My First Fact File Ancient Rome by Simon Holland, Adam Hill

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This continues my four book review in the 'My First Fact File' series today. This is about ancient Rome. Now I've read a book about Rome by a man named Holland, I do expect to see a future book about those Nederlanders written by someone named Rome! Just kidding. I've actually visited Rome, so I have a real appreciation for the history, although of course modern Rome is worlds away from what it was at the height of the Roman empire back in the early second century.

This book will quite effectively take you back there, though. Written with some knowlegeable detail by Simon Holland with consultation from Matthew Nicholls, and finely-illustrated by Adam Hill (who gets to draw hills! The seven hills of Rome! This is poetry in motion, I tell you) this book covers everything a young mind needs to know, from the founding of Rome, the mythology and the actual - to the growth of the Republic, the empire, the Roman soldiers, their weapons, armor, battle tactics and conquest, through everyday life, including homes, engineering, cities, arts, society, childhood, how Rome kept itself fed, to entertainment and religious belief. In short, everything you need to know to get a solid grounding in ancient Rome.

There are, as usual in this series, small, inexpensive and easy projects for children to undertake to get a hands-on feel for some of the aspects of life discussed, including making a shield and a catapult, to designing a city, a home, and thinking about what policies you would implement were you the emperor of your own home! If this doesn't stir your child's mind I do not know what will. I commend it as a worthy and educational read.

My First Fact File Oceans by Jen Green, Wesley Robins

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. You know it's an ARC when you espy a note on page 22 urging Kate to add a leader line! I assume all that will be done by the time the published edition emerges!

Again by the tireless Jen Green, with consultant Diva Amon, and this time nicely illustrated by Wesley Robins, this book tackles the massive oceans that Earth is blessed with - a subject which was touched on in her excellent My First Fact File Weather book I also review today. Again this is a print book, but I got only to review the ebook representation of it.

This book is the same length as the other one - some forty pages, with each pair of pages in a double spread, each spread devoted to an important aspect of a very important subject. It covers an overview of the five great oceans (and no, Ocean's 8 wasn't one of them), winds and waves, currents and tides, the ocean floor on which, (I read on the BBC news website in the middle of last May), a plastic bag was found at the bottom of the Marianas trench - some 35,000 feet down. Yes, we've even polluted that. The ocean floor is constantly on the move, believe it or not, as this book makes clear. Whether that will get rid of that bag, I don't know!

But I digress! the book covers the various levels in the ocean from sunlight surface to dark depths, as well as the littoral (literally!), food chains (not fast food!), coral reefs, icy ocean environments (which would sure feel nice as hot as it's been here recently!), animal journeys (including salmon, whales, and the Arctic tern), dangerous waters, rising seas, ships and boats (a brief history), exploration, and pollution. I recently had the pleasure of an ocean cruise and gained a refreshed appreciation for the sea, which I hope will be reflected in a novel I'm currently working on, but this book, aimed at children though it is, brought all of that back to me.

Once again the book has some pretty neat experiments for young children to undertake - safe and inexpensive. There's a sink or swim project to compare fresh and saline water, there's an experiment where you can make your own current, and even one where you can make your own tsunami! Just a small one. Probably won't bring your house down. I'm guessing...! There's a couple of pages devoted to rising sea levels due to climate change - and including a nice little experiment to see how your mini-sea level rises when ice melts.

For me, it would have been nice has this clarified that floating ice - like at the North Pole - will not contribute to sea level rise because it's already in the ocean, but melting ice on land - such as that on Greenland and the Antarctic will indeed cause a major sea-level rise if it all melts. But you can't have everything. Of course not! Where would you keep it?!

Overall I really liked this book and commend it as a worthy read. I appreciated that it tells the truth, and illustrates the text well, and colorfully. It's done in ways that will engage young children and educate them, and we all need an education about the oceans, it seems.

My First Fact File Weather by Jen Green, Tom Woolley

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This, one of four 'My First Fact File' books I'm reviewing, is aimed at younger children. It's written as a print book (the content page has no clickable links to other pages in the ebook), and it was finely illustrated by Tom Woolley and written by Jen Green with some consultation with Adam Scaife.

It's over forty pages long and each pair of pages is a double spread. It starts where everything starts - the Sun, (without which we - and even the planet itself - wouldn't exist!) and proceeds through the atmosphere, just like a sunbeam, explaining in some detail along the way how all of this interacts with oceans and winds to create a climate.

I really appreciated that it does not pull punches when it comes to talking about the indisputable fact that the climate is changing and this change has been caused by human activity. There are no cowardly and irresponsible presidential lies here. The book continues with all aspects of climate and weather, and covers biomes, the seasons, the water cycle, clouds, rain, snow, sleet, and hail, thunder and lightning, hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts, and floods. It's really excellent.

There are some practical experiments children can undertake as well, which makes the book fun, including testing air pressure, comparing wind speeds, demonstrating how seasons work, and making your own water cycle. These are simple, inexpensive things young children can safely, do and they looked like entertaining educational opportunities to me!

I commend this book as a worthy and educational read.

My Kindergarten in 100 Words by Sophie Beer

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Yes, there are indeed 100 words, spread over ten pages with fine illustrations to identify what each word is. This was an ARC and the first few images were in color, the rest black and white line drawings, so I don't know if the finished product (I'm not the kidn of reviewer who ever gets the finished product!) will be like this or completely in color. Nevertheless the drawings alone are nice and will draw the eye of kids who look at this, and each is labeled.

I ought to note that while Sophie Beer is the illustrator, I am not sure who the author is. Maybe it's all Sophie Beer's work or maybe the author is anonymous. There's no copyright page and I'm not a beer drinker myself (joke!) so it's not clear who exactly wrote this.

Anyway, the book takes us through the day, from getting out of bed, through morning ablutions and enjoying breakfast, to walking to the nursery, the day at the nursery and five pages of things you might see there, to being picked up for the trip back home. The book is short, simple, and sweet, and I can see this being a really useful tool for preparing a child to go to nursery for that first time, and even getting them excited about it and looking forward to their first day. I commend this as a worthy read.

Saving the Team by Alex Morgan, Full Fathom Five

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known beforehand that this was a Full Fathom Five product, I would never have picked it off the library shelf, but I didn't learn this until later. I expected better from someone of Alex Morgan's Stature.

Anyway, after enjoying this year's women's world cup I discovered that one of the US team's leading scorers, Alex Morgan, had written a middle-grade series about girls' soccer. At least I can only assume she wrote it. It is Full Fathom Five after all, so who knows? Since I'd written my own YA novel about a girl who gets to play soccer in the English men's professional league, I was curious as to how a professional player would write a soccer story, so I checked this out of the library.

I have to say I was disappointed in it in several ways, not just in the story telling. I can't speak for middle-grade girls, but this wasn't quite what I was expecting and the story was a bit too black and white, traditional, and safe for my taste: the inattentive adults, the evil bully girl, the oh-so-wonderful instant friends, the 'problems' that are not really problems. To me it felt a bit young and simplistic for today's middle graders.

The basic plot is that Devin moves from the west coast to the east coast meaning it's the trope 'new girl in school' garbage that's already been done to death. Could Morgan not have added a bit of an original twist here? Aren't strikers supposed to be inventive? I guess she really wasn't very inventive in the world cup. Yes, she admirably took the goals as the chances presented themselves, scoring five of hers in that first easy game, but she really didn't have to work for any of them, did she? She certainly didn't make them with inventive and incisive runs through the defense; for the most part she simply stood there and then took advantage of the opening when the ball came right to her. She's no Marta Vieira da Silva, that's for sure.

You know there's a lot been said about the US behavior in that first game - about scoring so many goals against Thailand, but I never had a problem with that. You get the chance, you score. It's almost a knee-jerk reaction, and no one can complain about the confidence-building and experience credits it brings to a player, especially in an opening game. No, my problem was that the US's extravagant celebration of each goal was way out of proportion to the effort it took to get it. They were humiliating poor Thailand and reveling in it. That's cold. That's callous. I expect better of a women's team. Morgan herself writes on p85 of this very novel, "There's a mercy rule in soccer, right?" as Devin's team is being roundly beaten. How hypocritical that was.

If they'd faced a tough, seasoned, team (as they did each game once they were into the knock-out rounds where their scoring dropped precipitously from that first game and came to rely more than once on penalty goals), then celebrating like that after a score is entirely appropriate, because it's hard work scoring against a team like those, and players deserve that kind of celebratory release, but shaming a poorer team which doesn't have the resources the US team had and which isn't going to get paid the third of a million dollars that each of the US players will end up with (and that excludes any endorsements they may get) is disgraceful in my opinion and far beneath the conduct I'd expect of a team which has the status and power that the US team enjoys. It was white players beating down the brown players and loving it, and that's never a good thing.

Equality isn't only about pay (which the US women's team definitely deserves having earned actually more than the US men's team has over the last few years). It's about everyone having an equal chance. The Thai team is new to the cup and had nowhere near the experience and resources the US team had. The Argentinian team had to fight bigotry and prejudice and a complete lack of support in their struggle to have a national women's team. The US deserves equal pay and no one in their right mind would argue otherwise, but that said, the US also enjoys privilege and status which many other women's teams are still fighting desperately for. We'd be fools to forget that this is bigger than the US team. Much bigger.

But I digress! As usual! So what's with this Alex Morgan obsession with California - like it's some exotic foreign country that Devin can't get over? Could it be that Morgan herself is from California and perhaps now has a thoroughly warped view about how super-human the soccer players are and how they dress far in advance of the rest of the country? Yeah, five of the US 23-member team were native Californians, but three hailed from Georgia and two each from Arizona, New Jersey, and New York state, so whence this outlandish praise for California soccer? Bias - again! Remember this is where players were born, not necessarily where they blossomed and learned how to became the world-class players they are today.

It's nice that the cover of this novel depicted such a diversity of people: Asian, Black, and white, but if you look at photos of the USWNT, it's almost entirely white. There were only three black players on the team of 23 - and not a single Asian or Latinx player. Yes, of course they have to pick the best players, but what does it say about us if we can find the best only among white players? Whence equality there? Where is our melting pot of diversity and opportunity?

That said, the book cover doesn't remotely reflect the characters in the novel - and pink boots? Really? And the art is by a female artist who once again evidently never read the novel. The only pink mentioned in the novel is of a headband and a top. Never boots. How about a picture of real live girls - real soccer players on the cover - not models, not cartoon characters? Is that too much to ask? I guess it is from what's been roundly touted as a book mill, but more on that later.

Morgan has Devin stupidly following along with these Californians like a bleating lamb. "Mom, I must have flip-flops!" (or words to that effect) she cries after their team tryout! (Disclosure - I am biased against flip-flops. I think they're stupid, cheap, and nasty, but then I'm not the one writing a novel advocating about them! Although now, I think maybe I'll put in a couple of words about them in this novel I'm currently working on! LOL!). My point here is that once again Morgan could have made Devin stand out by making her an individual instead of a lamb, but no. She doesn't want that. Maybe she thinks individuals have no place in team sports, but if that's so I'd have to ask her "Did Megan Rapinoe get to be the figure she is today by blending in?" Hell no! Learn something from your teammates, Morgan!

There was at least one grammar issue that I recall, where Morgan apparently doesn't understand the difference between criteria and criterion (p8). The former is plural, the latter singular, and Morgan uses the wrong one. Now you can argue that this was written in first person by a twelve-year-old, so maybe it was the youngster who got it wrong and not the university-educated author who is more than twice her age, but this comes back to how you want your main character to appear, doesn't it?

Do do you want her to sound illiterate and dumb? I guess that's the choice the author of this novel leaned into. It's one of many problems with first person voice stories which is why I rail against them. Do you really want to write the novel in a way that makes it as dumb as your character might be? Because that doesn't make for great reading in my book. On the other hand, if you have a dumb character and write her in first person, but write literately, then do you betray that character and your entire story? This is why third person is nearly always the wisest choice. First person doesn't bring immediacy, it brings a complete lack of realism and dearth of suspense which overwhelms your rather desperate substitution of first person for immediacy.

So by now you must know that I did not like this story. It felt wrong, too fluffy, inauthentic, too easy, and far too predictable. Yes, they do beat their bedeviling team at the end, and it's no spoiler to say that, but that victory comes out of nothing - no sweat, no tears and certainly no blood (which is probably a good thing!). Maybe middle-grade girls will like this story, but if they do, I feel sorry for them that they settle for so little when they could have so much more. Surely this, right now, in the midst of the afterglow from the US women's victory on a world stage, is when we ought to be strongly-pushing for more and better for our girls?

All of that aside, the biggest reason for avoiding this series like the plague is that it's copyright not to Alex Morgan, but to Alex Morgan and "Full Fathom Five" which is the book mill run by businessman James Frey, which begs the question as to whether Morgan even wrote it at all. In January 2006, The Smoking Gun published an article online titled: "A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey's Fiction Addiction" alleging that James Frey simply made up large parts of his memoirs. The next month, Frey apologized for these fabrications. Full Fathom Five was the subject of an article in New York magazine: "James Frey's Fiction Factory" (November 2010) which is still available online as of this posting date. You should read it: http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/. For me, I would advise avoiding this series like the plague. I feel it does a disservice to women's soccer and women in general for that matter.

George Washington's Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade, Don Yeager

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook that was written evidently for a much younger audience than I represent. The book was read by Kilmeade, and he did it in such a strident and breathless voice that I couldn't stand to listen to it. Worse than this though, the facts were presented in such a biased and fanciful fashion that I found myself having a hard time swallowing everything he said. It felt much more like listening to florid fiction than to historical fact.

The secret six were actually known as the Culpeper ring, named after a Virginia County. They were spies who fed information out of New York City to Washington about the activities, movements, and plans of British troops in NYC. The main two members were Abraham Woodhull and Robert Townsend. The best information they got was when they laid hands on a British naval Code handbook. That was less through spying than from luck, but it served the French Navy well.

While these guys (including women) did provide other valuable information, the value of some of their activities was debatable. It's arguable that the defeat of the Brits and surrender at Yorktown did more than any spies did, and this victory was brought about as much by the French and Spanish as it was by the US, if not more so. Cornwallis could well have withdrawn rather than surrendered had the port not been very effectively blockaded by the French.

The secret six were spies for the revolution forces, which side was consistently presented as upstanding, brilliant, heroic, and fine, whereas, of course, the British were evil villains. This was exploited most obviously in the report of the British prison ship HMS jersey, which was pretty brutal, but this was war and it was in the early 1780s, when people were hardly the most civilized and no Geneva convention existed. Additionally, the revolutionaries were considered traitors, so the Brits were not very much disposed to treating them kindly. Not that Washington had many prisoners to exchange anyway, since the British captured far more US forces than the other way around. That doesn't make what happened palatable, but it does provide some context that this helter-skelter account fails to do.

Another thing this story doesn't make clear was that Washington, who could have exchanged prisoners, was disinclined to do so because he didn't want to exchange professional British soldiers for civilian volunteers and conscripts! He didn't consider it a fair exchange. How brutal was that? Remember these were the guys who were fighting for the rich folk who didn't want to pay taxes. That's what today, we call Republicans.

The rich were the guys who claimed they wanted the vote, but none of the guys fighting on the front line ever had the vote! Only about 6% of the population were eligible to vote in 1789! In short, the pretext of the revolution was bullshit, yet those who were wealthy were not the ones dying en masse on the front lines or being interned (and interred) in the HMS Jersey! How long did it take for American Indians to get the vote? For African Americans? For women? This wasn't a fight for freedom - it was a fight for the rich, and the poor paid the price on both sides. When that emancipation was truly sought, it started a civil (read not-at-all-civil) war a century later.

So my take on this is that if you're looking for an historical account, don't look here. If you're looking for an hysterical account, then this is the audiobook for you!

Diary of a Tokyo Teen by Christine Mari Inzer

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a short and fun graphic novel written by a seventeen year old who was born in Japan to a local woman and a US citizen father, so she has two passports. She migrated at a young age to the US, and this is a sweet and fun graphic documentary of her return trip a decade or so later.

It's quite idiosyncratic, obviously; she remarks upon and records the things which intrigue and amuse her, but much of it has a wider appeal than that. The author and I couldn't be more different than chalk and cheese in things like age and gender, but we do have the ex-pat thing in common, so I could see through her eyes quite well, and she expresses herself with smarts, erudition, and a nice eye for oddity and absurdity.

The book is also educational. Because she was absent from Japan for so long and having left at such an early age, although a lot of what she saw on her return had a familiarity to it, there was also a lot that was - or at least seemed - new, so we get to look at Japan very much through a visitor's eye, but this eye is softened by her familiarity with the culture. There is also culture shock with regard to how clean and neat everything is, how proud and polite the people are who serve in both fast food places and restaurants, and how curious the toilets are - among many other things!

I've never been to Japan, but I certainly would like to visit. Reading books like this help me feel a little bit like I've already visited. I commend this one as a worthy read.

Bonk by Mary Roach

Rating: WORTHY!

I get through a number of audiobooks and I'm less picky about those than print or ebooks because I have this captive time while commuting so I may as well get experimental to avoid getting completely mental, so I go out on more of a limb with audiobooks. Not anything crazy. I mean I don't try sitting on the case while driving, or hanging CDs from my mirror to catch the sunlight, but I tend to listen to a wider variety of material than I read, and I read a pretty wide variety as it is. Anyway that's my excuse for this one, which turned out to be highly entertaining with a few LOLs and belly laughs along the way.

Mary Roach has an interesting take on life, her humor dry, sly, and wry, and she puts it to full use here in this survey of studies on human sexuality with some animal variants tossed in for good measure. This is an historical survey, so it goes way back - before even Kinsey Masters Johnson, so it covers some ground and gives an interesting perspective on how white men studied female sexuality back then and the bizarre ideas they had about it. Unfortunately we're still suffering from that kind of bias even in much more recent studies of many aspects of human health and bodily function - not just sexuality which routinely exclude women for no good reason and to the detriment of our understanding, particularly of when it comes to female health.

Anyway, without going into any details, I can commend this as an interesting, educational, and worthy read.

Bad Machinery Volume 5 The Case of the Fire Inside by John Allison

Rating: WORTHY!

This was one of the last two of this series that I had not read yet, although by no means the last in chronological order. Not that that matters very much with this series, but this one was published as volume five, and was the last one I read, and it's odd to think this grew on me so quickly after I had initially not liked one of these volumes when I read it a few years back and so never pursued the series! Now I'm sorry it's over, but I do understand Allison's desire to move on and try something new. I'm just sorry I didn't like what he did next.

In this volume, the author explores Selkies - mythological seal-like creatures that inhabit the ocean, but after casting-off their sealskin cloak, appear as human - and very pretty young girls some of them are, too. Due to Lottie's discovery of one of these cloaks on the beach, and her stuffing it into one of the boys' bags, the Selkie latches onto this boy and pursues him ardently, including enrolling at his school, where she poses a threat to the established swimming champion in the school, who is also threatened by her boyfriend dating one of the girls without telling her he doesn't want to date her any more. But wait, his ex is good-looking, and a great swimmer? What's going on here? Meanwhile the Selkie's dad emerges from the ocean in search of his lost girls and is immediately assumed to be a homeless guy!

Once again I was highly amused by this and I am sorry to see the series come to an end. I commend this as a worthy read.

Bad Machinery Volume 2 The Case of the Good Boy by John Allison

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second to last I've read in this series, but the second to be published chronologically. In the story, Mildred wants to win an enchanted pencil at the visiting carnival, so she can draw a dog - which the pencil will make real, and then she can have a pet. Meanwhile toddlers are disappearing, mostly from the baby care centre, and the police don't seem to be doing much about it ("Oh, they'll turn up!"). Meanwhile some sort of creature is lurking in the forest and a crazed animal hunter is called in to track it down.

So once again the boys and the girls are coming at a mystery from two direction and destined to collide, one way or another, in the middle. There's the usual off-kilter humor, and bizarre utterances from Lottie, my favorite character, and overall the story was hilarious and very much appreciated. I fully commend it as a worthy read.

Courtney Crumrin Volume 3 In the Twilight Kingdom by Ted Naifeh

Rating: WORTHY!

I didn't realize when I first picked this one up on spec from the library that it's volume three in an apparently disjointed series of seven. It was readable as a standalone though, if you don't mind missing the backstory - which really doesn't seem to have impacted my grasp of this volume. By the time I'd completed half of it and found it engaging, I decided I might go back and see if the library has any previous volumes, and I still feel that way despite the story slowing down rather in the second half and not really having an ending.

Courtney is a young witch with a less than accommodating attitude, and I liked her as a character. She's powerful and feared, but for all that she seems to be very restrained with her practicing her witchery. She tries to warn her teacher at this witch school not to conduct this experimental spell, but the teacher doesn't listen, and when they realize the spell won't wear-off this poor kid, as the teacher had thought it would, Courtney has to step-up and try to fix it. The teacher has to learn a second lesson though, before she realizes she ought to seriously listen to Courtney's advice.

My problem in the second half was that Cortney went into the goblin lands to try to fix this bad spell, yet there was nothing she did there which seemed to lead to a solution, and nearly all her time there was spent fixing a second gaff by her teacher. One wonders why Courtney isn't teaching this class.

The thing is that by the end of the story, the boy still wasn't 'fixed'. I didn't understand that, and it doesn't appear that this story is taken up on any later volume, so I have to declare a certain amount of dissatisfaction with that regardless of how much I had enjoyed this to begin with. It's with some mixed feelings that I still consider this particular volume a worthy read therefore. It was interesting and different, and the black and white line art was good, but I guess I'll have to read another one to decide how I feel about the series as a whole.

I survived the Joplin Tornado by Lauren Tarshis

Rating: WORTHY!

I don't know what made an old woman think she could write a novel about a little kid surviving a tornado but...I'M JOKING! Lauren Tarshis isn't old and even if she were it wouldn't matter. I don't subscribe to the 'write what you know' nonsense. The rule ought to be 'write what you can make a good story out of' (or maybe, in some cases, 'write what you can get away with', but let's not go there), and this author has almost made a career out of writing this "I survived" series. I say 'almost' because she's written other stuff and novel writing isn't all she does.

She started this series though, in 2010 with I Survived the Titanic (start big, right? Or write...), and has published a score or so of these. All these stories are based on real historical events, not all of them natural - or even human-caused - disasters, this particular one has its roots in the EF5 tornado which slammed Joplin, Missouri on Sunday, May 22, 2011. In addition to scores of deaths. It did almost three billion dollars in damage.

This was a mutant tornado, and as such was a good one to dramatize in this fiction based on the real disaster. I listened to the audiobook, and the main character is an eleven-year-old boy named Dex, whose father went to college with a guy who now makes a career out of chasing tornadoes and talking about them on his TV show, which is of course mandatory watching for Dex and his father. Why not his mother, I have no idea. Dex also has an older brother who is in the Navy Seals. I don't know why that was included because it's irrelevant to what happens in the story. His brother could have been a criminal or a younger brother, or a school teacher or anything. It made no difference to events.

Dex meets the tornado chaser by accident - literally, and gets invited to go chasing the next morning. They end up being caught in this monster tornado that precipitated rapidly and right outside Joplin. It was a cell of several tornadoes inside a shield of rain that was almost a mile across, and it hit Joplin right on, carving a path through there before heading off into the countryside and finally dissipating.

Dex's story is really very short, and the action in it is pretty violent at times, so you might want to exercise caution in who you let read this, but for most boys in middle grade it would probably be a worthy read. I don't know if girls would be likely to get into it in the same way, but maybe a few would. Certainly they ought to consider the educational value. It's read in fine style by Thérèse Plummer, and afterwards the author talks about the real tornado, how it formed, and the damage it did, so this makes for a really educational work. This isn't a series that I'm interested in pursuing, but maybe a child of appropriate age would, and I commend it as a worthy listen!

Sali and the Five Kingdoms by Oumar Dieng

Rating: WARTY!

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

I made it a third of the way through this before giving up due to the story moving too slowly, paradoxically jumping abruptly from one thing to another, and trying to be far too mysterious. It didn't feel very well-written to me. There was little descriptive writing, and none of the characters seemed inclined to use contractions: it was all "I am" and "you are" - nobody seemed able to say "I'm" and "you're" which gave a very stilted tone to the novel. I quit reading this when a 'mineral which isn't on the periodic table' was mentioned.

The fact is that there can't be anything that's not on the periodic table, which contains every element (some of which, such as manganese, for example are called minerals). Even elements we have not yet discovered are on the table with a holding space for their proper place when they're officially discovered and labeled. That's why it's called periodic, because it's predictable. We know where the undiscovered elements will appear on the table, and what their properties are likely to be. Most of the undiscovered ones are so unstable they don't exist in nature except for split fractions of a second in, for example, nuclear reactions. They're highly radioactive and would do no living thing any good. There's a potential 'island of stability' where there is thought to be a spot for a very heavy stable element around 184 neutrons in size. These have not yet been discovered or created in the lab, but they're not complete mysteries, so I don't buy this 'not on the table' nonsense and I don't approve of misleading young people on this score either.

In addition to this, Sali seems to live in complete isolation from the world, having zero friends despite being part of a Tae Kwon Do dojang (that's the Korean version of a dojo) and she seemed very moody and hair-trigger, even more so than you might imagine given what she's been through. The basic story is that Sali saw her mother quite literally disappear before her eyes when she was young, and thirteen years later, no sign of her mother has been found. Sali is a graduate (I guess from college - the story jumped so fast into it that it was hard to tell, which was another problem), and is starting an internship. Younger readers may enjoy it, but it's hard to tell who the book is aimed at because the main character, who unfortunately tells the story in first person, is (apparently) a college grad starting work, whereas the tone of the book is much more middle grade.

Additionally, the setting of the book is futuristic, but there's nothing in the opening chapter which reveals this, so when Sali gets into her car and uses this way-advanced heads-up display to navigate to a rendezvous, it really stood out starkly against the low-tech background the story had been residing in up to that point. It was quite a jolt. I let that slide, but as these minor hiccups kept coming, they became collectively too big of a hiccup to enjoy the story after quite a short time, and like I said, I gave up about a third the way in due to lack of interest in pursuing this. I'm not a fan of first person to begin with since it nearly always seems so very unrealistic, but that wasn't really the issue here, so that was a pleasant surprise!

But there were many problems. At one point there was this seemingly random information tossed into story about the discovery of a hive of wild bees - this supposedly 39 years after bees had become extinct. Note that 39 years is a heavy foreshadowing of three times thirteen - the number of years since Sali's mom disappeared, but that wasn't the problem. The problem here is that there's absolutely no talk of the issues it would cause if bees actually did disappear. Bees pollinate 70% of the crops that feed 90% of the world! You can't have bees disappear for almost forty years and there be no impact on society, yet this is how this story read. Again, unrealistic - serving further to isolate Sali and her story from the real world (that is, the real world as depicted in this story).

One problem for me was the disjointed writing style - with large jumps between one event and another with little or no indication of the time elapsed. When this happens between chapters, it's not so bad, but when it happens between one paragraph and the next with no effort to clue the reader in to the passage of time, it's confusing or worse, annoying, and this happened after Sali had foolishly gone to a rendezvous after some guy left a note on her car. Fortunately the rendezvous is in a public place and Sali has some martial arts skills, but it's not a good idea to let young readers think it's okay to meet a stranger, especially not when, as I write this, a young woman's body was found in a canyon after she met someone in Utah who evidently did not have her best interests at heart. Sali should have at the very least told someone what she was up to.

There were two problems with her meeting this guy. The first is that while the guy she meets actually does have information about her mother, as usual, it's very vague. He palms her off with advice to ask her father, and despite his having a folder with some extensive documentation in it, he never shares that with her, which begs the question as to why he's carrying it around in the first place. I'm not a fan at all of a writing style which creates an artificial 'mystery' by withholding information from the reader (and the main character) for no good reason at all. It makes the story seem amateur and fake, like bad fanfic.

The second problem is that Sali seems far too lax in pursuing this new information with her father. The story tells us it's several days after she met this guy Simon before she calls her father about it, which seemed unrealistic given how much she still suffers from her mother's abrupt and dramatic disappearance. You'd think she'd want to pursue it immediately and we're given no reason why she doesn't. More realistically, she would have called her dad the same night and the hell with waking him up, but this isn't the only weird jump in time. The very next sentence after she hangs up the call with dad begins, "It had been a few weeks since I had met with Simon Freitz". Just like that! There's no new chapter, no section symbol to indicate a gap.

Instead, there's one short paragraph where she relates that she's still angry with her dad, and then in the very next paragraph after that, her dad is arriving with her grandpa in his truck! He's back from London and there's no preamble or heads up, which could have been related in that previous paragraph. It's just so disjointed! This kind of thing turned me off this story pretty quickly.

Oumar Dieng motivational speaker, storyteller, author and life coach, and while I wish him all the best in his career, I can't commend this one as a worthy read.

Parable of the Sower A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Octavia E Butler by John Jennings, Damian Duffy

Rating: WARTY!

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

Having enjoyed a biography on Octavia Butler about three years ago, I've been intending to look up some of her work ever since, but for one reason or another never got around to it, so when this one came up for consideration on Net Galley, I jumped at the chance. It's a graphic novel, so I figured it would be a relatively quick read, and the fact that this version is 276 pages long didn't daunt me, even though the print book itself is only about 75 pages longer! Unfortunately, it didn't work for me.

The first and most obvious problem was the unfinished nature graphics. An understandably huge part of a graphic novel is the graphics, but these looked like the artist had rough-sketched the images and then forgot to complete them, and no colorist ever came along to notice, The result is that every page is rough-sketched - as in, for example, there are no faces on many of the characters, or the face has the cross marking showing where the face center line and the eyes will be, or the entire panel has several overlaid outlines for characters and scenery, like it was rough-sketched out and then never cleaned up!

Initially, I had no idea if this was intentional, or if the comic is still a work in progress. Usually, if that's the case, there's something to indicate that, and at least a few of the panels are done to completion. After a search I did find a small note on one page indicating that it was a work in progress and that it's a combination of sketches, inks, and final art, but all of the art was in exactly the same state with no finished color panels anywhere to be seen. This isn't intended to be published until next January, so why not simply wait until more of it is done and send it out for review later - when we can see what the finished product will be like?! I've never seen a comic book sent out for review in this state. Never.

If that was the only problem, that would be one thing, but for me the story itself wasn't entertaining and wasn't very smart in places either. Set in the mid 2020's, the story focuses on a community in which resides Lauren Oya Olamina (Loo? Being originally from Britain, I couldn't take her seriously with those initials, but I let that slide). Lauren starts her own religion which sounds more like a real cult in that it advocates that humans - with no resources and no plan - leave Earth and settle on some other planet. Why that would make more sense than simply using the exorbitant cost of such a space flight to fix Earth seems to have been ignored, but since I haven't read that far (and Butler never did write that third part of what was intended to be a trilogy), it's hard to say. At this point I have no plans to read any further than the fifty percent of this that I made it through!

I couldn't tell from the rough drawings (which went all the way through the book - I skimmed to check) if this was an entirely African American or a mixed community. I assume it was mixed because there seems to have been an issue later with outside people they encounter not deeming mixed-race couples to be kosher, although again how that back-sliding occurred, I can't say. Nor can I tell who the people were who were breaking in - they were just outsiders, described vaguely as homeless, which begs the question as to why this community had so little charity. I know they didn't have much for themselves, but they did all right, yet never once did they seem to feel the need to try and help any of the outsiders who were clearly desperate enough to break in.

The biggest problem for me was how idiotic these people seemed to be inside the community. Despite continually harping on the danger posed by outsiders, it's only after people start breaking in and stealing that this ever-present threat of people breaking-in and stealing becomes an action item on their agenda! They start minimal patrols of two people, and even then these patrols don't use the guns they're issued. What's the point of the guns and all the target practice exactly, if you're never going to fire them, not even in warning?!

So yes, this community struck me as being exceedingly dumb. Apparently they have several keys to the gate, but they seem as lax in keeping an eye on the keys as Star Trek crews typically are in keeping an eye on the shuttle bay, leading to shuttles being routinely purloined. So no one keeps an eye on those keys either, and it really doesn't matter anyway because people can clearly get in without them. What happens eventually (so I understand, although I didn't read that far) is that the community predictably fails, and a hoard of refugees start a trek to the north, where conditions are apparently better. Why it took so long, I do not know!

This novel was written in the nineties and while Butler got climate change correct, she somehow seemed to think that everything: not just the environment, but the government, the military, the police, and whatever, would fail catastrophically within a quarter century. The military and government are never mentioned - not in the fifty percent of this that I could stand to read. The police are mentioned as a private organization which it's not worth the time and cost to call on anyway. For me the author failed to show how all of this could remotely come about in so short a time. We're just left with the unsupported claim that it did, and this is how things are now in this story. I need a little bit more depth for my fiction than this offered.

Consequently I cannot commend this as a worthy read, and especially not with such scrappy graphics and without even a page or two of samples of the finished product. This really ought to have been held back a month or two longer so that some pages at least could have been finished.

My Very First Book of Colors by Eric Carle

Rating: WORTHY!

I think author Carle is being a bit arrogant in assuming this will be your child's very first book of colors, but maybe it will be! This was one of two young children's learning books that I thought was inventive and cute. They consist of solid, hard-wearing pages that are easily wiped clean, and which are split into top and bottom halves. In this one, the top contained a swatch of color (not a real swatch - a printed one, and it didn't tell time), the bottom contained pictures that largely matched the colors, but the top and bottom for each single page did not match, so it's a detective game which encourages a child to explore and find the matching color. The colors are not solid colors, and contain patterns within them, so even if your child is color-challenged it occurs to me that they may still be able to match one with the other, but that's merely a surmise. There are not that many pages, so it's not a huge challenge, but it's enough to get a young mind working, and I commend this as a worthy read.

My Very First Book of Shapes by Eric Carle

Rating: WORTHY!

I think author Carle is being way optimistic in assuming this will be your child's very first book of shapes, but maybe it will be! This was one of two young children's learning books that I thought was inventive and cute. This one consists of solid, hard-wearing pages that are easily wiped clean, and which are split into top and bottom halves. The top halves contain silhouette shapes; the bottom, pictures that match the shapes, but the top and bottom for each single page do not match, so it's a detective game which encourages a child to explore and find the matching shape. There are not that many pages, so it's not a huge challenge, but it's enough to get a young mind working, and I commend this as a worthy read.

Giant Days Not on the Test Edition by John Allison, Lissa Treiman, Max Sarin, Whitney Cogar

Rating: WARTY!

I 'graduated' to this from the Bad Machinery graphic novels which I loved, but I was very disappointed in this one. Part of the problem is that Allison has sold out to American audiences, I think. I have to say that I can't get with a comic that has the same rhythm as a pop song. The format of this one mirrored US sitcoms which are lousy at best: one-liner, canned laugh, one liner, canned laugh, two one liners, extended canned laugh, repeat without rinsing.

The premise is that of three female friends at college (just like the three female friends at high school): Daisy Wooten, Esther de Groot, and Susan Ptolemy. I thought Esther was going to be like Charlotte Grote (especially given the name!) in the Bad Machinery comics but she wasn't a patch on Lottie. None of these characters was as interesting as the other girls, and the situations were so predictable, and not very inventive.

The worst part about it though was that pretty much the entire focus of this was not on the girls as it had been in Bad Machinery, but on the girls in relation to boys, which made them far less self-motivated and interesting, and turned the whole thing into a YA novel. I have precious little respect for most YA output. So in short, this was a fail for me and I have no intention of reading any more of this series. It's time to find something completely new.

Bad Machinery Volume 7 The Case of the Forked Road by John Allison

Rating: WORTHY!

Here I go reviewing the last volume before I've read them all. The others are on the way. This one, surprisingly, was actually in a regular comic book format - but slightly smaller. This made for easy reading, but disguised the fact that it was considerably shorter than the others I've read. Whether this was just because it's the closing volume, or this one was written for the print version rather than as a web comic, I do not know.

The story was just about the girls, too - which is fine with me because they've been typically far more interesting than the boys who barely were featured in this story. And by that I mean they were in the story hardly at all - not that they were in the story without any clothes on.

So Charlotte Grote, Mildred Haversham, and Shauna Wickle are on the case - once they discover what the case is, and in this case it's the curious wormhole in a cabinet in the chemistry lab at school, which they go through back to 1960, only to return and discover that the present is screwed-up, so naturally they have to go back and fix it now. Or then. Whatevs.

You know they're still going to screw something up, right?

I loved this story. It might be my favorite, but I still have volumes two and five to go, so we'll see. Meanwhile this gets a worthy!

Painting Masterclass by Susie Hodge

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Subtitled "Creative Techniques of 100 Great Artists" this book of almost 300 pages does precisely what it promises, and explores well-known (and lesser-known) works by artists both classically famous and bubbling under. In each case a painting is depicted and discussed, including the paints used, the techniques employed, and imparting some information about the artist as well. Susie Hodge has an MA in Art History from Birkbeck, University of London, and has has written over 100 books not only on the topic of art.

If I have a complaint - and notwithstanding that it may seem churlish to complain about a book that has commendably assembled five-score masterpieces for our perusal and education - it would be that once again we're faced with something designed for a print version and therefore being inadequately represented in ebook format. Too many of these paintings are unfortunately - some might say scandalously - split across two pages which is never - ever - a good thing. In the ebook version it's worse, because there is a thick gray line down anything that dares to be in landscape orientation. Additionally, the book has a glossary and an index, but again the index is for the print version, and is not 'clickable' to navigate in the ebook.

If I have praises, I have too many to list here in a review that's already yeay long, but the inclusion of so many female painters is definitely praiseworthy. The history of arts isn't that of white men, but for all that's written about it, you can be excused for being bamboozled into thinking it is. You can go back as far as you like - even to cave paintings (which get some coverage in the introduction), and it seems that the thrust (the male thrust, of course) is to exclude women as creators - like the caves were solely painted by men when we have no idea who the artists actually were. This book commendably does a lot to redress that sorry imbalance (and no, Joan Miró isn't female) and is the better for it.

After some fifty pages of material that is both introductory and educational, including a history of art (not quite the same as art history!), the book is divided into seven main sections, each with a dozen or so artists representative of that category:

• Nudes
  I'm not sure why nudes get to be first. Sounds like naked aggression to me, but here we go (and I promise not to make fun of artist names or painting titles):
  
  • Titian - Venus of Urbino
  • Jacopo Tintoretto - The Origin of the Milky Way
  • François Boucher - The Triumph of Venus
  • Francisco Goya - Nude Maja
  • Gustave Gourbet - Sleeping Nude
  • Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - The Turkish Bath
  • Gustave Caillebotte - Man at his Bath
  • Georges Seurat - Models
  • Edvard Munch - Madonna
  • Paul Gaugin - Nevermore
  • Paula Modersohn-Becker - Self Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary
  • Gustave Klimt - Danaë
  • Amedeo Modigliani - Red Nude
  • Suzanne Valadon - Reclining Nude
  • Jenny Saville - Branded
  • Cecily Brown - Two Figures on a Landscape
• Figures
  Figures excludes portraits, which appear in 'heads'!
  
  • Michelangelo Buonarotti - The Delphic Sybil
  • Sofonisba Anguissola - The Chess Game
  • Paolo Veronese - The Wedding Feast at Cana
  • Pieter Breugel the Elder - Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
  • El Greco - Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple
  • Caravaggio - Deposition from the Cross
  • Artemisia Gentileschi - Judith Beheading Holfernes
  • Frans Hals - The Laughing Cavlier
  • Diego Velázquez - Las Meninas
  • Rembrandt Van Rijn - The Jewish Bride
  • Jacques-Louis David - The Oath of the Horatii
  • Édouard Manet - Luncheon on the Grass
  • Honoré Daumier - Third Class Carriage
  • Edgar Degas - The Ballet Class
  • Berthe Morisot - The Cradle
  • Eva Gonzalès - Nanny and Child
  • Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - At the Moulin Rouge, the Dance
  • Egon Schiele - Seated Woman with Bent Knee
  • Balthus - The Card Game
  • Richard Diebenkorn - Coffee
  • Peter Doig - Two Trees
  That cavalier really isn't laughing, so I feel that portrait name has been treated rather...cavlierly. Also the Jewish bride wasn't so named by Rembrandt. Luncheon on the Grass was rather controversially imitated for an album cover by the new wave band Bow Wow Wow in the early eighties.
  
• Landscape
  These are the gray divider line pictures
  
  • Claude Lorrain - An Artist Studying from Nature
  • John Constable - The Hay Wain
  • Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - The Bridge at Narni, Near Rome
  • Caspar David Friedrich - Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds
  • JMW Turner - The Red Rigi
  • Jean-François Millet - Haystacks: Autumn
  • Oskar Kokoschka - Tre Croci Dolomite Landscape
  • Paul Klee - Hammamet with its Mosque
  • Claude Monet - Water Lilies
  • Edward Hopper - Haskell's House
  • Emil Nolde - Distant Marshland with Farmhouses
  • Frank Auerbach - Primrose Hill Study Autumn Evening
  • Julie Mehretu - Retopistics a Renegade Excavation
  • Hurvin Anderson - Untitled (Red Flags)
  Constable's painting is known as The Hay Wain but it wasn't originally named that by him. His less memorable name for it was 'Landscape: Noon'! It was subject to minor vandalism in 2013 in the museum where it's kept, but no lasting damage was done. there is a beautifully-rendered rose on the Klee page which to me far outshines the main painting. Nolde's watercolor is equuisite and Anderson's untitled beach scene is equally entrancing.
  
• Still Life
  Isn't all painting still life, ultimately? LOL! Just kidding.
  
  • Floris van Dyck - Still Life with Fruit, Nuts, and Cheese
  • Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin - Still Life with Peaches, a Silver Goblet, Grapes, and Walnuts
  • Henri Fantin-Latour - Flowers and Fruit
  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Onions
  • Paul Cézanne - Still life with Cherries and Peaches
  • Georges Braque - Violin and Palette
  • Juan Gris - Grapes
  • Fernand Léger - Still Life with a Beer Mug
  • Georgio Morandi - Still Life
  • Georgia O'Keeffe - Jimson Weed White Flower No 1
  Gris's painting was curiously not done as a Grisaille. Go figure! Not sure how still a life with an empty beer mug would be, especially if it was the artist who drained it, but moving along.... Georgia O'Keeffe's painting is wonderful.
  
• Heads
  Portraits.
  
  • Leonardo da Vinci - Mona Lisa
  • Raphael - Madonna in the Meadow
  • Hans Holbein the Younger - Jane Seymour
  • Johannes Vermeer - Girl with a Pearl Earring
  • Adélaïde Labille-Guiard - Self-Portrait with Two Pupils
  • Mary Cassatt - Portrait of the Artist
  • Piere Bonnard - Self-Portrait
  • Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
  • Eugène Carrière - Self-Portrait
  • André Derain - Portrait of Henri Matisse
  • Henri Matisse - Portrait of Derain
  • Amrita Sher-Gill - Hungarian Gypsy Girl
  • Pablo Picasso - Weeping Woman
  • Alberto Giacometti - Anette
  • Marlene Dumas - Amy Winehouse (Amy Blue)
  Mona Lisa is never described as The Laughing Lisa. I rest my case.... I have to say I am not convinced there was any pearl earring here. It seems to me, given the circumstances, that it was more likely that it was some sort of shiny metal - perhaps silver if it was the daughter of Vermeer's sponsor. No one knows what Vermeer titled it, but it became known as the girl with a turban until relatively recently when it became rather poetically known as "Girl with a Pearl." If you look at Vermeers featuring girls actually wearing pearls they look quite different from this one, but you pays your money and you takes your art. These were all created before the term 'selfie' came into use, so the much more formal 'self-portrait was a common title. I love the reciprocity of the Derain and Matisse works! Weeping woman was probably captured after Picasso jilted her for another woman, and 'Anette' looks like something out of a horror movie, so disturbing is it.
  
• Fantasy
  This was an unexpected, but welcome inclusion.
  
  • Sandro Botticelli - The Birth of Venus
  • Peter Paul Rubens - Minerva Protects Pax from Mars
  • Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - The Finding of Moses
  • Eugène Delacroix - The Death of Sardanapalus
  • Rosa Bonheur - Highland Raid
  • Ilya Repin - Sadko and the Underwater Kingdom
  • Edward Burne-Jones - The Doom Fulfilled
  • Marc Chagall - I and the Village
  • Francis Picabia - Dances at the Spring
  • Leonora Carrington - Self-Portrait
  • Frida Kahlo - The Two Fridas
  • Howard Hodgkin - Robyn Denny and Katherine Reid
  • Philip Guston - The Street
  • Paula Rego - The Dance
  Repin's painting is remarkable, but I think that the Best Title Award has to go to Burne-Jones's painting. It's really hard to tell if Picabia's spring is a season, a water source, or even...a bedspring.
  
• Abstraction
  I wish I could be more specific about this section but....
  
  • Wassily Kandinsky - Composition 7
  • Hannah Höch - Mechanical Garden
  • Joan Miró - The Poetess
  • Jackson Pollack - Autumn Rhythm (No 30)
  • Nicolas de Staël - Agrigente
  • Hans Hofmann - The Golden Wall
  • Helen Frankenthaler - The Bay
  • Gerhard Richter - Abstraktes Bild
  • Cy Twombly - Untitled (Bacchus)
  • Gillian Ayres - Suns of Seven Circles Shine

Long list! But worth it. The paintings - some you may love, others you may hate - say a lot and are well-worth seeing, as is reading the breakdown of how they were composed, and what sort of paints and materials were used in their creation. This book is as remarkable as the paintings and I commend it as a worthy read for any artist or anyone interested in art.

Desert Exile by Yoshiko Uchida

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a depressing read, but never was there a better time since this travesty took place than now to read this account of one woman's experiences in the concentration camps set up by the racist hypocrite Franklin "Detain them" Roosevelt to intern Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Most of the well over 100,000 people imprisoned behind barbed wire were American citizens.

The constitution meant nothing to a clueless and panicked government back then. These people were incarcerated in shoddy, ill-finished - if even finished - barracks and everything they owned which they could not carry with them and which they could not entrust to reliable friends, was gone when they were finally set free two or three years later. They were released into destitution and had to start over from scratch; then this same government had the nerve to ask the young men they'd detained to show their loyalty by signing-up for the same military which had pointed machine guns at them for the previous few years.

Yoshiko Uchida was merely one of these, but that doesn't make her personal story less important. She, her sister, and her mom and dad were given ten days notice that they had to leave for a camp taking only what they could carry. The camp was a racetrack and they were 'housed' in the horse stables - a family of four in a large horse stall stinking of manure with no privacy and barely any facilities. Later they were moved to a specially-constructed - well half-constructed - camp in the middle of the Utah desert.

It was a couple of months before they got sheetrock installed inside their 'apartment' to keep the desert wind and the chalky desert sand out of their 'home'. It took equally long to get their stove installed - which until then had been a hole in the roof where the desert sand and chill got in. The list of abuses continues not only back then, but also today. Like I said it's a depressing but necessary read at a time when this government is doing the same thing to illegal immigrants - using euphemisms to describe the concentration camps. You don't make America great again by treating humans beings like cattle, and apparently that's a lesson we have a really hard time intern-alizing.

I commend this book as an important and worthy read.

101 More Mixed Media Techniques by Cherril Doty, Heather Greenwood, Monica Moody, Marsh Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I'm not the kind fo reviewer who gets a print version to review, which is fine, but it does mean I get some slightly-askew perspectives on a lot of books, and the thing that caught my eye immediately with this one was the table of content. It told me that this book is designed as a print book with no thought given to electronic format readers because there is no click option to go to a specific part of the book from the content nor to return to the content, unfortunately, although I guess you can always use the search function if you know what you're searching for. That aside it was well laid out and organized.

The book opens with a word or two on materials and supplies, and then quickly launches into the various sections, which cover borders and edges; embossing and casting; drips, drops, and sprays; aging and antiquing; pens, pencils and Pastels; yarn and string; fabric and fibers; using metals; resists and masking; alcohol inks; watercolor monotypes, pyrography; washi tape; alternative surfaces; spray inks; ephemera; and finally gelatos - and I'm guessing that's not desert!

As you might guess from this, I'm not a professional artist or any kind of artist really, but I love to learn, and I learned a lot from this, including some new terms/techniques I'd never encountered before despite reading a lot of art books! Each of the above sections is broken-down into actual techniques for achieving the required effects. For example, borders and edges covers such techniques as cut, torn, and colored edges; burned edges and sharp borders; colored border effects; and applied borders.

Each section is subdivided this way with a simple, but detailed path working towards the desired outcome with step-by-step instructions augmented by photographs. For example, the section on embossing covers not only embossing by hand, but also by vehicle - yes, setting up your materials in front of the vehicle tire and driving over it to create the emboss. This section also includes making your own pulp paper, creating molds and using found objects. The section on aging and antiquing employs several methods, including recycling teabags. This is something soccer player Arrogant Alex would not be able to appreciate, I suspect!

This isn't just about method and technique - it's fundamentally about art, and some of the art work including as examples here is quite remarkable regardless of what technique was used to produce it. The picture on the tea bag antiquing page is really quite outstanding, for example, as is the ocean and beach in the section on pastels, the rose in the 3D fabric effects section, the bird and the butterfly in the candy foil accents section, the chicken in the wax-resists section, the two pictures in the cling-wrap effects, the amazing image in the using yupo section (plus now I know what yupo is!). The stag and the butterfly in the pyrography section are noteworthy. I'm not a big fan of 'day of the dead' style art, but if you are, you'll no doubt love the decorated 'coffin' in the 'burn outside the box' section.

And on that score, if this book does nothing else for you, it will unquestionably get you out of any rut you might be in, inspiring you to try something new and experiment more. Washi tape, for example, is something I learned of only very recently, and the section here on it is short, but it contains four different items on the uses of this tape. Alternative surfaces is another out-of-box experience section, covering the ABC's: acrylic, burlap, clay as well as fabric, styrofoam, wood, muslin, and glass - always a fun medium to explore in art. A word about the flammability (especially in a paint environment) and non-biodegradability of styrofoam would have been appreciated. It's a nasty material.

So overall, the book is comprehensive and really helpful. It covers a lot of ground in relatively simple steps, and will no doubt make a major contribution to any artist who wants to stretch themselves or improve on techniques they may already possess. I commend it as a worthy and education read.

Show Me Cool Magic by Jake Banfield

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a fun book in the end. it got off to a bit of a slow start for me when I realized that almost half of the book was taken up with information about staging a magic act rather than magic tricks. I started to wonder how many tricks there could be in the remaining few pages at this rate, but in the end there was a bunch of them, and while many of them are really for a young performer, and one of them was the same card trick twice, just done in a slightly different way, some of them are quite sneaky and sophisticated, so overall, I think this is a winner.

The tricks are varied and are explained by means of written instructions augmented by photographs, so in general it's clear what's happening. The trick section of the book opens with a discussion of basics covering card, coin, and 'mind reading' as well as magician's tools and troubleshooting - always good to have handy! It then lays out the tricks in three sections: openers, middles, and finales. Good to be organized!

The tricks themselves are fun. The openers include producing four aces out of a shuffled pack, reading your subject's pulse (not really - that's the illusion!), a body illusion, a vanishing pen - a neat and simple trick which is relatively easy to do with little practice. Once you've mastered that, you can also master the cut and restored shoelace trick! There is a total of ten tricks in the 'openers' section.

In the 'middles' are eleven more tricks, including the lie detector(!), jumping rings, stacked kings, pencil through a banknote, and how to make a coin appear to enter a sealed drink can! Yes, it can be done with some practice and trickery! 'Finales' brings a further nine tricks, including prediction and the always amazing cup-and-ball trick, with a surprise! In short, there is some thirty tricks here, ranging from simple, but effective, to rather more complex, but nothing that a willing child cannot do with some dedication and lots of practice. That's the real secret here: practice until you're confident, and once you master one trick, others will come a lot easier.

It doesn't matter whether you're planning on putting on a 'professional show' or you just want to learn some neat tricks to impress your friends and family, there is something here for all occasions. It's all about misdirection and illusion, and with some reading and practice, you can emulate the professionals. I commend this as a fun, worthy, and education read!

Play, Make, Create, A Process-Art Handbook by Meri Cherry

Rating: WORTHY!

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

It's very rare for me to be disappointed by a crafts or arts book from Quarto Publishing Group, and this one is yet another winner, full of fun, color, adventure and exploration. And all this from simple ingredients. The book covers painting and crafts projects as well as out-and-out fun projects such as making your own play dough, and your own slime!

An author with the most amazing of names - Meri Cherry - brings over forty projects - she calls them invitations, because really that's what they are: invitations for younger children (and likely older ones as well) to indulge in process art. What is that exactly? The author explains, but in short it really means the point of these projects isn't the destination; it's the journey - the learning of self-sufficiency, the growing of confidence, the freedom of exploration, and the joy of creativity.

The projects include collage, salt painting, self portraits int he mirror, covering a picture with clear plastic and paining on top of that to augment the original image, drawing with eyes closed, creating 'artist trading cards', and oobleck. Yeah, that one caught me by surprise because I'd never heard it called that before and I'm not a fan of Dr Seuss. The technical term for it is a non-Newtonian fluid, which is how I know it, but oobleck works better with kids! The thing is this term was introduced before it was defined (with a recipe!) on page 40, so I was lost for a while on that one!

That aside, the book was amazing, fun, and inventive, with internal links to things that are referenced in the text. These links never have a link back to where you were, unfortunately, but my app has a feature which allows you to return to the original page after a jump like that. The problem is that Bluefire reader - an app I normally swear by for reading ebooks, got into trouble when I reached page forty - I think it was.

It wouldn't swipe past there for love or money (I tried both!) and even when I slid the little bar at the bottom of the screen, the image wouldn't switch to the next page. I don't know what that was all about. I was able to download the ARC to Adobe Digital Editions and finish reading it in there, fortunately. Just FYI! I'm not the kind of reviewer who merits a print book, which is fine with me, but it does occasionally lead to technical difficulties!

The book covers a large variety of projects, including ice sculpture (after a fashion - no chain saws involved!), volcanic eruptions, potions, and crazy contraptions in addition to a bunch of regular art ideas, so no matter what your charge is into, this book doubtlessly has a bunch of things that will interest them. I commend it as fun, educational, and confidence-building. The book even includes tips about clean up (or avoiding it by staying clean, which is even better), so what's not to like?!

When We Became Humans by Michael Bright, Hannah Bailey

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Erratum:
On the introductory page What's a Human?' - in the section on hominins, the text reads, "Humans and are closest relatives are called hominins" I suspect it should read, 'our' closest relatives.

Written well by Bright and illustrated nicely by Bailey, this book tells of the evolution of humans over 65 million years - and yes, that's when the first mammals date back to! People often say that it was only the destruction of the dinosaurs in the penultimate extinction event (we're going through the ultimate one right now) that 'allowed' mammals to evolve to become today's dominant class of living things (aside from bacteria and viruses, that is. And beetles! LOL!).

I'm not sure I buy that. Dinosaurs, in one form or another date back to some quarter billion years ago, and they didn't start to become dominant themselves until a major extinction event from which they profited, in much the same way we profited. But could mammals have become dominant if Dinosaurs had not died out? I think they could, but there isn't any way to really know! perhaps a more interesting questions is: would humans ever have evolved if dinosaurs had not died out?

This books isn't about speculation though - it's about what actually happened as testified to by the abundant evidence we have for primate and human evolution from fossils, from genetics, and from other sources. This books starts tracing that lineage from the earliest mammals such as Purgatorius (sounds like a Roman gladiator, right?!) to Archicebus, to Aegyptopithecus. Here's a tip - any complicated fossil name like that which ends in 'pithecus' - that means it was some sort of ape or monkey. This one - the fossil of it, that is, was first found in Egypt, hence the start of the name.

A couple of others were Proconsul and Pierolapithecus. Yeah - not all names follow the same rules! Proconsul was a monkey but it cheated a bit because there was an ape in London zoo when it was discovered, that was named Consul, so this was named to indicate it came earlier than modern apes. Duhh!

In language suitable for younger children, the book explains clearly not only what we know, but how we know what we know. Evidence from anatomy, from old DNA, from comparing skeletons, and even from studying modern DNA and how modern organisms are related, can reveal a lot, when you know what you're looking for and have a competent scientific understanding. Those without such an education will draw false conclusions and even make things up. Those people are not scientists, and don't know what they're talking about. Stick with a solid 150 or so years of evolutionary science, a steadily mounting trail of reliable evidence, and a solid track record, and you won't go wrong!

Next up comes the earliest precursors of modern humans such as Australopithecus - there it is again. You now know the pithecus part, but what of the Australo-? Well, what sounds like that? Australia! That doesn't mean it was found in Australia, but that word - that prefix, means of the south. Australia's in the south and this specimen was found in the south - but of Africa. Ah you ask, so why isn't it called Africanus? Well, there is actually one called Africanus! Can't use the same name twice!

The names kept on coming. At one point there was almost no fossil evidence for human evolution; now, scientists are finding it regularly as they learn more about where to look. The book discusses these findings, including what these primitive people ate (and yes, by this point they were more like people than like apes), where they lived, and how they worked with tools.

The scientist sho study these things have found evidence of rock shelters where primitive humans lived the fires they made, and the tools they created. They even named one species 'handyman' - Homo for 'human' and 'habilis' for handy - that is, they were good with their hands. The name is often shortened to H. habilis - the first part always with a capital letter, the second part always lower case. They weren't handy because they lived close by and could come over and fix something for you at short notice! Once the 'H's started showing up, many more were found and this book does a great job of laying out the story, and illustrating how they might have looked - remember we have only the skeletons, so we have to kind of guess how they looked, and one guess is as good as another!

H. heildebergensis and the Neanderthals are discussed next, the mysterious Denisovans, and even the 'hobbit' people - H. floresiensis! But you know what? All of these have disappeared, leaving humans: H. sapiens, as the sole surviving member of our genus (the genus is the first bit, the H, the species is the second bit, the sapiens. If there's a third bit, its a sub-species. All modern humans, no matter whether they look exactly like you or a bit different, no matter what country they live in or what they wear or believe, or eat or do everyday, are this same species. There's a chart toward the end of the book laying out all of these human and near-human species.

The book discusses how this all began in Africa, how the giant mammals of the world died out, and how humans spread from Africa to occupy every content on the planet - the most wide-spread single species there is. Maybe apart from rats. And mice. And bacteria. And viruses! I guess that's quite a few of us, huh?! There's a nice map showing how humans spread across the globe near the end of the book.

We went on - as the book makes clear, to refine our tools, to invent the wheel, to invent glue to hold weapons together to go hunting and to protect ourselves, to beginning agriculture, to domesticating animals - including the wolf which we now keep as dogs - and to inventing video games. Wow! Actually the book doesn't say that last bit - I added it myself. Bu we learned how to make things and then trade them with other communities to get other stuff that we couldn't find or make. Then came trade tariffs. Actually, I added that bit as well!

We went far beyond that over time to grow into and create the complicated world humans inhabit now. The book discusses healthcare, jewelry, art, and monument building, and then writing came along, of course, so we could record everything we did in order to benefit future generations - and this book is one of those results! I commend it as a fun, interesting, educational, and very worthy read.

Bad Machinery Volume 4 The Case of the Lonely One by John Allison

Rating: WORTHY!

Another outing for Charlotte, Linton, Jack, Mildred, Shauna, and Sonny, who are now in the second year at Griswold Grammar school and marveling at how tiny and young the new first years look. One new kid, Lem, is decidedly strange. He eats onions like they're apples and suddenly, everyone starts thinking he's a cool guy - including Shauna's previously disparaging friends.

But where are Shauna's compatriots? Why do they all seem utterly preoccupied with other things and uncaring about a "mystery"? Shauna, it seems, will have to go it alone, or recruit new people onto her team, because one by one, it seems, even her closest friends are being won over to Lem's onion-eating circle. What the heck is going on? One way or another, Shauna's going to find out.

After a weird start to this series several years back, and a hiccup several years back minus two, I finally got really into it over the last few days, and now I intend to check out the remaining three volumes.