She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Rating: WARTY!

I swore after my last outing with this author that I wouldn't read another, but I'd forgotten that I'd ordered this book from the library, so I gave it a whirl in the hope that it would be better than Stuck in the Middle With You which I reviewed negatively back in October 2015. It wasn't!

This one just arrived at my excellent local library, and so, hoping it would be more focused upon what I was interested in, I plunged in. The problem was that this was just like the other (or that was just like this!). It was just as dissipated, random, lackluster and as meandering as the other one was. This disappointed me. Like the other book, this one was all over the place, starting in 2001 with a random encounter with two girls, one of whom had been a student of the author's when she was a both a professor of English and a he. This had taken place two years before the publication of the book. The second chapter referred us back to 1968. The third jumped up to 1974, then there was a weird interlude, after which we're off to 1979, and then to 1982. No. Just no!

I confess I don't get this "Nauseating Grasshopper" technique which, as a martial art, would undoubtedly be a deadly and disorientating fighting style, but which is nothing but irritating and off-putting as a literary conceit (and I use that last word advisedly). It's the same kind of thing which was employed in the other book and at a point just 50 pages in, I started to realize that I had little interest in continuing to read this despite the engrossing and important topic. I only ever had two English professors (post high school) and both of them were great in their own way. How this English professor can write a book about a n important and fundamentally interesting topic, yet make such a pig's ear out of it is beyond my understanding. Perhaps it's precisely because it was written by an English professor that it's so bad. Perhaps you have to have a certain distance from the language in some way I can't quite define, to be able to execute a story successfully in it.

If the skipping around like a cat on a hot tin roof had revealed anything, I could have maybe got with it, but it didn't. This wasn't a coherent story, not even remotely. It was an exhibition (and I mean that in the most derogatory sense) of miniatures - of impressionistic paintings in water colors that were so lacking in definition that they were essentially meaningless stains on old, discarded canvasses. They conveyed nothing, and I can no more recommend this than I could finish it. I wanted to learn just what had gone on with this guy who was really a girl, and I wanted to hear it in her own words, but I couldn't because she's not there.

Happy Marriage Volume Two by Maki Enjoji

Rating: WARTY!

This was volume two in a series. I noticed it in the excellent local library and decided to give it a try even though it's not my usual fare, so I picked up the first two volumes (it looks like it runs to maybe half a dozen volumes, but the volumes were not all there, so it was hard to tell. It's a Josei (mature romance) manga about an arranged marriage, but it's not quite what you might think at first glance. Normally I wouldn't go in for this because I'm not a big romance reader. Unless it's done expertly, which tragically few are, it's boring to me. Also I am not a fan of this style of manga, where every character, male and female looks exactly the same and the only way you can distinguish one form another is by clothes and hairstyle. They all have insanely large eyes and ridiculously pointy chins. This one also had issues with assigning the speech balloons - sometimes it was entirely unclear about who was saying what.

Those problems aside, I enjoyed this first volume. The girl, Chiwa Takanashi is far too much of a wuss for my taste, and both of the characters seemed to be as simplistic in their behavior as they were in their art work. over the course of volume one, they seemed to be growing more complex, but over volume two, it was obvious they had not grown at all. They were just as incompetent and stupid in relationships as they had been before they married. Their attitude is juvenile and rigid, especially Hakuto's, and worse, he evolved into a complete jerk and a monstrous control freak, and Chiwa became a passive, compliant lamb. This came to a head in the last chapter of the volume, where she finally decides to get out from under Hakuto's thumb and take a job at a start-up run by an old friend from college. Hakuto refuses to accept her resignation, and then browbeats her college friend into withdrawing his job offer (some friend), and Chiwa completely falls into line with this scheme of imprisonment and control. I'm sorry, but I don't want to read about a slave girl - a woman who is nothing more than a toy doll for a man. I sincerely hope that Japanese women are not like this!

Happy Marriage Volume 1 by Maki Enjoji

Rating: WORTHY!

This was volume one in a series. It's a Josei manga about an arranged marriage but it's not quite what you might think at first glance. Normally I wouldn't go in for this because I'm not a big romance reader. Unless it's done expertly, which tragically few are, it's boring to me. Also I am not a fan of this style of manga, where every character, male and female looks exactly the same and the only way you can distinguish one form another is by clothes and hairstyle. They all have insanely large eyes and ridiculously pointy chins. This one also had issues with assigning the speech balloons - sometimes it was entirely unclear about who was saying what.

Those problems aside, I enjoyed this first volume. The girl is a bit too much of a wuss for my taste, and both of them seemed to be as simplistic in their behavior as they were in their art work, but as the story played out, they started to fill out, growing some character and some foibles, which made it interesting. Each volume has four 'chapters', and the author (who is also the artist) added in some amusing comments here and there about the story and the development of it, and some things she had thought of which were left out, which made it more interesting for me.

Despite some issues, I liked this volume and I recommend it as a worthy read. I can't say the same for volume two, however!

Doll Bones by Holly Black

Rating: WORTHY!

These three twelve-year-old kids, Alice, Poppy, and Zach, have a healthy imagination and play together in an elaborate fantasy world they've created, featuring pirates and mermaids, and evil queens, based on their respective toys - action figures, Barbie dolls, and this one bone china doll in Poppy's mom's cabinet. The way Holly Black evokes these kids and their passion for this fantasy world is remarkable. The way it's read by Nick Podehl contributed greatly to the atmosphere and representation of the kids, too. I can only speculate uselessly how I would have found this novel had I read it first rather than listened to it. I would still have liked it, but would I have liked it as much? More? It's impossible to say, just as it's impossible to say if I would have disliked it had the narrator been rather nauseating. You pays your money and you takes your chance! Except that in this case it's "You borrows your audiobook ...."

Zach's dad thinks Zach is too old and too male to be playing with dolls, so he throws out all of Zach's figures one day while Zach is at school. The boy already resented his father for disappearing for some time before slowly sliding his way back into the family, but now Zach honestly hates him. For reasons which I didn't feel were well explained, Zach is too embarrassed to admit to the girls that his toys were thrown away, so he brusquely states that he's done playing these childish games. This begins a thread of discord which runs uncomfortably through this story like a out-of-the-way itch

The girls are crushed, but he's adamant about his decision, until late one night Alice and Poppy show up outside his bedroom window with a story that Poppy has been having night-time visitations from the ghost of the bone china doll, which she says is made from real bones of a dead girl who wants to be buried or she will curse them. Poppy has some actual ashes and bone fragments she says were inside the doll. They look like they came from someone's cremated remains.

Zach isn't sure that she's being honest, and he only half-way believes the ghost story, but he's impressed by Poppy's earnest demeanor, and by Alice's bravery at risking being grounded for life by her strict grandmother. Alice said she would only go with Poppy if Zach came, and Poppy was determined to go alone if she had to. Zach may have been skeptical, but impressed by the strength of conviction in his friends, and interested in one more adventure with the girls, the three of them hop on a bus to East Liverpool in the wee hours. it's a three hour ride to whence this dead girl supposedly hailed. Their plan is to bury her and lift the curse.

Thus begins their quest! The story is told well and has a lot of action and adventure, and some interesting conversations and shifting allegiances. There are some less than noble behaviors indulged in by these three kids, and I would have liked to have seen some sort of remorse or cost to the kids resulting from these, but there was none. I didn't like that. That aside, though, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I recommend it not only for age-appropriate readers (/listeners!), but for anyone who likes a good adventure story.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: The Power of the Mind Worms by Steve Darnall

Rating: WARTY!

I was a big fan of playing Sid Meier's Civilization game when I first discovered it, but I only liked the 2D version. The "isomorphic" version was just confusing to me. It made it really hard to keep track of where your pieces actually were. I know of no battle strategy display that uses such a bizarre system. On top of that, the bizarre rules were heavily biased towards making it all but impossible to win, especially if you had the gall to trespass above level two or three. I reached a point where I lost patience with trying to get the rules to work or the game to work within them, so I refused to play by those ridiculous rules, and I developed methods for bypassing them, such as creating a large number of cities quickly, defending them well, making them close enough that cities co co-defend each other, and upgrading military units as soon as better ones became available.

In terms of economics, instead of building up large cities with all manner of amenities, I would have each city build one thing (typically city walls to begin with, and later cathedrals, for which the sale price was higher). I would keep selling and rebuilding the thing over and over again, to fill my coffers, and eventually I would have so much that I could conquer cities just by bribery, and then sell off their buildings and use that cash to bribe the next city. I tried to be at peace with all other civilizations, but this is not a game that promotes peace and harmony at all (which is why this graphic novel was such a joke to me!).

Once another civilization betrayed the peace, I would became ruthless in destroying them. My leadership was always despot so I never had to worry about my 'advisers' or 'government'. I always kept one token 'enemy' village alive, though so I could continue playing out the game and not have it end prematurely, but after a while I started quitting the game as soon as it looked like I was unbeatable, because it became boring then. It also annoyed me that a civilization never really got anything for exploring or for however many years of peace you maintained. Like I said, it was all about hostility and this really didn't interest me that much. It was the exploring and building up a civilization which I really enjoyed.

The supposed goal of the game was to build a rocket to take your civilization to a new world, but I rarely made it to that stage of the game, and I didn't care because it was boring and time-wasting to me, since you never could actually go to another planet - not until a later version came out, and that version didn't interest me. This story, then, is based on that idea, and on those later games which were produced which took Civilization to the next level - where you started the game by colonizing another planet.

This graphic novel, with amazing art work by Rafael Kayana, takes it from there. People are living on the laughably unoriginal planet named Gaia, and the female ruler of these people is at odds with another faction of humans led by a guy. She wants to live in harmony with the planet, and her opponent essentially wants to strip-mine it. The situation is literally black and white since she's white (or pale Asian at least) and he's black. She's the 'gentle passive female' and he's the 'aggressive, belligerent male'. It's so pathetic as to be a joke. There is no gray area here.

Her position is as sad as it is weak because the planet isn't in harmony with the people. How can it be? Humans did not evolve there, and evidently do not belong since they cannot even breathe the atmosphere. They're required to wear a mask outdoors in the same way the humans were so required on Pandora in the Avatar movie. There's no harmony here, although I'd take issue with the contention we read at one point which states that nitrogen is harmful to humans ("If the nitrogen in the air doesn't kill you, the mind worms will"!). Seriously? Eighty percent of our atmosphere here on Earth is nitrogen. It doesn't kill humans - unless, of course there's no oxygen with it and we therefore suffocate, but that's not due to the nitrogen. Any other gas would suffocate us in just the same way that water does. And water is made from oxygen! This poor science is inexcusable.

Of course, once she bonds with the psychic worms, then she can commune with them and use them to defeat the militaristic and superior forces opposing them. There is, of course no explanation whatsoever for the existence of the mind worms: no word on how they evolved so far and yet failed to evolve further, much less on how they're even able to commune with a completely alien species, or even why they would. Despite the beautiful art work, I can't recommend this because the story was quite simply too stupid to live.

Dante's Divine Comedy by Seymour Chwast

Rating: WARTY!

In which I play the back nine with Dante Alighieri!

I almost picked up a copy of the Divine comedy in audio book form, but I declined it in favor of this graphic novel, Wise decision! The book seemed like too much to take for me, and the graphic novel confirmed it. Much simplified - indeed to a degree greater than I would have liked - the book depicts pretty much the Cliff's Notes version of the story, with lots of low grade illustration (in the form of monochrome line drawings and very little text. There's a mild sense of humor running through it, but overall I was neither impressed by the graphic novel version, nor by the primitive and idiotic original story, steeped as it was in the most asinine superstition and bullshit imaginable. I was so glad I didn't plump for the audio book which would have been a nightmare to listen to if it was as tedious as this version.

This is where the nine circles of hell originated, at least in popular consciousness, and which in turn evidently owes a lot to the seven deadly sins. It's also very confusing. The first seven circles are each dismissed with barely a page of illustration and text, and having been through that, I have to question the mental health of Dante, although having said that, I do fully realize that this was how people in general and the church in particular really viewed life and death back then. Or at least tried to sell it, in the case of the church.

The first circle of hell is Limbo, which is apparently simply hanging out solely with, it would appear, celebrities. It left me not knowing quite what to do, because for me that would be hell. I imagine it wouldn't seem remotely like hell for all-too-many people, and especially for those who live in a celebrity culture like the population of the USA seems to do!

The second circle of hell is the naked truth. We're told that it's inhabited by "Lustful creatures who committed sins of the flesh who are tossed about carelessly in the dark by the most furious winds." Now they spend eternity locked in carnal embrace. I can't imagine all that many people actually going beyond this level. They would be happy here - probably most guys, and more women than you might initially imagine. It would be like going back to the sixties. For eternity. How is this hell? LOL!

The third circle (or the turd circle as it happens) is to punish the gluttons, and this one is the first level which actually does punish. Evidently the fate of gluttons is to float around in the very excrement which has resulted from their own gluttony. Ick! You gluttons better get your shit together or you're actually going to get your shit - together!

I really wanted to get my hands on the fourth circle, which is devoted to avarice. It's also where apparently Rolling Rock beer got its name, because rolling rocks is what these people do - around a circle until they crash into the other team coming the other way, then they turn and roll the rocks back in the opposite direction. This sounds like a rip-off of the Sisyphus myth, but not really much of a hell as compared with the previous level, at least!

The fifth Circle is a joke, apparently. It's naked mud wrestling! It's not exactly my cup of mud - although I guess that would depend upon who it is I was scheduled to wrestle! LOL! There's a kind of a break here, where we see out traveler and his guide traveling the River Acheron (take that, Percy Jackson and your river Styx lowest common denominator!) Evidently these three rivers, The Acheron, the Phlegethon, and the Styx, flow from the mouth of a statue. I never knew that! Nor can I figure out how Greek mythology took over this story about Christian punishment! Rip-Off!

As the two travel (Virgil and Dante) with Phlegyas across the Styx now, they pass sinner Filippo, who is killed by other sinners. Wait, what? Wasn't he dead already?! We are in the afterlife (written as two words in this version!) are we not? It's no wonder that three furies appear and call upon Medusa. I felt like doing the same at this point. The sixth circle consists of heretics and Epicureans, sitting in coffins surrounded by fire. They look bored, but I would imagine they would have some great debates and discussions going if this weren't fiction.

The seventh circle is devoted to violence to begin with, but this is where the neat nine circles goes to hell - as it were, because there are now sub-divisions, and anyone who has lived in a badly-designed subdivision will know exactly what kind of hell it is. On level two, a minotaur guards a ravine of broken rocks across which Dante rides on a centaur, because those broken rocks are hellish, don't you know? Dante seems to have a particular obsession with naked bodies and broken rocks. You have to wonder what state his own rocks were in when he was naked. Possibly New Jersey, but more likely Arizona. Oh, and centaurs prevent the violent folk from escaping the boiling blood river! I imagine they would become trapped when the blood congealed from being boiled. Have I ever boiled blood, you ask? Well this ridiculous theology makes my blood boil. Does that count?

On level three of the seventh circle, you can catch the direct line to Buckingham palace. Oh, wait, wrong hell! No, here, harpies feed on the suicide trees, which are like the ones in the Wizard of Oz movie - living beings. They have it better than those who were violent against god, though! Those villains have to lie on hot sand and have ashes rain upon them. Seriously? Dante's god is so petty that he punishes people for eternity with abusive and nasty pettiness because they were violent against him? I know some parents are harsh on their children, but for the most part, a truly loving parent forgives their kids and loves them unconditionally, continually striving to help them all they can. God evidently gives up after four score and ten. For all our faults, when it comes to looking after our loved ones, for the most part, we humans put all gods to shame.

In the second zone the sodomites are punished under fiery rain! The thing is that flames evidently burn-off the features of the sodomites, so not a one of them is ugly! Yeay! Next up, eighth circle, which is yet another sub-divided mess: the fraudulent, the pimps and seducers, oh, and astrologers, magicians and diviners! Hypocrites. Serpents attack thieves and the two merge. Sowers of discord have to walk in a circle where they're repeatedly stabbed, heal, and are stabbed again. Falsifiers of metals get scabs. Now scabs merely cross picket lines. The ninth circle is pretty much more of the same. It's all about betrayal and usury - which is a sin! Bankers of the Earth beware! You have nothing to lose but your bottom line....

Curiously, Dante has an out. Giants lower him to the bottom of hell where he can use the devil's own tunnel to climb out and escape! He makes his way to purgatory where he's required to wash his hands of hell, because he's not a spirit. He notices that he casts a shadow, but Virgil, his companion does not. Spirits, we're told, cannot cast a shadow but can feel pain. How does that work?

The dead are begging Dante to tell their loved ones to pray for them. Why is this? Are we to understand from this that two spirits, both equally stained with sin, will have different outcomes if one has people begging for him whereas the other does not? This is the same thing as saying that it's not your own sin which condemns you, but the level of groveling you can command from your followers! Honestly? Why would the prayers of the living matter? Why not the prayers of those already dead, who have gone on to heaven? Wouldn't their evaluation be more accurate? And why would a perfect god need to be told anything? Or asked for anything? Doesn't he already know? So the purpose of this is for people to debase themselves with no guarantee of an outcome, evidently. It has nothing to do with actually affecting, much less effecting, an outcome. Indeed, how can a perfect god's mind be changed by prayer? To suggest it can be changed indicates the divine mind is in an imperfect state!

Of course, the value of Dante's insights is rather lessened when we learn of his cosmology, which has Earth at the center and the sun out in a "sphere" between Venus and Mars.... Comedy is definitely the word for this. It's a joke. Not only is the original story complete trash, as well as being both juvenile and vindictive, this graphic rendition of it felt to me like it was tossed together on the cheap. It was lackluster and minimalist to an extreme degree, and I can't recommend it.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Rating: WARTY!

I started listening to Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief this past weekend and this morning. It's pretty bad and very much a rip-off of Harry Potter. It's like cut-price Greek mythology - set in America no less - meets Harry Potter. There's even a wand, after a fashion - it's Zeus's lightning bolt. Someone stole it and evidently the gods are, as usual, utterly incapable of discovering who took it or where it is. For reasons unexplained, they zero-in on Percy Jackson, who is, unbeknownst to him, the son of not only his mother, but also Zeus's brother Poseidon, who's been banned by Zeus from seeing his son. The Greek gods were the original dysfunctional family.

In order to protect Percy from unspecified potential enemies, his mom evidently had no other choice than to take-up residence with a disgusting guy who abuses her to a caricatured degree, mentally and physically. Evidently his smell is powerful enough to hide Percy from enemies who are evidently as dumb as the gods. Percy attends a special private school, although who pays for this goes unspecified. The only thing taught at the school, it would seem, is ancient Greek mythology, and Latin. Why Latin, I have no idea whatsoever. No Roman gods are involved in this story! I studied Latin for two years in high school and got nothing out of it other than a better understanding of English, which I could have arrived at in far less painful ways, trust me!

As is typical for this magical child trope, Percy, like Potter, grows up in pain and is kept in ignorance about his true origin and nature. Like Potter, he's bullied at school, and he's been told that he suffers from ADHD and dyslexia. He discovers he can read ancient Greek with no trouble, but plain modern English escapes him. I never knew that was what dyslexia was all about! Wow!

I was having a hard time getting into the story, mostly because Percy was incredibly stupid and blind, and the mythology had been dumbed-down to childish levels presumably to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I had quite liked the movie, which despite its flaws, was considerably better than the novel. It was tighter, smarter, better told, and more 'sensible', although it still fell short of being truly good.

The movie changed a few significant things, too - such as Percy saving Grover from the minotaur in the book, which was changed to Grover saving Percy in the movie; then came the second movie which sucked! This morning, I decided that this first novel was very much of the same nature as the second movie, and I skipped to the last couple of disks figuring I could skim through those before I drop it off at the library this afternoon. It's gone, girl!

My conviction that this novel would never improve and would be just as bad at the end as it was at the beginning, was fully confirmed and amplified upon. After hearing the guy who was reading this story pronounce Charon as Karen as opposed to Care - on, and discovering that Kerberos (not pronounced with a K, but begun with a 'ser' - as in Ser-bian in this novel), and discovering that this fierce guardian of hell was really just a puppy who liked to chase balls, I had pretty much heard all I could stand. I never like Annabeth in the movie (she was better in True Detective), and I liked her just as little in the novel. And why was she named Annabeth? She's the daughter of a Greek God and she's named with a Hebrew name? Grover is a Satyr, and gets an English name?!

This author has no respect for the mythology and dumbs it down incredibly. What in the name of the gods inspired him to take Greek mythology and then divorce it entirely from Greece and set it in the USA? What logic or rationale is behind that? Obviously none. The Empire State Building is Olympus? It's really saddening that he trashed and cheapened some fine mythology instead of fully capitalizing on it. On the other hand, he has a best-selling franchise from treating his readers like they deserve nothing better, so maybe the rest of us should jump on this bandwagon and start turning out equally careless LCD novels? I honestly don't l think I can do that, and I certainly can't recommend this as a worthy read. The grpahic novle is no better. I posted a negative review of that in June of 2017.

The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber

Rating: WORTHY!

James Thurber died in 1961, and has largely been forgotten except for when someone makes (or remakes) a movie based on his best known story: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I've been a fan of Thurber's for years, so I'm pleased to be able to write a positive review of a children's story he wrote that I had never read before.

This story is delightfully full of Thurber's sly and dry sense of humor, and is illustrated in a style reminiscent of Thurber's own, by Marc Simont. There is a princess kept imprisoned in Coffin Castle, by the cold Duke. Within the castle are thirteen clocks which are stopped at ten to five (and the odds of starting them are much longer). Along comes a prince to try his hand after so very many others have failed, and as usual, he's given impossible tasks to complete for the princess's hand (and, presumably, the rest of her). The first is to gather one thousand jewels and deliver them to the Duke in nine and ninety hours. The second is to restart the clocks - if he has the time! Can he succeed? Only Thurber knows!

This delight of a story, with an introduction by none other than Neil Gaiman. The tale is charming, funny, irreverent, and well told with, of course, a happy ending. I recommend it.

Kat McGee and the Halloween Costume Caper by Kristin Riddick

Rating: WORTHY!

"Long Ranger" should maybe be "Lone Ranger"?!

This is my first Katherine McGee, and indeed my first Kristin Riddick, novel, and it was a worthy read, although as a series, it’s not something which at my age I feel any compulsion to continue, but for the intended age range, I see no problems with it at all. It was a fun, inventive story of wild derring-do, support and friendship and sends a very positive message. I have to add that the illustrations are remarkable and worthy of a novel aimed at any age. Nick Guarracino is a fine artist - and a useful contributor. For example at one point the questers came upon a wall of trumpets and I was picturing that completely wrong until I saw the artist's depiction of it. Hopefully he saw it as the author intended!

Kat loves Halloween, and makes her own costume every year, but this year, "the menacing Dr S" has prevailed upon the powers that be to cancel Halloween, based on problems of vandalism and theft which have accompanied previous events. I strongly suspected Dr S of actually orchestrating those very events, and we soon learn why. Kat's grandmother - the only one who fully supported Kat's amizing costuming ambitions, feeds her a special home-made lollipop one evening which not only puts Kat to sleep, it transports her from her native Totsville to Treatsville, which is the town where the Halloween costumes live. Someone there, who looks remarkably like Dr S, is stealing those costumes for his own benefit, which in Treatsville, where the costumes have a life of their own, is nothing short of kidnapping!

Kat is hosted by Dolce, who frankly creeped me out despite her charming demeanor and her appealing looks. Dolce initially prevaricates about being a witch, and certainly doesn't behave or look like traditional witch, but later she describes herself as a "wee witch-in-training," and she explains to Kat why this young girl is so important to Treatsville's future - but can she brave the Forest of Fear, the Pits of Gloom, and the Swamp of Sorrow? Kat calls to herself costumes from previous Halloweens: The Jujitsu Princess, and The Candy Cane Witch, and with these trusty companions, she launches herself on this quest, bravely if cautiously, but with Preppy Pirate spying on them and Snaggletooth trying to kidnap all costumes and thwart (yes, thwart!) her quest, can she succeed? I guessed that she would!

I had an issue or two over some of the events in the story like this one: "...like when Ellie Byrd stepped on the end of a rake two years ago. A fish head attached to the handle flew in her face. She hasn’t been able to go near a hay maze since." I know that's meant to be scary and funny, but stepping on a rake can lead to puncture wounds that in turn necessitate a trip to the Doctor for a tetanus shot, or at the very least a painful whack in the face. Even if we assume it was a leaf rake it's still potentially dangerous. Could the author not have called it a hoe or a shovel or something less spikey? Or maybe had the fish-head come at her by some other means?

Minor complaints like that aside, I liked Kat's attitude and the sense of humor which pervaded this story, and some of the text was choice. How about this for a rich phrase: " A festering laugh", or this comment on vampires: "...if this vampire’s bite doesn’t kill me, his four-hundred-year-old breath will!" I loved that, and it's for those reasons I am rating this a worthy read for the intended age range.

Whistling Women by Kelly Romo

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Four shiny black Buick’s" doesn’t need the apostrophe
"...at least FDR. is trying..." FDR isn’t an abbreviation like Dr. or Ms., it's initials, so either it should be simply FDR, which rightly or wrongly is my minimalist preference, or it should be F.D.R.
"nauseas" misspelling of nauseous
"...in his stripped vest..." should be 'striped vest'
"Beat’s me" should be "Beats me"

This novel (of which I got an advance review copy) is set in 1935, the year when Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California, and Harlem had race riots, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater was completed, and the Dust Bowl hit, Jews lost citizenship in Germany, and the FBI wiped out the Barker gang, the first canned beer was sold and alcoholics anonymous was founded, Lawrence of Arabia died and parking meters were brought into use by Oklahoma city. 1935 - and already there were too many cars!

It’s also set in San Diego, the birthplace of California, home of the largest naval fleet in the world, and takes place during the California Pacific International Exposition. The exposition really took place in 1935, and it did precisely what instigator Frank Drugan hoped it would - it attracted over seven million visitors and brought almost thirty eight million dollars into San Diego's economy at a time when the entire USA was still in a sluggish recovery from 1929. No one knew at the time that the economy would get its biggest boost from the second world war and the USA would become a superpower.

Yes, there was a nudist colony located in the sunken Zoro garden, but it was populated with performers, not actual nudists, and both men and women wore a covering on the lower half of their body, but yes, there was a macaw! Fittingly, this place which housed "pretties", and which brought in more money than any other exhibit at the exposition, is now a butterfly garden, still housing pretties, but much more honest and innocent. In the fictional version, the fenced in nudist colony is populated by real nudists who benefit from the admission price which funds their colony. You could also say they benefit from the exposure - in attracting new members, so to speak.

Author Kelly Romo has taken the real events and woven them with a fictional tale to produce a truly well-written and engaging story about alienated sisters, once close but now torn apart by awful events with which we’re teased until we slowly learn the truth by the half-way point in the novel. Although it’s clear long before then what happened, we never learn all the twisted and intriguing details, which are doled out throughout the second half of the novel. The novel is gorgeously written with all of the important characters sketched sharply, even if briefly. The relationship between Wavey and Addie is complex and beautifully sculpted. It's mirrored in the relationship between Wavey's daughters Rumor and Mary, two girls who are counterparts to their elders, Rumor matching Addie, and Mary matching Wavey, their names, one fairly common and one rare, being switched between the generations and the personalities.

This is very much a woman's story, and is the better for it. Although it isn't first person (and is the better for it!), it's told very much from Addie's PoV, and to a lesser extent, Rumor's. Neither Wavey nor Mary really get their own story, appearing only in relationship - and often very much as a foil - to their respective sister. Indeed Wavey is painted more in hues chosen by her sister and her daughter than ever she is from her own palette. Men appearing in the story are almost universally bad influences or downright bad people. With only two exceptions (and one of those is highly iffy), they are not men to be around, especially not if you're young, female, and defenseless. Even when one appears to be a decent and positive influence, we find his foundation to be as unreliable as the sand on the beach.

Both Wavey and Addie are different women, but strong in their own way. Rumor is a force to be reckoned with, and although younger than Mary, is significantly more mature and self-possessed, very much a catalyst. This story would still have been worth reading without all the secrets and intrigue, but of course without that, the estrangement, which is the spine of this body of work, would have been lacking.

While I loved the novel overall, there was one slight annoyance: Wavey's " fractured blue eyes". It felt like if I read that phrase once, I read it a gazillion times, although it only appeared on maybe eight or ten occasions in one form or another: fractured, splintered, prisms, and so on. Once was more than enough when it isn’t really explained that well. From a reference to cracked ice and to prisms, I took it to mean that they were two or more shades of blue, colored like a kaleidoscope, but pale like ice. The problem as that this wasn't exactly clear to me. I found myself wondering if it was a metaphor. Did it mean that they were sad? Does it mean they fracture light like waves in the ocean, which is where her name came from? Or did her name come from a wave hat? We never learn. Does it mean the eyes were as broken as their owner? That they were cold and impenetrable like glass, and unforgiving? The fact that the sharp description of Wavey's eyes was so vague in meaning made the repeated use of this term all the more irritating, but this was a minor point when compared with the engrossing sweep of the overall story.

Wavey isn't forgiving of Addie's behavior, even though she claims she is, but it’s fine because Addie isn’t forgiving herself either. Wavey doesn’t trust Addie around her kids, believing that her sister was corrupted by her stint in the orphanage, and then more so by her time at the nudist colony. This rejection crushes Addie. Wavey's kids think they have a reasonable handle on things, but they really don’t. Only Wavey knows the whole story, and the question running like a snagged thread through this tale is whether or not these four girls can handle what really happened, bring it all together, and make a new life which includes all of them.

In the end things come together in a pleasant and satisfying way, although not necessarily in a way you might predict for a story like this. I absolutely adored it. Both Addie and Wavey are outstanding characters, but they are not the only ones who leave a mark on you. Addie's friends at the nudist colony are a story in themselves, especially Daisy, who is Addie's roommate, and Daisy's son Sal. There's one other person, who seems to play only a minor role, but whose character is sketched ever more sharply as the story rolls on to a breath catching ending. I was thrilled to read this and recommend it highly. Like one of Wavey's neighbors, who is abruptly turfed out of her bungalow because she can’t make the rent, or like one of the older women who is dismissed from the colony because she's no longer the youthful, healthy crowd-pleasing specimen of femininity she once was, I'll miss the people I'm leaving behind as I move on to the next novel on my list! This is my first Kelly Romo. It will not be my last!

The Monster That Ate My Socks by AJ Cosmo

Rating: WORTHY!

I’ve had some success with AJ Cosmo’s children’s books and this was another one. Weird, but original and fun, and which took a Doctor Who approach to conflict resolution by showing that the brain is mightier than the sword. A nameless child is having a problem in that his stinky socks seem to be showing up in tatters the next morning – not clean ones, only the stinky ones. He doesn’t seem to grasp that if he washed them, or at least secured them, they might be safe from whatever it is that’s eating them, but he does have the smarts to lie in wait one night to find out that a green, three-eyed little creature is attacking and devouring his socks, and he makes a plan with his friend Ryan to trap the critter, which they do. He didn’t realize, though, that even monsters have families, and this one is only wanting to be able to take care of three kids.

Further investigation reveals that the monsters also love to eat bad homework and test results (now there’s an idea!), so the kids come up with a nice solution to the problem. In some ways I was a little bit disappointed that there was no opportunity seized here to discuss personal hygiene or the important of doing well in school. There doesn’t need to be a lecture, just a word or two here and there to get the idea into kids’ heads. That curmudgeonly comment aside, I did like the story and the monsters, and they message that you can help people even when, at first blush, they appear to be scary or beyond help.

And here I thought lost socks were orbiting Saturn alongside all the lost luggage! Shows what I know. I liked the overall story and the originality, and I consider this a worthy read. Besides, it has socks appeal!

Tovi the Penguin Goes Away for Christmas by Janina Rossiter

Rating: WORTHY!

I've had a mixed relationship with Tovi, but who can resist a good Christmas story? This one was a good one - and had a nice message - that friends are more important than presents, although presents are good too! Tovi and his two friends are evidently quite well-off, because they have a winter retreat they can visit for Xmas. I guess they have a nice income from licensing their image to the Linux people and the Batman franchise...!

The penguins discover on Xmas morning that Santa hasn't delivered any presents! Rather than dissolve into blubbering and inertia, they press on and make a joyous dinner, and play games and have a good old time. When they arrive home, they discover that Santa has indeed paid them a visit - he just didn't know they were away from home. Not only did they have a great time, now they get to open presents. I found this to be a fun story, and with an important message, which is why I'm rating this one a worthy read.

The Awkward Owl by Shawnda Blake

Rating: WORTHY!

Awkward is itself an awkward word with the 'wkw' - I mean how weird is that? The owl was really a turkey vulture (it was all a misunderstanding), but this story isn't awkward at all; it's charming, and it is about an owl - a young one who-who hasn't yet got full control of his faculties. He flies backwards and upside down and bumps into trees while other owls swoop and flutter on silent but deadly wings.

Fortunately there's a little girl who is understanding (and sadly nameless), not critical or fun-poking, and she helps the owl until he can grow a little more and not be the Jar Jar Binks of the owl world. I found the drawings in this story to be a hoot! The tale was amusingly sweet, ruffled no feathers, and was gentle and easy, and full of promise. I recommend this one because it dared to be inventive and different.

What's For Thanksgiving Dinner? by Sally Huss

Rating: WORTHY!

Being a foreigner, I've lived in the US with three strikes against me at Thanksgiving. It never was a tradition in England, where I grew up, so it never was a tradition for me. I was three thousand miles from my family (who didn't celebrate it anyway!), so it was hardly possibly to drive over and spend the day, and I am a vegetarian, so the idea of eating Turkey was as disgusting as having to sit with other people who were eating it. No one got this. While none of the palaver surrounding Thanksgiving impinged on me at all, there were those who sought to force it upon my against my will. It was annoying when friends rather rudely insisted that I must participate on this family occasion, and overbearingly insisted that I join them. I felt annoyed, even angry at times, when I would rather be doing something else. Rather than hurt their feelings or make them think I was anti-social I would join them, but soon learned to make excuses - lying that I had other plans, just so I could be alone with my pets and my movies and my books. England has a harvest festival, as I am sure many northern nations do, but it's nothing like Thanksgiving.

Now, of course I have my own family, who are all Americans, so I'm outnumbered and it would be churlish to fight it, so Thanksgiving has become a part of my life now. My family is liberal enough that it's no big deal (which is why they're my family and I love them!) so it's a fun occasion which does not suffer the stiff confines of stodgy and inhibiting tradition. Friendship and cooperation! That's why I wanted to read yet another Sally Huss book, which definitely set itself free from tradition in many ways while still holding to it in others. I'm not sure there's much educational value in this book, but there is a strong story of acceptance - and a vegetarian message! I'm not convinced that was the author's intention, but who knows?

The three main characters are a duck, called Duck, a goose named Goose, and a turkey named Beauregarde (I may have made that last name up). Duck traditionally eats goose for Thanksgiving (let's not get too naturally correct here), and Goose traditionally eats duck, so these two are definitely intent upon capturing each other, but as their doomed quest becomes evident, they make a pact to go after Turkey. Once again they fail, and all three becomes friends and decide on pumpkin pie. A great little story and a sweet (literally!) ending. It's a story of friendship and cooperation (so maybe I was wrong about the educational value!), and I recommend this one.

Schools on Trial by Nikhil Goyal

Rating: WARTY!

Nikhil Goyal WAS a 17-year-old senior at Syosset High School when he first began haranguing the world about poor schooling, but after reading his book on school reformation, I was left with the feeling that his education was lacking - at least in terms of making intelligent constructive arguments and supporting them with solid data. I found this book (of which I read an advance review copy) to be shallow and inutile, and I cannot recommend it.

The system is culpable. However, what happens in nearly every instance is that instead of castigating the perpetrator of this crime, we - society - chide the victims. We blame the students for "refusing to be educated." We blame the millions of dropouts. We blame the misfits who weren't able to or refused to conform to the standards of conventional schooling. We blame the kids who goof off during class, the kids who don't shut up and sit down, the kids who don't pay attention, the kids who don't study enough, the kids who don't perform well on tests, the kids who don't finish their homework, and the kids who cut class or school altogether.

Like many of his assertions, this author fails to back up his frequent wild claims evidence or references. Maybe it's all true, but I'm certainly not going to take the unsupported word of a stranger for this. Why should I believe it from a book any more than I would had some random traveler pinned my ear back with these claims on the subway? And I don't believe it is true. Yes, some children are blamed, as are some teachers and some schools, and even some cities or states, but to put this out there, as though everyone blames the children and only the children and no one is trying to do anything about it, is misleading at best, and downright dishonest at worst.

School drop-out rate has been declining recently and graduation rates are at an historic high. A USA Today report indicates the drop-out rate is only half a million, not a million or more. That's obviously still unacceptable, but misrepresenting it isn't helping.

We're told that over a million students drop out of school each year! This would mean that means that our drop-out rate is around fifty percent, which isn't even remotely true when graduation rates, which have been increasing over the last few years, are in the 80% range. Even that rate is far too low, and lower than other nations, but it certainly doesn't support a claim of a million a year. We don't even get to hear what the reason for the drop out is, so while a portion of it is undoubtedly because the student isn't happy at - or simply doesn't like - the school, to pretend the whole one million, even if it were not an exaggeration, is for this sole reason is dishonest.

This book is one anecdote after another, and none of these anecdotes are supported with references, yet they are substituted for data in making claims for how bad students supposedly think schools are - and the anecdotes in the beginning of the book came from 1909. HOW IS THAT EVEN REMOTELY RELEVANT?! We're told of a 2003 study which essentially tested whether kids were happier playing or going to school - well duhh! Why wasn't the result a surprise? If you conducted the same study on adults who are working, the result would undoubtedly be the same. Does this mean that all work environments are terrorist institutions at heart and we should reform them en masse? We're told, in another bold claim, that "Much of the hell children go through in school would not be tolerated by any adult," yet we have twenty million college students in the US. Hm! It seems "the hell" - whatever the undefined "hell" is - is widely tolerated by adults.

In an interview, the author has said, "One common irritant was all the testing." He also says that students should "not be broken up by age group. Instead, students should be grouped by ability." - but how do you gauge the ability without some form of testing? Crickets chirp. Claim after claim about what he thinks we should do, but not a single suggestion as to exactly what we should do or how we should do it and finance it. The author asserts, "We need to have school resemble the real world as much as possible." Why? No word. How would that work? No word. What improvement would it bring? No word. How do you gauge where a student is without some sort of measurement or testing? No word. And if this is what he wants, why advocate getting rid of advanced placement programs?

In an article, we read of him comparing public school curriculum with that of a school in San Franciso called "Brightworks", but what he doesn't say is that this school is not a public school - it does not have to accept all-comers. There is an admissions process and an admission fee. They can afford to select the brightest students with the best social skills and aptitude - the ones who will fit and work in their system. You cannot make a comparison between a very selective school like this and a regular public school! It's nonsensical and meaningless The author sadly and blindly seems to have narrowly-focused his views on his own personal school experience and derived all of his "ideas" - which are not novel - from that. He appears to have done a very limited survey of educators, but not of schools, so he doesn't appear to know about what schools are doing outside of his own tunnel vision.

Like too many Americans, the author harks back to a golden time of colonialism, when he appears to be claiming, without a shred of evidence to support the claim, that the colonials were very well-educated without any formalized schooling system. He conveniently forgets that the colonists were not your everyday people, but were actually "gentlemen" fortune hunters come to exploit the colonies for whatever they could get out of it. Even later in the time of Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, the population was very largely rural and did not have to handle anything like we do today. The farms of today would be essentially unintelligible to the gentlemen of Franklin's era. But it serves the author's thesis well to compare the education "system" from those 'golden days' with the one today, whilst failing to compare the complexity of life and the employment skills needed today, because to do an honest comparison would fail him miserably. It serves him well to recall simpler times and say it will all work out in the end, without having to show how such a loose - and better-financed (these were wealthy men he's quoting and referencing) education system "beats" ours.

He asserts at one point that "school environments discourage the fostering of deep relationships and a larger sense of belonging" - so schools don't have sports teams, or clubs, or school 'houses'? No schools have uniforms? What school did he go to again? He says, " Out of the thirteen years most of us spend in school, we can usually only recount a handful of teachers we were genuinely attached." I can't recall one. How is this relevant again? And to what is it relevant? Is that crickets I hear again?

The author brings in a character named Sam, and goes on and on about him. It's a personal story and a good emotional trigger, but it's an anecdote, not data. There's no reason to believe that what Sam went through is "so common", or the norm, or representative. At one point we read:

Then finally, after two years of round-the-clock bullying [round the clock bullying at school? Was Sam in a boarding school?!], Sam's time in school improved slightly in the eighth grade. He grew taller. He gained some respect, made a few friends, received support from teachers, and didn't get ridiculed nearly as much as before.

And all of this was without a radical reform to the school system! How on Earth is this even possible?! The author conveniently doesn't go into any details about what changed and how it changed, so that others can learn from this experience and build on it, because none of that would support his thesis that only a radical makeover will work. On the contrary, this actually argues instead that the present system can work if it's handled properly.

Sam's idea for reforming the system is to let him sleep in:

That's another quibble Sam has about school: the sleep schedule it forces him to conform to. "School starts around 8 a.m.," he said. "I have to wake up at 7 a.m. It's actually really tough. You feel unmotivated, sleepy. Your eyes are weary. It feels terrible." In another conversation, he told me, "My natural sleep [bedtime] schedule is around 12 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Get thee to bed early, Sam! Duhh! You can't be up watching TV, or playing video games, or reading comic books, or whatever, until midnight and then expect to be awake the next morning. I have no idea what he means by his natural cycle being 12pm (that's twelve noon) to an hour after midnight! That would mean he's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed well before school starts. He should be at his peak at 7am if he wakes up at one! Did he mean 12am to 1pm? He wants to go to school in the afternoon and evening?! That's called night class.

He says, "In order to be popular, you need some combination of good looks, athletic ability, and brand-name apparel. Students who don't measure up or conform are inevitably ostracized." Welcome to the real world - the one you want schools to be more like! LOL! But once again. his unsupported claim is flawed. It's based on the assumption that bullying is violent, cruel, rife, and all-pervasive, yet he hasn't even attempted to make that argument! As with his entire thesis, he's started from assumptions and built his assertions on those without actually checking to even see if they're true, let alone if they're important. He asks, for example, "Why is bullying so common in traditional schools?" This a classic question along the well-worn lines of "Have you stopped beating you wife?" It's a question which carries on its back the assumption that bullying is very common in public schools, and the author takes this assertion and runs with it, without even once attempting to establish that what he claims is actually true. There's a huge difference between bullying existing in schools at some level, and it being "so common".

He then goes on, "Up to roughly 94 percent of a school's population consists of students, with the rest teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, and staff. So what you have is 6 percent of the population making decisions on behalf of the 94 percent without their consent. If that's not considered antidemocratic, I'm not sure what would be." This is a quote in a section about how bullying begins. All he's done here is make it look like that 6% are the bullies! Is he was trying to argue that all school bullying is done by teachers? I'd agree if he was talking about my school, but I'm smarter than to let myself be deluded that my experience can be extrapolated to the entire nation and what would maybe have worked there will apply to everyone else. If he's not arguing that teachers are the bullies, then how is his out-of-left-field statistic even remotely relevant to one kid bullying another kid?

His "solution" to school bullying? We must teach children to be kinder to one another! I can't believe no one ever thought of that before. Thank god for this author! All these years the evil system has been fomenting bullying by evidently teaching kids to be meaner to one another when the answer was right in front of us from the start! How could we all have been so incorrigibly blind?! Well, I guess it's not just we readers! Illiteracy in the US in 1870 was 20%. Now it’s almost zero. Besides, literature and conversation was pretty much all they had for home entertainment – so what choice did they have? Assuming the could afford the candles or oil to read when it grew dark, and they were all done with their endless chores.

At one point the author lauds Summerhill school, an experimental school founded in England in 1921, that still exists. He praises this school, but when I looked in Wikipedia to see what outstanding students this school had turned out, all it listed were: John Burningham, a children's author, Keith Critchlow, an artist, Rebecca De Mornay, an actor, Storm Thorgerson, a rock album cover designer, Gus Dudgeon, a record producer and Mikey Cuddihy, an artist. Now one of these was also a professor or architecture, but this is all that Summerhill can deliver? No outstanding scientists, no such engineers, no such doctors, no great leaders of society?

So how is this of value? If the author had been able to show school after school, that does not restrict admissions, that teaches as he advocates, and that turns out outstanding members of society - people who create, and lead, and invent, and strike out in new directions, then I would believe he has a point to make, but he has failed comprehensively to do this. Despite the lousy (according to his lights) school system, the USA has one of the best educational systems in the world that turns out outstanding people in all fields. So once again, I ask, what is it, exactly, that's so bad about this system and how will this author's assertions improve upon that? And no, I'm not asking for breathless, adolescent, idealistic castles in the sir, but real world examples of what this would bring to the table. The author is completely empty-handed on this measure, it would appear.

Nowhere in this book did I read about any role for parents in their children's education (although admittedly, I skipped much). Why not? Why are parents irrelevant in this "struggle"? This author's problem, I believe, is that he's lacking a sufficiently wide education to know what he's talking about. As with any teenager, he's all idealism and devoid of practicality. He's using anecdote for data and he's trying to parlay idealistic examples into general conclusions. Worse, he's confusing school with college. School is where children get their basic education,. College (university, however you want to describe it) is where they make the very choices he's advocating - choices about which career to follow and which educational path to choose. That's not to say that there should be no such choices or guidance in lower schools, but there's a certain realism which this author seems either loathe to face or of which, at his youthful and inexperienced age, he's either ignorant or foolishly dismissive.

Without that preliminary basic education, children are not equipped to make intelligent informed choices because they do not have the tools to do so. He wants to put education into the hands of the very people who do not have the education and experience to be able to make properly informed choices which will best determine what they need. Suppose, in this free choice, the kids want to spend all day playing video games? Is his system going to allow that? Suppose they don't want to learn to read and write? Suppose they want to hang out under the bleachers drinking and smoking? Is he going to allow all of this? How is letting kids have complete control going to end bullying? What's going to become of such ill-prepared students? Is society going to pay their way throughout their life - to take care of these kids who are completely unprepared for a real life and a career: for finding work and housing, for taking care of their future, their savings, their health, the life, liberty, and happiness? The author is silent on where any of this will lead. And he's woefully ignorant of the fact that play and education can successfully and vitally go hand-in-hand.

A lot of his referents are appallingly outdated. He's referencing and quoting people from a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, and so on. That's not to say that no one back then had a handle on education, or had anything useful to contribute, but it is to say that the world we live in now is very different from what it was even in the seventies, when no computers existed as far as the general public was concerned. Harking back to ideas from those times might inform as to which directions have worked and - something he fails to address - which haven't, but the mindless wholesale trashing and abandoning of progress that's been made in the last half century in favor of juvenile daydreaming about idyllic golden ages isn't a solution. It's escapism at best and vandalism at worst.

As Michael Douglas, playing President Shephard in The American President put it, "We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them." Maybe this author can reform education, but he's not going to do it by writing frantic books. He's only going to do it by becoming an influential expert on the topic and rolling up his sleeves and getting it done. What Nikhil Goyal most needs to help him get there is - an education! Until then, his fifteen minutes are up.

Get Back, Imagine...Saving John Lennon by Donovan Day

Rating: WARTY!

NOTE: I understand from the author that this book is undergoing some changes, so this advance review may not apply to the final published edition.

Erratum:
"They wanted a good more than that." A good bit more than that? A good deal...?
"We need to keep our stories straights." - too many esses!
"I’m going back to December 9, 1980" - you'd be a day late. He was killed the night of December eighth!

I finished this book yesterday, and while I went into it thinking "Don't let me down" and so wanting it to please, please me, in the end it didn't come together, and it can't buy my love. This fiction followed a long and winding road like an old brown shoe, as it asked the question, "What if someone could go back in time and save John Lennon from being killed that chill, early December night in 1980?" It sounded like a great premise to me.

Lenny's ("Is his name actually Lennon?" I initially asked, but no, it isn't, I'm sorry to say!) story is that he's staying with his granddad and his granddad's husband (which was a nice touch) while his mom is out of town. Dad left a long time ago for a girl he met at a ball game, and Lenny was angry. He became Lenny the Lion, stealing coffee cups from the display at Starbucks and selling them. This eventually earned him a trip to a psychiatrist's office, which is oddly where he learned to play guitar. Anyone who has actually tried to learn to play guitar is going to resent how easy it was for him. I know I do!

A day in the life of first person PoV Lenny Funk (which is why we get no perspective on Yoko) consists of him playing his guitar in the Columbus Circle subway station to make some cash. Yoko (not that Yoko! This is a younger, modern Yoko who isn't even Japanese) shows up when a bully is giving Lenny grief. Lenny talks her into singing with him, and we read, "A crowd of people gathers around us..." What would have been wrong with writing, "A crowd of people stopped and stared" - a line from the Lennon-McCartney song, A day in the Life, one of the few songs to which they actually both contributed significantly, and specifically, a line that Lennon himself wrote? That would have been so cool, but it was a glorious opportunity missed, and in the end, that came to signify the entire novel. I was guessing at this point that we'd be seeing very few Lennon or Beatles references of this nature, and I was right. It was one in a too-long line of chances which were squandered thoughtlessly. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da!

The real starting point of this story is where Lenny discovers that an iPod nano, given to him by his grandfather, is his ticket to ride a time portal. When he plays a song from a certain time, he can physically travel back to that time and interact with people there, although how this works is rather arbitrary and very convenient for Lenny and Yoko, and when a friend like Yoko says, "I wanna hold your hand" they can travel with him. This is a great premise which reminded me of the Kathleen Turner - Nicholas Cage movie, Peggy Sue Got Married, which I loved and which was also heavily influenced by music. This is a different story, but while it's technically well-written and was quite engrossing to begin with, overall, I can't recommend it as a worthy read because there was far too much wrong with the story to let it slide.

The first sickening problem I had was with the "women are only worth anything if they're beautiful" insult to which far too many writers seem addicted, and with which this novel is replete. I know Lenny is a high school kid and this is his PoV, but he gets on this one-note song and he never gets off it. Pretty much as soon as Yoko showed up, I read, "...but this girl is maybe the best-looking female to talk to me. Ever." A couple of screens after that, he's convinced he's in love with Yoko. This shallowness gave me no confidence whatsoever that Lenny would ever be able to do anything for John Lennon! Worse than this, and at the same time that we’re being told that only beautiful young women are worth anything, we’re also learning not a thing about how Yoko feels about anything, and this is serving only to reinforce what we’ve been told: that what’s going on in a girl's mind is unimportant because only her looks matter. It’s truly nauseating, especially from a near-adult make character.

The litany of beautiful was ugly:

• Even the most jaded of commuters can’t ignore a beautiful girl singing her heart out.
• Did a beautiful girl my own age...
• I'm the one with the beautiful girl...
• Yoko’s beautiful face pops into my mind.
• ...where a group of beautiful women are crowded around the owner...
• There are, of course, beautiful women with them
• “I knew it was her because she looks just like you, just as beautiful.”
• She is so beautiful.

None of this necessary, and it's not just with the word 'beautiful' either. It's a full-frontal assault on women's credibility as people as opposed to window-dressings and trophies. Consider, for example, "...the band members are posing with a young, hot Asian woman." It couldn't be merely an Asian woman, or even a 'young Asian woman' or even 'a cool-looking Asian woman'. It has to be a "hot" one. All others can just go home. Then there's this double-whammy: "Instead of beautiful English girls, this club is filled with stunning French women...."

The insults get personal too. Shakira gets this: "Shakira is an exotic beauty" - and this was to imply that Yoko was not, which is insulting at best and racist at worst. It;s insulting to Yoko and to Shakira nbecuase it implies she has little or nothignt o offer other than her looks, which is pure bullshit. I'll bet you didn't know that Katy Perry has nothing to offer but her looks, either did you? That's what this tells me: "Well, John is a man and Katy Perry is a looker..." That insults not only Katy Perry, but also John Lennon! It could have said, "Well they're both talented musicians" but it didn't. It could have said they were both about human rights, but it didn't. Instead, it deliberately took the low road and thereby promoted John as shallowly searching for a hot babe, and Katy Perry as a skin-seep sex doll with no self respect.

Yoko (her name means ocean child, but it can mean many other kinds of child - ko - depending on how it's written) Ono comes in for some abuse later, too. It seems evident from this writing that this author is one of those who blames the Beatles break-up on Yoko, when the truth is that she really had little to do with it. It implies that John Lennon, who had already left the band but had not yet publicized it, has no mind of his own, and it also ignores the fact that the break-up was actually about many things, including Paul's very public quitting. All of this in turn was really all down to the lack of effective and consensus leadership after Brian Epstein died. Paul's hissy-fit over the other three not wanting his father-in-law to run Apple Corps didn't help. Of course, there were more currents running, and running deep here, than can be detailed with any simplicity, but the absolute best you could argue is that Yoko was merely one catalyst. You cannot realistically or fairly make her carry that weight alone.

A major issue for me was how unbelievably expert these seventeen-year-old kids were about the sixties. Yes, I'm sure there are some young people out there who do know more than you'd expect, but these two (Yoko and Lenny) were Mary Sue and Gary Stu. They had an all access pass wherever they went, and they knew everything about everything no matter which time period they were in. it was too much. At the same time, paradoxically, they knew nothing, because their entire focus was on musicians and music and they were completely oblivious to everything else around them. This made then truly annoying, juvenile, and shallow.

The idea comes up in the story that Jim Morrison can be prevented from overdosing, and later, that John Lennon can be saved from being murdered, but never once do we hear it even suggested that they could go back and save Martin Luther King, or Bobby Kennedy, or the passengers on the Pan-Am 103 flight that crashed at Lockerbie, or some three-thousand people in the Twin Towers, or the sixteen thousand or so who have died from the Union Carbide incompetence at Bhopal. This complete lack of awareness and this obsessive-compulsive focus on The Beatles only made the characters seem more dull and more shallow than ever. I get that this was about one theme, but the failure to even mention, let alone address other possibilities made the two main characters callous and selfish. I didn't like either of them.

On a matter of a pet peeve which has nothing to do with this novel, I used the word 'murder' back there deliberately, because from everything I've read about John Lennon, he was one of the least pretentious and most down-to-Earth people there was, and I honestly don't believe that he would want to be put up on a pedestal or compared, via this kind of terminology, to people like Ghandi. If he was that kind of a person, he would never have returned his MBE.

On top of all the other issues, Yenny and Loko were shown to be incredibly stupid, making the same chronically bad decision twice in a row in allowing someone to stay back in time for a visit. Lenny in particular was shown to be thoroughly clueless and incompetent with his decisions. This occurs often in time-travel movies. For example, Marty McFly's decision in Back to the Future to add only a few minutes to his return time to save Doc Brown's life, when he could have added an hour or a day or a week is a direct parallel to Lenny's last minute idiocy. Authors so easily forget that these are time travel stories: you can go back and back and back again until you get it right, unless there is some feature to the travel which prevents it. Indeed, this was a feature of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day movie, but Lenny never gets it. Yes, his time is dwindling, but he still has plenty of time and he fails.

If this had been one of those 'butterfly effect' movies where something that's changed in the past results in a horrible dystopian future, I could see how the ending, while still poor, might have made a limp kind of sense, but we'd already been shown that this isn't he case, so that excuse wasn't on the table. If we'd been shown that fate intervenes to 'correct' changes that are made, this would have been another validation, of a weak kind, of the ending, but none of that held, so the ending made zero sense. However, it was infinitely better than the dumb alternate universe we did see, which was truly sad (and not in a good way).

Even the times he does go back he fails in an epic manner, and he's too stupid to figure out why. We can work it out, but he evidently can't. At one point, a simple call to the police would have fixed all of his problems, but he's quite evidently not smart enough to entertain such an idea. One of the best loved episodes of time-travel sci-fi series Doctor Who actually makes a virtue of the "Why don't they ever go to the police?" question, and is the better for it. Unfortunately, Lenny doesn't know how to ask for a little help from his friends!

The overall impression I had from this was that the story had not been well thought through, so it's hello, goodbye to this one, and I feel fine about that. It read more like a second or third draft than a finished story, and on top of that, something about the way it portrayed John Lennon, particularly in the later chapters, felt disrespectful. While I could bring up other issues, I think this is plenty to make my point. I can't in good faith recommend a story which is obviously lacking so much in plot and character and where, in the end, the sum total of what we learn about the main character is that all he needs is love, but the fact is that he's a real nowhere man and this bird has flown.

The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel was beautifully written and had an historical feel to it even though it was set in modern times. It was also set in France commendably, thereby proving that the USA isn't the only nation where interesting stories can happen. The main character, however, was American.

Twelve-year-old Maya and her family - kid brother James, her mom, and her all-but-absent father - have moved to France for a year. Maya's father has been offered a job at the chemical philosophy society, Why, we never actually learn, we can merely guess. Maya and James attend school, and meet their oddball cousin Louise, who is all but invisible to everyone, and even when Maya looks at her she's inexplicably hard to see. But she's a great French teacher.

Close by where Maya is living, there is an odd building with a sculpture of a young woman's head above the door - a sculpture which looks disturbingly like Maya. And did that weird brass salamander door-handle actually turn and look at her? And smile? What's the deal with the old man she meets and his 'cabinet of earths'? What earths are they and where do they come from? Is there any connection between those and the children who seem to disappear too often - and then return somehow changed? And what's going on with her oddly good-looking and beautifully purple-eyed uncle?

The answers to these questions are original (at least in my experience!) and engrossing - and even disturbing. Will Maya be able to protect those she loves or if she does, does it mean she must sacrifice herself to do so? This is the start of a series, so you know she's going to come through okay - that negates the drama somewhat. And there's a guy - Valko - who befriends her, but there is no romance here, just friendship, and Maya certainly doesn't become a wilting violet in his presence or become dependent upon him to rescue her. She's a commendable young woman: responsible, thoughtful, strong - a female main character of a kind which is all-too-rare in stories written by female authors. Maya puts to shame a score of young adult female characters, and Anne Nesbet is to be congratulated on writing such a character and putting her into a story which wholly immersed even a jaded adult reader, I recommend this story highly.

Billy and the Devil by Dean Lilleyman

Rating: WARTY!

Set in England and making absolutely no concessions to mid-Atlanticism (be warned!), this novel begins in early April 1967 as judged by the references to Sandie Shaw winning the Eurovision Song Contest, which was held on April 8th that year, and is about a human disaster zone. The structure of the novel is rather experimental, and is odd because it has a prologue, which I skipped. I don't do prologues. To me, if it's important enough to include, it's important enough to include in chapter one (or later), and this is why it's odd, because the novel has another prologue in chapter one! I read this one; it's where teenage post-partum Jean decides she's keeping baby Billy but wants nothing to do with his father. Chapter two jumps to first person PoV which I don't like. In this case it wasn't obnoxious to begin with, but became so as the story regressed. This shifting structure of the novel served only to remind me that this was indeed a novel I was reading. It kept me from becoming truly immersed in it and that, amongst other things, became a problem for me in enjoying it.

On the positive side, chapter two is set in Chesterfield, city of the crooked spire and home of a League One soccer team. Chesterfield is only ten miles from my home town and I know it well, so this story began to resonate with me. It reminded me of my own youth and some experiences I'd had. I never was an addict, unless you count movies and books, but I knew dead-end people like this, and dead-end places like these. It's in this town where we meet the baby which Jean decided not to give up. Now he's a young boy, and the saddest thing is that he's already on a downhill ride, walled-in on one side by his past, and on the other by a largely incapable and/or uncaring present, so that when he reached his early teens, even though life had improved immeasurably, the rot had already gone too far to be remedied.

The problem was that this was the last time I felt bad for him, because the story then dropped into a numbingly repetitive rut, of which I became both increasingly aware and deadened by, as I reached the mid-point. Some of it was highly entertaining, whereas other parts - too many other parts - were truly tedious to read - so much so that I began skipping sections because it was not only boring, but consisted of whole paragraphs of poorly punctuated, block caps infested, run-on text that was hard to read and make sense of. It felt as though not only had Billy given up caring, the author had, too. The structure changed often, sometimes reading like a regular novel, other times like hastily jotted notes for a chapter which were then never followed-up on, and left as is. Some parts read like a play, such the Punch and Judy chapter, which I found cruel but funny, and very much in the vein of the real Punch and Judy puppet shows that used to be popular but are now largely forgotten, but there were far too few chapters like that.

For me, though, the biggest problem was that it felt more and more like the author was saying, "Hey, look at me! How clever and inventive, and crazy am I?" It felt less and less like there had been a real motivation to tell a coherent and engrossing story about Billy, and it was more like a leering gross-out story about Billy, and not even told, but rambled almost incoherently. One or two times reading about how drunk he got and how much he vomited and urinated and so on were fine, but when we get detailed descriptions every time, it became uninteresting - and uninventive. It was the same with his interactions with various women who seemed to be unaccountably attracted to him no matter how unappealing he was. The bottom line is that we really never got any closer to him than they did. He was all about antagonism, acting out, and obsessive self-importance, and the vaguely likable character we met at the start was drowned in alcohol. I understand that this is how it can be with addiction, but it felt to me that there are better ways of relating a tragedy like this than deliberately pushing the reader away. And there are ways to make it seem realistic. This method failed for me.

On that note, I found myself thinking, if this guy came up to me somewhere, and started telling me this story, just like it's written here, would I be interested? Would I care? Would I listen? And the answer was "No!" I'd be making excuses and leaving because there's no human interest there to hold me, and it's largely incoherent anyway! It's just a litany of villainy, so why read a book that's exactly like that? In the end, Billy is just a spoiled brat, a veneer of a human who has no redeeming, educational, or appealing value, and who offers us no access to him whatsoever. While I agree there are people like this in real life, whose stories, told less tediously in a documentary, can be compelling, to find such a character in a novel and to be forced to spend time listening to his mindless, drunken ranting, and his selfish acting-out, and to see the countless people, including family, he trashed and left in his wake like so much jetsam, was neither an endearing nor an engaging proposition.

I was actually much more interested in those other people - his family, his children, his friends, the women he felt-up and discarded - than ever I was in Billy himself! What were their lives like? How did they view him? What was their aftermath? Did the fiancée ever get back in her fiancé's good graces? We were offered no chance to learn anything of them, so not only was Billy a selfish, boorish oaf, the novel itself felt equally selfish and boorish, focusing far too much on him and the damage he did to himself, and not at all on the "collateral" damage. It was as though none of that was remotely important, and this grated on me and made me resentful towards Billy rather than try to find some way to empathize or uncover some level of understanding, and it made me cruelly wish that his story was over in one way or another.

Overall, it was like watching a really slow-motion train-wreck, and while the wreck at regular speed is dramatic and gripping, and holds a deep human interest, when you slow it way down to snail speed, so that it hardly moves, it becomes emotionally unmoving, too. No one wants to follow that because there's nothing to follow! No matter how tragic it actually is, it's meaningless at a microscopic level and pointless to try to view it through such a lens. I can't recommend this novel. based on the sixty percent or so that I managed to get through. I should advise, too, that this novel was so English - and midlands English, too - that you really have to have been there to get it, otherwise the jargon and slang will be as much over your head as a beer bottle tossed callously from a football train.

Ape House by Sara Gruen

Rating: WARTY!

Read a bit tediously by Paul Boehmer, this novel focuses on bonobos, a great ape species which is very similar to chimpanzees in many ways, very different in others. All of the major great ape species have been taught to communicate in American Sign Language, from Koko the gorilla, to Kanzi the Bonobo, to Chantek the Orangutan. Apes are not the only species with which we’ve communicated. These studies cross a wide range. There are not only chimpanzees, but also elephants, dolphins, and parrots, and dolphins. Although there is controversy around these studies, and even around the study directors, it’s definitely fair to say that animals are way more complex than most humans have typically been willing to credit, and some of them have very advanced intelligence, experiencing emotions as humans do.

In the novel, fictional character Isabel Duncan works with Bonobos and language. She becomes the subject of a newspaper story researched by John Thigpen and two other people from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who visit her one New Year's Day to discuss the Bonobos she works with: Bonzi, Jelani, Lola, Makena, Mbongo , and Sam. Boehmer reads these oddly, and I can’t be sure if this is how the author told him they were pronounced, or if he's making it up and getting it wrong. He pronounces Bonzi as Bon-Zee rather than as Bonsy, and Mbongo as Muh-bongo rather than Um-bongo.

It would be nice to know how they’re supposed to be pronounced and an audio book is the perfect way to do this. Print books and ebooks fail in this regard unless they have a pronunciation guide. It would have also been nice to know what the more obscure names meant, too. All names used to actually mean something, and we’ve lost that. Now people pick names for how they sound, or to honor a relative or a celebrity rather than for how they apply to the child and what they mean. When I come up with character names, I really give some thought to how they should portray the character, and in some books, the names are clues to the characters character or fate - if you can only figure them out! I had particular fun with this in Saurus, one of my favorites.

This story really takes off when there's an explosion at the lab, and the apes end up in a reality TV show. Isabel discovers that in order to fix this, she has to find a way to connect better with humans - something she's not very skilled at. This fictional character seems to be based loosely on the real life, controversial ape language researcher, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. One of the interesting things about these studies, and about great ape research in the wild, is that the big names associated with it always seem to be female. The three best-known names in great ape studies in the wild were women tasked by Louis Leakey to study these apes in the hope that it would throw light on early hominid development, and it has, but these women were also controversial. The best known of them is probably Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees, but almost equally well known was Dian Fossey who studied gorillas and was murdered by gorilla poachers. Much less well known is Birute Galdikas who studied orangutans. The books these three wrote are well-worth reading, as is Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal if you want to learn more.

The author, Sara Gruen, studied American Sign language and the symbolic lexigram language the apes use so that she could better understand the bonobos she visited at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa. This is where Kanzi lives. Clearly the author may be writing fiction, even fanciful fiction, but it is grounded in her own personal experiences with real apes. My problem with her writing, however, had to do with how the university responded to the bombing of the lab. It was like they couldn't wash their hands of the apes and of Isabel fast enough, and this seemed completely unrealistic to me. They were, in effect, siding with the terrorists. Never once did they try to correct the insane mis-perception of the purpose of the "lab" - which was language studies, not animal experimentation.

You would think they would be very much concerned about putting their best face before the public, and they didn’t even have to lie about it, yet they failed on an epic level. Never once did they consult with Isabel about the apes' future. I get that the university effectively owned the apes and it was their decision, but I find it hard to believe that any university worth its name would behave so callously and precipitously. I also get that this is a dramatic fiction, but it seemed to me that there were better ways to set this up than to make the university leadership look like spineless jerks. Maybe the author hates universities!

The lot was plodding and predictable, but the worst fail for me, however, was the fact that The main story - about the apes - was repeatedly sidelined by a boring domestic trivia story going on between the other main character, John Thigpen, and his wife Amanda. I could see the author desperately wanted to get John and Isabel together, but why? Why not just make John single? Why include John at all, and thereby make Isabel merely another maiden-in-distress, needing to be rescued by Saint John, a knight in shining armor? It made no sense to me to take the drama away from the apes, and it was yet another insult by a female writer to a female main character.

From a purely narrative PoV, it was really annoying to have to abandon the main story to go off into this boring drama over whether this couple would stay together or over Amanda's and John's spinelessness when confronted with Amanda's domineering and interfering mother. It didn’t even instill any confidence in me that an invertebrate like John could be a heroic man of action when he was such a wallflower, or that he was even heroic at all if he was going to abandon his wife at he drop of an ape. Maybe I got his wrong - as I said, I didn't finish this novel, so maybe it panned out differently; however, it felt like the road most traveled and that's the road least interesting to me, but it was this negation of both Isabel and the apes which was what truly killed this story. I could not finish it, and I cannot recommend it based on what I heard. I haven'tread anything else by this author and now I have no intention of doing so.