They say Blue by Jillian Tamaki

Rating: WORTHY!

I commend this book! Reading it was like reading a series of haikus. The theme is color and it meanders all over the world and the seasons, starting with the blue sky and ocean in summer, and drifting through the seasons. It was beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated and I fell completely in love with it. I enjoyed Jillian Tamaki's drawings in Gertie's Leap to Greatness by Kate Beasley, which I favorably reviewed back in June of 2016. It's nice to see her out on her own. I recommend this nook, even if you don't have children!

A Dog With Nice Ears by Lauren Child

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been in love with Charlie and Lola ever since my own kids used to watch this children's TV show. They're way beyond it now, but I still love these characters. They're a fictional bro and sis who were created by the very imaginative and inventive English writer and illustrator Lauren Child in 2000AD. This is one of the books. Until this, I'd seen only the TV show, but I have to say that this captured the show perfectly - or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the TV show captures the books perfectly since they came first.

There are several fun books to be had, assuming this one is anything to judge the rest by, but in this episode we're focused on Lola's desire to own a dog. Her parents are dead set against it. Shame on them, but I can understand a parent not wanting to get a dog for a very young child, because it's going to die on them when they're in their teens and that could be traumatizing, let's face it. I know it did me in.

Anyway Lola's perspective on what the dog should look like and how it should behave are predictably - knowing Lola as I do - bizarre. It's only when she gets her pet home that everything falls into place, and the result amused the heck out of me. Did I mentioned I loved the TV show?! And the author's name is Child for goodness sake!

I recommend this for any parent with a slightly off-kilter sense of humor and any kids who need to be nudged outside of their comfort zone once in a while. It's good for them. My kids lapped up the TV show, but then they're my kids, so what would you expect! LOL! I commend this book and I'll bet the entire series is a worthy read.

Hedge Hog by Ashlyn Anstee

Rating: WORTHY!

I used to keep pet hedgehogs when I was a kid and I adored them. Naturally when I saw this book I was interested in reading it. The key to how this is going to play out is in the fact that in the title, hedgehog isn't one word!

Hedgehogs are known fro balling up, but no hedgehog balls up like this one did. The animals are all getting ready for winter (unnaturally it must be said, if verisimilitude is your goal in children's books!) and are bunking up together to stay warm, unlikely bedfellows snuggling down for winter. The only one who seems to be antisocial is the hedgehog who frankly is rather prickly, and who refuses to let anyone share his hedge.

Well things go south - and it's not the animals. Hedgehog suddenly finds himself without a bunk and the other animals are kind enough to forgive him and let him in. Lesson learned.

This was a fun and playful book with amusing images and I commend it for any child who might need to learn a little about sharing, or who might just like a sweet, fun book that can open up a great discussion about selfishness.

Love Letters to Jane's World by Paige Braddock

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I requested this from Net Galley's 'read now' collection which is always a bit of a hit and miss affair, and this was a miss I'm sorry to report, because I really thought I'd enjoy it. I was thinking that it would be a fun and amusing read, but it was neither.

I became bored with it quite quickly, which surprised me, and I made it only a third of the way through by which time I honestly could not stand to read any more. It's just not my kind of humor I guess: too cheesy and simple for my taste.

Worse than this though was that for a book which claims diversity as one of its qualities, there was one - perhaps two - people of color in the entire thing, which doesn't sound very diverse to me given that most people on the planet are people of color, and a third of them are Asian. But talking of so-called minorities, I guess I'm in the minority in disliking this since it has done well for itself over the years and been somewhat groundbreaking to boot for a comic whose main character is LGBTQIA. For me she was more LGBTMIA, though.

The story is a highly fanciful 'autobiography' it would appear, given that the main character is quite obviously modeled on the author, but I hope the author is smarter than the character depicted here, who comes across as quite stupid and thoughtless. I didn't like her, much less respect her, which didn't help to like the comic strip stories.

The artwork was very much 'Sunday Funnies' style, but in black and white line drawings, so no color diversity here either, and sometimes the text was hard to read because it was also hand drawn and rather scrappily so - something I've never understood about comics. It was large enough to read okay (for the most part) on a tablet computer, but I sure wouldn't want to try reading this on a smart phone or in a badly printed copy.

It's yet another graphic novel which doesn't acknowledge that there are ebooks, and the print book margins made it quite wasteful of trees, too. This is another negative against this comic book since trees are the only entity which is doing anything concrete to fight climate change, and here is another author/publisher seemingly determined to decimate them. And so it goes.

I wish the author all the best in her career, but I cannot recommend this one.

Green Almonds: Letters from Palestine by Anaële Hermans, Delphine Hermans

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is an interesting story told in graphic novel form, of a trip to Israel and Palestine by one of a pair of sisters (Anaële the writer), the other sister (Delphine the artist) remaining in Belgium. I never did get out of it why the one sister went and not the other, or how she financed her trip which lasted ten months, or what the actual reason was for her trip!

The other thing that was missing was any sense of history which would have put the present circumstances into perspective. This conflict (which is much too polite a word for it) between these two peoples, and which has religion at its root, did not arise yesterday! It's been going on for centuries, but most notably since 1948 when Palestine, as it was then, was carved into two, with the Palestinians being given what is now known as Jordan, and the Israelis being given a sliver of land along the Mediterranean coast.

On the day Israel was effectively created, it was invaded by four Arab nations (later joined by four others) and yet it held its own without outside help from anyone. It's been under siege ever since, with a continual rain of rockets and mortars (well over ten thousand combined) onto Israeli territory which has been beset by terrorist attacks for some seventy years.

Over just the last two decades, these attacks have killed over two dozen Israeli civilians, five foreign nationals, at least eleven Palestinians, and only five Israeli soldiers. None of this is ever mentioned in these stories. The wall which looms large, both figuratively and literally in this story is a direct outcome of these attacks, yet none of this is ever mentioned in stories like these.

None of this excuses the Israeli behavior towards innocent Palestinians, either, which is quite flatly inexcusable, but it does put it in context. This story focuses on Palestinian deprivations and hardships, and on efforts by both Palestinians and Israelis to address the conflict. For that reason, because it gives a different and very personal perspective and about country I have also traveled in (Israel) and visited many of the places mentioned here, I consider it a worthy read, because it tells a story which definitely needs to be told, and which was both saddening and heartwarming in almost equal measures.

Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears by John McNamee

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was an unexpected gem I found in net Galley's 'read now' selection, which is always a hit and miss affair. This was a hit. The graphic novel consists of simply-drawn cartoons - several panels and sometimes more than one page to each topic, illustrating humorous and unexpected outcomes to stories arising from assorted inspirations such as fairy tales, pop culture, religion and so on.

The very first one, for example, shows Goldilocks entering a room and unsuccessfully sampling various servings of porridge, and eventually revealing that the reasons she cannot find one to her taste is that this is hell and it's where porridge thieves are sent!

That's the kind of humor, and sometimes it's hit and sometimes miss. There were several of these I simply didn't get, or I did get (or thought I did!), but did not find funny, but there are enough here that anyone is bound to find something to their taste. The closest better-known example of this kind of humor that I can reference are the cartoons of The Far Side, although this is a bit different from that. I had the same feeling of hit and miss with those cartoons that I do with this, but this was, overall, funny enough and original enough that I consider it a worthy read.

The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen Minor Works

Rating: WORTHY!

As I mentioned in the previous review, I checked this out of the library at the same time as the other, only to discover that they pretty much contain the same material, so you takes your library card and you pays your respects, I guess. These can probably be found online these days so maybe a trip to the bookstore or library isn't necessary.

This volume contains very much the same thing the other did, but in a different order, this one being more chronological, and largely in reverse order of the other, strangely enough. Up front is young Jane's 'juvenilia' so-called, which consists of literary efforts preserved (and thankfully so) from her childhood which are amusing and very interesting for Austen fans. This is followed by Lady Susan a very short epistolary story which may have been written as early as the mid 1790's when Jane wasn't even in her twenties, but which wasn't actually published until almost a century later. Lady Susan is quite different from her other work.

There is also The Watsons (rather a prototype of Pride and Prejudice) and Sanditon, aka The Brothers, which was uncompleted at the time of her death. This book also contains quite a few poems written by Austen which make for interesting reading. I recommend this as a worthy read.

Sanditon and Other Stories by Jane Austen

Rating: WORTHY!

I got this from my local library out of curiosity. I got a companion volume to it also, but both volumes contain pretty much the same thing: the Jane Austen works that didn't quite make it big!

This volume contains what is commonly called Sanditon, which was the novel Austen was working on when she died. Her own title for it was The Brothers. Many people have pretentiously tried to 'continue' this novel since it was incomplete, but unsurprisingly, it has never taken off as her other major works did.

It contains Lady Susan, about a very aggressive and self-possessed older woman, which Austen finished right before she began work on "Elinor and Marianne" which came to be known as Sense and Sensibility, and following which she began her second full-length novel, "First Impressions" which is known today as Pride and Prejudice.

It also contains The Watsons - the story of Sherlock Holmes's famous companion before the two of them met. Just kidding! Seriously, The Watsons is about an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sounds remarkably like Pride and Prejudice, doesn't it?!

Additionally this collection contains what's come to be called "Juvenilia" which is material Austen composed when she was a juvenile. Some of this is really quite amusing. It also contains Austen's tongue-in-cheek 'plan of a novel' and opinions she evidently collected, expressed by friends over her (then) recently published work such as Mansfield Park and Emma.

I recommend this for real fans of Jane Austen.

Atheism: The Case Against God by George H Smith

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a book which covers the ground which Richard Dawkins was accused of failing to cover in his excellent The God Delusion, but as Dawkins himself mentioned in that book, it was never his intention to do that since it had been done already - in books such as this one! Note that these arguments are not new (indeed, the copyright on this one is some forty years old), and some of them go back to antiquity, but the refutations still stand as strong as ever since nothing new or original has arisen to overturn these.

The author opens with a discussion of the scope of atheism and the concept of a god, and then specifically looks at the god of Christianity. In part two, he considers reason versus faith, the varieties of faith, and the revelation. Part three addresses the arguments for a god tackling them one after another: those from natural theology, from a first cause, from contingency, and from design: a non-argument which has been much popularized lately by those who are clueless about science and who call themselves creation scientists. Trust me, there is no such thing as creation science unless the definition of science is changed by faith so that it equates to 'carping about things you don't like and can refute neither by logic nor by counter evidence'.

He concludes with a discussion of the practical consequences of belief and the sins of Christianity.

I recommend this as a worthy read, but please note that you can these days find pretty much everything this book contains online.

Bad Feminist Roxane Gay

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook I requested after becoming interested in the author from my reading of World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The problem is that unlike the graphic novel, which I loved, this book was self-obsessed and boring.

Let's get one thing clarified right up front: it has nothing whatsoever to do with any brand of feminism, good, bad, or indifferent (and however you might foolishly try to define those!), so the title is completely wrong and disgustingly bait and switch. This is evidently one of those books where the author puts together a collection of essays and takes the title of the collection from one of its constituents. I always have a problem with that precisely because it is too often misleading.

In this case it was especially misleading because this is far more 'Bad Memoir' (assuming there are really good ones, which I confess I sometimes doubt) than ever it is anything else. The essays are just god-awfully rambling, self-serving recollections from her life, and not even ones that offer anything new, or insightful, or any great wisdom. I'm neither black nor gay and this book revealed nothing to me about either quality which told me anything I had not heard or read before, or thought of myself. So what was the point?

After listening to some essays and skimming some others, I quit this and went to look at some reviews to see if it was just me who felt this way about it, and no, it wasn't. Others had come independently to the same conclusion, and this is where I discovered that there's barely a thing in here about feminism. So maybe after all, the title is right and it's bad feminist because it contains so little about the topic in the title? Maybe? LGBTQED?

Anyway after reading those reviews, I felt no compulsion whatsoever to go back in here and listen to any more. All I can say is that I'm disappointed, sadly disappointed, and I cannot recommend this, especially since I'm unwilling to commend it in the first place!

The Summer of Jordi Perez by Amy Spalding

Rating: WORTHY!

Subtitled "and the best burger in Los Angeles" this book tells the story of Abby, who is working a summer part time internship at a fashion store called Lemonberry not far from where she lives. Normally the store takes on only one intern, but the manager, Maggie, is expecting a busy summer and so takes on two this year, and therein lies the problem - the intern often gets to stay on at the store as a paid employee (how that works given that they;re already staffed isn't gone into), so it means that Abby in in competition with Jordana Perez, on whom she soon discovers, she's crushing.

If you don't like cute, you won't like this because this is a very cute relationship. But that said, it's also quite stereotypical. I've read too many YA novels where there's the girl and the bad boy, and while this is an LGBTQIA story, Jordi is definitely the trope bad boy, short-haitred, dressed in black, in complete contrast to Abby who wears bright colors, often with a fruit motif. It turns out that Jordi isn't as bad as she's painted, so there is an out, but it still seemed a bit been-there-done-that to me: Abby the femme with Jordi the butch. It's right there in the names! it would have been nice had they been named against stereotype, and the fact these these contrasts between them were never really explored was a minor problem for me.

Another contrast is that Abby is overweight and Jordi is far from it. Some reviewers have outright described her as fat, but I don't like to use that word, especially in a case where we never really get an idea of exactly what body type Abby has. Ultimately, it's not important what body a person has if they're healthy and are getting some exercise, but it felt like a bit of a betrayal in that Abby seems far too comfortable in herself for the real world, and we never really get any feeling that she's had a hard time for her body.

It would be nice if that was everyone's case, it really would, but it's not, so this felt a bit unrealistic to me especially set as it was in a teen/high-school environment. Literally everyone accepted her and no one ever had a remark about her? And this is when she's hanging around with jocks because her best friend is dating one? It seemed a bit too sunshine and rainbows, especially in an era of a shameful presidency where crassness and crudity and rampant misogyny, homophobia, and racism is positively encouraged. The book was published only this year, so yes, the author knew, and I was sorry she didn't do more with that.

That said, I really loved Abby for her humor and wit, and for her observations of life around her and even for being scatterbrained at times. Her relationship with her best friend Maliah was a solid one, and even what she develops with this new guy during the course of the story - one of the jocks, named Jackson, or Jax for short. He was pretty cool despite being a dick on occasion, and be warned there is an ulterior motive!

Abby seems to be fine with how she is, but there seems to be a lot of reference to her body in spite of this. She mentions it quite a lot in contrast to her profession that she's happy with how she is, and this isn't gone into either. Nor is her mother's shameful behavior towards her which seems inexplicable and particularly with regard to the kind of person Abby grew up to be.

Abby got her internship because she is a blogger with a lot to say about fashion for plus-sized women. Jordi got the job because of her photography and it's this which causes some grief later in the story - a plot point I found to be a little on the thin side which is ironic give the subject of the story! Once she and Abby begin dating, Jordi starts takign lots of pictures of Abby, and Abby never objects or questions to what use these might be put, not even when she realizes that Jordi likes to show the world how she sees it, and that she has an upcoming show at a local public display area.

Warning bells should have rung in Abby's head, which is sad, because they don't and this makes her look a lot less astute about trends and signs than she's been shown to be to that point. I'm not usually good at picking these things out, but even I could see exactly what was coming from a mile away.

The blurb tells us that "...when Jordi's photography puts Abby in the spotlight, it feels like a betrayal, rather than a starring role." Yes, Abby is the star of Jordi's show. This is not a spoiler because it's no surprise whatsoever. This is followed by the truly dumb, trademark question that utterly moronic blurb-writers cannot seem to keep themselves from asking: "Can Abby find a way to reconcile her positive yet private sense of self with the image that other people have of her?" Hell no! The world will explode in a nuclear holocaust! Hell no! She's met a hot Internet celeb, and fallen in love, throwing Jordi over. Hell no, Abby is so offended by Jordi's pictorial that she's scared straight and starts dating Jax. Seriously? Of course Abby and Jordi will end up together - it's that kind of story. Duhh!

Book blurb writers must have a truly abyssal view of their readers' intellect to pose imbecilic questions like that. And they're so frequent, especially in chick lit. What does that say about how publishers view their readership?

Abby's reaction to Jordi putting her into the spotlight seemed disingenuous to me, and it completely betrays the relationship far more than Abby whines that Jordi has betrayed her. Grow a pair Abby! Her reaction is far too dramatic and written solely for the purpose of breaking them up so they can have a tearful reunion later, and this smacked of amateurishness to me. It read t this point more like fanfic than ever it did a professionally published novel.

This is the part of the book that I did not like and which seemed much more unrealistic than any other part. Some people have called out Jordi in their reviews, for her behavior, but she's behaving true to character. It's Abby who is willing to betray Jordi and her supposed love for this woman, over a thing like this which could easily have been resolved instead of discussing it with her. This relationship is doomed, trust me!

I think it would have been a better ending to have had Abby realize that she had overreacted, and had her go to reconcile with Jordi only to find that Jordi refuses, because Abby had betrayed her by showing such a ready willingness to completely ditch her and turn her back on her over a simple misunderstanding. That's how I would have ended this one.

I have to say a word about the fashion element too! On the one hand this book shows Abby as being very stylish and dressy, and on a budget too (although Abby never actually seems short of money, Where she gets it all goes unexplained). I have no problem with Abby wanting to be stylish and having an eye for it. She can be anything she wants. Even the anorexic, self-indulgent, fatuous and shallow world of fashion is waking up - begrudgingly and far too slowly - to the fact that people come in other sizes than Bulemic Zero.

But it bothered me that Abby (and the author) had nothing much to say on this topic. Just saying. It's this and the magazines, and Hollywood, and TV which contrive to make women feel ugly and poorly dressed, and unsexy and worthless, and it's shameful. This is why I have no tolerance for the fashion world. Its sole purpose is to make women feel inadequate and out of date, and thereby inveigle them into endlessly dieting and spending money they don't have on the endlessly updating latest fashions, and it's criminal, misogynistic, and disgusting. Women have enough to contend with in the academic ad business worlds without piling this on.

Once again I find myself having to talk about biceps! As in when Amy Spalding wrote: “...wrapped up in Trevor’s bicep.” Seriously, unless you’re an anatomist or a surgeon, there’s no such thing as a bicep. The bulge you see on the inside of the upper arm is the biceps, plural, because there’s more than one which combine to make the visible part. You’d have to deflesh the arm to actually see a bicep. Did Trevor’s girlfriend tear the flesh off her boyfriend’s arm? I doubt it. Does main character Abby have X-ray vision? Not that she tells us. Does yet another YA author not know what she’s talking about? More than probably.

But all of that said, this book was cute and for the most part told a story I really liked and enjoyed. I just think that the predictable break-up was far too predictable and for the most predictable of reasons, and this betrayed the story. Plus I am not a huge fan of predictable! A little bit predictable yes, because it's comforting, and we can use a lot of that under this presidency, but not so glaringly so! That said I commend the novel as a worthy read overall.

Fearless girls, wise women, and beloved sisters edited by Kathleen Ragan

Rating: WORTHY!

Subtitled "heroines in folktales from around the world" this was a mixed quality book which I nonetheless commend as a worthy read. I picked it up because folk tales are always fun; plus I'm currently working on a book based on a fairy tale, and I was hoping it would contribute to enriching that book, but it really didn't! It did give me some entertainment, and those ideas are now percolating in my brain, which is always a dangerous thing.

This book, be warned, is a very long book, and it took me some time to get though in my leisurely, meandering, idiosyncratic manner. It's divided into somewhat arbitrary regions of the globe from which these various tales are derived: Africa, Pacific, Europe, Asia, North and South American, etc., and each story indicates the people it came from, so the variety (and the quality, as I mentioned) is immense. It does mean that there is something for everyone.

After each story, the editor adds a paragraph about the thrust of the story or adds some personal observation, or something about feminism. The book is after all, as you can guess, comprised of stories wherein the main character is a woman, and some of them are based on legends of real historical women.

My favorites were Molly Whuppie, A Wonderful Story, Davit, and Anait, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy many of the others. Now I've commended it, I can recommend it!

Sailor Twain or, The Mermaid in the Hudson by Mark Siegel

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a graphic novel written and illustrated by Siegel, which I read a while back and had forgotten to blog! I do not know how that happened, but now I'm correcting that mistake. I really enjoyed this. It went on a bit long to be truly perfect, and the ending was somewhat confused, but overall it was a worthy read.

I'm not a big fan of mermaid stories, despite having an idea for one of my own! They have never made a whole lot of sense to me, but to have the, what might be called 'vagina-shaming' and erroneous insult of a fishy smell taken ownership of in so graphic a manner whereby the lower half actually is a fish, is too delicious and intriguing a concept, and I have to love it.

My lack of fanship for these stories is admirably attested to by the fact that I've reviewed only one mermaid book in my entire blog of many hundreds of reviews, and I liked that one. I know I have another somewhere on my shelf which I should read and blog, but for now, this is the only other one. That said, I watched and enjoyed an entire TV series about these mermaids who live on the coast of Queensland, Australia. it was called H2O and had a kick-ass theme song (Ordinary Girl) written by Shelly Rosenberg and performed by Kate Alexa.

The reason I made this drastic decision was that I was working on my Terrene World novel Seahorses, a follow-up to Cloud Fighters, although featuring a different cast (I'm not a fan of series!). My characters are not mermaids, but they do have special powers in this environmentally-themed, female-empowerment novel for middle-graders which was also set in that same general vicinity, and I wanted some local flavor and accent, and in the end I became quite a fan of the show because it was so cute and amusing! Plus I've always been a softie for Australians.

Anyway! Sailor Twain plies the Hudson river in New York and he lands a mermaid one day. She's sick and he keeps her hidden in his cabin as he nurses her back to health whereupon the two become quite attached. The story then becomes highly embellished with shady characters, mysterious females, and undersea enchantments, and apart from the somewhat confused ending, it tells a fun story of intrigue, fantasy, and mystery and does quite a good take on mermaid mythology. I recommend it. Or maybe just commend it. I mean, why would I recommend it when I haven't commended it in the first place? Okay...so I commend it, and now I recommend it! Yeah, that's it!

Fire and Heist by Sarah Beth Durst

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

THIS BOOK WAS FREAKING AWESOME!

Let me say here, right up front, that I am not a fan of were-books: shape-shifters and the like. I particularly detest the plethora of werewolf novels that have flooded the market in the wake of the execrable Twilight garbage. It should have been named Twee Light. What I respect are not those authors who jump on the latest big trilogy bandwagon (it's alway a tedious trilogy, isn't it?), but those who take the road less traveled, and I had a feeling about this one. So it's congrats to the blurb writer for once!

Anyone who follows my reviews has to know that I have little respect for publisher's back-cover blurb writers. I have to love a blurb that doesn't ask a totally brain-dead question at the end: "Will she find the love of her life?" (after the spineless chicky has fled back to her hometown?) Duhh. Of course she will otherwise what's the point of your dumbass romance? "Can Jack-Me-Lad-The-Hero ex-Marine special forces cowboy save the wilting maiden in distress and take her in his manly arms?" Who the heck cares, really? Can the young fresh filly in the werewolf pack win the hardened heart of the aloof, troubled, damaged, warped, out-of-whack, blemished, besmirched, gun-shy, bad-boy alpha male? Or should the bitch just shoot him like the rabid cur he is? Do those blurb writers really think their readers are that stupid?

But I digress! I decided take a chance and it paid off. I am not a fan of first person novels at all, but this one was first person and I loved it. See? It can be done - if you know how to write, and two things Sarah Beth Durst knows are how to plot and how to write. I was enraptured from the start and flew through the pages like a were-dragon through the sky, and talking of which, Sky Hawkins is my new go-to-girl.

The story is quite short, but packed with amusement, action, and awesomeness. I can't give it a better compliment than to say I wish I had thought of this first! I guess I'll have to stick with Saurus! The story is of the Hawkins family - once well-to-do in the wyvern world, but now rather disgraced and humbled, their mother having failed in her last heist (wyverns are famous for their heists), and also having shamefully disappeared without a trace.

Well, Sky isn't going to put up with it, and if her frightened brothers and father aren't going to help, she's going to put together her own crew, and find out exactly what her mother was up to on that fateful night trying to rob the vault of her boyfriend's...sorry, ex-boyfriend's (he ditched her after the scandal) father. I won't insult your intelligence by asking if she knows what she's doing! I'll just say, read it and leap!

I came across a couple of notes I'd made to myself that I only just uncovered recently. Here they are! At one point, Sky observes of the dragon land that she calls home: “'Home has robots?' When I’d pictured a dragon homeland, I hadn’t pictured, well, Star Trek" Excuse me, but Star Trek has no robots! It’s one of the big problems with it, just as the problem with Star Wars is too many ridiculous and annoying robots. We have robots and drones already, here and now. I makes no sense whatsoever to posit a future where they no longer exist - not without a really good explanation for it which has yet to be forthcoming.

The other thing was that on p132, Novi, the portal guard has to return to her post, but then four pages later, she’s still there with Sky! These are only minor issues, and have nothing to take away from the overall enjoyability of the book. I don't doubt that we've all made the Novi error or something like it, but it is something a professional editor should catch even if the writer doesn't. So I still recommend this work as a worthy read. Just wanted to tidy up and close out the review!

Essential Art History by Paul Duro, Michael Greenhalgh

Rating: WORTHY!

Now back to some books I can get behind! I recently published the sixth in my own Little Rattuses series for children and insane adults like myself. Titled The Very Fine-Art Rattuses, the book aimed at teaching a smattering of fine art to young children. Arts are all too often forgotten in our ridiculous addiction to sports in the USA, and it's important not to lose them or lose sight of them, especially in young impressionist...er...impressionable children! A book like this, while not itself aimed at children, is useful for anyone who wants to know more, or, like me, seeks to include art in a novel, and make it look like they know what they're talking about! Now you know my secret! I don't paper over the cracks, I paint over them!

This three-hundred-some page paperback is a literal A-Z of art terminology, a virtual encyclopedia of everything from Abbozzo (not to be confused with a bozo) to Zola, Émile (not to be confused with a bozo). I recommend this for anyone who wants a handy art book to hand, but note that this book is text only - it carries zero illustrations. This book may know a lot about art, but it doesn't show what it's like! This may strike you as odd, but it would be ten times as thick if it had illustrated the terminology, and imagery is all over the Internet these days anyway for reference purposes. I recommend it.

A Little Piece of Her by Zidrou, Raphaël Beuchot

Rating: WARTY!

This is NOT from an advance review copy for which I DO NOT thank the publisher.

I have to rate this negatively because of the shabby way the publisher treats people who ask to review it. The graphic novel was not downloadable as ebooks typically are, but set up in some ass-backward "copy protection" system that means you cannot load it, read a part of it, and get back to it later to finish it. You have to constantly download it. What this meant is that the book was locked away ("archived" they call it) before I could finish reading it, and that shabby treatment of a reviewer, I consider WARTY in the extreme.

I don't get paid for this work, except in that I get to read books! But I'd be read books anyway and thanks to Amazon's deliberate and calculated sabotaging of book prices, I could get all the free books I want from them if I didn't refuse to do business with Amazon.

Jeff Bezos in now the richest man ever, BTW. Ahead of Bill Gates. Ahead of Mark Zuckerberg. Ahead of Warren Buffett, and to my knowledge, and unlike those latter three, he hasn't signed on to the pledge to give away at least half his fortune. Yet the authors who publish with him are lucky to get a fraction of the ninety-nine cents he has very effectively forced many people to charge for their hard work. Ninety-nine cents! That's less than the old pulp writers used to get paid! It would be nice if he gave some of his fortune to help out the struggling authors who've helped make him a multi-billionaire, wouldn't it?!

No, I do this because I love books and I feel people have a right to a chance at being read and getting some exposure, but this publisher seems hell bent on sabotaging that process. The format had purportedly extra protection built into it such that it was not possible to download it - a reviewer like me, who can only get the ebook (which is fine - it saves a tree here and there!), has to read this one on a web page or some fly-by-night temporary platform. If you close the page, you then have to go through the laborious process of accessing it all over again.

Worse, there is no means of conveniently navigating from one page to another on my tablet, except by sliding each individual page up or down the screen. If you want to go back and check something at the start, it's a long chore in a two hundred page comic.

The idea behind this is purportedly to protect the work by specifically assigning it to a person's email address, and I can fully understand the need for protection of copyrighted work, but in practice, this method offers no protection whatsoever, since anyone who can read something like this on their screen can take a screen-shot and copy it very effectively and quite anonymously that way. So to me it made no sense, and all it offered in practice was an inconvenience and annoyance to honest reviewers who would never abuse the privilege we have of getting an advance review copy of a work. As I said, I will not be recommending this, and neither will I be requesting anything to review from this publisher (Europe Comics) ever again.

The World Book of Records by Tonino Benacquista, Nicolas Barral

Rating: WARTY!

This is NOT from an advance review copy for which I DO NOT thank the publisher.

I have to rate this negatively because of the shabby way the publisher treats people who ask to review it. The graphic novel was not downloadable as ebooks typically are, but set up in some ass-backward "copy protection" system that means you cannot load it, read a part of it, and get back to it later to finish it. You have to constantly download it. What this meant is that the book was locked away ("archived" they call it) before I could finish reading it, and that shabby treatment of a reviewer, I consider WARTY in the extreme.

I don't get paid for this work, except in that I get to read books! But I'd be read books anyway and thanks to Amazon's deliberate and calculated sabotaging of book prices, I could get all the free books I want from them if I didn't refuse to do business with Amazon.

Jeff Bezos in now the richest man ever, BTW. Ahead of Bill Gates. Ahead of Mark Zuckerberg. Ahead of Warren Buffett, and to my knowledge, and unlike those latter three, he hasn't signed on to the pledge to give away at least half his fortune. Yet the authors who publish with him are lucky to get a fraction of the ninety-nine cents he has very effectively forced many people to charge for their hard work. Ninety-nine cents! That's less than the old pulp writers used to get paid! It would be nice if he gave some of his fortune to help out the struggling authors who've helped make him a multi-billionaire, wouldn't it?!

No, I do this because I love books and I feel people have a right to a chance at being read and getting some exposure, but this publisher seems hell bent on sabotaging that process. The format had purportedly extra protection built into it such that it was not possible to download it - a reviewer like me, who can only get the ebook (which is fine - it saves a tree here and there!), has to read this one on a web page or some fly-by-night temporary platform. If you close the page, you then have to go through the laborious process of accessing it all over again.

Worse, there is no means of conveniently navigating from one page to another on my tablet, except by sliding each individual page up or down the screen. If you want to go back and check something at the start, it's a long chore in a two hundred page comic.

The idea behind this is purportedly to protect the work by specifically assigning it to a person's email address, and I can fully understand the need for protection of copyrighted work, but in practice, this method offers no protection whatsoever, since anyone who can read something like this on their screen can take a screen-shot and copy it very effectively and quite anonymously that way. So to me it made no sense, and all it offered in practice was an inconvenience and annoyance to honest reviewers who would never abuse the privilege we have of getting an advance review copy of a work. As I said, I will not be recommending this, and neither will I be requesting anything to review from this publisher (Europe Comics) ever again.

Bessie Stringfield Tales of the Talented Tenth by Joel Christian Gill

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I have to rate this negatively because it begins with the fictional version of Bessie Stringfield's life, and from that point onward, it necessarily casts doubt on the rest of the story. Bessie Beatrice White was born in Edenton, North Carolina, not Jamaica, and there was no dramatic crossing of the ocean to Boston during which her mother pretty much succumbed to consumption (or whatever) and her father abandoned her in a hotel. Why the author felt he needed to augment this story with pure fiction, even fiction she purveyed herself, is a mystery.

It's like he felt her story wasn't good enough without it. The author/illustrator seems strangely averse to illustrating faces too, such as her parents, the woman who runs the fictional hotel where she's fictionally abandoned, the woman who adopts her, and the woman who interviews her.

The frame of the story is a woman interviewing Bessie who then recounts her life. For me it failed because it made Bessie seem to be an extraordinarily selfish and self-centered person. It also skips a lot of detail. Like how did she pay for her gallivanting after she took off at age nineteen? It mentions later that she performed in carnivals on her bike, but there's nothing about how she financed her trips at such a young age or where her bike came from. The author seems to have bought into more fiction: that of divine miracles!

The story mentions that she had six marriages and no children, but it fails to discuss the fact that that her first marriage gave her three miscarriages. It also says nothing about why she married six times, whether she abandoned each of those husbands, split from them amicably, or they abandoned her.

It relates that she took off after college and started riding around the US, but her criss-crossing the country eight times was during her time as an army courier. Despite working for the US to help the war effort, she was subject to racism repeatedly, and they didn't even have the "excuse" of having a racist, misogynistic, homophobic jackass as president back then.

So while this is a story worth telling, I did not feel this was the version worth reading, and I cannot recommend it.

Infinity 8 Vol. 1: Love and Mummies by Zep, Lewis Trondheim

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This graphic novel was a bit of a ill-fated cross between iZombie and the Ood alien race from Doctor Who; it takes the worst elements from them rather than the best. I did not like the story. It made little sense and I DNF'd it about three-quarters of the way through. The main character is far too sexualized and without any good reason for it except that this is what comic books do, of course. It needs to stop.

For reasons unknown, the city-sized spaceship containing a variety of aliens is halfway between the Milky Way and Andromeda when it encounters a debris field. Space being only two-dimensional as it so often is in these stories, the ship can't go over the debris, so it's halted and the captain, again for no good reason, decides to investigate.

The investigation is a joke and goes nowhere nor does it try to go anywhere. Once again, just as in Star Trek, we're faced here with a futuristic society in which all of the robotics, and AI, and drones which we have today, has not only failed to advance, but has also somehow inexplicably been lost to history, so instead of robots going out to investigate, we have to send humans. Fallible. Distractable. Weak. Troublesome humans.

So poor is the management of this ship that aliens also get loose. One of this particular alien race (the Ood rip-offs) is in love with the main character while another of the same race wants her dead - again for no reason, while a bunch more of these aliens are trying to destroy the very ship they're traveling on - and the ship the size of a city evidently has no peacekeepers or law enforcement on board! I think that sense continued the journey while the ship got left behind. That hypothesis honestly explains a lot in this story.

I don't think very many sci-fi writers expend much energy on thinking about how their alien races evolved. They simply create the aliens because they think they look cool and that's the way it is no matter how ridiculous or improbable they all are. So these aliens were once again a poor and irrational assortment, all of them derivative of Earth species, so none of them really looked alien.

Worse, these writers have aliens falling in love with humans without giving any thought to the improbability of it. It would be like trying to get people to take you seriously while your story has a human fall in love with a shark or a boa constrictor. I can't take a story like this seriously, and I cannot recommend this at all.

Lizzy and the Good Luck Girl by Susan Lubner

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was an entertaining book about Lizzy, her friend Joss, and this young girl they find living rough in a decrepit house across the street from Lizzy's family restaurant where Lizzy also helps out. It's almost an exhausting book to read because there's always something going on! I don't know where Lizzy gets the energy! She is a sweet-hearted girl who helps out at the local animal rescue center and is working with Joss to produce cat sweaters to sell to raise funds for the shelter.

Her soft spot for down-on-their-luck pets is what gets her into that building where she and Joss encounter Charlotte, who has run away from home because her family is breaking up, and she can't stand to see it. Lizzy and Joss promise not to give the girl away, but when the house across the street burns down, Lizzy ends up taking in another stray, and Charlotte starts living in her closet!

I don't normally comment on covers because they're usually nothing to do with the author, and my blog is about writing: interiors, not covers! But I have to say in this case, the cover image is quite charming. I liked it very much.

Overall this book was fun, engaging, told a great story, and really brought me, as a reader, in. Even though it's not aimed anywhere near me, I'm happy to be collateral damage in this case! It touches on some delicate topics with appropriate humor, sensitivity, and complete honesty. I recommend it as a worthy read.

Alex and the Monsters: Here Comes Mr. Flat! by Jaume Copons, Liliana Fortuny

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Translated from the original French by David Warriner, this book (curiously originally titled Arriba el Sr Flat!) was a bit young for me, so while I found it entertaining and I recommend it as a worthy read for middle-grade readers, it's also the start of a series, and I don't intend to follow it beyond this volume. I'm not much of a series kind of a guy!

So Alex is a middle-grader who is totally irresponsible and I'm not completely convinced that he learned his lesson by the end of the book! His room is a mess and his homework assignments - while he does them - do not get turned in. Frankly I think his teachers are as irresponsible as Alex is if they don't require the kids to turn in their assignments regularly!

Alex discovers that this plush toy he finds (which he calls a 'stuffie') is actually a real monster from a book (so the monster claims). The monsters all got kicked out of their book by the evil Dr Brut. The monster, Mr Flat, brings a change to Alex's life by interesting him in reading, but aside from Mr Flat going missing, that's about all that happens in this short novel.

The novel is illustrated by Liliana Fortuny, and has some comic-book like pages, but mostly it's a chapter book and it's mildly amusing and entertaining, and the pictures are sometimes funny, so I consider this a worthy read for its intended age group.

Dry by Clare Liardet

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I thought this book was a great idea and I enjoyed it, but I have to say I had some issues with the nutritional claims made for some of the fruit employed in these drinks!

The idea behind this, which I think is great, is to supply recipes for an assortment of alcohol-free, fruit and vegetable drinks, and while some were not to my personal taste, most of them sounded delicious and I plan on trying some of them out. I think the best way to enjoy these is to forget about any nutritional benefits and simply enjoy a good drink made with fresh fruit, which is plenty good enough for me!

Fresh fruit is good for you, better than store-bought, processed fruit juice, because it contains fiber in a natural whole fruit. It also contains vitamins and minerals, but we need to be careful about what claims we make for what a given fruit contains. For example, pineapple is a good source for manganese and vitamin C, but it has no other significant value nutritionally and it's misleading to suggest that it does.

While grapefruit does have vitamin C it has less than half the potassium that a banana does. Pink grapefruit does have lycopene which is an antioxidant, but note that some fruits such as grapefruit can interfere with drug absorption, so if you plan on enjoying a lot of fruit and fruit drinks, be sure to run your plan by your doctor for advice on whether your drug regimen is going to be adversely affected by it - just to be safe!

Note also that rhubarb leaves are toxic, but the stems have a wide variety of vitamins (at low levels), a decent amount of vitamin k, and low levels of an assortment of minerals. The claim that ginger root has antibacterial, ani-inflammatory, or antiviral properties needs to be taken with a pinch of that Himalayan salt. Ginger can cause problems too, including allergic reactions, and there’s no medical evidence that it has any ability to control nausea.

There’s also no evidence that Himalayan salt is any better for you than regular salt either, and raw Himalayan salt can contain lead if it’s not purified. The pink color is from dead microorganisms that lived in the ocean where this was formed. Himalayan salt is really just sea salt that's over a hundred million years old so you could argue that it's not exactly fresh!

Since raw honey is a potential source of botulism, it’s not recommended for very young children. It does contain more nutrients than processed honey, but it also contains a lot of calories. In my non-medical opinion, if you’re eating a healthy diet anyway, raw honey isn’t going to contribute anything you’ll miss, so you may as well use the processed kind. Also, while turmeric is related to the ginger plant, there’s no medical evidence that this has any health properties either.

The blood orange on the other hand is indeed colored red by anthocyanins and may - possibly, it’s too early to call - have some value in aiding weight loss. But there isn't just one kind of blood orange. They come in quite a variety and some varieties are sweeter than others.

So like I said, setting the nutrition claims to one side and enjoying the drinks simply for the fun and the fresh fruit and veggies seems to me to be a winning plan. That's what I plan on doing. On that basis I recommend this book as a worthy read.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L Sánchez

Rating: WARTY!

This was another disappointing audiobook experiment! First of all it was first person, which is nearly always a bad idea. That in itself can sometimes be bearable, but when your novel title contains the word 'Mexican' and the novel's author is named Sánchez (with the emphasis accent yet!), then you expect a Latin lilt in your narrator, especially if she's named Garcia! At least I'd hoped for one. I was disappointed.

If I had read this myself, I could have at least imagined an accent to enjoy, but Kyla Garcia has no Latin lilt whatsoever to her voice, so there wasn't even that to mellow the delivery and contribute to the listening experience. She didn't do a particularly good job of reading, so I have to wonder why was she even picked for this job? Was it because her name sounds Mexican? That's not a valid reason to pick a narrator!

Maybe that's not relevant, because even if it had been read by a richly-accented Mexican voice, for me the story would still have failed. The reason is that the main character telling this story was obnoxious. She;s racist, bigoted, obnoxiously opinionated, perennially annoying, and I honestly couldn't stand to listen to this. She was incessantly carping about things, and what was supposed to be a tragedy was turned into a joke for me. She was attending her older sister's funeral and it occurred to me that her sister probably committed suicide so she wouldn't have to listen to this whining bitch of a kid sister anymore. Seriously. The title definitely applied to the narrator, but I think it would have been much more a propósito had it been titled "I Am Irremediably Removed From a Perfect Anything."

I started playing the book as I set out on Friday morning to get some chores done and reward myself with a movie, but after about ten minutes I decided silence was better than listening to any more of this crap. I was on my way to the library and ended up dropping this off as well as the book I was returning. I cannot recommend this at all and have no desire to listen to or read anything more by this author.

The Last Jungle Book by Stephen Desberg, Henri Reculé

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

In Rudyard Kipling's original Jungle Book stories, Mowgli is first introduced as a wild man living in the forest who is recruited into the forest ranger service because of his extraordinary jungle craft. He marries, has a child, and returns to the forest. In later stories, his childhood is related, but it really isn't quite like the sanitized Disney version (is anything?!).

I was very disappointed in this version, which let's face it is more of an introduction than a story. The blurb was completely misleading in that it suggests that Mowgli (rhymes with cow-glee) has returned to the scene of his childhood to write the last chapter in it - which I presumed would the the dispatch of his hated enemy Shere Khan (which means 'Tiger Chief', not 'lame'! 'Lungri' means lame - it was a nickname for Khan, who was lame). The problem is that none of this happens, nor will it since Mowgli is a silver-haired old man now in this story.

All we get is a pictorial re-telling of the popular version of Jungle Book with nothing new added. It makes Mowgli's vow at the end - to drape Shere Khan's pelt over the council rock of the wolves, all the more hollow, since no such thing ever happened in this story. It did happen in the original jungle books stories - not the draping but the capture of the pelt, so maybe there are more volumes to come, but even if there are, I was so disillusioned with this one that I have no interest in reading any more. This contributed nothing new, and while the artwork was acceptable and the writing not awful, neither of these offered anything truly new, original, or outstanding.

I can see why this was on Net Galley's 'Read Now' shelf. I cannot recommend it. I'd recommend going to Kipling's original material and reading that - and I believe it's all out of copyright now if you're looking for story ideas!

Little Mama by Halim

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a story of teen pregnancy and resultant child neglect and abuse and poor life choices, which effectively forced the young kid to become the mother of the household, but it was so heavy-handed and scrappy and the black/white/grayscale line drawing artwork so sketchy that it failed for me.

It was also sometimes hard to tell which character we were looking at and even what exactly was happening on occasion. It had the feeling, to me, of being unfinished - like a draft story roughed-out in some very quickly scribbled panels rather than something that was designed and crafted, and labored over. I did not like it.

The overall feel of the work was not helped by the copy protection "system" that was employed here. The format had purportedly extra protection built into it such that it was not possible to download it - a reviewer like me, who can only get the ebook (which is fine - it saves a tree here and there!), has to read this one on a web page. If you close the page, you then have to go through the laborious process of accessing it again.

Worse, there is no means of conveniently navigating from one page to another on my tablet, except by sliding each individual page up or down the screen. If you want to go back and check something at the start, it's a long chore in a two hundred page comic like this one.

The idea behind this is to protect the work by specifically assigning it to a person's email address, and I can fully understand the need for protection of copyrighted work, but in practice, it offers no protection since anyone who can read something like this on their screen can take a screen-shot and copy it quite anonymously that way. So to me it made no sense and all it offered in practice was an inconvenience and annoyance to honest reviewers who would never abuse the privilege we have of getting an advance review copy of a work.

So I have to say that other than the one or two other such books I already have lined up for review, I will not be requesting any more books to review that have this kind of protection on them. It's far too much of a hassle and inconvenience and simply not worth my time as a 'volunteer' reviewer, not when I'm also trying to put in time on my own projects.

As for this particular volume, I cannot rate it favorably because it simple did not tell a worthy tale for me. This is an important topic and it deserves a better medium than this to relate it.