The Body Snatchers by Robert Louis Stephenson

Rating: WARTY!

This was a very short audiobook story rooted no doubt in the true events of William Burke and William Hare, notorious for their not only laying their hands on dead bodies which they sold on for medical research, but also laying hands on a few of the living and changing their status so they could sell those bodies on too. Hare turned on Burke for immunity, and Burke was hanged. His skeleton lives on today in the Anatomical Museum of Edinburgh Medical School.

In this story, a man named Fettes, who works in a facility where bodies are made available to medical students for research, recognizes a body they have just bought as a woman he saw alive and well only the previous day. Naturally he becomes suspicious as to how this happened, but he's such a wuss that he does nothing about it, simply falling in line with his superiors regarding not asking questions as to where these corpses come from. This is actually realistic. People tend to be sheep-like rather than rock the boat even when skullduggery is involved.

The problem as that the story was very rigid and uninteresting. This isn't surprising given that it was written long ago, and in a way you have to expect this, but you also hope that the story will be interesting enough that it makes up for the antiquated story-telling style. In this case it did not, so no commendation from me for this one, only condemnation.

The Chimes by Charles Dickens

Rating: WARTY!

I have heard the chimes, but not at midnight, and they were shallow in this audiobook! This was a short story by Dickens and it sounded vaguely interesting from the blurb, since the story is about how this character gets advice from goblins on the plight of the impoverished in Dickens's London, but in practice it quickly became tiresome.

The main character was not interesting to me and was tedious to listen to, and I lost all interest in it about a third of the way through. Rather than use a 'bell' motif to divide up the story, here Dickens used a clock motif, dividing it into 'quarters' as in quarter hours. It was really more like reading an essay than a novel. Can't commend.

Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook which started out great, got a little lost in the middle section, but came out entertainingly enough at the end for me to rate it a worthy read for the middle-grade audience it's aimed at. It's in the 'Rick Riordan Presents' series, which apparently meant he offered some advice during her writing of it, but what that would have been, I do not know since shortening the middle section was what was required, and he either never suggested that, or she didn't listen if he did! I guess it's good of him to give a boost to other writers (depending on the motive behind it!), but I am not a fan of his writing at all, so seeing his name on something is more likely to turn me away from a book than onto it! Fortunately in this case I read the blurb before I ever saw the Riordan name on it, and I was interested enough not to put it back on the shelf.

I think the character names might have been better chosen! I'm sure that pandering to a western audience wasn't Lee's first thought in writing this, Indeed, in some ways the novel is bigoted in that it presents a sci-fi scenario where everything is Chinese which is just as bigoted as a writer who presents the future as American or any other nationality.

I'm sure the author felt the names were great, and objectively they probably were, but looked at from the point of view of a person listening, who may not be used to Chinese names, hearing something like 'Yune Me', especially while distracted by driving to one extent or another, made the name sound rather like 'You and Me', and so it went! One character was named Min, but it was pronounced like it read 'mean', so that didn't work too well for western ears. The final amusement was a character named Inspector Suk (not sure about the spellings since this was audiobook).

But maybe that's just me who loves playing with words. The story itself was quite interesting, being a blend of sci-fi and fantasy. The main character is Min, who is described as a 'fox spirit' who is also a shape-shifter, but she never changes into a fox (not that I recall, although I did skip some parts during the boring bits!). Her brother Joon, is in the military as a cadet on a spacecraft, but he has disappeared. When a government official arrives in Min's insignificant little village on an insignificant little half-terra-formed planet, Min's trouble-making ways are highlighted, and she's threatened with being shipped-off to stay with an auntie. She is not pleased by this.

Rather than let that happen she runs away, and eventually winds up - in a bit too much of a coincidence - on the same ship her brother was on. Since she can shape-shift and see ghosts, she makes a deal with the ghost of another cadet who had died during an encounter with pirates, to impersonate him. I somehow missed how it was that his body never gave her away. The idea was that in impersonating him, she could help him move on to the spirit world, and for herself, learn what happened to Joon. The ghost really is of no help to her, so I was at a loss as to why he was even included as a character in the story at all.

The biggest problem was that for me, this is where the story ground to a halt. Min spent far, far too much time dicking around on the ship learning how to be a cadet and learning nothing of what happened to Joon. Recall that this is a girl who can shape-shift and is good at it, so she could have impersonated anyone, gone anywhere and discovered anything, yet it was all cadet all the time, and it was boring.

I began skimming the story at that point until she finally got off the ship and went unsurprisingly to what was called a Lost Colony not because they didn't know where it was, but because they couldn't use the planet due to the prevalence of unfriendly ghosts there. That's where Min found the Dragon Pearl and became a hero.

That part was also much better and was highly amusing in parts, so this is why I gave this book a worthy rating, although it had problems. Those problems did nothing to win me back to thinking that Rick Riordan knows how to write! All he's ever done is steal Greek mythology, inexplicably move it to the USA and put a white savior in charge. That's not my kind of writing, but for this audiobook: a worthy read with the above caveats.

Spring Skies Over Bluebell Castle by Sarah Bennett

Rating: WARTY!

This story sounded intriguing to me since I was born and raised in Derbyshire where it's set, but it fell short of the glory of a great story and it happened quickly. The language was far too flowery for my taste for one thing:

“As she stepped down onto the creamy marble floor of the imposing entrance hall, a blast of cold from the open front door sent a shiver through her, and she was glad for the thermal vest hidden beneath her silk blouse. A strip of Wedgwood blue sky showed over the rooftops of the buildings across the street.“

Creamy? Imposing? Silk? Wedgwood? At least she spelled Wedgwood right so credit where credit is due, but this was way too much, especially when most of it was all in one sentence.

And this is how we meet Lucie Kennington, who works for a high-end art gallery and is suspended in a most unrealistic way when an art piece she brought to the attention of the gallery is apparently stolen by being switched out for a fake. This made no sense to me since if she wanted to steal it, then why the hell would she ever bring it to the attention of the gallery in the first place? She found it hanging unsung on someone's wall and recognized it for what it was. If she were going to be dishonest about it, she would have offered the owner a few pounds for it and made out like gangbusters in the profit. If their beef is that it was stolen, not necessarily by her, then the problem is security, not the woman who found the piece.

So she gets suspended while an investigation takes place, and immediately this turns into one of those 'weak women fleeing back to her home town - or in this case to the countryside' which is precisely the kind of chick-lit story I detest. I foolishly picked this one up to read thinking it might be different and intrigued by the Derbyshire aspect. I had little to nothing of Derbyshire in the part I read which was admittedly limited.

All I really got was dumb-ass Lucie and an even more dumb-ass family of landed gentry named after characters from Arthurian mythology (which has nothing to do with Derbyshire, BTW) dealing with a financial crisis in their castle. It's patently obvious she's going to get it on with Arthur Ludworth who "might just be the most handsome man Lucie’s ever laid eyes on." Barf. Arthur has 'shaggy hair' of course which is probably why she can’t wait to shag him.

Of course, Arthur's salvation is once more a painting which Lucie recognizes and which is worth a fortune. I'm guessing the art gallery will find Lucie completely innocent and beg her to return, for her only to thumb her nose at them now she's King Arthur's trophy wife.

I didn't like Luci or Arthur; they were both as dumb as a bag of dumbbells, so maybe that makes them a perfect match, but that really put the brakes on this story for me. Girl with a secret past afraid of being embarrassed, and too stupid to tell all to the man she's supposedly falling in love with? I'm sorry but 'dumb broads' are not remotely interesting to me, nor is the 'billionaire falls for the poor girl' kind of a story - which is what this is, close enough, and you don't even get the eroticism! LOL! I ditched it and was glad I did. There's better to be had out there than this; much better.

Oracles of Delphi Keep by Victoria Laurie

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook was read decently by Susan Duerden, with whom I've had largely a good experience over three audiobooks now, but the novel was overly long and rambling, and in the end this insistence on going endlessly on about things which were uninteresting to me and worse, which contributed little to moving the story along, was what lost me. I started skipping parts, which is never a good sign, and then I skipped the whole second half or so of the story, moving to the closing section to see if anything interesting had happened by then, and the answer to that was a short, sharp, "No!"

I share a first name with the main character, Ian Wigby, who is an orphan newly-moved in to Delphi Keep in the 1930s - literally a castle keep which has been given over by its owner, an Earl (this is set in Britain) for use as an orphanage. Ian is punished for a transgression by being put in charge of a new addition to the orphanage - a very young child who gets named Theo, and who becomes essentially a younger sister to Ian as the two grow up together. She's not his actual sister as the idiot blurb misleading asserts. I thought this was a really interesting premise and ought to have been put to better use in a story than this one had it.

Time passes in the story, and despite having matured somewhat, Ian still shows no sign of growing! He recklessly takes his "sister" exploring the chalk caves on the coast near the orphanage - a place he knows that the residents of the orphanage are expressly banned from visiting. The trip almost ends tragically as some supernatural and ferocious animal tries to kill them. They escape by squeezing through tunnels too narrow for the animal to follow, but it tracks them back to the orphanage and breaks in, putting everyone at risk. Meanwhile Ian gets into more trouble starting a fight with the clichéd school bully over ownership of a little casket he found while in the tunnels.

Ian consistently struck me as a jerk and a dickhead, with poor impulse control and a dishonest streak. He's hardly an exemplar I'd want children to read about, and yet this book was the first in a series (not that, once again, the publisher will ever tell you this on the book cover, which is again, dishonest). For me the book was boring and it seems like it would be quite horrific for some of the intended age group who might read this, but I can't commend it primarily because of the poor, rambling writing.

The Guineveres by Sarah Domet

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook, read a bit like a chant by by Erin Bennet, started out well, but quickly became bogged down with pedantic definitions of saints and their purported achievements (which, based on the one I looked up, were somewhat fancifully rendered here, to say the least), and with hum-drum uninteresting activities which had already been described earlier in the story, instead of getting on with the story. I ended up becoming annoyed with it. It didn't help that it was one long flashback told in perfect recollection by one of the girls as an older woman, who can apparently recall minute details and conversation verbatim.

Set in the years of World War One (or so I believe - it was never specified), the story is of four girls named Guinevere, but who all very conveniently go by completely different nicknames, not one of them electing to go by her full name, so we have: Ginny, Gwen, Vere, and Win. They are also the same age, give or take, and all arrive at the Catholic school within a relatively short time period, and naturally gravitate together. This felt a bit unlikely not to say unnatural, but I was willing to allow that for a good story. It started out well, with the four planning a breakout from the convent, but getting caught. They were sentenced to work in the 'hospital' which is where the next thing came up.

Several severely-wounded soldiers are brought in, all of whom are not much given to doing anything other than laying there. After seeing a more senior student 'escape' the convent by being sent out along with the soldier she was caring for, to continue his care at his home, the four Guineveres all adopt one of the remaining four, and start spending time with them, praying for them and talking to them in the hope of getting the same break. It doesn't work and things start to go south.

There were some moments of hilarity, and I always felt like "The Guineveres" might do anything to entertain me at any given time. I loved the collective name for these girls and kept hoping for good things, but the problem is they almost never were delivered. The story was slow and pedantic, and The Guineveres failed to live up to my hopes, much less my expectations. I ended up skipping the parts whenever a saint was mentioned because they quickly became tedious, and then this led to skipping the boring parts and finally I realized I was skipping and skipping, and not for joy(!), and I gave up on it altogether. The book had a lot more potential than it ever delivered and left me sorely disappointed.

Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood

Rating: WARTY!

Narrated by someone with the highly-appropriate name of Kate Reading, but who ought to be named Kate Droning since she does an unfortunately monotonous job of it, this audiobook, which I had initially (and mistakenly) thought was a biography, turned out to be a tedious and pretentious fiction that tells us nothing whatsoever since it's the purest invention of the author. It turns out that Kate Reading is actually a fake name which I'm sure she thinks is hilarious.

Naturally it's rooted in the reality of Hemingway being unable to commit to a woman and holding the misogynistic and highly abusive idea that he ought to be entitled to a wife and a mistress at the same time and under the same roof, regardless of their wishes, but for me, this book did nothing to tell the real story of the women involved. It was far more about Hemingway and his four wives than ever it was about four women who happened at one point or another to be married to Ernest Hemingway.

The book felt like one of those where the title is along the lines of "The __________'s Daughter" or in this case, "The Iceberg Author's Wives" - it renders the women an appendage of someone else: a guy, rather than their own autonomous selves. I don't like that. I'm recently read such a work by Kate Moss and it was boring. It's going to be the last such book I read because the title is problematic for me from the off, before you even get to the story. The thing is though, that when I got to the story in this case, the author did precisely the same thing to these four women that such titles do to the female subjects of such novels. It's not appreciated and female writers in particular should be ashamed of writing things like that.

But I digress! So the first story is Hadley Hemingway going on about her competitive position with regard to Pauline Pfeiffer, but we really learn far less about these two women than we do about Hemingway, and it was disappointing. At that point I skipped to the one which interested me most, which was Martha Gellhorn, and after that, I quit listening altogether, because she wasn't in the story at all except as a story told by Hadley which even further removed her as a subject than Hadley had been! Go figure. I decided to go directly to the author's mouth and have reviewed - positively! - a couple of books that Martha Gellhorn actually wrote herself. Meanwhile I am done with this author. This book is bad writing, period.

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

Rating: WARTY!

Author Sheila Heti is very reminiscent in her features of actor Cate Blanchett, but while I like the latter, I am not a fan of the former after listening to the opening portion of this. I really have very little to say about this one since I listened to so little of it, but the style really rubbed me up the wrong way from the off. The New Yorker has a review by Alexandra Schwartz which describes this as "sometimes exasperating." I beg to disagree. It was entirely exasperating.

It was first person to begin with which, with few exceptions, is nearly always a mistake as a voice, and while I commend authors who read their own work in the audiobook, I cannot commend this one in this case, because her voice wasn't easy on my ears. It was rather strident and domineering and felt like I was being lectured about something I'd done wrong! Well sorry, I'm a guy! Fatherhood is my thing. Motherhood isn't even possible for me! Do please forgive me!

This was one of the most egregious examples of the first person - what I'd call a #MeOnly style - and it was truly tedious to listen to. It was rambling and uninteresting, and I simply couldn't get into it. I gave up on it in short order and returned it to the library where hopefully someone, somewhere, somehow will find it to their taste.

The blurb claims that "Motherhood treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood - whether or not to have children - with the intelligence, wit and originality" but this is patent bullshit - or perhaps in this case, baby shit. The blurb promised that the novel would follow her internal debate about whether to get pregnant "Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance" and I couldn't stand the thought of having to listen to this droning self-indulgence for that long.

I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas by Lewis Black

Rating: WARTY!

This was a comedian's take on Christmas and it was therefore supposed to be funny, but it was entirely the opposite: tedious, obvious, and not remotely funny. I skipped the middle completely and listened to a bit on the end while I was on the way back to the library to drop it off, and the guy seems to have majored in name-dropping in comedy school, because he was talking about a USO tour and he made no attempt at humor. All he did was drop names, so I dropped him - back into the library return box.

I love my library, but it recently lost yet another audiobook I dropped off in the box. As with the previous three occasions, I was the one who found it - for the fourth time on the library shelf, evidently put back there without being checked back in. Now I wish it had been this one they lost. I would not have gone looking for it!

Cell 8 by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström, Kari Dickson

Rating: WARTY!

Talking of crime, this was one more casualty in an increasing number of failed audiobook experiments. I have a modest commute to and from work, and I like to catch up on reading on the trip, so...audiobooks! This is why I tend to experiment a lot more with audiobooks than other formats, and why I have more fails. This novel was one from a rising tide of Scandinavian crime fiction which is curious because there's very little homicide there compared with other nations.

The USA, for example, is almost at the top of the list for sheer numbers of murders (although in the middling lower half for murder rate) whereas northern Europe is low on the list. Iceland had precisely one murder in 2016, for example, the same year the USA had over 17,000. Norway had 27, Denmark 56. The purportedly easy-going Sweden had over one hundred, but by comparison, the supposedly highly civil UK had almost 800. That said, the murder rates in these countries are very roughly the same and only about a fifth of the rate in the USA. So not a lot of murders to work with in Scandinavia, and nowhere near in proportion to the slew of novels about them, hence my comment about it being curious.

I've had some success with other Scandinavian crime books, but I couldn't get with this audiobook translated from the foreign by Kari Dickson. It began with a guy in jail and then went to a flashback the length, presumably, of the entire novel. I don't do flashbacks. This flashback involved the singer in a band on a cruise ship taking exception to a man who was fondling the women he was dancing with. The singer gets arrested and turns out to be someone else. Yawn.

Why this guy thought he ought to be policing these women who were in a public place on a dance floor and perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what they wanted is a mystery that wasn't gone into in the portion I could stand to listen to. I could not get into this, it wasn't interesting at all to me. Life is too short to waste on a book that doesn't grab you from the start.

Eye to I by Rolf Nelson

Rating: WARTY!

Rolf Nelson is a Professor of Psychology and Dorothy Reed Williams Professor in the Social Sciences at Wheaton College (the one in Massachusetts, not the idiotic creation-preaching one in Illinois), and the only thing I can say is that I pity anyone who has to sit through one of his lectures, unfortunately. These are a series of lectures which I thought might be interesting in view of the topic of the next book in my The Little Rattuses™ children's picture book series, but I'm sorry to report that there was little to nothing to see here, so I moved along.

The idea was to discuss how we see things and how our brain interprets what we see, but the lectures were dry, humorless, rambling and repetitive, and it was truly tedious to listen to them. I kept skipping tracks to move on to more interesting bits, but those were sadly very few and quite far between. I know it's a big academic thing to get a book out there on whatever topic it is that you teach, but I really think it's better not to put one out rather than publish one this bad. You'll learn more from reading Wikipedia on the topic of sight and color vision, even if it's tough-going, than you will from these lectures and stay awake in the process. This was awful.

Frida & Diego by Catherine Reef

Rating: WORTHY!

I've long been interested in Frida Kahlo and the life she was forced to live, so when I happened upon this larger format print book I saw in the library, I grabbed it up without thinking twice. It tells the individual stories of the childhood and youth of the two artists separately, and then of their life together, problematic as it was at times. It discusses their work and how events in their lives influenced it, and of Frida's struggle with health issues, beginning with polio, and then with a tramcar accident which resulted in a metal hand rail piercing her hip - a major and life-threatening injury from which she never fully-recovered and for which she was still having surgeries long after the accident.

As if that wasn't bad enough, she ended up falling for a serial philanderer which led to a codependent relationship that neither party could move on from, not even after they divorced. The book covers a lot of ground and contains a wealth of fascinating detail. The author has done her work without question.

The only thing about this book which bothered me was that so little of their art was depicted. There is a lot of imagery and quite a few of their paintings are included, but most of the pictures are photographs of them and their friends, so for me, too little of the art was on show. That aside though, I enjoyed reading this, and I commend it as a worthy read for anyone who is a fan of either artist, or even of art in general. Both the over-used phrases 'struggling artist' and 'tortured artist' apply quite literally to Frida Kahlo and she's always worth reading about.

If I Die Tonight by Alison Gaylin

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook is supposedly about a hit and run in a stolen car, but it moved so slowly that I got the impression it was far more about a single mom detective policing two problematic kids than ever it would be about solving a crime, so I gave up on it. I think I'm going to quit even thinking of reading books with titles of this nature - the "If blah blah blah" kind of title.

This author also wrote a novel titled "What Remains of Me" which is a no-no and pretentious kind of a title for me. If I'd know about the previous title, I would never have picked this one up, and it would have been a wise decision. So it's a hackneyed story that the author evidently isn't interested in getting to, with a fake bad guy. On top of that, I later discovered that Kirkus loved this book, which is another reason to avoid it like the plague.

Travels With Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a record of the author's adventures (mostly) when not reporting on war, the most entertaining of which, for me, was her trip to Africa on a whim, with little forethought and no planning. This woman was fearless and went wherever whimsy took her, reporting with an astute and amusing eye on everything she sees and experiences. She was a woman ahead of her time and an exemplar for feminism. She covers not only adventures in Africa, but also in China, in Eilat in Israel, and in Moscow.

She was not only a journalist, but also wrote novels. She's observant and witty, smart and insightful, adventurous and unstoppable. I commend this as a fascinating travelogue.

Regifters by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew, Marc Hempel

Rating: WORTHY!

Written by Carey, and illustrated by Liew and Hempel, this middle-grade graphic novel was cute, fun and entertaining, with an interesting story, and a twist here and there.

Dik-Seong Jen, or Jen Dickson if you want to be a dik about it, goes by Dixie to avoid all of that. She's an American of Korean ancestry and is a fine student not so much at school, but at the Hapkido Dojang (Dojo, but for Korean martial arts), where her sensei tells her she could be great, but her Ki (qi, ch'i) is all screwed-up.

Jen knows exactly what's screwing it up, too: this guy Adam at school, that she's crushing on to a self-destructive level. This ongoing cringe-worthy embarrassment is offset by Jen's easy-going narration style where she pretty much breaks the fourth wall all the time, including one point where she urges readers not to read the next section because it's too embarrassing for her.

Jen is supposed to be focused on the upcoming martial arts tournament in which she's competing. Her entry fee is a hundred dollars which she has, but she blows that and a further hundred dollars she's saved on a small statue of a warrior, to give to Adam, also a martial artist, but who is interested in a different girl at school. Adam then thinks he can impress this other girl by re-gifting the statue to her.

After that Dixie is forced to compete in preliminary knock-out competition to get one of the free entry tickets to the competition because she daren't tell her dad she blew her money - especially not when he's trying to impress the Korean president of the bank from whom he's hoping to borrow money. The president is looking forward to seeing Dixie compete in the tournament while displaying her love of Korean traditions! And so it goes around and around, especially when Dixie fails to win a free ticket. What now?!

Enter Dillinger, a street punk who is a shaker and mover in town and who looks to be a thug to begin with, but he saves Dixie from a couple of bullies and the two of them end up forging a grudging acquaintanceship. When her best friend gives up her own ticket to the tournament, after spraining her leg badly, Dixie realizes she can still enter, and she begins training with Dillinger, who has money bet on her. The problem is that she's going to have to fight the guy who beat her when she tried to get a free ticket, and then also fight Adam!

This was a fun graphic novel - more fun than a lot of stuff I've read lately, and I loved it! It was entertaining, well drawn, adventurous, lacking in stereotypes, inventive, and with some nice twists and turns. I commend it as a worthy read.

Jessica Jones Blind Spot by Kelly Thompson, Mattia de Iulis, Marcio Takara, Rachelle Rosenberg

Rating: WORTHY!

I've been almost, but not quite, universally disappointed when I've back-tracked from a movie or TV show to the graphic novel version. The last disappointment was Captain Marvel which I took a look at before I went to see the movie. The movie turned out to be probably my favorite movie of all time. The graphic novels far from it. So you can see how I might honestly fear taking that step this time, but having watched season three (and probably the last - at least on Netflix) of Jessica Jones, and really enjoying the whole show - far more than the other three in the defenders quartet, what can I say? I was jonesing for more (yes, I went there!).

So I pulled this edition out of the library and gave it a chance. I'm glad I did because when I took a look at it, I was pleasantly surprised for once. This was a good solid story - very much a murder mystery (with a few twists along the way) and though I figured out what was going on before it was revealed, which is unusual for me in this kind of story, I really enjoyed reading it, so Kudos to writer Thompson for restoring my faith in comic book writers! Kudos also to artists and colorists Iulis, Takara, and Rosenberg.

It's nice to read a graphic novel which doesn't sexualize the female characters (except for in this one scene, but I decided to let that slide). Jessica Jones needs no sexualization because she is sexy as hell from her can-do attitude, her smarts, her never-say-die approach (which was severely tested here - LOL!), and her sharp wits. All of that was on display this story, and it beats any improbably pneumatic super hero "girl" any time in my book - and evidently in this crew's book too, I'm happy to report. That said I could have done without the ridiculous birthday party garbage added as a short story filler in back of this graphic novel. It sucked and was painfully stupid. And no, it wasn't about Iron Fist.

The main story begins with Jessica finding a corpse in her office, and it turns out to be a woman who came to Jessica for help some time before, and then who disappeared, leaving Jessica with a 'pebble in her shoe' feeling of failure. She resolves - after being arrested for the murder, and then freed by Matt Murdoch - that she will solve the woman's murder as a professional curtesy to try and alleviate her failure in the Dia Sloane case to begin with. Just like in season three of the TV show, Jessica finds herself on the trail of a serial killer, but this one is targeting supers - good or bad, but all female. His first target is Jessica. You'll have to read this to see how that goes.

One thing I don't like about too many Marvel comics I've read recently is the inexplicable need writers seem to feel to drag in every single Marvel name they can find. It's pathetic and I was sorry to see that Thompson failed to skip that. This brings me to a pet beef about Marvel - particularly with New York City. I don't get why every super in the Marvel pantheon lives in New York City. Stan Lee said it was because you write what you know. I don't buy that as an excuse, but given that, the logical outcome is that NYC ought to be the most crime-free city on the entire planet - and clearly it isn't.

Worse than this, Jessica seems to get zero help from any of these supers in solving this case - a case where she herself came close to death. She has visits from Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Misty Knight, Doctor Strange, who is more like my parodied Doctor Deranged in this book, Elsa Bloodstone and others, and not a one of them lifts a finger to help her. What's up with that? So while this came clsoe to failing me, it held up well enough and for long enough that I consider it a rare worthy comic-book read.

Kick Kennedy by Barbara Leaming

Rating: WORTHY!

Kathleen Kennedy was nicknamed "Kick" which sounds stupid to us today, but which was right in line with kids for the era in which she grew up. She was a part of a very large Catholic family, sister to John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy. This audiobook tells of her time from her first trip to Britain in the late 1930's and her eventual marriage to the Marquess of Hartington, heir apparent to the 10th Duke of Devonshire. She lost her husband to the war in Belgium in 1944, not long after the marriage, and died in Europe herself just a few years later, at the age of 28 in a plane crash.

This book which sports, I have to say, some rather fanciful story-telling here and there it seems to me, recounts her life and death, surround by Lords and Dukes and Grand Dukes and Viscounts, and Marquises. It's really quite shameful how spoiled-rotten these people were, and how easy their life was, drifting from one event to another, from one function to another, from one party to another, never doing a lick of work because they were so rich, they didn't have to. Now that doesn't make it right that she died so young, but it does make it hard to sympathize with her when she lived a life most people who live into their eighties can't even imagine.

That said it makes for an interesting read, even if parts of it are so far from one's personal experience that it seems like reading fiction even when it's true. Having started to fall for the guy, she found herself torn away from him by her father's insistence that his entire family return to the USA as hostilities between Britain and Germany, via France and Czechoslovakia's travails. The Kennedys had been welcomed and even somewhat revered in Britain, and Kick was very popular with her own set, but when Joe Kennedy started talking, back in the USA, about leaving Britain to it when it came to fighting this war, his popularity plummeted in the UK and he saw this starkly on his return.

Meanwhile all Kick wanted to do was return to see Billy. She eventually got her wish and they married to opposition from her Catholic, but far from catholic parents, and this was despite her not giving up on Catholicism herself. All she had to do was agree to the children being raised Protestant, and she didn't protest about that at all. The thing was that her husband stuck his head up, either unaware that he was being fired on by a German machinegun, or not realizing it was dangerous, and was shot in that same head. It was a whole week before Kick learned her husband of only four months had died - only one month after Kick's own brother, Joe Kennedy Junior, also died in a plane crash.

The book moves a lot more quickly after this and it would seem that Kick had changed her view of life by then, so instead of seeking out someone she truly loved, now she was little more than a gold digger. Having lost her status since her husband's death and seeing the dukedom go then to his younger brother (who was married to one of the feisty Mitford sisters), it wasn't so very long before she began chasing after the married 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, who was even richer and had higher status than her late husband had.

Prior to reading this I had little idea of Kick Kennedy other than being intrigued that she was JFK's sister and had died young and was tied to the area of Britain where I had grown up (she's buried in my home county). Now I've read this (listened to it, more accurately) and learned plenty about her, and while I commend this book as a worthy read, I can't imagine I would ever have actually liked Kick Kennedy had I been alive in the era which she lived. In fact, our social circles would have been so divorced from one another that I would never have even met her at all, and that would have been fine with me because she disgusts me.

Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas by Frederick Kohner

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a 1957 novel written by Kohner based on the experiences of his daughter who got in with a bunch of surfer dudes and learned to surf herself. The story isn't a biography, but is extrapolated from her experiences and turned into a fictional adventure in its own right.

Gidget's actual name is Franzie - we do not learn her last name in this novel although I understand it's revealed in a sequel as Hofer. She becomes Gidget when she starts hanging with the surfer guys, having run into them after being rescued from an undertow by a mocking surfer. None of these guys use their real name. Like super heroes, they go by supposedly cool titles like Kahuna and Moondoggie. Since Franzie is a female of diminutive stature, a girl midget, she's dubbed with the portmanteau monica: Gidget.

Initially she's not welcomed - this is a guys' club after all, but not everyone is hostile to her, and she ingratiates herself by delivering lots of food to them, purloined from the larder at home. The surfing guys appreciate this and gobble it down, and slowly she becomes assimilated into their group. She especially raises the hackles of the self-absorbed Moondoggie, so you know he's the one she's going to get hitched to. The one who takes her under his wing initially though, is Kahuna, an expert surfer who travels the globe catching the waves wherever they lure him. The other guys are typically college students down for the summer.

Gidget, who at fifteen, can't afford a board of her own, sometimes manages to get rides doubling-up on a surfboard with one of the surfers, starting with Kahuna, and after she stays overnight (after a party gone wrong), in Kahuna's beach hut, Moondoggie gets the wrong idea and starts a fight which Kahuna wins. Losing patience with both of them, Gidget grabs one of their surfboards and goes out to ride a huge wave - something she's never done alone before. With some concentration and supreme effort, she nails it, and that seems to break some tension. She and Moondoogie start seeing each other romantically.

This was a sweet, innocent and slightly scary story given how much freedom Gidget is allowed by her parents and what a potentially risky alliance hers is, but times were in general far more innocent back then and Kahuna proves himself to be a real gentleman - more so than Moondoggie initially is. So this was a fun and interesting story, well-written, if a little clichéd, but worth the read.

In Pieces by Sally Field

Rating: WORTHY!

This audiobook started out great, but went downhill quickly once Burt Reynolds came on the scene, and everything from that point on was annoying. I'd skipped almost nothing for the entire eighty percent or whatever prior to that point, but I skipped almost everything after it. That said, however, I consider this a worthy listen because it was heartfelt, informative, and beautifully read by the author, who has one of the best reading voices I've ever listened to.

The story is delicately told, but pulls no punches and hides no secrets. Of course it's one voice and no one the author talks about gets a chance to respond, but they can always write their own biography and address it that way. Talking of which, I'm really not a great fan of biographies, but I do read or listen to one now and then, and I like Sally Field as an actor.

I enjoyed her playing Spider-Man's aunt in The Amazing Spider-Man and the sequel, but prior to that I had seen her in Stay Hungry many years ago, and in Soapdish which I thought was hilarious and in which I really fell in love with her (along with Kevin Kline and several of the other cast members) as a comedy actor. I also loved her voice acting in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. She was great in Mrs Doubtfire and in Legally Blonde 2 too!

I have never seen her supposed masterpieces, Norma Rae or Places in the Heart for which she won academy awards so I cannot comment on those. They're not my kind of movie. I did take a look at Gidget and at The Flying Nun and was not at all impressed with those - not so much with her personally, but with the whole dumb-ass, tame, uninventive, unadventurous, moronic sit-com shtick, which frankly makes me barf, and which I suspect she might well feel the same way about, but at least it got her face and acting known. It did lead me to read Frederick Kohner's 1957 original novel, Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas which he wrote based on his own daughter's anecdotes, and I found that really entertaining and which I also review positively, today.

This biography begins with Field's early and difficult childhood, her molestation by her stepfather, and her various unsatisfactory relationships. She doesn't blame everyone but herself when things went wrong, either, shouldering her fair share. I found the insights she gave into actors, and directors and into her own lifelong learning of her craft quite fascinating and this was the major reason I wanted to listen to this, but there are also disturbing and moving moments, and amazing descriptions of her giving birth to her first two children, which makes me think she would have made a great comedy writer had she chosen to do that instead of act. What impressed me most though was how whole and sane she has managed to stay despite what she went through.

So overall, I commend this as a worthy read and I'm glad I listened to it (except for that last 20%!).

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

Rating: WARTY!

There is no 'dark voyage', so that's the first problem with this book - or at least there wasn't in the first third of the book which was all I read before I gave up in disgust. There's more than one voyage, but the one I read about was hardly dark, and where I thought it was going to include some good action stuff: spying, infiltration, sabotage, adventure, instead it was largely a boring account of day-to-day activity on a boat, no adventure involved. Yawn. The author seems to somehow be missing the point of what a thriller is supposed to be.

It interested me because it was about this Danish boat captain who was helping the allies in World War Two, and his crew was diverse, including a couple of Germans who hated Hitler as much as the rest of the allies did, but the story-telling and the pacing was uninteresting and tedious respectively, and the story was more about the captain than ever it was about the voyage or the adventure such as it was. I felt completely misled by the book blurb, which I believe is on the publisher, not the author, but the author wrote the story I read and it wasn't up to par, so that's on him, and I can't commend this one based on what I could stand to read of it.

NPR American Chronicles Exploring space

Rating: WARTY!

This was a short audiobook consisting of excepts (excerp-tuhs as the NPR people pronounce it!), and I was not thrilled with this at all. It was very superficial. The only interviews that were interesting were the ones with the astronauts, notably, John Glenn, veteran space traveler John Young, and African American astronaut Bernard Harris, but htose were very short. The rest of it I could have managed without, including the tinny and annoying musical accompaniment to far too many of the items. Even those astronaut interviews were rather superficial, so I cannot recommend this, especially since I haven't commended it in the first place and I don't intend to!

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an odd, but interesting and entertaining story. The author sells well in Japan apparently, and has several titles published there. This is her first English translation.

The novella is about a Japanese woman, Keiko Furukura, who is in her mid-thirties and who seems to the rest of the world to be stagnating. She is neither in a successful career, nor is she married with children which seem to be the only two viable options available to Japanese women, reading between the lines here.

in fact, Keiko has some sort of deficit disorder in that she doesn't see life like her peers do. For example, when she was in middle school and two boys were fighting, and other girls were urging them to stop it to no avail, Keiko's solution was to grab a nearby shovel and hit one of them on the head with it, which expediently stopped the fight at once. Problem solved.

She couldn't understand why she got into trouble for this any more than she can grasp why it's not acceptable to stick something sharp into a baby to shock it into stopping its endless wailing. Fortunately, she has learned that her solution would be socially unacceptable, and doesn't attempt it, even though the offending baby is her nephew, the son of her younger sister Mami. Keiko has learned that by watching how her peers deal with situations and then emulating them, even though the emulation itself makes no sense to her, she can get by. Mami, realizing Keiko has a problem, helps her with this.

This emulation even extends to copying their mannerisms, clothing choices, and speech inflections, although she's careful not to emulate her peers too precisely. Instead, she imbibes each of their essences, and regurgitates a meld of that as her own style. Keiko is like a robot who is given an AI learning program. In this way she's able to hold down a long-term job at a convenience store named Smile Mart which always seems to be pushing special offers.

The store is actually the perfect environment for Keiko, because it's highly-structured and the daily routine follows a specific set of simple rules. In such circumstances, she flourishes and becomes the store's most reliable and efficient employee. In this way she reminds me of Jeff Daniels's character Bill Johnson in the excellent movie Pleasantville, although she doesn't become anywhere near as lost as he does when routine changes. She feels completely at home in the Smile Mart, more so than anywhere else, and she volunteers for extra shifts because given a choice, that's where she'd rather be. Over the years she sees eight managers come and go, and many more of the staff. Those managers have all seemed to revere her as a stellar and exemplary employee.

This all starts to unravel with the arrival of a completely disaffected, rude, self-absorbed, and frankly gross employee by the name of Shiraha. He is fired, but when Keiko meets him lurking around the store because of his unrequited interest in another female employee, she starts to bond with him. He has no interest in her and she has never been interested in romance or sex, but he moves into her apartment and in that way she can assure her family that she has a boyfriend even though he is, in her own words, really like a stray pet that she took in, and feeds. This nevertheless brings big changes to her life.

I enjoyed this. It is a fast read: even though it's around 160 pages, the book is a very small format. Had it been a regularly-sized print book, it would have probably been less than ninety pages and looking quite skimpy, so it felt rather dishonest that the publisher had made an attempt to 'bulk it up' like this. Despite that, I commend it as a worthy read and may well come back to this author at some point in the future to sample more of her work (assuming more is translated because my Japanese is non-existent, sad to say!).

Shrill by Lindy West

Rating: WARTY!

I've read one or two novels about women who might variously be described, depending on who is doing the describing, as fat, overweight, obese, big-boned, chubby. None of these names are any better for people than was this novel as it happens, but I will grant that 'shrill' is a great title for it. With its tone, it ought to have been written in block caps. For reasons which escape me, the novel had some good buzz about it, which is how it came to my attention, but I immediately started to think maybe it was over-hyped when I realized it was first person voice. If you're going to be shrill, then you don't want to write in first person. In fact, very nearly every time you don't want to write in first person, because it doesn't do anything for your novel other than to make it an annoying mantra of "Hey, lookit MEEEE!"

I gave up on this particular one on page nineteen when I read, "I watched my friends become slender and beautiful" which told me in very plain terms that this writer is a part of the problem. In the preceding pages I'd already noted that body-shaming (and its equally despicable counter-part, body-idolizing) was part of this author's technique. She rambled on for several pages about Disney characters and others, when everyone already knows, or ought to know, that Disney is not known for political correctness or for realistic representations of anything, in either its animated oeuvre or its live action efforts. Not that these days, there's any difference between the two with Disney incestuously remaking every animated feature as a live action rinse and repeat. Barf.

Just in passing, I think she author here completely misinterpreted the depiction of King Triton in The Little Mermaid whose muscular frame was meant to imply power, not some ovulating go-to hunky guy - and even if she were correct in her errant assessment, why would it be a problem when it comes to merpeople? To take this character and talk about his disgusting fishiness, like he was trying to appear to humans when he clearly despised humans is completely out of left field and is just as bad of a tirade of body-shaming as anything the author complains about. It turns out she's part of the problem! Not that Triton is real, but it matters because it’s not the reality of the character, but the militant attitude of the author that's in question here. I notice she had not a word to say about how wrong it was that Ariel was not only willing to undergo the equivalent of plastic surgery in order to snag a human, but also to be muted? You see nothing wrong with that Ms West?

But I digress! Now: 'slender and beautiful'? The highest proportion of overweight and obese people in the world live in the USA. We have well over ten percent of the world's total. In a nation where some three-quarters of men and well over half of women are overweight and a third of children are joining them, the character in this novel has only friends who are all slender and beautiful? Not one of them was 'well-rounded' or even 'pleasantly plump'? Not one of them was 'plain' or 'homely'? They were all slender and beautiful?

I call horseshit on that one for two reasons. Firstly, given the statistics, it has all the hallmarks of an outright lie, and second, why is someone who is purposefully writing a book about a weight problem (from one perspective or another) equating slender with beautiful as though no one who isn't slender can possibly be attractive? That just seemed completely wrong-headed to me. Once again the author is a part of the problem, and I could not stand to read any more of this, especially since I was already having problems with it. I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Galaxy Girls by Libby Jackson

Rating: WORTHY!

Libby Jackson is a physicist and engineer who works for the UK Space Agency. She wrote this book to highlight the contributions women have made toward science and the various space programs, and have often gone unsung. Well...this book sings!

Divided into five sections, the book covers fifty women, and although the subtitle misleadingly says it's 50 stories of women in space, the majority of these women have not been in space, but have unquestionably and materially contributed to the success of everyone who went into space. The sections and the women covered are as follows:

• The Origins of Space Travel
  
  • Émilie du Châtelet - or more formally, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, was a French author, mathematician, physicist, natural philosopher just before the mid-eighteenth century when women were not welcomed in any of those fields.
  • Ada Lovelace, aka Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was Lord Byron's daughter, but her mother kept her away from Byron and saw to it that she was educated in mathematics, which brought her eventually into the computing field invented by Charles Babbage. Lovelace was the first computer programmer.
  • Jeannette Ridlon Piccard was an aeronaut before there were airplanes. She was the first licensed female balloon pilot in the US and the first women to enter the stratosphere - and that's not metaphor. Where do you think Jean Luc Picard of the Enterprise got his name?!
  • Mary Sherman Morgan was a rocket fuel scientist who invented Hydyne which powered a rocket that put the United States's first satellite into orbit.
  • Jacqueline Cochran was the first woman to break the sound barrier.
• The Dawn of the Space Age
  
  • Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to fly in space - in the Soviet space program as it then was, when the Russians were the ones setting the pace and making all the firsts: first satellite into space, first man into space, first multi-person spacecraft into space, first spacewalk. What this book doesn't mentions it had the early soviet spacecraft were rather simplistic things as compared with US space craft, and the cosmonauts have very little to do or control.
  • Jerrie Cobb was an aviation pioneer and the first woman to fly in the Paris Air Show. She was also one of the little known Mercury 13 women trainees who passed the same tests as the Mercury 7 men did, but weren't allowed to fly a spacecraft.
  • The Mercury 7 Wives were the longsuffering spouses of the first seven astronauts picked to fly spacecraft. They were unprepared for the intense publicity, but handled it just fine.
  • Eilene Galloway was the first space lawyer, so to speak. You'll have to read the book to find out what that's all about!
  • Mary Jackson you may recall if you saw the movie Hidden Figures - whi9ch was of course, Hollywood style, overly dramatic compared with the real story which I reviewed a while ago on this blog.
  • Dee O'Hara was a nurse to the astronauts, involved in their care and medical education, and went on to even greater things, such as setting up the Flight Medicine Clinic at the Johnson Space Center
  • Katherine Johnson was also featured in Hidden Figures and was responsible for figuring launch windows and spacecraft trajectories, including emergency return paths.
  • Margaret Hamilton was the director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT lab which developed the on-board flight software for the Apollo spacecraft.
  • The Waltham "Little Old Ladies" wove the software for the Apollo guidance computer - literally. The copper strands were hand-woven to pass information as a series of ones and zeroes into the computer and were designed this way to be ultra-reliable.
  • Poppy Northcutt was an engineer on the Apollo space program.
  • Rita Rapp worked on a critical aspect of the Apollo program in developing food that could be eaten - and was appetizing and nutritious, for the astronauts, which was a lot harder than you might think, especially with crumbs not being welcome floating around in a spacecraft!
  • Dottie Lee was another 'human computer' who worked on math calculations for the space program. When she retired it took ten men to replace her. She was responsible for the heat shield design for returning spacecraft, which is now also being employed on the new Orion spacecraft.
  • "The ILC Seamstresses" helped outfit the Apollo astronauts, including the ones who walked on the Moon. I also review a children's book about this same topic on this blog in Papa Put a Man on the Moon by Kristy Dempsey and Sarah Green
• Space Stations and Shuttles
  
  • Sally Ride was the first American woman and the youngest American astronaut into space, and she survived Challenger twice before it exploded when she wasn't on it.
  • Svetlana Savitskaya was in the second group of Russian cosmonauts selected and the first woman to walk in space, probably an activity prompted by the USA's announcement that Kathy Sullivan was soon scheduled to do the same thing.
  • Nichelle Nichols - actor in the original Star Trek series and inspiration to many women, particularly those of color.
  • Christa McAuliffe and Judy Resnik both died in the appalling and inexcusable Challenger explosion. I'm not sure that being the first women to die in space is really a milestone, but it's something.
  • Mae Jemison was the first African-American woman into space (Guy Bluford was the first African-American man almost a decade earlier) and she went on afterwards to found the 100 Year Starship organization (I didn't know it had been lost!).
  • Helen Sharman was the first British astronaut in space and the first woman to visit the Russian Mir space station. Yeay Britain! Sends a woman up first!
  • Eileen Collins is a (now retired) USAF colonel who piloted the shuttle Discovery in its docking with the Mir. She was also the first female commander of a US Spacecraft.
  • Chiaki Mukai was the first Japanese woman in space.
  • Claudie Haigneré was one of the first seven French astronauts and the only woman - one woman out of ten thousand candidates with very few females included - who was the first French woman to fly in space.
  • Patricia Cowings was the first African-American woman scientist to be trained as an astronaut, but never went into space. She spent her time in research into physiology, and she trained people in the voluntary control of physiological responses which helped astronauts cope with weightlessness and motion sickness.
  • Irene Long was the first female chief medical officer at the Kennedy Space Center.
• Living and Working in Space
  
  • Peggy Whitson has the distinction of being the oldest female astronaut to fly in space and is also the holder of the most EVA time for a female astronaut. Having spent some 665 days in space, she's also done the equivalent of a trip to Mars and back - although not all in one go! At her retirement at the end of her last trip, she was the most experienced US astronaut - spending more time in space than any other American.
  • Julie Robinson is the Chief Scientist of the International Space Station and founder of the ISS Program Science Forum.
  • Suni Williams is an officer of the US Navy and I believe the first astronaut to have a haircut in space, donating her pony tail to Locks of Love, but maybe not given how long other astronauts have spent aboard various spacecraft and the ISS. I have no information about hair grooming in space! She is definitely the first person to run a marathon in space!
  • Jeanne Lee Crews was the first waste disposal engineer in the space program - in the sense of designing a shield to protect the ISS from space garbage of which there is an endless amount after fifty years of space flights.
  • Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian woman to fly in space, and Laurel Clark was a Captain in the USN, and a doctor. They died together in the inexplicable Columbia disaster. The US has killed more astronauts in space than any other nation: 14 in just two shuttle flights, plus three on the ground in the Apollo 1 fire.

The last section is The Future of Space and looks at what's coming and who's helping to usher it in. I commend this book as a worthy read for boys and girls.

Secrets of the Great Fire Tree by Justine Laismith

Rating: WARTY!

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

I gave up on this one at about fifty percent in because the story was so badly letting down the exciting title that I couldn't stand it. If you're going to title your middle-grade novel 'secrets of' something, and include the phrase, 'Great Fire Tree', then you had better have something thrilling to back it up with, and this novel did not. It was pedantic and boring, and just seemed to ramble on in diverse directions paradoxically without really getting anywhere. Instead of Asian fantasy we got a mundane school bullying story, and a farming story. I gave up on it because I could see no hope of it improving and I was bored to tears. I can't commend it based on the fifty percent that I managed to get through.

The story is of Kai, who is left largely on his own when his mother is forced to go and work in the city. It's just him and his pet pig - that's really being fattened for the kill. He gets the idea that if he can unlock the secrets of the Fire Tree, he can bring his mother back home. I was willing to set aside what might have been a more interesting story of Kai growing and learning how to handle things without magic, but when instead I was expecting a good Asian fantasy and didn't get one, I was disappointed.

I've read and enjoyed Asian fantasies before, so I do get that eastern fantasy isn't the same as western fantasy, but even within that context, the story seemed to take forever to get anywhere, and even when it was going places, it seemed to be all over the place - everywhere in fact, except the magical world promised by the blurb. By the time I quit this tale, not only had any secrets failed to materialize, story failed to even look like it would impart any. My patience can only be stretched so far, and this one exceeded it. I cannot commend it based on what I read.