Love Is for Tomorrow by Michael Karner, Isaac Newton Acquah

Rating: WARTY!

This novel struck me as strange from the outset. Obviously (and especially as judged by the cover) this is very much intended to be in the mold of a James Bond spy thriller, but it really has nothing to do with James Bond. It has a lot more to do with the special ops genre of stories, such as Mission Impossible, for example, with small teams going in under the radar to accomplish a goal.

The novel itself is written in a very breathless style, almost like fan fiction, which was hard for me to stomach. Some of the expressions used seemed really odd, and some of the descriptions were off. For example, Arlington cemetery isn't known for its trees, and willow trees aren't known for emulating umbrellas, so describing a funeral there which has willow trees forming huge umbrellas over the mourners seemed inauthentic to me. It felt like the authors often used a word too many in describing things, too. It's hard to explain that, but the descriptions often made me say, "What?" and brought me to a halt while I went back and re-read it to figure out if it made any sense.

In other instance, the words were not gainfully employed, such as when the authors used the term, "She walked into a side nave" when it should have been, "She walked into a transept." It was things like this which kept taking me out of the story, but perhaps other readers will not notice or not care about things like this, so here's an example of the writing style which felt off to me. This is one complete section of text with nothing removed or changed, so you can judge for yourself:

     The car lurched forward and propelled her onto the narrow street without making as much as a sound.
     She maneuvered through an upslope alley, being spit out onto the main square on top of the mountain. She closed distance with Olga's Mercedes, as she sped the Porsche Boxter downhill. The city walls rushed past her. She banked right, taking the road over the bridge. The river rumbled a hundred meters below as the three cars reached the other side.
     Tanya led them in a wide circle around the city. The yellow blades of dry grass rushed past her. Cars and cyclists stopped in laybys to take in the sunset, oblivious to the chase.

Apart from misspelling 'Boxster', this description just sounded odd to me. Note, to begin with, that this is not a car chase, James Bond style. It's merely a vehicle tailing two other vehicles to a restaurant. Why it was written in such a melodramatic fashion is a complete mystery to me. And the wording is too much. For example, while banking (in this sense) is an aeronautical term, you can describe a motorbike as banking around a corner, but not a car. Then we had "The city walls rushed past her...The yellow blades of dry grass rushed past her." It was too much to take seriously for me - not all in one small section of text.

This kind of thing struck me as strange given what the blurb says: that the authors are scientists and have engineered every sentence. Say what? What does that even mean? It certainly didn't feel to me like any 'sentence engineering' was undertaken unless what's meant by that is injecting gratuitous Adrenalin into passages which require none. That entire section could have been reduced to a couple of sentences indicating that car C tailed cars A and B to the restaurant; nothing would have been lost, and I would have enjoyed it a lot better.

Science and engineering are two different disciplines, and while they do have many points of overlap, they're not the same thing. Why a scientist would be better at 'engineering' a sentence than a professional writer would be, escapes me. Scientists are often the worst at writing novels because of the fact that they're trained in writing scientific papers, and the two approaches are not the same.

Initially I had guessed that the writers were French, and writing in English, but I was wrong. Karner is Austrian and Acquah is from Ghana; however, if they wrote this directly in English, it might explain some of the wording. One thing I noticed here was that they don't use contractions in this volume, so the English is rather stilted with everyone saying "I am" and "I have" instead of "I'm" and "I've", and so on. This is odd because in the brief introductory (so-called) volume I reviewed, they did use such contractions. I don't know why that changed.

Right after the section form which I took the above quote, the people who were tailed entered a restaurant. For some reason which isn't explained, the person tailing them cannot enter the restaurant. Not that there's any reason to. What they want to do is conduct surveillance using a small drone, but instead of getting on with it and running the surveillance from the car right there in the parking lot, which would have been perfectly fine, they quite literally invade an occupied home across the street, barging in and taking over the house to conduct their surveillance from there. It's completely absurd and hardly the best way to undertake clandestine surveillance unless you want to cause an uproar and direct your subject's attention to your activities!

The worst part about this is that they apparently intended to assassinate someone. A bullet was fired that evidently entered someone's head, but I could not figure out who it was who was killed! I was certainly neither of the two people they'd been initially tailing. So they invade someone's home to kill someone across the valley and then they leave the witnesses (the people whose home they just invaded) alive? Again, it was nonsensical.

It was at this point, 30% in, that I really decided I didn't want to read any more, but because the novel was so short, I decided I would go to 50% and if there was no sign of improvement, terminate it there. I'm not one of these people who believes in wasting my time reading an un-entertaining novel when there are so many more and better ones waiting for me to get to.

Another issue I had was not with the writing, but with the crappy Kindle app I use to read novels on my phone. Note that this was not an advance review copy, but a published copy, so it should have been ready for prime time. I have my Kindle app set to a black screen with white text, but in this novel, random words, sentences, and entire paragraphs were in reverse colors: a white background with black text. Sometimes the reverse text would even begin in the middle of a word. I have no idea why, and there seemed to be no pattern to it. The effect was the same in the Kindle app on an iPad, too.

I did not encounter this problem with the introductory volume, but I have encountered numerous issues with the Kindle conversion process in general and while there are things authors can do to minimize issues, these tend to be very restrictive things which step on authorial creativity. The bottom line is that this is simply Amazon's way of saying, "Screw you! We don't care! We don't have to care: we're Amazon!" It's really annoying, but this really had nothing to do with the authorship itself.

Finally to the plot! The basic story consists of a small team of people wo are supposedly spies. None of these people had any sort of a real introduction in this volume. They remained flat and uninteresting. I really didn't care what happened to them or whether they succeeded or failed in whatever it was they were doing at any given moment. There was no sense of tension or possibility of failure.

I had thought that perhaps the earlier volume took care of this, but it did not, so the characters are completely flat and have zero history, and thus were uninteresting to me. They were what they did and nothing more. Antoine is apparently the leader, and he is employed by an international agency located in Vienna. On his team are an ex-MI5 agent, although how someone who isn't a British citizen would ever have been an MI5 agent isn't explained. Perhaps 'from Ghana' means he was based there, not born there. Additionally there is a hacker from India, and a so-called 'Lord of War' (whatever that means - I think it means arms dealer) from Pakistan, who are evidently an item, and for reasons unknown, this seems to be a problem.

I don't get how these people can be successful spies. Not one of them has any real training in espionage. They're essentially nothing more than murders. The obligatory 'hacker' is a joke in stories these days, and this one, Priya, turned out to be far less interesting than I'd hoped she'd be. She did no hacking at all in the part I managed to read. There's another character named Mini, but she played such a small role that she may as well not have been there.

I was initially attracted by the international flavor of the team, as improbable as it sounded in the blurb, but this really contributed nothing to the story. These people could have been anyone of any gender and any nationality, and the story would have been the same. This cosmopolitan flavor had made me think, originally, that this novel would make a pleasant change from the usual white men only (with a 'babe' thrown in for sexuality) club, which is what Mission Impossible largely is, but it didn't.

This team has to contend with stolen Chinese stealth technology and a dirty bomb, although the authors seem to be confusing 'dirty bomb' with 'neutron bomb' or perhaps even with a regular nuclear bomb. Dirty bombs are not intended to be hugely destructive in terms of blowing things apart. Dirty bombs are intended to contaminate large areas to render them useless and quarantined. A neutron bomb does something similar, but the intention there is to kill large numbers of people while leaving infrastructure intact. I'm not sure what the real purpose was supposed to be here.

Anyway, I reached fifty percent and things did not improve. They actually became worse, and I honestly could not bear to read any more, so I quit this at the end of chapter ten. There is something wrong, and off about the writing as I've indicated. Overall, it just grates. There was another example where some hacker has evidently brought down firewalls in multiple systems Mafia-boy style, including, we're expected to believe, the CIA. The team decides to use this as a means of investigating three people they are tracking. Despite the fact that firewalls are down, we're expected to believe that in order to get into the CIA's database, Priya will have to infiltrate an NSA facility and log-in to the system from the inside. In that case, what does it matter that the firewall is down? They could have done that at any time. None of this made any sense.

So Priya gets into this high security building by lifting the ID card of one of the janitors. This bald assumption that all janitors are trusted anywhere inside an NSA facility simply isn't credible. Neither is it credible that there would be no security worth a damn, and no night-shift at an NSA facility! The funny thing is that this isn't the biggest problem here. Even if we buy this scenario, why do they put it off until that night? It's simply not credible that a firewall breach at a CIA or NSA facility would be left hanging in the wind throughout the course of a whole day. By the time these people had got in there that night, the breach would have been long sealed, or at the very least, the affected computers removed from the network entirely. It's simply not remotely believable, and this merely served to confirm the feeling I'd had at around the 30% mark, that I could find better things to read with my time.

I honestly can't recommend this novel in good faith as a worthy read, but I wish the authors all the best.

Love is for Tomorrow Réunion by Michael Karner, Isaac Newton Acquah

Rating: WARTY!

I initially had the impression that these authors were French, but they're not. Karner is from Austria and Acquah is from Ghana. Not that that's important in the grand scheme of things, but I had initially been interested in it because these novels felt to me like they had been written in English by people who had English as a second language, because of the way sentences were constructed and the way the English was employed and formed. I say 'novels' because this and the next one I'll review, Love is for Tomorrow really come as a pair although they can be read separately.

I avoid prologues like the plague because in my experience, they're a complete waste of trees and contribute nothing to the story. This 'novel' proved that beyond contestation because it was merely a prologue, and not a novel at all. Far too many authors just don't seem to get that chapter one is the prologue! Duhh! But for me, prologues are far too pretentious, yelling out, "Look at me, I'm Shakespeare, setting the scene!" I have no time for that.

I was particularly disappointed in this, which is nothing but a very short introductory volume offered for free on Amazon. The reason I was disappointed was not so much that it was way short, but that it's not even introductory. We learn almost literally nothing about any of the characters. This entire and very short story is merely a meeting at a café, and an assassination of three CIA officers. And these murderers are supposed to be the main characters in the main volume? Why would I be interested in people like these?

This begs the question as to why I have the main volume if I was so disappointed in this prologue, but the reason for it is that I got this one several weeks before I got the other. I'd begun to read it, but put it to one side to do other things and then promptly forgot about it! That's how memorable and addictive it was. When I was asked if I would review the main novel, I realized I had this other volume, so I returned to finish it. I didn't like it, but now I have to continue on with the main volume even after finding this one an unworthy read. I cannot recommend this, not even as an introduction because it offers nothing by way of introduction. I think the authors or the publisher thought that it would be some sort of intro-suction, and pull readers into the main novel. Maybe it will work. It wouldn't have for me if I didn't already have the main novel and a commitment to take a look at it.

Batwoman: Vol 4 This Blood is Thick by JH Williams III, W Haden Blackman and various artists

Rating: WARTY!

I covered some general issues I had with this series in my review of volume one. I enjoyed that issue despite the problems, but this one fared far less well. The only reason I eve read it was that I had all four volumes out of the library at once. if I'd had to buy them as single issues every month at the store, I never would have finished the collection in volume two, much less read all four collections.

Volume four of this series of collections was the worst of all. I couldn't even finish it. The thing which really nauseated me was the artwork (at last!), but the intriguing thing was that this was done by a different set of artists. My problem with it was that while the quality was slightly better, the characters looked completely different from how they appeared in the first three volumes! The opening sequence of Kate and Maggie in bed together looked so alien I had no idea who these two people were! Worse than that, however was that they looked significantly younger - like they were teenage girls.

It wasn't this apparent consumption of a draft from the fountain of youth that actually turned me off however, it was the section after that where once again we have to spend time with loser dad Jacob, whom I could not stand and whose story I found consistently dull and tedious through this story arc. In this segment, he was talking to his wife, and while they both looked somewhat different from previous artwork, Jacob at least still looked his age, which was quite mature, whereas his wife looked like a child bride! I don't know if she was supposed to be his original wife in which case she was way-the-hell too young, or if he had remarried, in which case the text made no mention of it, but she looked younger than Kate Kane had in earlier volumes, and Batwoman is supposedly in her thirties. Not that an aunt can't look (or even be) younger than a niece, but it was simply wrong for these two to be talking about 'children' the way they were when the wife was drawn very nearly as a child herself!

After that, I could not take the series seriously, and I quit reading. I certainly cannot recommend any of this unless you're a real (and desperate!) die-hard fan.

Batwoman: Vol 3 World's Finest by JH Williams III, W Haden Blackman and various artists

Rating: WARTY!

I covered some general issues I had with this series in my review of volume one. I enjoyed that issue despite the problems, but this one fared far less well. The only reason I eve read it was that I had all four volumes out of the library at once. if I'd had to buy them as single issues every month at the store, I never would have finished the collection in volume two, much less read all four collections.

Well I'm sorry to have to report that for me, this series which started out so well in volume one, went quickly downhill in volume two. I thought that three might pick things up. It featured Wonder Woman. She and Batwoman had to go to the depths of the ocean to try to track down Medusa, although what Medusa had to do with ocean depths was a mystery. Supposedly that was where she was in prison, but she wasn't actually there and in the end it turned out that she was right back where they'd started: in Gotham City, which was, let's face it, pretty darned obvious when you think about it.

They had to track down Perseus to discover this fact about Medusa, although why he would know goes unexplained. The real problem with this, though, was that Perseus was a direct rip-off of the Kill Bill character Sidewinder, played by Michael Madsen, who wore a cowboy hat and lived in a trailer out in the desert middle of nowhere just like Perseus did. Sad.

Volume three, therefore, seemed to be nothing but filler and had nothing of interest to offer. The artwork continued to be wooden and uninspiring although it wasn't abysmally atrocious. In some parts, because of the choppy story-telling, it was actually hard to tell which of the "civilian" characters was which, they were drawn so much alike. The only redeeming factor was the way Batwoman approached Maggie Sawyer towards the end, kissed her full on and asked her to marry her. This was a full page spread and was beautiful. It was Batwoman coming out in a whole different way. I loved that, but it wasn't enough to rescue a novel which seemed more interested in portraying Batwoman as a smug poseur in page after page, instead of really getting down to a solid story. This may impress die-hard fans of the genre, but it takes both none of that and a lot more than that to get me into a story. I can't recommend this one.

Batwoman: Vol 2 To Drown the World by JH Williams III, W Haden Blackman and various artists

Rating: WARTY!

I covered some general issues I had with this series in my review of volume one. I enjoyed that issue despite the problems, but this one fared less well. The same wooden artwork did not impress me any more than it had in volume one, and the story was flat and uninteresting.

One of the most interesting parts of the original volume was the relationship between Batwoman (in her Kate Kane persona) and Maggie Sawyer, the police detective. Here the relationship was all but ignored. Instead, we got the relationship between Kate's uncle Jacob, and the comatose Bette Kane, who had been critically injured in the previous volume. This was tiresome to read. One of the characters I most enjoyed in the first volume was Flamebird, Bette's super persona, but that was completely absent, of course, and the endless hospital pity parties featuring Jacob Kane were no substitute by any stretch of the imagination. The recovery of Bette was trite and a joke.

I actually came to share Kate's detestation of Jacob after he said, "...since I let Kate become Batwoman" - like he owned her and it was his choice. The guy's a jerk. I'd like to see Kate kick his weasel ass. He does sit with Bette often, but he reads to her from Ian Fleming's James Bond novel You Only Live Twice. I found it hard to imagine she would enjoy that. Could he not have found out what her favorite book was, and read that to her?

I liked new character Sune, who at one point tries to make out with Batwoman, and the latter doesn't even push her away! Sorry Maggie, but your chosen partner is unfaithful to you! Sune played far too small a role. A bigger role was played by another new character who evidently had mystical powers to create, in reality, something which a population believed in, even if it was not a real thing in which they believed. In this way, he had created La Llorona by murdering Maria Salvaje's children causing her to drown herself in her misery. He was boring, but happily didn't last long.

One of the worst parts of this novel was the endless - and I do mean endless - flashbacks. I hate those, and this was nothing but a constant irritation to me. I cannot recommend this volume, but since I have all of the first four volumes from the library, I do intend to continue on and read the other two, something I would never do had I been picking these up one at a time - so maybe it will get better!

Batwoman: Vol 1 Hydrology by JH Williams III, W Haden Blackman and various artists

Rating: WORTHY!

After a few children's book reviews, it's time to move on to more adult fare - although I'm sure there are those who consider comics and graphic novels solely children's fare too! I'm not one of those people, although I do sometimes think comics have not yet fully matured, especially in the light of electronic presentation. The maturity factor is the main reason I grew interested in a four graphic novel series titled Batwoman - not 'Batgirl', but Batwoman', a title which intrigued me.

Why is it that male super heroes are called 'man' - as in Batman, Spider-Man, and so on, but female heroes are typically named 'girl'? Yes, there are women here, Wonder Woman being the most prominent, but you'll find far more female heroes with 'girl' tacked onto their title than you'll find male ones with a 'boy' suffix. Even stories like 'Superboy' are actually nothing more than retrospective looks at 'Superman'.

Someone I knew once argued that 'woman' indicates a person who has grown and settled down - perhaps into a rut - and who has, to one degree or another, accepted the status quo, with the implication being that the status quo is a rather Biblical one. On the other hand, 'girl' has not yet sold out or bought into anything. She has not subjugated herself to the 'husband and wife' pairing, which implies that 'wife' is a creature in need of husbandry; therefore 'girl' still has the potential to lead her own life, to run riot, and to change the status quo. I didn't agree with that assessment, but it may play a part in what underlies the favoring of 'girl' over 'woman' in comic book super heroes.

For me, the problem at the root of this is that we're not comparing equivalent terms here. While 'woman' equals 'man' in terms of perceived maturity, girl does not equate to boy because of traditional gender disparity. 'Girl' is viewed, if not dismissed, as merely a minor stage on the uninterrupted path to a fertile 'woman', whereas traditional gender 'norms' have placed a veritable chasm between 'boy' and 'man' which must crossed in order to gain respect. Ridiculous as it was, in the past, a boy had to make his first kill during the hunt to become a man. Now he has to develop facial hair and get laid, both of which are still ridiculous.

There are no such equivalents for women. No girl ever achieved womanhood by plucking berries for the first time on the gather! It's because of this rampant patriarchy in our past that the measure of human growth has long been not whether a person is mature, but whether they were a man. If they were not, they were really of no account (which is doubtlessly why villains are typically not named 'man' as part of their title!).

'Boy', therefore, is not equivalent to 'girl', because girl is merely a step along the path to womanhood, and while technically boy is the same place along the path to manhood, manhood has come to mean something else. It's not just a mature human male. A boy then, is someone who has quite literally not 'manned up' - who is not ready to take his 'rightful' place in society. I think this is why we see few super heroes named 'boy' and why, for example, Batman had Robin, The Boy Wonder following him like an acolyte.

No one ever talks about 'womanning up'! This is, of course because women tend not to see things in terms of a competition or a race (and wisely in my view), in the way that men all too often do. This is why women's sports and female athletes are treated like second class citizens in a male-dominated society. While women do have obvious signs of sexual maturity, in terms of secondary sexual characteristics for example, their most potent sexual characteristic, menstruation, tends to be a hidden, personal, and private thing. There's nothing obvious about it, in the way that, for example, men begin to develop facial hair. In this way it's possible for a woman to be perceived as a girl for a lot longer than a man can be viewed as a boy. Obviously, I'm not talking about actual maturity, merely physical and perceived maturity. It's wrong, and genderist, but it's the hole we've long been digging for ourselves.

I was rather sorry then, to start reading this novel and discover that despite the mature titling, the adolescent comic book ethos still prevailed, with the female characters all being highly sexualized and objectified even as Batwoman was portrayed, in her alter ego, as a sexually adventurous, unrestrained, and independent woman. So then the problem becomes: is this acceptable? And if so, how acceptable is it? Where is the line to be drawn between 'this was a great story, and so I can recommend it', and 'this was a great story, but women were repeatedly demeaned in it, and so I can't recommend it'? Do comic books get a pass on this because they have always had this view? Is this an art form as, for example, some Japanese comics have bizarrely caricatured female characters, who are adult yet are portrayed as pixie girls, with pointed chins and huge eyes? If the art is done by women (which is largely not the case in these volumes), does this make objectification okay? If the female character is portrayed as gay, heading for a gay marriage, does that ameliorate it any?

I have to add one more thing, and this actually relates to the sexual orientation of Batwoman. She's a lesbian and openly so, which I think adds to the power of this particular title - that she's 'woman' and not 'girl' meaning that this is definitely a mature part of who she is, not merely some adolescent rebellion or experimentation. There was, however, a huge controversy over this particular series because at one point in it, Kate Kane, who is Batwoman, becomes engaged to police detective Maggie Sawyer. The controversy wasn't over this, but over DC comics refusal to countenance an actual marriage between the two! DC Comics through co-publisher Dan DiDio, argued that Batwoman couldn't marry because heroes should not have happy personal lives(!), and because they're committed to the defense of people at the sacrifice of their own personal interests. So does DC also think that cops, firefighters, and soldiers shouldn't marry either?

That's a huge thicket to wade through, but because writers JH Williams III and W Haden Blackman resigned from this series over the gay marriage issue, I'm going to take the easy way out here and give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm not going to factor in any objectification in my rating, because I support the actions of the writers, so I'm going to rate these four volumes on the quality of the art rather than the design of the female characters, and merely offer this caveat, because as always, it's entirely up to the reader to decide whether they want to support his kind of art form or not.

So on to the story! This is part of the new 52 DC Comics reboot. I liked it even though it begins with a rather patriarchal Batman actually stalking Batwoman and spying on her to determine if she's worthy of admission to his crime fighting syndicate! I kid you not. He played a very minor role in this story though. The bulk of it was Batwoman, aka Kate Kane, taking a rather patriarchal attitude herself towards her cousin Bette Kane, aka Flamebird, as she trains the latter in the art of crime-fighting.

There is also the beginning of the relationship between Kate and Maggie, wherein they quickly end up in bed together. I guess comic books aren't ready to deal with STDs yet! Or super-heroes are immune to them. The villain here is Maria Salvaje aka La Llorona, a ghost who takes young children to an apparent watery grave. In addition to this, Kate is dealing with the death of her twin sister, her dad, Colonel Jacob Kane, whom she blames for that death, Cameron Chase, of Department of Extranormal Operations which is run by a skeleton with the unoriginal name of Mr Bones, and an evil organization named Medusa, which I guess is DC world's equivalent of Marvel Comics' Hydra.

If you're a regular reader of this, which I am not, I'm guessing it would be easier to get into the story than it was for me, but eventually I did, and I enjoyed it. I liked the fairly complex life which Kate led, although we saw little of it outside of her crime-fighting persona. I liked her relationship with Maggie, and the fact that on the one hand the two were becoming involved in Kate's everyday world, but were rather becoming enemies in Batwoman's world.

The artwork, however, left a lot to be desired. It wasn't atrocious, by any means, but it looked and felt very wooden to me, particularly in the action scenes, like someone was posing one of those little wooden artist's models, and copying it without adding anything, and in particular forgetting to add any real sense of movement. Overall though, this to me was a worthy start, and despite the objections I've raised, I think it was a good read and worth pursing the series.

Superkids by Anya Damirón

Rating: WORTHY!

'Superkids' as a title is way-the-heck over-used, but this is the first book with this title that I've ever read, and overall I think it's a worthy read for appropriate age children, with bright colorful illustrations by Pablo Pino.

Ivan is a regular tear-away boy who has lots of energy and is obsessed with the super heroes he sees in movies and reads of in comic books. One day his parents (who are smarter than they look!) decide to take him to meet some real super heroes - kids who have overcome various difficulties to make their life what they want it to be despite obstacles.

Ivan gets to meet a boy who can paint with his feet, a girl who reads Braille, wheelchair-unbound kids who play basketball, a girl who can use sign language, a boy who can dress himself with the only arm he has, and so on. Ivan learns a valuable lesson from this, though he can't emulate any of these people when he tries. His parents point out to him, however, that he does have one superpower which is perhaps the best of all: he can accept people for who they are, and find the best in everyone.

I'd like to see a version of this in which Ivan meets people who are different in other ways: overweight, impoverished, of different race or beliefs, and so on, but that aside, this was a great start towards encouraging children to accept people for who they are, and which teaches them to dwell upon commonalities rather than differences even as they learn to appreciate difference and variety. That said, I recommend this book. I think it's well done and full of heart.

Deception by Working Partners Limited

Rating: WARTY!

Here's another middle grade book which disappointed me. The main problem is that it was set in 1569 yet it read like it could have been written about events taking place yesterday. Obviously you don't want to write a novel in the actual language which was used over four hundred years ago, but you do want to try and imbue your writing with a little bit of antiquity. This one didn't feel that way. Worse than this, it's written in first person PoV, and worse than that, it's written as diary entries. These never work for me because they're patently unrealistic, recounting exact details and word-for-word conversations. It constantly throws me out of the story in disbelief. Worse than this, the author is so focused on including all her research in detailing daily events in Elizabethan times that the story loses all immediacy and urgency which is the whole point of using first person PoV (not that I agree there is a point!).

This is a series which, judged by the titles (Assassin, Betrayal, Conspiracy, Deception, and so on), is intended to run to twenty six volumes. I can't think of anything more tedious than that. It's penned (and I mean that in both senses of the word) by anonymous writers who all contribute under the pseudonym of 'Grace Cavendish', the main character. She's a young maid of honor who is supposedly a pursuivant - an investigator for Queen Elizabeth. 'Pursuivant' didn't actually mean that, and in Elizabeth's time was far more likely to have still been used in its French version, poursuivant.

Even if it were as the writer claims, and while the head of state was a woman, in 1569, they didn't even have adult women in any positions of responsibility, much less running around investigating anything. They would certainly never have had a young girl doing so, especially one who was so dis-empowered that she had to sneak around deceptively to get anything done instead of being allowed to pursue her investigations, None of this made any sense. Neither did it make sense that a woman of nobility, such as Lady Cavendish supposedly was, would have to kow-tow to, and live in fear of the "common" women who were employed on the palace staff.

In 1569, Elizabeth was in her mid-thirties and had been queen for over a decade, yet here she's portrayed as a petulant, ill-tempered brat who lacks control, and who has less maturity than the youthful story teller! Nonsense! Elizabeth was coolly navigating the waters of avoiding marriage - at this point to a French Valois - and dealing with the Pope's rejection of her as a valid monarch. She was hardly the spoiled child we see here.

Though this is supposedly set in late 1569, in the grip of an icy winter, at this time in that year, three Earls from the north of England were leading a rebellion against Elizabeth. They were trying to install Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne in England, yet we're expected to believe that the sole thing bothering a petulant and spoiled Elizabeth was the introduction of a new silver coin? I'm sorry, but I cannot take this series seriously or pursue it. I guess I'm just not pursuivant enough!

Dead is so Last Year by Marlene Perez

Rating: WARTY!

This is part of a series with the rather lame inevitability of the word 'dead' in every title. Apparently no one told Marlene Perez that Charlaine Harris has already been there and done that. I didn't realize that this was part of a series when I picked it up on close-out. I went by the blurb, which I freely admit is often a mistake, which made no mention that this was volume three. I don't hold the author responsible for this since you give up all control of what's on the cover when you go with Big Publishing™ The story is set in Nightshade, a town busting at the seams with paranormal characters and activity, yet the blurb mentions none of that. It merely says that the fraudulently described "smart sisters" are psychic.

Note that the fraud was not in describing them as sisters. The blurb and the title do, I grant, indicate some paranormal goings-on, but nowhere near to the extent that this book exhibited. Again, if I'd known beforehand that there were vampires, and that one of the sisters was dating a werewolf, I would certainly have left this particular novel to gather dust on the clearance shelf! I certainly have no intention of pursuing this series. The weird thing was that neither the werewolf boyfriend nor the vampire was the reason I disliked it! This amused me even more than the title had.

My initial problem was that the author seemed to think that the only virtue female characters can have is their beauty, which is a major turn-off for me in any novel. However, this one surprised me by eventually leaving that theme where it belongs - in the past - which was unexpected, I do confess! Unfortunately, and just when I thought I could stand to read no more, the main character (another first person PoV I'm sorry to have to report) decided to focus on the mystery rather than the looks of all the females in town. Unfortunately, other issues kicked in at that point too, so the story still fell short of being a worthy read for me.

Apart from an obsession with looks, one thing which turns me off is dumb female characters. Yes, there are dumb people in life, male and female (and even some in between), and once in a while you can get an entertaining story out of such a character, even more so if she wises up, but you can't get a good story out of a young woman who is, even within the framework of the story, persistently and irremediably too dumb too live, or one who fails to fulfill even the author's own criteria for the character.

Clearly not much thought went into this series. Nightshade is supposed to be a relatively small town (at least it is from reading the test), yet it has a large high school with a successful football team, it has a college, and it has assorted other large town things going on, things found only in larger towns, yet it's talked about as though it's a cozy little village. It made no sense.

This novel was told from Daisy's PoV. Daisy has two sisters who are named Poppy and Rose, which was a bit too trite for my taste, and Daisy was not only not the sharpest knife in the knife drawer, she didn't seem capable of hosting much that was in the way of intelligent thought, or of following even elementary logic. She was presented as this psychic investigator who was supposed to step into the gap left by her mother's absence. She failed dismally. She mentioned her psychic powers frequently, but barely used them even when it would have made clear sense for her to do so. We were told more than once that she was "rusty" in practicing using her powers. Who, in real life, if they found that they had such power, would get rusty in using it? No one! Of course, this doesn't happen in real life, but in the book it was part of real life. It made no sense that she would become rusty or would have little or no interest in using her powers.

The sisters' mom was in Italy, where she and her daughters had spent part of the summer. Dad is out of the picture having gone missing in an earlier volume evidently. The girls were purportedly back to attend school, although none of the story took place in the school to speak of. All three of them get jobs without a shred of effort although, after the initial 'just starting her tiring job as a waitress period' is over, Daisy is never doing her job either.

Apparently unencumbered by school or work, Daisy has all the time in the world to wander around trying to figure out what's going on and she still takes forever - long after the reader has it all sorted. Some people describe a character like that as a Mary Sue although technically that's incorrect. A Mary Sue is a character who goes through a novel without a thing going wrong, without running into any difficulties, and without making any mistakes, but gets everything done, and does it perfectly. A Mary Poppins would be actually a better name for such a character. This would leave the term 'Mary Sue' open for the use it seems to be adopting: that of a character like Daisy who can't figure out anything, despite clues that are obvious even to a reader like me who is typically the last to figure things out. Maybe we should call such a character an Ian! So Daisy spends the entire novel, virtually, being a complete Ian.

The problem in this story is that someone is making clones. There are two obvious suspects, yet never once does Daisy suspect either one. Neither of them is investigated even though one of Daisy's sisters works with one of them, and Daisy herself witnesses the other doing things which are quite obviously shady and underhand, and which involve secret spells and employing old clothes. These are the smart sisters, remember, yet the one with whom one of the sisters works is called Doctor Franken (I am not making this up) who works in a genetics lab, yet never once does anyone consider that she might be a suspect!

Worse than this, the plan is supposed to be these clones taking over of the town council. They could have done this with bribes or blackmail, or better yet, used direct magic to control these people, yet instead they come up with the idea of creating clones to replace the council members! The problem is that not one of the initial clones is a clone of a council member - they're just random citizens which are then allowed to wander around town aimlessly. Worse than this, the clones have a sugar craze and eat large quantities of sweet food such as donuts, and still no one suspects a thing.

Now this is a town in which supernatural activities go on all the time, yet no one, not even the "smart" sisters, thinks for a split second that well-known citizens are suddenly behaving oddly. These sisters are not smart. They're morons. They don't even react when the yard is invaded by a ravenous pack of werewolves - other than to run indoors. They never call the police even though the wolves could be harming someone else while these chickens cower indoors. They never make the connection between the ravening wolves and the football team jocks suddenly miraculously bulking up on muscle. They're worse than irresponsible; they're freaking idiots.

I don't need books about idiot girls in my library. If I wanted to see that I would watch so-called reality TV (in which I have absolutely no interest either). Had this novel been written for middle-graders, I might have perceived it differently, but it's aimed at young adults and it misses its mark disastrously. It is not a worthy read, not even remotely.

Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B Cooney

Rating: WARTY!

Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of ward-winning novels, but this one, which won the Josette Frank Award in 2003, started out really well and I enjoyed it, but as soon as the main character took up residence in the palace of King Menelaus, the story fell completely flat and became a tiresome read. It is aimed at middle-grade children, so we shouldn't expect too much of it, but I think children have a right to expect enough from a novel, and I felt that this quite simply did not deliver. Even the title was a bit of a downer, which struck me as strange.

Some people have described this as an historical novel and it is, technically speaking, but it's also one of those novels written for children which puts the child at the pivot of events, and I typically find those to be the disingenuous and annoying braggarts of the literary world (whether written for children or for adults for that matter).

The story is supposed to be that of Anaxandra, who we join at the age of six, the daughter of a minor pirate lord of some non-entity of an Aegean island. She is a devotee of Medusa, and often prays to her for help and guidance, although Medusa was not actually a god. She was one of the Gorgons, a race of monsters. Why anyone would pray to such a creature is unexplained in this novel. This young girl is taken as tribute (so she believes) by king Nikander (note that my spellings may be off because I listened to an audio book, so I have no idea how the author spelled these names in the printed version), and grows up to middle-grade age with the royal family as a companion to his handicapped daughter Callisto, but his small island is raided by pirates who slaughter and destroy. Anaxandra manages to survive this and at one point amusingly frightens away some pirates by putting an octopus on her head and pretends that she is a displeased Medusa come to wreak havoc upon them. These pirates are pretty dumb, let's face it, and so they take off, and Anaxandra buries her dead king.

Just when she thinks hope is lost, King Menelaus of Sparta arrives with his fleet, and fearful of being taken into slavery, Anaxandra pretends she is Nikander's dead daughter Callisto. Menelaus adopts her into his own family, perhaps because they both share red hair (a color which is brought up with nauseating frequency). For me, here is where the story became uninteresting and fell completely flat. Contrary to popular consciousness, Helen (of Troy), wife of Menelaus, is portrayed not such much as a raging beauty as she is a royal bitch, and Paris is portrayed as a complete fop more worthy of being named Narkissos than Paris.

The problem with this part of this novel is that it's taken to the level of caricature, and so was as uninteresting to me. It lacked all and any attempt at nuance. As such, it wasn't entertaining at all. This is where the story became tedious to me, with page after page of commentary on what a bitch Helen was and what a poseur Paris was. It was tiresome, unimaginative, and uninventive, and it was at this point that i quit reading it. How it won an award, I do not know because Anaxandra had so many opportunities to become a really powerful character, and the author let all of them slip through her fingers.

Additionally, Anaxandra was one of the most emotionally dead characters I've ever encountered. There was no concern on her part for example, from the fact that she had been forced from her original home, or from seeing King Nikander, of whom she was very fond, die along with - evidently, her adopted sister Callisto, or form seeing her adopted mother, who was very kind to Callisto, being taken into slavery by the pirates. We never even got a description of her adopted mom's grief from losing both her husband and her daughter. At one point Anaxandra did consider going into the palace during the raid to get to Callisto, but her effort was half-hearted at best, and her complete loss of interest in Callisto's fate thereafter was shameful. Could the author not at least have had her find her sister and bury her too?

It was this complete lack of a clue about how real people children react and behave coupled with the sheer boredom later, which turned me off this book. How can any author,m even by accident, make the story of Helen and Paris boring?! I've never heard of the Josette Frank Award, but I have to say that standards must be low if this one won it. I can't recommend it.

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World by Daniel Callahan

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"humanity can solve the carbon and carbon problem" ??!
"but is now is now more" makes no sense.
"develop a successor to the Kyoto Prptocol is planned for Paris in December 2015" misspelling of protocol and poor grammar.
"such as improving automobile engine efficiency to reduce mileage per gallon" improve mileage per gallon, surely?!
"Too many cooks," the old saying has it, "spoils the broth." person mismatch.
"Of that amount $275 llion was spent on the top 1% of patients" million is missing a few letters.
"Michael Grubb has laid out the pathway that successful funding of technological research must follow to move from the beginning, research, to the end, successful implementation and dissemination." This made no sense to me.
"Most of that increase will come from the developing countries, which will account for 90% of the increase, with the Organisation for Economic Co -operation and Development countries (essentially developed countries) contributing only 17%." 107%?
" The IEA has projected a one-third increase in global energy demand between 2011- 2035, with a small decline in the share of fossil fuel from 83% to 76%. Renewables and nuclear energy will meet about 40% of basic demand during that same period." Again maybe I am misunderstanding this, but 76% *or 83%) plus 40% add up to more than 100, unless 'global energy demand' is somehow different from 'basic demand'. If it is, it should be made more clear.
Minor quibble: "between 2011- 2035" To me the hyphen equates to the word 'to' so this reads like 'between 2011 to 2035', whereas it should read 'between 2011 and 2035'. If I were going to use the hyphen, I'd write it as 'from 2011- 2035', but maybe others read it differently.

Note up front that this was an advance review copy and I appreciate the opportunity to read it. What I have identified as problems or potential problems with it may well have been taken care of by the time of publication! That said, this book, properly titled The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity by Daniel Callahan was a disappointment to me. I usually try to give environmentally themed books a positive review if I can because I think they're tremendously important, but i cannot honestly do that here.

The author has done an impressive amount of work, but what's presented does not appear to be intended as a popular handbook on solutions to important problems facing us in the near future. It's much more of a survey of five major problems which the author sees - problems which will impinge upon us all - and what options have been put forward in attempts at or as suggestions for the mitigation of these problems. As such, it can make for very dense and dry reading. I can't recommend undertaking it unless you're a true devotee of environmental literature, because for me, even that wasn't quite enough.

It was interesting in many ways, but I would not recommend it for casual reading. In addition to this, there were multiple issues with it which drew it out of my favor (for what that's worth!). There were areas that read - to me - like pure gobbledygook. For example, I had no idea what this meant: "Most proposals for mitigation and adaptation change require forging or greatly enhancing government- private sector alliances, a receptive government with public support, industry incentives to take chances with uncertain long-term profit, and multidisciplinary and integrated systems, among others." I'm sure I could have parsed it out and derived the intended meaning if I spent some time on it, but I wasn't willing to spend my time doing the very work I felt the author should have done.

First I want to look at the things which were interesting - or disturbing, depending upon your perspective. They were actually both: interesting for now, and very disturbing for the not-too-distant future. There were many of these. They were not always presented in the most coherent manner, though, which rather robbed them of their power and deluged the reader in statistics rather than an engaging relation of clear facts and opinions. It's hard to get a good feel for a situation when the reader has so many numbers, percentages and assorted facts spit out in short order with little by way of explanation or context.

While the book did a pretty decent job of presenting many disturbing facts, the apparent lack of good solutions was also upsetting; however, some solutions were completely overlooked. For example, we're informed that "Some 80% of all infectious disease in poor countries can be traced to dirty water" and some pertinent issues are discussed, yet one promising solution, from Dean Kamen (the inventor of AutoSyringe, the Segway, and the iBOT Mobility System) went unmentioned. Similarly, and still on the topic of water, I felt that sea-water filtration as a solution to fresh water shortage, was given way too short shrift, being largely dismissed as expensive. Well energy is expensive, but the places where water is often in very short supply are the same ones where solar power can provide abundant low cost energy, and we did get told how cheap that had become. That doesn't solve all the issues with sea water use, but I would have liked to have seen this explored more, given how much water this planet does have available even if it is mixed thoroughly with salt.

I confess that it was with a certain amount of smugness that I read about bottled water, which I do not drink. I learned that "Bottled water is an exceedingly profitable item, vigorously advertised, stoutly defended by its manufacturers, and seeming adored by the public. In 2009 Americans spent $10.6 billion to consume 8.4 million gallons of it. It is a strikingly popular item in upscale restaurants, where it is served at 80% markups." I also read that "A 2006 study found that 17 million barrels of oil a year are required to produce the plastic bottles, while the cost of tap water production is around a thousandth as much" and "Americans drink around 29 gallons of bottled water a year per capita." That's a lot of expensive water being consumed by the very people who have least need of it. One thing which was not explored was the potential health risk in the possibility of leeching of chemicals from plastic water bottles into the water which these people are consuming in such massive quantities.

Aging was another area of interest. While those of us in spoiled-rotten western cultures have access to decent food (though we may not choose to avail ourselves of it), clean water, good healthcare, non of us can escape aging! "In 1975 there were six children for every older person, but by 2035 there will only two." This is another area of concern: how we will take care of our growing aging population when they are going to outnumber the very people who can physically and financially care for them. I would have liked this to have been explored in greater depth.

Climate change was disturbingly summed-up in this section which quoted James Hansen:

with current policies in place we are locked into a rise of between 2 ° C and 5.3 ° C, " adding in an interview that 4 ° C "would be enough to melt all the ice . . . we are now three years away from that point-of-no return.

For me, part of the problem with this book was the extensive quotation of the work of others. It felt more like reading a compilation than an original book and very little of what was quoted made much impact upon me, the above being one of the few exceptions.

In addition to those problems, there were assorted issues with grammar and with percentages not adding up. While those are on the author and publisher, another issue, the formatting of the book as read in the Kindle app on my phone which left a lot to be desired, is purely a fault of the app rather than with the book itself. Authors can take steps to mitigate the damage the Kindle conversion process subjects your work to, but this restricts creativity rather a lot. One thing which could have been fixed, I think, would have been to have had the references (with which the text was replete) clickable. It was annoying to read something, see a reference number, and not be able to click to it and click back. In a print book, it's easy to stick your finger between pages and look up a reference, returning to where you left off. It's not possible to do that in a kindle app unless the references are clickable and the book provides a return click to get you back to where you started. Perhaps this will be available in the final published copy, but without having a copy available to me that is close to what's intended to be published (which this book was hopefully!), I can't give an adequate review of those things.

Overall, and while I like, as I said, to review environmental books positively if I can, I wasn't able to do that with this one because it left too much undone and did not leave me feeling better educated afterwards than I had been before. Yes, it was an ARC, but in this electronic age, I felt it could have been in a lot better shape, including a final run-through with a spell-checker. I can't see this appealing to a wide readership, not without being better presented. With all these things in mind I cannot in good faith recommend this book, and I'm sorry for that.

Hawksong by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Rating: WARTY!

Two households, both alike in dipshits,
In fair bird droppings, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break two new misfits,
Where uncivil blood makes love demeaned.
From forth the fatal wash of mortal enemas
A pair of snake-cross'd birders take their life;
One Zane Cobriana, in heart and soul an ass
Talks Danica Shardae into becoming his wife.
The fearful passage of their asinine love,
And the continuance of their friends' rage,
Which, buttheads that they were, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
Shall wish your very own life to end.

This was one of the sorriest novels I've ever not read. Nope, I listened to it, and the reader's voice was barely tolerable. It's a Romeo and Juliet redux, but instead of the couple dying, the story died.

The blurb, of course, made it sound like it might be interesting and there was a sequel, both of which I happily borrowed from the local library hoping for a treat. That hope died. I returned the second volume unheard. I got through fifty percent of the first volume before I could stand it no more. There was no performance, unless that word is a contraction of 'perfunctory dormancy', and if I had to listen to the reader Jennifer Ikeda say "Donnika" just one more time I would have lost it. Dahknicker Shardead and inZane Cobrie-cheese. he;s so inzane that he crawls out of his skin every year. Literally.

I've seen some reviewers, even negative ones, praise the world building, and I have to ask, what world-building? There was ZERO world building here! What 'story' we got made no sense. These two races, the Avians and the reptilians - no - they were not even reptilians, they were serpient! What is that? It's not the equivalent of a class like avian. It's a sub-order, serpentes, which I guess is what those people were, so maybe it's right after all, if their race is judged by the behavior of the leader, Zane, who happily skins people who piss him off, and evidently carpets the floor of his room with the skins. This is a civilized person? This is someone to fall in love with? He's a snake in the grass. A man who suggests that his intended bride wasn't been beaten too much? How much beating would be just enough, Zane? This is a man who cam make peace? No, it isn't. Snakes are not very much into making peace with birds. They'd rather eat them.

There was no real description of the world in which these people lived, or even how they came to be (= no world-building). They were supposed to be birds and snakes, yet they maintained human form most of the time. Why? No explanation. Apparently there were humans on this planet, but they played no role whatsoever in the events - not in the portion to which I listened, anyway - so why were these races mimicking humans? No explanation. Why were there humans at all? No explanation.

The races were supposed to have been at war for a thousand years or more, and no one had any idea why they were fighting, yet they continued. Not once during this millennium of mêlée was any technology developed. Why not? War produces huge and lethal advances in technology, yet neither of these two races achieved anything. Why not? How the birds had failed to beat the earth-bound snakes escapes me. The two races supposedly detested each other, yet completely out of the blue, two of them magically started to trust each other. Two alien races, neither of which could have had any attraction to the other, yet they agree to marry, believing, for no reason at all, that this would end the war. Seriously? Why would it? Why would they think it would?

Dah-knicker became Zane's "Naga" - yet another snake word which made me laugh because it sounded so much like "nagger". Donni-kuh was his nagger. We had the Cobriana family, the Cobra race, the serpient people, the serpents? There was no logic to any of these amateur naming conventions, including the main character's names. The bird was named Danica Shardae, the guy Zane Cobriana? Seriously? So that's why he couldn't get into the dance club - it was mambas only! He drove an old battered car. It was a real rattler! He's so tired of people that he dreams of living alone on a coral island, watching Monty Python. And wearing a boa....

These critters were not human, yet they mimicked humans and took very pretentious human names. Why? No doubt for the same reason that they inhabited very human palaces, where they had servants, and where despite being at war for a thousand years, they Avians still haven't thought that it might be a good idea to guard the servants' stairs which lead directly to the princess's bedroom. These people are morons. No wonder they can't win. Again, zero world-building.

Danica was supposed to be a hawk, yet she possessed not a single hawk-like trait. She was more like a Dodo. Danica laid an egg. The same goes for Zane and his purported cobra-esque personality. The snakes could hypnotize people with a glance? Honestly? Could we not get a modicum of originality here? This story was sad, sad, sad. Yeah, it gave me a belly-laugh, but I give it the bird.

The Underdogs by Sara Hammel

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with The Underdogs by Mike Lupica or any of a gazillion other novels titled 'Underdog', this novel posed as a middle-grade detective novel in the blurb, but which in the writing, turned out to be a young adult, snotty, elitist novel which had nothing to do with detecting. At least that's how it was for the first twenty-five percent of it, after which I gave up in disgust. Keep that in mind as you read this review. There may have been things taking place later in the story which mitigate some of my criticism, but in my experience, when a novel begins this badly and continues in the same vein for the first 25% of the story, things ain't gonna change much. It was also replete with flashback, which is just annoying to me. The chapters were interleaved (and titled) 'Before' and 'After' through the entire novel, and it was annoying, because as soon as it looked like something might start to happen, the brakes were slammed on and we got an irrelevant trip into the past before the murder. It didn't work.

Even by Big Publishing™ standards, the blurb for this was way off. It began with the usual "When" and revealed that "a popular teen beauty’s body is discovered by the pool at an elite tennis club". What her beauty has to do with it is unexplained, and I should have realized, right there and then, that something was wrong here. Would the murder have been okay if the girl had been "ordinary"? Would they have let it go un-investigated if she had been ugly? It bothers me that in a purportedly middle-grade novel, we're already focused on beauty and popularity before the story even began, and it's entirely irrelevant to the story. A girl was murdered. Isn't that enough? Is it somehow more tragic if she's beautiful and popular? Not in my book it isn't, but in this blurb writer's imagination, it evidently is.

I understand that writers don't have anything to do with the cover or the blurb when they go with Big Publishing™, and this blog is about writing, not pretty covers or catchy blurbs, so just one more comment on that score: the worst thing about the blurb was the huge disconnect between "twelve-year-old Evie and her best friend, Chelsea" and the age of the people represented in the actual story. They did not read as middle grade characters! Perhaps this was intentional. Perhaps the club catered to adults and young adults, and Evie and Chelsea were the exception, but nowhere was it made clear just what age range we were talking about here, and all of the characters seemed to me to be way older than twelve, including Evie and Chelsea! They were just not realistic, even when we take into account their privileged lifestyle.

That was a writing problem. The blurb tells us that Evie and Chelsea jump on the case. My question is, did the blurb writer actually read the novel?! The very last thing Evie and Chelsea did was jump on the case! They literally did nothing but stalk people and eavesdrop for the entirety of the 25% I read! They were the most passive protagonists I've ever read about. They did literally nothing but ogle guys and discuss guys and drool over guys, and spy on people. It was like a reboot of Harriet the Spy, but for an older audience. It was boring in the extreme, and it made these two young girls look as vapid and shallow, and clueless and tedious as it's possible to make a character look. The two of them did no investigating, came up with no ideas, did no detective work, offered no theories or had any clue whatsoever. Worse than this, they got into no mischief, made no mistakes, got into no trouble, were never in any danger, and were as monotonous and one-note as it's possible to be. There was no appreciable attempt at humor.

As I said, I read only 25%, so it's entirely possible that this entire story turned around 180° on the very next page after I stopped reading, and the story took off and was brilliant, but somehow I seriously doubt it because there never was any indication that it was going to ever do that. While the writing wasn't technically bad (i.e. was not full of gaffs, spelling and grammar errors, and it was not awful to read from that perspective, neither was it inspired or inspiring. It was refreshing given that this was an advance review copy, so I was grateful for that! Unfortunately, the author uses 'thusly'! Now while that isn't technically a gaff, it is really annoying and looks pretentious as all get-out. There was also my personal pet peeve on hair color: "Hair that was so black it had glints of blue in it...." No. Just no.

My biggest beef with this story though, was that it consistently presented young women in an awful light. Take this, for example: "Nicholas was Annabel’s brother, almost like a twin but not. He was older by less than two years, protective and so fond of his baby sister." Baby sister? She's two years younger. Why demean her like that? She's not a baby. Unless Nicholas is two years old. This was only one of endless instances where girls were summarily dismissed as one-note and shallow, obsessed with boys and never - ever, ever - given to a single thought about anything else. Just as badly, boys were objectified in the extreme, which is just as bad as objectifying women. I'm sorry, but I cannot support or recommend a story like this one, which evidently had nothing to offer but lust and improbably raging hormones, and no detecting in sight.

Doctor Who 2 The Girl Who Waited, The Boy Who Lived by various writers and artists

Rating: WARTY!

I hate to end my 2015 reviews on a negative note, but this is the second of two novels I didn't like that I'm reviewing today! Fortunately I got them both from the library so I wasn't out anything but my time! Annoying as that is, it's not as bad as throwing good money after bad literature. I love my local library and all who sail in her!

I'm a big fan of the Doctor Who TV series, despite recently concluded series nine being rather less than satisfactory, but my experience with Doctor Who in written (as opposed to visual) form has been so unsatisfactory that I'm giving up reading Doctor Who stories! I will simply have to wait until series ten starts next year for my next fix!

This fat, hardback, large-format graphic novel weighed a ton, but while the artwork - by assorted artists - was okay, and in some cases good (except for the sad cover), the stories were derivative and uninventive with tired old characters being recycled in unengaging ways. For the most part, the stories, evidently compiled from individually-released comics, were not entertaining and I liked only one of them (out of a dozen or so). It was a double-feature, and the only saving grace it boasted was Kevin the dinosaur who turned out to be more interesting than Jim the Fish. The latter has had several mentions in the TV show, but has failed to put in an appearance so far, and he (or she!) is unlikely to put in an appearance now that River Song has evidently been retired from the series.

There were Sontarans and Silurians doing nothing interesting. There was a text-free Santa Claus story which made no sense at all to me. There was a sad Jack the Ripper story, and though there were lots of references to canonical events and catch-phrases from the TV show, the stories which contained them were lifeless and sadly executed. I can't recommend this one.

Paulina & Fran by Rachel B Glaser

Rating: WARTY!

I hate to end my 2015 reviews on a negative note, but this novel wasn't at all what I'd hoped for from the blurb. OTOH, what novel is? Very few of them, to be sure. Rest assured that it's as far from "an audaciously witty debut" as it's possible to get. So Rachel B Glaser and I be unhappy with her effort. It started out interestingly enough, but there was a current underlying it which was obnoxious, and it quickly began to trudge and stumble.

I'd hoped it would get sanded down and become a lot more smooth as the story grew, but the ever-dragging story never did grow wheels, and so the rough edges prevailed. I made it literally half way through - to the end of chapter eight before I gave up on it. It was boring, repetitive and uninventive, and there were no characters in it that I liked. The most obnoxious characters were the titular ones and in that same order, too.

The story is apparently set in modern times, but there are weird anachronisms, so maybe it was set in the past and I missed something which explained this, because there were two mentions, one of a Walkman, and one of a Discman, featured in it despite the novel being published in 2015. It was very confusing. The novel does cover a decade, and of course the Walkman name is still around, but the Discman name belongs to the eighties, so while it's possible these referred to modern devices, this didn't alleviate the confusion.

The reason it didn't is that if this was indeed a modern setting (even from the last ten to fifteen years), then all of these people were complete morons in having routine, unprotected sex with multiple partners, and yet not a single one of them ever considered, not even for a second, that there was anything wrong with it or dangerous about it.

The main character, Paulina, was one of the most uninteresting, self-absorbed, bitchy, and obnoxious characters I've ever read about. She had no redeeming feature whatsoever, and was totally uninteresting to me. She and her co-dependent, Fran, were art students, and the author managed to make even that tedious to read about. Fran was a complete wallflower. Neither of them deserved any sort of decent relationship or any happiness, so it was nice to see that they were getting none. Why anyone would be remotely interested in either of them even as an acquaintance, much less a friend or a lover, was a complete mystery.

Some reviewers made mention of this as reminiscent of a Woody Allen movie - and they did not intend that in a positive light. I agree. It's like post-Annie Hall Woody Allen, when his movies were not even remotely funny, and just became a rambling, self-absorbed mess about unsurprisingly clichéd tropes. I refuse to recommend pretentious and tired drivel like this, which some Big publishing™ editor evidently and mistakenly considered to be a work of art.

Infinity Ring a Mutiny in Time by James Dashner

Rating: WARTY!

The author of The Maze Runner fouls up again with this series aimed at middle graders. Not that I've actually read The Maze Runner series. I was interested after seeing the first movie, but then lost all interest after the disastrous second movie which was profoundly dumb and tedious. If it's anything like the novel I've lost all desire to read any of those books. I was curious to see if he might do better with something aimed at a younger audience. He didn't.

The cover designers showed their legendary ineptitude again by putting a compass on the front cover instead of the actual infinity ring. This is about time travel not geographic travel per se, so what's with the compass? I swear I get more laughs out of Big Publishing™ cover designers than I do from books which are actually intended to be humorous!

This is your standard middle-grade time travel novel where young kids save the world by visiting extremely famous points and/or people, and/or landmarks in history. I'm sure there's a novel (or maybe even a series) which gets it right, but this one isn't it. Set in an alternate reality (where the US capital is Philadelphia and Columbus didn't discover Cuba) - which we learn is really our reality gone awry, we soon discover that there are breaks in history, starting in Aristotle's time, which must be set right to put reality back on track. Who determined where these were, and how they figured out there were breaks in the first place is left unexplained.

That's just the problem with this novel: there's far too much unexplained. Why they cannot go back and fix the first (in Alexander and Aristotle's time) and have all the other breaks fall into place goes just as unexplained as why they start with Columbus instead of starting with the first, or even with the last and work backwards. My guess is that no matter how many they fix, and no matter where they start, every single volume in this series will be exactly the same - with Time Wardens seeking to thwart or to capture them no matter how much history they change, which makes zero sense, and it's why I didn't bother finishing this novel once I saw where it was stupidly determined to go. Worse than this, the two kids have a pad computer with them, yet instead of information, it delivers clues in cheap rhymes and in absurdly simple visual puzzles! Why? No reason at all! God forbid we should make our young readers actually think when we can serve everything up like it's fast food!

The idea is that there are good guys and bad guys (the Time Wardens) stationed throughout history. How that works goes unexplained, because they would either already have to know where the breaks were, in order to station guards there, or they would have to station people all over the entire planet throughout time, which is absurd. That was the major problem with this story: the sheer absurdity of it. I couldn't stand to finish it, especially since it was puffed up with so much fluff. The novel could have comfortably begun on page 80 or thereabouts, at the end of chapter twelve, about two fifths of the way into the story, and lost nothing in the telling!

Had anyone but an established author submitted this trash, any respectable publisher would have rejected it. This novel seemed to me to be nothing short of a cynical attempt to bilk the rubes (aka middle-graders) out of money by running a cheap series which retells the same story over and over with a few details changed here and there to make them superficially different. I mean why tell an intelligent and original story in one concise volume when you can stretch it to a dozen? I can't support that and I can't recommend this.

The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting

Rating: WARTY!

While I've seen the Dolittle movies (both the Rex Harrison version, and the Eddie Murphy version) I've never read any of the books. You could argue that I still haven't since the one I review here is a Dalmatian Children's Classic (so-called), and as such is a condensed version (adapted by Kathryn R Knight) illustrated (by Nick Price) with many line drawings in which Dolittle is very much drawn in the mold of WC Fields!

As with many older books, there have been complaints of racism inherent in the book's pages, which I find rather disingenuous when applied retroactively. Yes, there are old books which are racist by today's standards, and the Dolittle books are among them. There are even old books (Mein Kampf comes to mind) which are racist by their own contemporary standards. I can't really speak to that since the version I read was an adaptation which has been washed clean of the original racism. I also find it interesting that Eddie Murphy agreed to act in this role given the book's history! Maybe they were aiming for some sort of redemption by making Dolittle black?

I have read various commentaries on this topic. It isn't a defense to say that this book isn't racist by its own contemporary standards. The original of this novel was racist by any standards. Is it a defense to say it isn't maliciously racist? By that i mean did it actively intend harm through the racism it contained? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it wasn't harmful. In this version, the racism has been bleached (yes, that is a reference to the original!), but I think as long as I'm mentioning this, it's only fare to also mention that Lofting wrote other books in this series condemning of slavery, and that even in this book, he depicts an African king who is pissed-off with white men because of their depredations of his nation's natural resources. To me, this goes a little way towards mitigating against charges of overt or active, or outright malicious racism. That does not make the book lily white, so to speak.

My biggest complaint about this particular version of the novel isn't about racism or the fact that the doctor speaks to the animals or they to him - it's children's fantasy after all! - but that the author doesn't have a clue about animals. Hugh Lofting was a soldier (he originated the idea for these stories in the trenches in France in World War One), not a veterinarian or a biologist, but even so, it would not have taken much effort, even in 1920, to look up a little bit about Africa to discover that it isn't home to Orang-utans. Nor would it have taken much more effort to discover that gorillas, orang-utans, and chimpanzees are apes, and not monkeys, and eagles are not commonly found out on the open ocean! It was that kind of thing which annoyed me more than anything else, so for me, the story was sadly lacking in a decent foundation.

Given the premise - a doctor discovers he has more affinity with animals than with humans, and can understand them and therefore treat them expertly - it seems to me that a golden opportunity was wasted here to teach children something about animals, biology and evolution. The novel may well be be moderately entertaining for very young children who question little, but for my money (and note that the book is available free online) it really wasn't a worthy read at all (I skipped a lot of the second half), not when there are more modern and better written novels with these themes - animals and adventure. Besides, this novel is out of copyright now, and neither Hugh Lofting (who died in 1947) nor his estate are going to get anything for it if you buy it! Whether oyu think he ever deserved anything for it is up to you! Maybe it's time for someone to rewrite this in an intelligent, educational, and non-racist way?

Bob's Burgers by assorted writers and artists

Rating: WARTY!

This graphic novel combines issues one and two and is evidently based on a TV show which I have never seen. It looked interesting from the blurb, but failed dismally in the execution. The art work was cartoon-ish, which perhaps fits the TV show, but which wasn't very interesting to me. The main character, Tina, looked like she sported a mustache, which was interesting to me (how often do we get a female character with a mustache, even in cartoons?!) - interesting that is, until I discovered that there is no mustache - it's just the way her mouth is poorly drawn!

Tina herself proved to be a rather one-note and uninteresting. There were times when the humor was moderately amusing, and there were some interesting concepts which I felt deserved better treatment than they got, but for the most part the stories were boring and did not entertain me. There is, periodically, a story told in rhyme, but I took to skipping these after I'd read the first two because they were even more boring.

Note that this was an advance review copy so some of my comments here may be irrelevant depending upon what's done with the actual published version. That said, I do not recommend reading this on an iPad because the art work was a bit scrappy-looking. This is, perhaps, because of reduced image quality for the e-version, but this doesn't say much or the e-version, does it?! Worse than this, though, was the fact that the text was too small to read comfortably in some panels because it was so tiny. I don't think comic book creators should issue ebook versions of their comics unless the comic has been specifically designed as an ebook and the comic is written specifically for the ebook format. It simply doesn't work otherwise and exhibits a certain disrespect for e-formats.

In terms of the print version I was a bit shocked at the profligacy with which paper was wasted. Perhaps fans of the show might not consider it a waste, but even were I a fan I would still consider it wasteful when a comic book arrives with twenty or thirty pages of variant covers and so-called "pin-up" images. I have to wonder why the creators hate trees so much! Maybe this is intended to be printed on recycled paper? I would hope so.

As it is I cannot in good faith recommend this one for the reasons I've discussed: hum-drum stories, mediocre art work, and shameful waste of trees.

Velvet Before the Secret Lives of Dead Men vol 2 by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second collected volume of one of the best graphic novels I've read in a long time. Unfortunately it's the start of a series, so I have to pick up more volumes. Had it been a novel, it would have been self-contained in one volume. I'm not a fan of series, but this one was good enough that I am interested in reading more, despite it being a royal pain! Unfortunately, there are no more compendium volumes beyond the second one at this point, as far as I can tell, which is annoying, especially since this series began in 2013. If the author would finish one series before moving on to another, maybe he'd get the one finished in a reasonable amount of time?!

Note that I've read only the compendium issues. Volume two covers original issues six through ten. Since volume fourteen isn't due until January 2016, I'm guessing it's going to be a while before the third compendium is released. Meanwhile I'm going to be looking for individual issues!

The story is set in the past, and has flashbacks into the more distant past, which was slightly annoying, but not too bad (I'm not a fan of flashbacks). This is very much a spy thriller in the mode of James Bond. It's set in Britain, but whereas James Bond has ties, tenuous as they are, to real British intelligence services, this is a secret service with a code-name. Other than that it's very much James Bond.

There are two big differences, both of which I approve. The first of these is that the agent taking the spotlight here isn't a male, but a female, and secondly, this female isn't a 'pretty young thing', but a mature woman. It's like Moneypenny left Bond behind and went on the mission herself, except that this isn't a recent Moneypenny. This is the Lois Maxwell Moneypenny and the novel works the better for it because it focuses on her tenacity, dedication, intelligence, and skill, and not on sexuality. I really liked of all of this.

This story continues full throttle from the first one, with Velvet, retired secret agent, who was very much a Moneypenny before she was forced to take up the role of field agent after she discovered she had been set up by someone high up in her own agency. The story jets across Europe and out to the Bahamas and back (another nod to James Bond), with Velvet Templeton having to remember skills and contacts from her field days many years before, and having to tread lightly and seek to forge contacts and even alliances with people from the past - some of whom were not on the same side of the intelligence services as she was. It ends in a cliffhanger since there are more volumes to come after this open, of course. I liked this very much and recommend the series (at least this far!)