Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Who's Coming for Dinner, Little Hoo? by Brenda Ponnay


Title: Who's Coming for Dinner, Little Hoo?
Author: Brenda Ponnay (no website found)
Publisher: Xist Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Today's December 23rd! It's time for a double W!

Here's a little charmer for very young 'uns. It's one of at least two books about Little Hoo. You may think they don't give a hoot, but wise-cracking aside, this one will likely become an owl-time favorite. It's done in fall colors, prettily illustrated with sufficient detail for young eyes without crowding and confusion. Little Hoo is having a dinner party, and is naturally anxious that all friends show up safely.

No worries! They do, and everyone brings a little something to turn a meal into a feast. I'm sure that clean-up with the feather duster beforehand is very much appreciated. I'm not gong to spoil it by revealing exactly who comes, but I don't want to pussy-foot around either, so let me assure you that they do step up. To whit: they bear gifts, or they show up with something squirreled away about their person, and those gifts aren't turkeys, either.

Normally I like children's books to be educational, and this one kinda squeezes in because education isn't just about math and science. It's also important to know how to behave socially, and how to reward an invitation by bringing a gift. I liked this book.


Monday, December 22, 2014

The Variable Man by Philip K Dick


Title: The Variable Man
Author: Philip K Dick
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!

It's the 22nd day of December, so this has to be a novel starting with a 'V'!

In 2036, Earth makes contact with a civilization in the Proxima Centauri system, but one hundred years later, Earth and Centaurus are in a war in which no shot has apparently ever been fired. Both sides are so obsessed with designing perfect weapons which can bring decisive victory that almost as soon as each design hits the drawing board, the other side has a defense which slightly betters it. Causing the original to be scrapped in favor of an improved design. Since nothing is ever stabilized, then nothing can actually be built! It’s delicious!

Dick comes up with a really entertaining concept of how faster-than-light travel works:

Hedge’s object continued to lose length and gain mass until it reached the theoretical limit of velocity, the speed of light. At that point the object, still gaining speed, simply ceased to exist. Having no length, it ceased to occupy space. It disappeared. However, the object had not been destroyed. It continued on its way, gaining momentum each moment, moving in an arc across the galaxy, away from the Sol system. Hedge’s object entered some other realm of being, beyond our powers of conception. The next phase of Hedge’s experiment consisted in a search for some way to slow the ftl object down, back to a sub-ftl speed, hence back into our universe.

Can’t argue with that! Actually I can because space is inextricably tied-in with time, but I'll let that slide!

The problem arises in this novel when humanity (or rather humanity's computers) decide that the odds are ever in its favor, and plans on launching an attack on the Centaurans within the week, using an FTL bomb which the Centaurans will not only not see coming, they will be unable to defend against.

In preparation for the end of the war, a historical research bubble is interrupted in its scan of the past and terminated manually. This causes it to bring a person back from two hundred years before. Unlike contemporary humans, this man is a generalist - he doesn’t specialize in a tightly circumscribed field of expertise as everyone else in this world does, and this results in those crucial computers being unable to calculate the odds of wining the war any more - they go blank because of this variable - this man who is an unpredictable unknown.

He arrives almost like a Messiah, right on the verge of a massive war to end all wars (as the claim goes) against the Centaurans and just like a Messiah, the powers that be, seeing him as a threat to the status quo, try to eliminate him. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't quite work out how they planned.

This is a really good story. I highly recommend it. It’s short so it’s a fast read, and while Dick wasn't really much on world-building or poetic conversation, he does just enough to get you engaged and keep you in his world - and in the end, maybe a lot of other writers could learn from that!

You can get this book on your reading device for 99 cents (it's free on Amazon as of the posting date of this review), but you can also read it for free online at the Gutenberg project:. Since Philip Dick has been dead for thirty years, trust me, he's not going to miss the income; only Big Publishing™ will benefit.


Hellsbane Hereafter by Paige Cuccaro


Title: Hellsbane Hereafter
Author: Paige Cuccarod
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This is book three in the inevitable series because authors can’t write one-offs any more, evidently. I haven't read the previous two volumes. This one looked interesting and it appears it can be read as a standalone if you don’t mind being in some ignorance of the previous history, which is referred to often and of which we’re given details in mini-infodumps here and there. I honestly didn’t feel like I'd missed anything. Let’s face it, in a series, everything is prologue until the last volume, and I don’t do prologues anyway!

The novel sounded interesting from the blurb - but that just means the blurb did its job - it lured me in, but once I got in there, it quickly became clear that this was not for me. The blurb and the cover image (both of which are typically misleading) are very suggestive of titanic angelic battles, but - at least as far as I read - there was no such thing. Instead there was a heck of a lot of moping around and soul-searching, which I didn’t enjoy in the least.

The worst part for me was when the hero, Dominica Hellsbane (seriously?) went to see her evil father - the very father she should have slaughtered in two previous volumes and failed. This was no epic meeting in a palace with her father sitting a-throne. It wasn't even a hellish trip down into the baking environs of the pit. Nope! Dad-the-demon works in an office downtown. I kid you not.

I have never understood the Harry Potter mentality whereby the supernatural is laundered into base currency, becoming tiresomely ordinary and losing all its color and appeal in the process. With Harry Potter it was the Ministry of Magic and boarding schools and so on, but at least Rowling had the smarts to poke fun at her designs. Here, we get the struggle between good and evil demoted to average-ville, with palatial offices atop skyscrapers, looking out over the city, and spreadsheets, secretaries, and hedge funds - on short, nonsensical in the extreme.

We’re told that Hellsbane can teleport, yet when she gets into the building, she apparently has to ride the elevator! The boss has a secretary, and every person she touches sends an electric shock through her because they're fallen angels don't you know, and they're "beautiful" and "erotic". The problem is that if you have to keep on telling me how beautiful and erotic they are, it kind looses its "oomph" in the repetition.

At this point I’d had quite enough. Not only did Hellsbane fail to kill her evil dad, she's now working for him by doing a little job involving her angelic step brother, who is a frat boy and lives with other angelic frat boys in an apartment. Honestly? What is the point? What is the point of writing a story about something as exotic and supernatural as angels and demons if all you do with it when you've got it is to render it into nothing but a juvenile Hellsbane Does Coed? Frankly, I didn’t have enough Promethazine on hand to make it through this kind of a novel, so I quit it right there.

I yearn for something new and original in these heaven and hell books - something with power and majesty, and with an original take on angels and demons. I pray for something heavenly, but what I get is hellish: it seems that it's foolish to hope for something above average when all writers are capable of delivering in this sphere evidently is the ordinary, the tame, the boring. It’s truly sad. I can’t recommend a novel like that. Like this. It's time to turn the Paige.


Sunday, December 21, 2014

The Undertaker's Daughter by Kate Mayfield


Title: The Undertaker's Daughter
Author: Kate Mayfield
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

If it's the 21st day of December, this this has to be a novel starting with 'U'!

Though the title sounds like one of those pretentious 'literary' works of fiction that medal mills love to lavish their trinkets upon, or perhaps the title of an Audrey Niffeneggar novel, unlike most of my reviews, this isn’t one of a fictional work. You could make a decent argument here that the author is subsuming herself under her father in titling it the way she does: making herself a sub-unit of her father rather than her own person. But the author gets to name their novel, so this is her choice - unless Big publishing™ stepped in and wrenched even those reins from her.

Talking of which, the names have been changed, as they say, in this story, but it is a true story of one woman's upbringing in a funeral home in the sixties and seventies. She was the first person in her family to be carried from the hospital where she had recently been born, directly into a funeral home - where her family lived, and where her life effectively and paradoxically began!

Once the family had moved to a new residence, where her father opened his own funeral parlor on the ground floor of his own home, life became interesting. Her father operated both the funeral home and an ambulance service - not unusual in those days - and they had multiple telephones; they could not afford to disrespectfully miss an important call about someone's dear departed or about someone who needed urgent delivery to the hospital.

It was just as well he didn't ignore the call from a mother-to-be, alone and about to give birth, on a day when the snowy weather was so atrocious that not even the police wouldn't respond! That was the day the undertaker not only made it out there to the house, but learned how to deliver a baby in a hearse, when the child decided it didn't want to wait for the hospital.

There were strict rules in place for conduct in the funeral home. When the funeral was in progress, life upstairs almost went into hibernation: the phones were muted, cooking was carefully monitored to avoid strong smells which might permeate downstairs, movement was reduced to tip-toeing, and conversation trimmed to a whisper, with TV and radio turned off.

The author had a rather strict upbringing, especially by modern standards, and her mother's intransigence and disciplinarian attitude eventually forced her into her spending more and more of her time in her father's funereal domain. It's strange to think of it like that, isn't it: to think that an environment can be so unappealing to you that you'd rather be in a funeral home?!

On that score, humor isn’t absent from this story. There are endless stories to be enjoyed here, and there's a sly (and occasionally not so sly) vein of humor running through them. The tone of the novel is perky and vibrant throughout. Curious asides about "the Egg Man" (long before The Beatles sang it!) and interesting phrases like "enough hairspray to kill a cat" abound making this a really engaging and interesting read.

The humor is matched equally with sadness, not just from the upset of people dying who were known to the family, and young children dying who were known personally to the author. There's also racism and the desegregation that really wasn't. On top of all that, there's a rivalry between her father's funeral services and those of the other guy in town. Note that this was not the guy who took care of black funerals, with whom her father got along famously, if secretly. No, this was rivalry with the guy who had the ear of the hospital's director, and some rich businessmen who had financial interests in burials for one reason or another.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this. This book is very different form my usual fare, and it;s probably because of that that i enjoyed it so. I recommend this book as a good read, a trip through history, and a very personal account of life in the sixties and seventies.


A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss


Title: A Universe From Nothing
Author: Lawrence Krauss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

It's December 21st, so it's time for double U - not to be confused with W!

A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing has been a very controversial book and for no good reason. If you search for reviews on it, what pops up in abundance is Christian websites desperately trying not to refute it (they can’t) but to discredit it! That's a good sign, because it means that it seriously shredded yet another facet of their inane fairy tale, and like a wounded wild animal, they’re lashing out blindly in their pain. This is a routine knee-jerk reaction which we see every time a new Richard Dawkins book comes out, for example.

Note in passing, one more thing about this book. When real professionals, doctors, scientists, and so on, publish a book, they never put their credentials after their name. It's always - and only 'Lawrence Krauss', or 'Lynn Margulis', or 'Neil deGrasse Tyson', or 'Richard Dawkins', or 'Carl Sagan', or 'Stephen Gould', or 'Brian Greene', and so on. This is how you differentiate books like this, ones which contain honest, factual information and tested scientific theory, from those bullshit books which which contain so-called magic diets or alternate lifestyle "help", where the authors invariably lard up their name with a string of letters trailing it. Keep that in mind for future purchases!

The really amusing thing is that reviewers - on both sides of the fence, religious and scientific - are not so much reviewing what Krauss wrote per se as they are whinging about whether the powerful arguments science makes - which discredit or side-line religion - really dispatch it or not. I found that as interesting as it was revealing, because these same people don’t ever try to argue in that same way when a religious book is published using science to try to establish their particular god!

I noticed that one Christian website, in a negative review of this book, was still flogging the bankrupt and discredited (non-)argument employed by William Lane Craig, but not original with him:

    Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. The universe exists. Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God.

This particular website concluded: "Since this is a logically valid deductive argument, and since the universe obviously exists, non-theists must deny premises 1 or 4 to rationally avoid God’s existence." This is patent nonsense of course! It’s not even rational. Point one is far from established. It’s simply wet sand upon which the theists choose to base their claims, and it completely ignores quantum physics and vacuum energy which fly in the face of it. Point four is nothing but a baseless and desperate assertion, which proves nothing other than that they who support this argument are not above hypocritically bearing false witness.

Point three in no way rationally follows from anything which preceded it not least of which because point one has not been established. This is the transparent theist attempt to get a free lunch, because all of the 'arguments' they make carry within them the implicit and a priori assumption existence of a god. They claim that their god has always existed, yet if you tell them that the universe (or whatever generated it) has always existed, they argue that it cannot be so - it needed a cause; then they argue that their god is causeless! Rational? Not even close.

I'm a big fan of Lawrence Krauss, but I think he did a better job in the popular books which first brought him to wide-spread recognition than he does here. His The Physics of Star Trek And Beyond Star Trek are amazing and very accessible, and I highly recommend them. The second was, I think, better than the first. Here in this book, he's not looking at how realistic (or otherwise) science fiction is, he's actually looking at the meaning of science which is so advanced that it might appear like science fiction (or even fantasy) to people who either don’t take the trouble to understand it, or who are arbitrarily predisposed (from the thorough religious indoctrination most people are subject to from childhood) to dismiss it out of hand.

But while I think he could have done a lot better job in conveying his ideas (and perhaps an even better job in reading them - I listened to the audio book version, which Krauss reads himself, and not always very clearly), I still think he made his case. The question is what case was it he was making? People assume he was simply making a claim that everything came from nothing and he proved it in this book, but that's not actually what he's saying.

In his own words, in an interview, Krauss put it this way: "...I'll be the first to say that empty space as I'm describing it isn't necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain't nothing anymore." That's an excellent interview and I recommend reading it. It clarifies a lot of things and makes obsolete a lot of the arguments people have tried to raise in the wake of this book. The link was good at the time this review was first posted.

Krauss came from a background of particle physics and moved into astrophysics afterwards, so he's in a very good position professionally, to write a book like this. He begins by bringing his readers up to speed on the modern theory of how the universe began. And note that here, theory is used in a scientific sense - as an understanding of physical laws and an explanation for how they interact with the real world. It's not being used in the popular sense, like one kid might say to another, I have a theory that your dad isn’t going to be thrilled with us for arriving home so late. A scientific theory is something which has been put together based on observations of reality. It seeks to clarify why things are the way they are, and more than this, it offers predictions which can be tested, and which will either disprove the theory or which will help to further confirm it.

This is why I don’t get why some scientists have taken issue with this book because it asks a "Why?" question! Science is all about why, so why can't Krauss ask why there is something instead of nothing?! Both they and the theists are also missing the point that even if Krauss has not explained everything (and I don’t see where he ever claimed that he had), the fact remains that he has explained everything that he did explain without having to ever call upon any gods. That's the bottom line here. Religion has always had its forte in the gaps in our knowledge. Had we the scientific understanding of the world we now have, but had it ten thousand years ago, no religion could ever have begun.

Some have criticized Krauss for what they describe as 'padding' this book with a discussion of scientific discoveries about the universe, and how we know how big it is, and of what it's composed, but this is necessary since he's talking about its origin. It’s important to understand that origin and how it was discovered, because topics that he discusses here are called into use later - or at least show the need for a certain amount of familiarity with what came before to understand properly what's discussed later.

It’s not a question of the individual value of the different parts, it’s a matter of the utility of the whole. To take a part of his book and criticize that while ignoring the whole package is nonsensical! It’s like checking that your kid packed everything before you go on vacation, focusing on one corner of the suitcase and saying, "There's nothing but socks all the way down! How can you go out in public with only socks?" Well duhh!

My only complaint is about the clarity, as I've mentioned. I think Krauss could have done a better job of explaining in some portions of the book, and he certainly could have done a better job of reading those parts! Perhaps the audio book isn’t the best way to absorb this book, not least because it skips all of the illustrations and diagrams. That said I recommend the book because I think it does exactly what the title promises for theistic definitions of nothing.

Of course, the theists are going to continue to move the goalposts; that's a given. It's true that science is not about proof, it’s about going where the evidence leads and understanding what it means, but if the history of science has proved anything, it’s that as long as theists keep on proudly erecting those goalposts, then scientists are going to continue to score right through them.

If you can't get the book, but you do have Internet access, then you can watch a recording of Krauss giving a lecture which is the essence or even the prototype of this book. It's in this video that we can enjoy gems like: "Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today!" and "Empty space is responsible for 90% of your mass." I recommend this book.


Saturday, December 20, 2014

Tweet Revenge by Rickard B DeMille


Title: Tweet Revenge
Author: Rickard B DeMille
Publisher: MacDonald, Barclay (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This is book one is yet another series - this one to be known as 'the Dawn Johnson mystery series', because why strive for something new when you can keep milking the same idea indefinitely? Hey, more strength to you if you can get the public to buy essentially the same novel over and over again. Microsoft has built an entire industry on doing that for decades! It’s a great business model, but it's not so kind to literature, but hey! that's a small price to pay.

I couldn’t finish this novel because it wasn't something which honestly appealed to me. The writing wasn't engaging and I didn’t find either of the main characters that interesting or appealing. When you find yourself not wanting to re-open the book, and when you do open it, discover that you're having to force yourself to read it, then you have to know it’s time to ditch it and move onto something which actually and naturally compels you to keep turning those pages.

The story switched back and forth between the PoV of the serial killer - some Dexter knock-off dickhead who took justice into his own hands because (he felt) some murderers had got away with it, and Dawn the FBI agent with, shall we say, a somewhat relaxed morality when it comes to justice. The author goes out of his way to make sure we fully understand that the 'good guy' Dawn, is African American and that she's also not a completely good guy in the traditional sense. I am not sure why that was. I mean it’s kudos for having a non-white character in a leading role - an effort which is sadly lacking in popular literature, but if you have to keep hitting the reader over the head with what you've done, it rather detracts from the self-evident wisdom of act in the first place.

Yeah, I know. And the thing is that I kept getting the feeling throughout the portion I read that in the end, Dawn was going to let this guy get away with murder - literally. I didn't read it all, so my view of this may erroneous, but it bothered me - if indeed it does end that way - that this guy would get away with it. Note that I don’t know if it does wind up like that, nor am I interested enough to find out. I'm just guessing, but if it does, then what does this say about our hero, Dawn, who permits this?

It bothered me that Dexter took justice into his own hands, but there were some mitigating circumstances in his case: first, he was sick in the head(!) and secondly, he went out of his way to get convincing proof that the guy/girl he was after actually was the perp. This didn’t make what he did right, of course, but it did offer some sort of explanation that a fiction writer and the attendant readership/viewership could accept.

The problem with this novel, for me, is that I got none of that: none of the effort required to prove the intended victim guilty. Maybe that appeared in parts of the novel I never read, but it was sufficiently lacking in the parts I did read that it turned me off this character (and it wasn't the only thing). That in turn put me off the main character who was going along with this rough justice (if indeed that's how it turned out) being meted out on what are, in the final analysis, truly sick people in dire need of medical help, deadly though they are. Once you sanction vigilantism, you remove the process from all scrutiny and from checks and balances, and you permit one person to be the arresting officer, the prosecutor, the defense, the jury, the judge, and the executioner.

Even aside from that, if none of that happens in this novel, I still had no compelling reason to keep on reading it. There was no hook for me - nothing that made me think, "Wow!" or "I gotta find out what happens next", or that strongly drew me to any of the characters. To me it was boring, just a series of events laid down one after another like so many dominoes.

There was the trope mystery going on here, too - the one which supposedly transcends the episodes and arcs over the entire series. Those things are artificial and boring to me, and this one has been done before. It’s no different from the one undergone by the female cop, Kate Beckett, in the TV series Castle, or by Carrie Wells, the eidetic cop in Unforgettable. It’s not enough for me to want to follow a formulaic and therefore ultimately boring TV show, or in this case to want to read a series of similarly formulaic novels, especially when I'm offered no good reason to do so.


Treasure Coast by Tom Kakonis


Title: Treasure Coast
Author: Tom Kakonis
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

It's the twentieth of December, so it's time for a novel beginning with 'T' - and today's a two-fer.

Well I made it to very nearly page fifty - the end of chapter four - of this one, and I still had no idea what this novel was about or where it was going, and at that point, I no longer cared. Each of the first four chapters introduced me to new characters, none of whom interested me or made me want to learn more about them, and none of whom seemed to be doing anything or going anywhere, to have anything on their minds, to be interesting, or to be moving any kind of story in any direction, let alone forwards, and I decided I had better reads to do with my time than bounce around like a spastic pin-ball in this one.

I can’t tell you what this was about - treasure maybe? Rich ocean-front dwellers? Nice coastlines? I don’t know and the author offered me nothing to get me interested or to offer me a good reason why I should stick around to find out. I have read novels which have pulled me right in from page one. This wasn't one of them, and if fifty pages doesn’t stir me, it’s a pretty reliable sign that six times that number isn’t going to do me any favors at all. Life's too short, and I can’t recommend this one based on what I read - which admittedly wasn't much, but it was more than enough for me!


Friday, December 19, 2014

The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer


Title: The Supernaturalist
Author: Eoin Colfer
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Rating: WARTY!

Today is December 19th, and in this crazy month of alphabetization, it's time to review a novel titled starting with 'S'!

This is a novel that's far more griping than gripping. It's a dystopian future where a city called Satellite harbors so much pollution that everyone would actually be dead were it real. The descriptions are so asinine that they're caricatures worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon rather than a serious attempt at decent young-adult fiction. Not one of the main characters is remotely interesting, and I couldn't stand to listen to the audio book after a few tracks. I kept skipping the boring bits to find interesting bits only to find that I was skipping everything because it was all uniformly boring.

Everything is extreme - there is no middle ground which made it completely unbelievable. I had resisted reading Colfer's (first name I thought was pronounced like mine, but it's actually pronounced 'Owen') 'Artemis Fowl' series because it just looked stupid and boring, and now I know what a wise decision that was - especially after starting on one recently and finding it boring so I;m done now with Colfer's books. I picked this one up only because it was on close-out, and that's coincidentally the best thing for it.

The disaffected narrator is known as Cosmo. He lives in the absolute worst orphanage (Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys) that it's possible to imagine. There is no way something like this would exist. We're told this is in the near future - "soon", but there is no conceivable way in hell that society could backslide to this extreme degree in so short a time-frame.

Indeed, this entire novel was so farcical that it very effectively undermined everything that came afterwards. We're expected to believe that this is a highly advanced technological society, yet there's still pollution to a degree that makes Chernobyl look like a fruit-juice stain and no one seems to have any idea how to fix it!

By a ridiculous fluke, Cosmo escapes the orphanage and lucks into joining a band of "supernaturalists" who are hunting down strange translucent blue "creatures" which appear after accidents and suck the life out of the victims (so we're expected to believe, but this is a lie). The creatures used to appear only for badly-injured people but now are propagating and appearing on even mildly injured people. Given what the creatures are really doing, why they aren't appearing on literally everyone in a polluted society like this is an unexplained mystery.

I was turned off this from the very start by the absurd description of the orphanage, but although I thought I was starting to get into it after a little bit, I really wasn't, and I got to the point where I could stand to listen to any more of this ridiculous farce.


The Boy a Thousand Years Wide by David Spon-Smith


Title: The Boy a Thousand Years Wide (No listing found)
Author: David Spon-Smith (no website found)
Publisher: Unknown
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Errata:
p18 " Lazarus' " should be: " Lazarus's " - Lazarus isn't a plural.
p18 "...he's seen it to." should be: "...he's seen it too."
p19 "The crowd roar their approval." should be: "The crowd roars its approval."

p22 "I see Lazarus lips moving..." should be: "I see Lazarus's lips moving..."

This novel has no preliminary pages whatsoever other than a title page and a prologue. Chapter one began on page eight, and chapter twenty-one concluded on page 422. There was nothing after that, meaning that this book contained absolutely no acknowledgments or publishing information at all. Kudos to the author for so effectively breaking with tradition!

Given this, I found it very strange that there was a prologue! I guess some antiquated traditions have a very powerful stranglehold indeed. I skipped the prologue as I skip all prologues. I don't see the point of this quaintly stodgy and antique conceit - especially when the prologue is in book two or later of a series! Excuse me, but wasn't book one the prologue? That's not the case with this novel since this is "book one", but I've seen that kind of thing often enough to find it thoroughly hilarious. The bottom line is that if the author doesn't think that the text is important enough to include it in the main body of the novel, then I sure don't consider it important enough to expend my valuable time upon it. I've never regretted skipping a prologue!

While the book is superficially 415 pages, the text is extraordinarily widely spaced, at least in the Advance Review Copy, so with normal spacing, this novel is probably closer to 200 pages. It reminds me of my first effort at producing a novel and it strikes me as a serious waste of trees if a novel like that ever ran to a print version. Were I keeping a running score, I'd have to deduct points for that, I'm afraid. It's also first person PoV, the most potentially disastrous voice, which means that I felt slightly antagonistic towards it to begin with, so keep that in mind!

The first paragraph began really weirdly:

It's so cold, so cold I can't feel my face any more. The sort of morning when murmuring snowdrifts fall out of the blackness, drowning out everything except the crackling of the power grids. Behind me stands the City, its chrome Scrapers pierce the dusty sky like needles in my skin. In front lays the Borough, its grey ruins broken by time and neglect. The Wall surrounds us both. Everywhere else, snow white wastelands as far as the eye can see.

I have no idea what some of that even means, and it's so disjointed, with broken sentences, non-sequiturs, and bad metaphor that it was actually painful for me to read. That's not the choicest feeling with which to imbue your readers in the first paragraph of chapter one!

This vein continued with some truly odd phraseology, such as "...like a rocket sending me to the universe and back." on page 23. Aren't we in the universe? How do you go to the universe when you're in it already? Another example is (and this is in keeping with some really unpredictable initial capitalization which the author has going on: "We stop at the first bit of Pinewood we come across." which makes it sound like they found a small piece of pine sitting on the ground and stopped because of it.

On top of that, the voice isn't only first person, it's also present tense too, which makes for odd reading and some inventive sentence construction, but the most annoying two things in the first few pages were for one, the strong similarity between this and the Hunger Games, and for two, the tedious repetition that this guy Baxter (the main character who's narrating this story) indulged himself in, telling us with irritating frequency that his mysterious and dangerous "twin" was trying to get loose inside him and he must fight it.

That was really and truly annoying, especially given that when this "twin" finally does rise up, all it does is tell Baxter to follow his new-found friend Trent as they escape! Why was Baxter so scared of a sheep like that when all it does is give directions like a GPS device in a car? We have to conclude that either it's not dangerous, or that he really doesn't know his 'twin' at all well.

The Hunger Games motif here is of course, in that young people are being 'sacrificed' for entertainment, with a massive discrepancy between the impoverished and badly done-to sacrifices on the one hand, and the wealthy, strutting peacocks of the capital residents - which here are referred to as 'city people'. There's even a 'Caesar' character, here named Lazarus.

But before they're actually forced to fight to the death, Baxter and Trent jump over the city wall into the soft snow, to make their escape. As it happens, Mary (Baxter's evident love interest) shows-up right at the last minute and manages to find her way past any security, and though the crowds just in time to escape with them. Why they never made this escape before today goes unexplained. Mary is of course beautiful, because you know the only significant thing about a woman that there can possibly be is beauty. Nothing matters when it comes to women, except superficiality.

This novel is heavy on endless conversation, between stretches of which are tiny links of descriptive prose, which meant that it gave me absolutely no sense whatsoever of the world in which these endless conversations and some action described in sentence fragments are taking place. Yeah it was a desolate wasteland, and yeah it was a bitterly cold winter, but what else? I never learned. I got no sense of place or atmosphere at all. As I mentioned, the novel has a lot of white space between lines, and this is how it felt in terms of world-building - all gaps with very little to fill them.

So I made it to page sixty, which is just over ten percent in, and I could honestly find no compelling reason to read any more. I wasn't interested in these characters, or their plight, or their world, and I honestly didn't care what happened to them. They had no appeal for me whatsoever. As the movie preview announcer might phrase it: "In a world where there are gazillions of books, one man chose to read only those which really gave him a great ride. I'm sorry, but this novel doesn't make that list.


Thursday, December 18, 2014

The Red Blazer Girls by Michael D Beil


Title: The Red Blazer Girls
Author: Michael D Beil
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a first person PoV narrated middle-grade story about four girls (Sophie St. Pierre, Margaret Wrobel, Rebecca Chen, and Leigh Anne Jaimes) who become engaged in a quest to solve clues and find a treasure at St. Veronica's Catholic school.

I see this novel being promoted as "The Ring of Rocamadour: Red Blazer Girls #1" in reviews, but my copy has The Red Blazer Girls on the cover, and that's it. No ring puts in an appearance until chapter eight, although the inside title page does mention the Ring of Rocamadour, but I don't get how reviewers translate that into retitling the entire novel!

One day whilst pursuing a foolish 'ghost' sighting, some of the four girls discover that the ghost is really an old woman who lives in a house attached to the local Catholic church. While visiting with her, the girls discover a birthday card hidden inside a book - a card which a man had intended that his then 12-year-old daughter Caroline would solve, but she's now an adult and living far away, so it falls to the new generation of 12-year-olds to solve it. Not a one of them - neither girls nor adults - thinks of calling or emailing Caroline to get her help solving the clues for some bizarre reason.

On a rather flimsy pretext, the girls end-up in a house attached to the school church, and meet Ms. Harriman. They discover a long-forgotten clue that leads on a treasure hunt. The first clue is pretty sad. It's a simple anagram - a very, very simple anagram that reveals a book title that leads to the next clue. The second clue is a bit more complex.

For supposed Catholic girls, these four sure seem to have a rather salty vocabulary! They don't seem very religious, either, which is fine with me, but the clues are pretty much all imparted through investigations inside a church. Why he put them in a church goes unexplained, especially since the clues are hidden in very difficult to get at places, such as being under a dedication plaque that's screwed to a pew, for example. Recall that the clues were placed a decade ago, and for a girl who was highly educated and very literate, not for the four girls who are now trying to locate and decipher them in the present. It would seem that several of those who negatively reviewed this novel forgot that important distinction.

One major problem with this is that it's written by a mature guy, and he's trying to portray juvenile girls, which is admirable, but which gets him into trouble in places. Some of the references the girls use are mature guy references, not middle-grade girl references, so while this makes it accessible to older readers, it also makes it rather unrealistic as well.

Some of the clues are a bit weird, too. The first one - the title of a book and the name of its author - was so limp and easy as to be pathetic - not remotely worthy of an intelligent and very literate young woman. Others were so obscure that there was no way you would get them unless you were a literal expert on, or dedicated devotee of, Charles Dickens, for example, which his daughter evidently was, but which these girls are really not.

Others were math problems, mostly focused on Cartesian graphing. These were well done, and it's admirable that the girls were depicted not only attacking them, but also relishing the prospect. I liked that very much and it's one of the reasons I'm positively reviewing this novel. It portrays girls as smart, independent, can-do kind of people, no boys required, although there is a lot of interaction between the girls and male figures, mostly authority figures (or a potential bad guy), but also including one of their own age upon whom one of the quartet has a crush.

I think it would have been better had the author kept strongly in mind that these were modern twelve-year-olds (the book was published in 2009), and that they were dealing with a very personalized problem which was set for a highly educated girl a decade or two previously. It seems that he perhaps became a bit muddled as to who he was writing for or to whom he was trying to appeal, and who he was representing in the writing.

That aside I liked the novel, I liked the portrayal of the girls for the most part, and the puzzles were not too awfully bad. I think it will appeal to middle-graders - probably mostly female, but ones who are not afraid to admit to an intellect and to a love of adventure and mystery.


The Scarlet Letter (graphic novel) by Nathaniel Hawthorne


Title: The Scarlet Letter
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher: Undon Entertainment
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated excellently by SunNeko Lee


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

I negatively reviewed The Scarlet Letter audio book in May 2014, but this version I'm rating as a worthy read..

Nathanial Hathorne was born July 4th. He later changed his name to the commonly used spelling, because he didn't want to be associated with John Hathorne, a relative who was the only judge at the Salem witch trials to never acknowledge his murderous guilt in condemning so many innocent women to death in the name of the supposedly Holy Bible. The novel is an historical romance by two means: it was written going on for two hundred years ago, but it's set some two hundred years prior to that, in Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Most people think of The Scarlet Letter as being a novel about one woman's dignity in the aftermath of what was then (and still is by all-too-many) believed to be a grave sin: adultery (by extension, sex between two children is infantry…). This novel isn’t about that at all. It’s about the complete and utter failure of organized religion. This novel is fiction, but it illustrates all-too-starkly how religion has failed: failed in and of itself, and predictably failed the people who invented it out of their blind ignorance and weak desperation.

It shows how Christians were (and even today still are in too many instances) hypocritical to their roots, and while you may rail at that, claiming that this is fiction, not a documentary, the fact remains that there isn’t a single thing depicted in the novel which has not actually happened in real life - and which continues to happen even today. Indeed, Hawthorne based this story on what he knew of several people from the era in which his novel is set. Prynne seems to have been named after Hester Craford and William Prynne.

Salem resident Hester Craford was convicted of adultery in 1668 by Judge William Hathorne, who was the very ancestor from whom Hawthorne sought to distance himself by adding a 'w' to his name! Another source for Hawthorne was undoubtedly Boston resident Elizabeth Pain, who was buried in the same graveyard in which Hawthorne depicts Prynne being buried. All three of these people lived during the same period (early to mid-17th century) in New England.

One of the central tenets of Christianity is forgiveness, yet we rarely see it, so it's hardly surprising that no one was willing to forgive or forget in this novel! Why is Christianity so lasciviously in bed with hypocrisy? This is a religion which claims to follow Jesus Christ. Not that Jesus or Christ were ever his name. There's no evidence that there ever really was such as person as is depicted in the New Testament: a miracle-working son of a god. But Yeshua (Joshua - the real name we should be dealing with), was a very common name at that time (as were Mary - Miriam - and Joseph - Yusef), and it would be foolish to assert that there were no rabbis ever carrying that name, but I’d be willing to bet that not a one of them was crucified and then returned from the dead.

The funny thing is that even if we grant the Christians all of that: everything they claim for their founder, they're still hypocrites, because their founder was not a Christian! He was a Jew who practiced Judaism, not Christianity. He was explicitly clear that he came only for the lost children of the House of Israel, not for gentiles (that's was Paul's derailment of the cult). Any so-called Christian who is not practicing Judaism is not a follower of the Yeshua depicted in the New Testament. The even more funny thing is that those self-same believers who fled Europe to escape persecution (because they had no faith in their god's ability to protect them!) then turned right around and started a persecution of their own!

The graphic novel begins in 1642, (as does the original which I reviewed a while ago) when Hester Prynne is publicly condemned and humiliated as one of the original scarlet woman, for an adulterous relationship she had after her husband, who intended upon following her to Boston, was lost at sea, and presumed dead, so in her own mind, she was a window, not a married woman per se. In reality her husband was living amongst the natives where he no doubt learned his alternative medicine. Why Prynne was condemned so strenuously whilst no effort at all was expended upon seeking out her deflowerer is at the feet, again, of the Christian church, which has been down on women ever since Miriam the Magdalene was fictitiously turned into a prostitute at the behest of a dumb-ass pope (and you know the Pope is infallible right? Ri-ight!

Prynne is condemned to wear a scarlet letter 'A' visible on her person at all times. Any woman with the virtues with which Prynne is typically invested would have worn it on her ass. Prynne wears it on her breast as if to say, "Thanks for the mammaries". For reasons which are never revealed, she refuses to name her despoiler. It turns out, no surprises here, to be one of the local clergy, Arthur Dimmesdale, who only 'fesses up when he's dying.

By amazing coincidence, when Prynne is up on the scaffold, doing the first part of her penance, her husband shows up, but such a lowlife is he that he pretends to be an itinerant physician, takes the name of Roger Chillingworth, and never acknowledges that Prynne is his wife. He takes up residence in the town, obsessed in finding out who the father of Prynne's child is, rather than striving to support his wife!

At one point, the local governor tells Prynne that he's considering taking her child away from her to have young Pearl raised in a home which has a mom who is not a 'loose woman', but Prynne swears that she will never give up her child. Dimmesdale at least, sides with her on this and talks the governor out of taking Pearl away; then he toddles off home to flagellate himself and re-ink the scarlet 'A' which he has tattooed secretly on his own chest. Way to man up!

Prynne settles in a cottage upon her release from jail, although how she affords it, and even makes a living selling her needle-point is a mystery. At that time, the population of Boston was minuscule. The city had been founded only a decade before this novel is set. It's a bigger mystery why no god came through for her with his long-suffering forgiveness and helped her out by asking everyone "Who wants to throw the first stone?" At this point in the story, Prynne has paid three penalties for this same 'crime': confessing and standing for three hours on the town scaffold, time in jail, and the permanent wearing o' the A. Wanna go for triple jeopardy?!,/p>

Eventually, Dimmesdale (no explanation is offered as to why he never married Prynne) dies in her arms after finally 'fessing up; then Chillingworth magically dies. Prynne and Pearl travel to Europe, where Pearl stays and marries, but Prynne for reasons unknown, returns to her cottage in Boston and lives out her years still wearing the 'A' instead of creating a new life for herself in Europe. What a moron!

I was unable to positively review the original novel, but I am going to positively review this graphic version, because it cuts to the chase, eviscerates the crap, and tells a decent story - all of the things Hawthorne failed to achieve with his original. It’s also really well illustrated, so kudos to both author and artist.

I have to say that I find these "manga" versions of classic novels to be absurd (but in this case not enough so to negatively rate it!). This is written in Japanese style, so you have to begin at "the end" and read backwards through the book - from the last page to the first, and from the top right of the page to the bottom left, completely contrary to how we westerners typically read a book.

I can see how this would be necessary if we were taking an original Japanese work and merely putting English words into blanked-out Japanese speech balloons: the format has already been fixed, so why not go with it? To artificially create such a comic from scratch when it’s intended for western audiences, however, makes no sense at all to me.

Maybe the publishers think that they'll reach more people that way, but I don’t see how that follows. People are either going to want to read this 'comic-book version' or they're not. I doubt that one of the factors in their decision will be the orient-ation! Unless the plan is to also market this in the east, with the speech balloons filled with eastern language characters (which I guess is possible), it makes little sense to me, and the eastern countries are so westernized now in many regards that I doubt it’s even an issue with them as to whether this issue is to be read forwards or backwards. But that's just me!


Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Quantico by Greg Bear


Title: Quantico
Author: Greg Bear
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WARTY!

Today is the 17th, so it's time for a novel which begins with 'Q'!

Normally I write my reviews as I read the book, but in this case I had finished it long before I could be bothered to put pen to paper - or more accurately, finger to keyboard! By the time I came to write it, I had pretty much forgotten the entire book, which is a review in and of itself. Obviously it didn't leave very much of an impression on me! I had to go back and read the blurb just to get my thoughts on track.

I'm a fan of Greg Bear's writing in some instances, but not a fan of everything he's written. I loved the "Way" quadrilogy (although I have yet to read the fourth book in that series), and I liked the Forge of God dilogy (the second volume better than the first), but I could not get into the loosely bound hexalogy which begins with Quantico. Indeed, it's so loosely bound that I was able to read several books out of order before I even knew it was a series!

I think the whole hexalogy goes: Quantico - Mariposa - Queen of Mars - Slant - Heads - Moving Mars but don't quote me on that. I read Mariposa too, but all I remember of that - essentially - is that I didn't like it much. It borrowed too heavily from Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation. Queen of Mars I never finished and it's been sitting around on my shelf while I try to decide if I want to start over with it! Moving Mars I read and liked, but Head and Slant I have not read. The latter does intrigue me, however.

This particular novel was a bit too much like the preachy later works of Michael Crichton - it felt too much like a lecture, or a Tom Clancy military training manual to enjoy it as a novel. The high-tech was interesting, but that's not a story. The story pursues new FBI special agents Fouad Al-Husam, William Griffin, and Jane Rowland, who team up with bio-terror expert Rebecca Rose, and find that they're in a lot deeper than they expected to be when they begin chasing what appear to be your run-of-the-mill terrorists. It takes place in the second decade of this century, which is another reason why it seemed so unrealistic, for me. It actually has nothing to do with the FBI training facility at Quantico!

The novel pretty much takes the most disturbing terror attacks of recent years and augments and modifies them to make a series of almost non-stop attacks in the very near future - a building wrecked in DC, a plague attack, and so on - but the diversity of the attacks and the number of people, and plot-lines drafted in to swell this story makes it a farce more than an entertaining story of terror. In the end, it makes it a confused mess, which is why my recollection of it isn't exactly crisp, I'm guessing.

So in short, I can't recommend a novel which is such a mess and makes so little impression - in other words, which does exactly the opposite of what the author intended!


Jake and the Gingerbread Wars by EG Foley


Title: Jake and the Gingerbread Wars
Author: EG Foley
Publisher: Foley Publications
Rating: WORTHY!

This Xmas novella started out rather sadly, but quickly picked up for me. We have a hero named Jake which is only one step away from the highly detested "Jack" - the most clichéd trope "hero" name of all time. As if that's not quite enough, he has a red-headed friend who is a motherly girl, and a male friend who is super smart. Jake appears to be something of a rip-off of Oliver Twist: he's an orphan who later discovers (over the course of a series of novels) that he's heir to a noble family estate and lives in a very magical world. Jake is, it turns out, an Earl.

The novel is set in Britain, and the author(s) (EG Foley is a pseudonym for two writers: romance writer Shana Gorian and her husband) does a good job with this, but unfortunately they don't know the difference between a Union Jack and a Union flag. It's only a 'jack' when it's flown from a ship, but pretty much everyone makes that mistake, and it's a Xmas story so I was willing to let more slip by than I normally would. In the end it was a wise decision because this novel really took off for me. I loved the punning chapter headings.

So with a few complaints out of the way, I have to happily relate that this novel launched from a really interesting premise. There's magic in the air - and it's of a little more substance than purely the magic of Xmas. Jake and his pals Archie and Dani are out Xmas shopping, and they discover two neighboring bakeries, the one upstairs a patisserie, the one downstairs, an English bakery.

They're run by rivals, who used to be intimates, but who are friends no longer. There's a good reason for this as you'll discover when you read. British Bob has the English bakery and he and his ex, Madame Marie, are running a competition to see whose gingerbread creation is the best. There's something rather weird, though, about those gingerbread villages....

This novel is, of course, set in Victorian times because that era, especially when experienced in England, is somehow seen as the best that Xmas has to offer, despite the wars and the appalling treatment of women and children. Oh, and did I mention that Jack the Ripper was a Victorian? Go figure! But again, it's an Xmas novel so I guess this is why everyone lets that slide.

Jake isn't your usual Victorian guy, though. He has a secret power of telekinesis: he can move stuff with his mind! This doesn't help him when he espies something curious flitting around the shop at great speed. He has seen fairies before, but never one which leaves a sparkly trail of red and green. Just as he thinks he can trap it, it causes a huge pyramid of pastries to fall and Jake can't even save the day with his power because it would expose his ability in public. "Crud!" thinks he as he realizes he must take the blame!

He resolves to have his revenge for this besmirching of his escutcheon by exposing this fairy, and along with his gryphon pet named Red, a friend named Archie, and a royal fairy of his acquaintance, he sneaks into the shop that night (his pick-pocketing and general criminal life of yester-year pays off here). The trouble is that it's not a fairy. It's a creature about whom Jake has neither experience nor very much knowledge, it turns out, but he's about to learn!

This new-found knowledge precipitates a road trip, and Jake and his friends (Archie, Isabelle, Dani, and Red) try to return this character, named Humbug, to his roots, and collect a reward. This also precipitates a lull in the story-telling unfortunately, as the group is held captive in a castle at one point and the story drops into the doldrums, but they soon escape. There are some oddities, too. At one point we get the nonsensical folklore that the Inuit ("Eskimos") have fifty words for snow, but it isn't true. They have no more words for snow than does any other culture.

There's also a strong religious thread running through this novel, the purpose of which escaped me. Perhaps it's just that the author is religious? At one point when someone mentions Xmas, we hear, "That's Baby Jesus's birthday!" which struck me as really odd. Baby Jesus's birthday? Why not just 'Jesus's birthday'? But this was spoken by a ten-year old, so it's perhaps explicable that way.

Head-scratching moments like this were more than offset by the writing at other times which I loved for the most part. One example, in chapter thirteen occurred when Jake said something which struck the others as dumb, and one of them asked, "Are you nickey in the head?" I almost lost it after reading that. I don't know why but it was so absurd a thing to say that it really caught my funny bone and spritzed my brain with all kinds of ideas and concepts for which I thank the EG's Foley heartily. Of course, I'll probably have forgotten everything I thought of then, if I ever sit down to try and incorporate said ideas into a story!

Like I said, some parts kinda bogged down, like the ice princess and inexplicably, the time spent at a certain workshop north of here (north of everywhere, come to think of it), but there were other parts which really got me laughing or made me really interested in turning the page. One of these, which I dare not forget to mention, was in Madam Marie's bakery, where Rollio and Juniette, the gingerbread star-cookie-cutter-crossed lovers were in dire peril of drowning themselves in a pail of milk, but it all worked out sweetly in the end!

I highly recommend this middle-grade novel. I loved it and I am sure the intended age range will adore it.


Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Pandora of Athens by Barry Denenberg


Title: Pandora of Athens
Author: Barry Denenberg (no website found)
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

So it's December sixteenth which must mean it's time for a novel beginning with the letter 'P'!

This is one of at least three books in "The Life and Times" Series, the other two being Atticus of Rome written by the same author as this one, and "Maïa of Thebes written by Ann Turner.

This story is of course about a girl named Pandora, who learns at the start of the book that she is named after the woman who was created - in a creation story which was obviously taken from the same roots as the Biblical creation fairy tale - as a punishment for humans accepting the gift of fire from Prometheus (who subsequently contracted a severe liver complaint!).

Pandora lives with her strict father Alcander, and her increasingly snotty brother Polybius. Being men in a man's world, those two had it easy, and had all the freedom they wanted. Pandora had heavy restrictions placed upon her behavior and freedom because she was a woman, and she resented this immensely, but she was at least blessed by a stepmother who was a Spartan!

I don't normally do covers for the very reason (inter alia) I'm about to highlight: my blog is about writing, not window dressing, which is all covers are: fluff at best and fraud at worst. The writer has little or nothing to do with the cover unless they self-publish, which is why we get dumb-ass covers such as the one this books sports. Cover artists never, ever, ever, ever read the novel which they illustrate. If they did, then this artist would have put the amphora on the girl's head, where the text quite clearly states she carried it, instead of on her clavicle - not even her shoulder!) as the artist cluelessly cants it!

Some parts of this novel were interesting, but I got the distinct impresison that the writer had a list of facts about life in Athens, and he was determined to put all of them into this story no matter what, so some parts of it read like a shopping list.

Another issue I have with historical novels - particularly those written for young people - is how they depict real historical characters. They're usually depicted as clowns or geniuses, neither of which portrait ends up being very complimentary to them. This happens here, with Socrates presented as some sort of brilliant genius and super-hero philospher when he was no such thing.

Since everything we know about Socrates was written by Plato and others, we really don't know Socrates at all. All we know is what people said about him. He was evidently against democracy and something of a hypocrite, as well as being arrogant in the extreme. He purportedly believed that might does not make right, but he supported the Spartans against Athens!

So, all in all I am not going to recommend this novel unless you want to read it as a laundry list of aspects of life in Athens in 399BC, in which case it's not bad, I guess, but you can get a better deal by actually reading a book about life back then rather than this novel.


Wildfire by Matt Hawkins


Title: Wildfire
Author: Matt Hawkins
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!

Brilliantly illustrated by Linda Sejic.


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This graphic novel wasn't as impressive to me as the blurb originally made it sound. The best thing about it, without a doubt, was the artwork, which was remarkable, but on top of the artwork, there needs to be a decent story, otherwise it’s not a novel but a coffee table art book. The lack of realism in this story was where this fell down for me. It felt more like I was reading an Internet rant than it felt like I was reading an entertaining story. Let's look at that issue first.

The author obviously has a bee in his bonnet about genetically modified foods (GM) - and very probably an Africanized bee, in this case! The fact of this is obvious from how he tacks on a bunch of supportive 'evidence' at the end of the book. He puts it out there like he's presenting a balanced view, but it's clear that it's not so, not only from the tack he takes in the fictional story itself, but also in the way things are tipped against GM foods in the presentation at the back of the comic.

One egregious example of this is the statement reporting the number of studies into the safety of GM foods. I forget the exact number, but for the sake of argument, let’s just say it’s 1,200. It was somewhere north of a thousand. Now if there are that many studies of the foods and they declare the foods to be safe, then this very strongly suggests that the foods are safe, yet the fact that there have been so many studies is used to imply here that the very number of studies itself is indicative that the foods aren't safe! Seriously?

If there had been few or no studies, then that would have used as an argument that we haven't done enough to demonstrate them to be safe, but when the safety is established by literally hundreds of studies, that somehow suspiciously suggests they're not safe?! I mean, if they were safe, then why would they be doing so many studies?! This, my friends, is conspiracy theory in the raw - it’s the "rationale" of young-earth creationism under a different guise, and it means that no amount of evidence can ever convince some people. That said, there is no anti-gm evidence presented at the back of the comic as it happens: it’s all claims and assertions, anecdotes and panic-mongering quotes. There's no science there supporting any anti-gm claim.

How easy is it to tear something down when the burden of evidence isn't on you? It’s very easy - and these same groups who are demanding dozens more safety tests when there are already literally hundreds of them, with more ongoing, are not the people who are doing any tests themselves. If they're so concerned, then why not do their own scientific tests and present their evidence supporting their claims? Is it because it’s a lot easier to whine and gripe like a Greek chorus trying to induce Phobos and Deimos than ever it is to do the honest work of scientific research? This is exactly how creationism works. Some of the nay-sayers are so delusional that they'll twist the evidence - no matter what it actually demonstrates - to mean whatever they think it should mean. That's actually what's truly scary.

The best experiments are the empirical ones - ones which are actually carried out as opposed to purely thought experiments, which is what the nay-sayers are 'carrying out'. GM foods have been around for almost a generation without any ill effects or disasters. Genetics apart, humankind has been modifying crops since agriculture began, and even before that, plants in particular have been genetically modified by purely natural means for a quarter billion years, all without disasters looming. This is because there isn't just the GM item out there - there is the whole of nature, and it’s a battleground, with one organism modifying itself and then another modifying to compete with the previous modification, and on and on. Nothing gets to run away uncontested.

Truth be told, there's far more scrutiny of GM foods than ever there is (or ever was) of other foods. If the naysayers could actually produce solid scientific evidence to demonstrate that their concerns have an actual basis in reality, that would be a different matter, but they have not because they evidently cannot. You'll notice that all they have to offer is complaints. They offer neither alternatives nor solutions, and certainly no evidence of their own.

So enough said about that. Let’s talk about the comic itself. The story that's presented here is that an evil big business is playing fast and loose with safety - fair enough, sometimes this happens - and through an accident, this gene gets loosed upon nature. The modification which was done causes plants to grow absurdly quickly, and herein was the first problem for me. The story at this point went not only beyond anything that's being done today in genetics, it also went beyond sci-fi and deeply into the mutation fantasy of 1950's B movies. There is no genetic modification to make a plant grow from seed to fruiting mature plant in a matter of seconds!

As if that wasn't bad enough, the story then goes on to show these plants sending seeds out into the air, and these seeds fertilizing every other plant out there, no matter how genetically distant those plants are from each other, and in a patently ridiculous short time, all plants are mutating and growing out of control! It takes no account whatsoever of innately different plant breeding cycles and methods, and of the massive differences between genomes of these various species involved. This is like saying a guy gets genetically modified, shoots some sperm into the air and suddenly giant mutant snails are all over the place. Yes - that is absurd, but it's no more absurd than what this story is claiming! It utterly ludicrous.

I have no problem with someone, with a gripe or not, writing a story about an adverse mutation getting loose, but for goodness sakes at least make it remotely plausible! I don’t see how you're doing your cause - whatever that cause may be - any favors whatsoever if you create a story as wildly impossible as this one is. I don't see how you can think it will actually help you make your point, or raise awareness, unless of course you also believe that your readership is really dumb or gullible.

It gets worse, too. Once the huge variety of flora has grown so inanely quickly (and without any rainfall to help it along!), it all suddenly sets on fire and burns down Los Angeles! Never once is the fact of increased oxygen production by the plants used to support this (which actually would have had some validity). Instead, we’re given no explanation for how the plants can both grow like a fairy tale bean stalk - which would require a heck of a lot of water - and the environment can simultaneously be so bone-dry that these plants suddenly burn fiercely and uncontrollably!

So no, this story was too fantastical to even have a remote chance of being any kind of representation of reality, but worse, it was too far out there to even be a decent story. It was more like a fairy tale, but even as such it wasn't entertaining.

I have to add to this review some comments concerning a movie which takes pretty much the same attitude as does this comic (but which is wholly unconnected except in bias). The movie seriously outdoes the comic. The title is GMO OMG - a cute name for a thoroughly biased, ignorant, and amateur effort to muddy the waters. It's purportedly a documentary, but the manipulative attitude, and the chronic bias in it are as laughable as they are juvenile, so it isn't actually a documentary at all - it's a polemic. The plain fact is this: the European Union, the World Health organization, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science are in agreement that GMOs are as safe as any other foods.

That's the fact which Jeremy Seifert, abusively employing his "vulnerable kids" to appeal to a viewer's emotions rather than dispassionately examining the actual evidence, will never tell you in his work of what pretty much amounts to fiction. He will also not tell you that the FDA (the US food and drug admin) tests GMO food for toxicity and allergenic properties. Yes, the biotech companies fund and conduct the tests, but if the FDA isn't satisfied with the testing, they can demand more and there are legal penalties for trying to bypass the rules.

Having said that, Seifert makes good points about loss of diversity in crops, and about the revolving door of government employees cycling back and forth between corporate allegiance and government 'allegiance'. These things are definitely in need of scrutiny, but the way to impress that upon people is to be disinterested and analytical. Seifert is neither. Instead, he's all emotion, anecdote, and folklore. There is no science in evidence. Never are we given the tools to actually decide for ourselves if there is an issue. Instead we're told there is absolutely an issue even as Seifert disingenuously pretends to be in ignorance, 'honestly searching for answers'.

From the very beginning, his complete and unswayable bias in glaringly evident. He makes much of Monsanto's refusal to entertain him (which given his tactics and attitude is entirely understandable), yet never once does he try to interview any scientists who are not dead-set against GMOs! Never once does he present references to studies.

Seifert commendably makes much of Monsanto's lobbying and heavy spending to defeat efforts to require labeling of GMO foods, yet when he presents one lone scientist who has an anti-GMO study, he fails to mention that this same scientist was funded by anti-GM interests such as Greenpeace, and he also fails to mention that this same scientist, Séralini, announced the release of a book and a movie tied to his study, and insisted upon confidentiality agreements being signed by reporters! There were many irregularities with the study which was one reason why it was rejected, but Seifert won't tell you this. He interviews only one politician - Dennis Kucinich, who is the husband of the movie's producer, herself an anti-GMO activist!

Seifert continually employees his children to dishonestly present an image of the GMO world as highly toxic and deadly. In one particularly egregious scene, he and his two young boys dress in home-made 'bio-hazard' outfits to trespass in a field of corn, damaging stalks. The juvenile claim implicit here is that this corn is a pesticide - designed to kill insects, and therefore is universally toxic to humans, but this is not even remotely a fair picture.

The corn and stalks are neither toxic nor dangerous. Indeed, they are less dangerous than the traditional stalks he claims it was possible to run through with impunity in his youth: the ones larded with chemical pesticides necessary before GMO crops came along. He inadvertently reveals this dishonesty later when discussing with a farmer how much pesticide he has to spray his corn with - using traditional methods! In twenty years of GMO foods, there have been no reports of ill-effects and Seifert cannot present even one documented example. All he can do is talk scary about this nebulous "threat" he claims exists.

The fact is that there have been more illnesses and even deaths reported from consumption of organic foods in terms of contamination by harmful bacteria from 'organic' fertilization than ever there have been as a result of consumption of GMO food. One huge problem is the almost complete lack of regulation of organic foods! Why doesn;t Seifert ever mention this? Because he's either ignorant of the topic or he's purely biased, that's why.

The movie is all over the place, too. What is its point? Seifert seems to begin by claiming that GMOs are highly dangerous, yet he's bouncing back and forth between different ideas like a pinball. What is his alternative? Have you noticed how these scare-mongering movies never offer alternatives?

He never, for example, tries to explain what advantage labeling of GMO foods would give us! Yes it would allow people to blindly reject them, but it would not tell us what Seifert claims he wants to know: what exactly is in them. In order to learn that, you actually have to do the work which Seifert was clearly unwilling to do: you have to understand the science and do some reading. Why obsess on whether or not the food is GMO And then ignore the information that's already on there: about salt, sugar, allergens, and chemical additives? He says not a word about those even as he hypocritically dismisses the government, implicitly claiming that they're in the pocket of private industry and not the least bit interested in having safe food!

Seifert at one point slides into an aside about organic crops v. GMO, with his interviewee claiming that organic crops out-perform non-organic over time, yet the fact remains that in the US, yields of maize (corn), for example, were flat until the 1930s, when they began to rise due to scientific manipulation of one sort or another. In other words, organic - which crops pretty much were back then - wasn't getting it done at a time when world population was significantly less than it is now. A study published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature concluded that yields from organic farming are lower, in general, than from regular agriculture and that this was especially true for cereals, staples of human diet. The interviewee from Rodale mentioned drought having an impact, but Seifert failed to mention that some of the genetic modification is aimed at drought tolerance - not all of it is aimed at pest control. This is another example of his bias.

Seifert's movie opens with Haitian mobs and burning of Monsanto seeds, with voiced claims of respect for nature and the natural cycle, but at the end, when he returns to some Haitian woman dancing (which has nothing whatsoever to do with his point) he somehow fails to notice a massive pile of discarded tires behind the woman. What? These people love the environment so much that they discard tires and don't recycle? Obviously, the truth is that these opening and closing scenes do indeed capture the hypocritical tone which permeates this entire movie.

In conclusion, I have to wonder where the money came from which Seifert clearly enjoys since he's able to take some considerable time off from whatever he does for a living to travel in a gas guzzler across a large part of the US. Why did he not take that money and run scientific tests of the food he was complaining about? Why did he not take organic, regular, and GM soy and corn and see if they really are contaminated and pesticidal and if so, to what extent? That would have been impressive and made his point, but his sham of a documentary was pathetic.