population - or any other portion of the world. Maybe the author thinks the USA needs more activists to offset the selfish damage it's doing?

That important beef aside, the stories are heart-warming and inspiring. That's what's most important, and it's why this book is well worth reading. Strong women, storng views, dedicated work. It's all in here, and I commend it as a worthy read.

That Thing about Bollywood by Supriya Kelkar

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This middle-grade work of fiction is about Sonali, a young girl whose parents are on the verge of breaking-up, and her reaction to this isn't what the majority of kids her age might experience. Sonali's reaction is for her to perceive her world turning into a Bollywood musical movie, along with songs, dance, and scenery changes. But she's the only one who seems to be aware that the entire world is changing!

I should say right up front that I'm not really a fan of Bollywood movies, but I do like Indian music and I love stories about the Indian people, even writing a couple myself. There was a short story titled Upanishad in Poem y Granite, and a full length new adult novel titled Balletwood which I published recently. But enough about me!

Sonali has learned, over her short eleven years, to bottle her feelings up and screw the top down tight, so when stress from her parents' antagonistic behavior, her younger brother's tearful reaction to it, and the possibility that she might be losing her best friend, all conspire to come down on her at once, it seems like something weird happens and her life becomes, slowly and by stages, a musical! Why not?!

I loved the changing emotional landscape and Sonali's valiant attempts to figure out what was going on, all the while trying to control her feelings, and her frequent references to 'filmi magic' which amused the heck out of me. She's a strong female character, and I appreciate those. The only writing issue I noticed in this novel was when I read, "...my bicep aching...." It's actually biceps! The bicep is a part of the biceps, but it's not the bulge one sees when someone flexes their upper arm. I guess it's technically possible to have a bicep ache, but usually people are not that specific! That's a minor pet peeve of mine because I read it (along with other language atrocities) so often, usually in idiotic YA novels.

Apart from that though, I loved the way this was written and I commend it as a worthy read. I shall be watching author Supriya Kelkar with anticipation from now on!

The Song of Sirin by Nicholas Kotar

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is a retelling of the old Russian story of Prince Ivan and the Gray Wolf. Many of these old folk tales are bizarre and brutal, but this one takes some beating. It's a story of stupidity and cruelty, and of theft and kidnapping, and you'd seriously have to put in some work to render it into an interesting story for modern ears - unless you just wanted to piss-off people. It doesnlt help that the story has too modern of s sensibility. I read at one point for example: "Don’t forget that it’s in the main square today." To me, that didnt seem like it fit the antique sensibility the author was trying to extstablish here, and it took me out of suspension of disbelief.

This author in my opinion has failed to make the story interesting and worse, has failed to make the characters interesting either. I started out interested, but became bored to tears rather quickly, and despite plugging on for a while in the hope that it would improve, I gave up about third of the way through because literally nothing was happening except that the 'prince' character, here named Voran, was showing us quite often how stupid and lethargic he was. And just in passing, Voron has a sister named Lebía. His sister has a name that's reminiscent of labia? Really?

He ends up meeting a pilgrim (here that's like a sorcerer-cum-prophet) who specifically tells him that to save the city he must find the living water, but rather than ask about this water: where it is, how to find it, and rather than ask the pilgrim to magically transport him there (a trick the pilgrim has shown himself quite capable of performing), Voran lolls around doing nothing. Later, he takes off on a trip with a bunch of people going on a pilgrimage, and then he abandons them for no good reason despite having been haunted all his life by his father's having abandoned some people in the past in similar circumstances - a dereliction of duty for which he's despised as a traitor. In short, Voron should really be named Moron.

Voran knows that this entire society will come crashing down if he doesn't find this living water. He can see signs that society is dying, yet at no point does he show any interest whatsoever in getting started on his quest. He's a dick. The problem is that instead of telling this really short story of the wolf in one volume, this author has gone the mercenary way of trying to turn it into a trilogy or a series, and it has suffered for it by dragging tediously along when a reader like me wants to see something happen, so the hell with it. I'm done with this story and with this author.