Cursor's Fury by Jim Butcher

Rating: WORTHY!

So in volume three of Jim Butcher's Excellent Adventures of the Warrior Goddess Kitai, we find Tavi with the First Lord, who seems to be taking an unseemly interest in Tavi's sex life. Not that he has a complete one from what he reveals. The First Lord proves that despite his awesome fury-crafting powers, he's even more clueless than is Tavi with regard to how deep this bond is with Kitai. He dispenses pretty much the same advice that Norman Osborn offers his son Harry with regard to Mary Jane in the original Spider-Man: "A word to the not-so-wise about your little girlfriend. Do what you need to with her, then broom her fast."

Tavi is almost panicked at the thought of spending significant time away from Kitai, and to give him his due, he does honestly worry that she might suffer, because of their bond, if she's forcibly kept from him for long periods of time, but in this same concern, he's actually disrespecting her strength and independence, so even though he's beginning to recognize their bond, he's still essentially clueless about her. This will come back to haunt him humorously, as it happens, in the final novel of the hexalogy.

Fortunately he doesn't need to worry. When he arrives at the legion camp and settles in, he gets into the habit of visiting the public baths, run by Cymnea, the brothel keeper. He tosses a coin to a blind beggar girl on his way in, and sitting in the bath later, he thinks, "Crows" and runs outside to discover that, as he's just begun to imagine, the beggar girl is actually Kitai spying on camp activities to learn all she can about what's really going on. She does this routinely throughout the novels from this point on, delivering invaluable information to Tavi because of her excellence in this pursuit. She chides him about taking so long to recognize her.

Before he gets to the camp, however, Tavi is sent to meet a crafting master to try and get his non-existent skills kick-started. There's a reason his skills have shriveled on the vine, but we don't learn of this until later in the series. He's dragged from his crafting lessons by Max, rather like Luke Skywalker is forced to abandon Yoda's teachings to address a problem. Hmm! Come to think of it, there's rather a lot in common between Tavi and Luke, isn't there?!

We learn a bit of Max's past here, because his stepmother who hates him with a vengeance and has tried to kill him, and his step brother who will inherit if Max dies, has also joined the new First Aleran. What happened to the original First Aleran isn't specified!

Tavi is now supposed to be a fully-fledged cursor, but given that he has no windcrafting - or crafting of any kind for that matter - he's pretty much useless as a cursor. In the legion, they call the newbies 'fish', so this novel really ought to have been called 'Fish's Fury'. Tavi goes under a false name: the bizarre name of Rufus Scipio, which no doubt was all the rage in the real Roman era, but strikes me as one of the most hilarious names I've ever seen. Perhaps that's why Butcher chose it?

Lord Kalare, is the bad guy in this instalment. Because of a letter the First Lord sent, written in a deliberately provocative manner because he knew it would be intercepted by Kalare's spies, the wannabe First Lord has launched a war upon what he considers is the real, but weak First lord. Kalare wants to be First Lord himself. He has kidnapped more than one person in order to hold them hostage and thereby prevent people from doing things he does not want done.

One of these kidnappees is a cursor friend of Tavi's - or rather her child, so that she then had to become a spy for him. Another is the wife of one of the other lords of Alera. It is Count Bernard, his wife, the cursor Lady Amara, and the problematic Lady Aquitaine, who are tasked with rescuing her. Lady Aquitaine holds the allegiance of Isana, Bernard's brother. Isana isn't involved since she's spending way the hell too much time trying to revive Fade, her slave (who is way more than that we discover) and who has been poisoned. So focused on him is she that she neglects to help the wounded in the battle.

Tavi is supposed to be garnering military experience for himself as the sub-tribune in the First Aleran. He discovers that things aren't working the way a well-organized military should be: supplies, for example, are disappearing, so he brings in Cymnea to take charge!

Lord Kalare has made an alliance with the Canim. They are to help him become First Lord in return for his granting them a portion of Alera upon which to live. The reason they need Alera rather than their own land is something to be explored in vol 4 of this series, but in this volume, Tavi is the only thing standing in the way of the Canim running riot. He establishes a front line in a fortified town, and holds the line. Kitai helps immeasurably by riding the land as a spy, at times taking Tavi to show him curious and vital secrets.

One of these secrets is that the Canim have a warrior leader and a spiritual leader, Sarl, and the spiritual leader has a magic of his own. He uses this magic to turn the sky red, and he plans to use it to strike down Tavi when he meets with the warrior leader, but his plan fails, because Tavi has possession of Lady Antillus's Bloodstone which prevents the Canim magic from destroying him. At the start of the novel, Tavi was playing chess with the warrior Cane who is now leading the Canim. During a truce, he's invited to play a game again with this Cane, and he does so, listening carefully as the Cane, who is not at all a friend of Sarl's, passes important information to him in a coded way, which helps him to understand why the Canim came here.

Tavi, of course, holds the line and repels the invaders, and kills Sarl after discrediting him to show the Canim that he, Tavi, was far stronger than their best magician, even though he really isn't. The novel ends with Kitai suggesting that Tavi let her bring in some Marat horsewomen to act as spies and scouts. She, of course, would lead them. She already has her hair shorn with a crest, in the tyle of the horse tribe of the Marat, and she has been at Tavi's side the whole time, so his army is used to seeing a Marat helping them.

Tavi considers this, and reacts by pushing her against the wall in his quarters and kissing her passionately. He forces himself to stop, complaining that the fury-crafted light in there is a signal to his officers that they can come in any time with issues and concerns. He needs to have Max put out the light, but as he says the words, the light goes out, and he discovers that he can command it to turn on and off at will. Kitai is not impressed with this, and at the very end of the last chapter, she tells the light to go out, and it does! A great read!

Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher

Rating: WORTHY!

This takes place two years on from what's come to be known as 'the Night of the Red Stars' which was seen during the great battle at the Elinarch bridge. Tavi has been fending-off attacks from the Canim throughout this time. At the instigation of Lady Invidia Aquitaine, Senator Arnos arrives to take over command. Lady Aquitaine's ultimate plan is to have Tavi removed from his command, so Tavi helps that along immensely by meeting with Nasaug, the Canim leader. Due to his spying activities, Tavi knows that Nasaug is trying to build ships so the Canim can return to their homeland, and he arranges with the Canim leader to help him by returning the Canim Ambassador Varg, who is currently imprisoned.

Tavi is arrested for conspiring with the enemy, but he escapes and boards a ship to Alkera Imperia, the capital. traveling with him are Isana, Kitai, Ehren, and Araris. They're pursued by Arnos’s men, but they use fury-crafting to kill the 'witchmen' whose sole value is keeping the violently intolerant leviathans unaware of their presence on the ocean. Once the witchmen are dead, the leviathans trash their pursuer's ship.

It's at this point that Tavi's aunt Isana comes back into the story with full force. She finds that her water-crafting has grown immensely. More importantly to her, she has been trying to tell Tavi who he really is. In the end, it was left to Fade, now know as Araris, to tell him that Isana is not his aunt - she's his mother. His father is the son of Lord Gaius, the First Lord and therefore, Tavi is next in line to the throne of Alera!

Meanwhile the First Lord himself enters the battle big time, and he arranges for Count Bernard and Lady Amara to travel with him, in total secrecy, to Kalare's lands. Until he gets to where he needs to be - a place where he can quiet the massive fury which Kalare has awoken, and which must be quieted before it kills thousands - he must not use his powers, so everything is on Bernard and Amara to take care of him, including the blister he gets on his feet.

When they arrive, the First Lord does the opposite of what he said - instead of quieting the fury, he awakens it, causing a massive volcanic eruption, which destroys the Kalarean capital and kills thousands. Amara is so pissed off with him that she throws his coin - the one which empowers her to be his cursor - in his face and quits on him on the spot.

Tavi frees Varg and returns him to his people. He choses that moment to declare that he is Gaius Octavian. grandson of the First Lord, and he challenges Senator Arnos to a 'Juris Macto' - a duel of honor. Unfortunately for Tavi, Arnos choses a representative to fight in his stead: Pharygiar Navaris, the deadliest man in Alera.

Fidelias, now known as Marcus, the man who betrayed Amara in vol one of this series, is tasked by the Lady Aquitaine to kill Tavi in the unlikely event that he wins. He does win, but Fidelius now betrays her. He fires the balest - a huge cross-bow like bolt, into Arnos and Aquitaine at once, as they are standing one behind the other. It looks like a Canim assasination, since this is their weapon of choice. Lady Aquitaine survives the wound, but since the bolt has been poisoned, she does not have long to live. Or does she?

Tavi manages to talk the First Lord into allowing the Canim safe passage back to their own land. They build ice ships to travel in, and Tavi and his usual crew go with them. Another worthy read!

Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher

Rating: WORTHY!

Butcher mistakenly titles this with an apostrophe as though Princeps s a plural. It is not! If he were titling it correctly, it should be Princeps's Fury.

Princeps's Fury takes off right after the previous volume. Tavi crosses the ocean on the ice ships and learns of the tragedy which has unfolded in the Canim homeland. Cursor Ehren, Tavi's friend, and the First Lord of Alera take the battle to the Vord, which is now revealed to be the biggest threat to Alera, beyond anything else they've ever faced. On this same front, the Lady Amara and her husband Count Bernard, Tavi's uncle, must try to discover how it is that the Vord can now use fury-crafting! As if they were not an evil enough foe to begin with. Finally, Isana, who is Tavi's mom, is dispatched to the north, where an entire Aleran army is effectively trapped because they must ward off the ice giants from even further north.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in this novel (apart from the always enthralling Kitai, whose humor, devotion to Tavi and skills as a horsewoman, spy, and warrior just keep on growing and growing) is Isana issuing a Juris Macto of her own! She wins, and forges a truce with the Ice People, which frees up the entire army there to battle the Vord, who are now seriously threatening to overrun Alera as they did the Canim homeland.

We learn that the reason that the Vord have fury-crafting skills is that they've taken the Lady Aquitaine on board. She is effectively one of them and they now have access to her skills. In return, she gets not to die from the poisoned balest with which Fidelius shot her. The Vord queen also has learned skills from Kalarus Brencis, who died at the First lord's hand in Captain's Fury so that she can now turn anyone into a Vord zombie.

The First Lord comes out big time here. He is dying we learn, because of his age, his stressful life, and the fact that his second wife was slowly poisoning him, so when he makes the ultimate sacrifice, and massively degrades the Vord at the same time, it's not surprising. What is surprising is that he has contact with a power which no other Lord of Alera has: he has tapped into Alera herself - the fury of the entire nation. He asks that Alera devote herself to Tavi now - that whatever allegiance she had to the First Lord be transferred to his grandson.

Tavi travels with Kitai (and other Alerans) to the homeland of the Canem (which is not next door to Panem!). He's transporting the Canem home, but upon arrival they discover that Canea has been overrun by Vord. For a while, Tavi and his small traveling team, separated by design from their main party, are held captive (across country from the coast where they arrived) by the leader of last outpost of the Canem, which is on the verge of being wiped out. When he's finally asked for help by the local Cane leader, Tavi is granted access to the battle reports from all the Canem tribes, one of which held out much longer than the rest.

Tavi slowly comes to the realization that the Vord not only operate through direct instructions from a queen, but also that the queen does not operate alone. Each time she moves to a new location, the queen spawns two daughters. This triad then wages war on the local populace until victory is won. Each of the three queens then moves to a new area and re-spawns, making a new triad. Thus the geometric progression of the assault.

The cane leader who held out longest had apparently discerned this pattern and changed his battle plan to address it head on. Instead of standing still and steadfastly trying to repel wave after wave of almost overwhelming Vord attacks, he went after the queen each time they managed to pinpoint the location of one of them, stemming the tide and forcing the Vord to regroup. But even this plan was doomed to failure because he did not have enough troops to overcome the massive attrition rate and he did not know how to overcome the Vord queens' ability to sense and control the thoughts of those enemy who were within a certain close range. He tried to win by sheer force of large numbers applied surgically, but even this was a doomed strategy in the end.

Tavi hatches a plan to overcome the Vord queens' mind-reading abilities, and also convinces his followers and the Cane alike to follow the lead of the successful Cane strategy, modified with his new twists. If you have seen the movie Push, you will recognize Tavi's contribution to the plan, but Princeps Fury was released in December 2008, before the release of Push in 2009. Is it odd that two separate writers both came up with the same idea around the same time?!

Meanwhile, back in Alera, the Vord are also mounting a full scale assault, and slowly beating back the Aleran armies towards their capital, despite a massive battle led and fought by Alera's finest lords and citizens. After Gaius's overwhelmingly massive blast of the Vord ground forces, the defenders suddenly discover that they've been had by the Vord. The local queen never intended the ground forces to succeed, but instead sacrificed them in order to wear down the Alerans and give away the location of Alera's best defensive personnel before unleashing her hitherto unencountered and certainly unexpected airborne force to wipe them out.

Meanwhile, Isana is dispatched by Gaius north to the massive wall designed to hold back the fearsome Ice People. She is to make peace with them (even though after 300 years of war, no peace has ever been struck). She makes far more progress in two meetings than anyone else has made. She discovers that they have fury-crafting skills and because of these, the natural (and unconscious) reaction of Aleran soldiers to their proximity was fear and loathing on the campaign trail. This irrational reaction is why no peace could ever be struck. Unfortunately, just as she's making progress, Lord Antillus launches a sneak attack upon the senior Ice People leadership, and all but destroys Isana's hard work and the value of her astute insights. Through sheer force of will and expert use of her now more powerful grasp of fury-crafting, Isana defeats Antillus's plan and saves the lives of the Ice leaders.

Amara and Bernard act as spies in this volume, also picking up useful knowledge of Vord practices, but this couple is the least interesting to me of all the various people we follow in this series. I don’t know what it is, but maybe it’s that they are far too sickly sweet, sappy, and intense for my taste, although I respect Amara's skills.

My two heroes, Kitai and the Vord queen aren't that interesting in this volume, either. Kitai is always worth reading about but she has no stand-outs here. The Vord queen becomes really fascinating only in volume six, where she's a treat. This is still a worthy read though.

First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher

Rating: WORTHY!

This final volume sees the retreat from the continent of Canea which has been overrun by the Vord. Gaius Octavian ("Tavi") along with the illustrious Kitai and the Canim leader Varg only to discover that Alera has been largely overrun as well. Having made landfall in the north, the group must strike east to link up with the remaining Aleran resistance in Riva.

The Vord queen, now an accomplished water crafter offers a surrender to any and every Aleran. They will be allowed to live out the remainder of their life in peace provided they vow to have no children. Tavi uses the same method to announce his return and his defiance of the Vord. In response, the Queen kidnaps Tavi's mom, Isana, as well as Fade, aka Araris Valerian, Isana's boyfriend.

With the help of the now friendly Ice People of the north, and a strong wind provided by Alera herself, Tavi sails over the ice, but Riva falls to the Vord, and led by acting First Lord Aquitainus the survivors retreat, of course, to the Calderon valley, much in the way the final showdown in the Potter stories was in Hogwarts. Tavi's uncle Bernard and his wife Amara meanwhile have been fortifying the Calderon. Aquitainus dies trying to beat the joined forces of his wife and the Vord queen.

Tavi launches an assault on Riva when he arrives there, bringing down the city walls like Joshua purportedly did, and his fire crafters torch all Vord food supplies. He then moves on to the Calderon where he hopes to pin the Vord between his forces and the rest who occupy the valley's defenders. The Vord queen raids Tavi's camp and wounds him.

It's at this point that Invidia switches sides again and betrays the troop positions of the Vord, but her betrayal was predicted by the Vord queen, so when all of the Aleran high nobles use their various crafting to attack the queen she slaughters many of the attackers. Invidia once again tries to switch sides, but Amara kills her. When the Vord queen retreats, she leaves behind Isana and Araris who are now free.

Tavi and Kitai pursue the escaping queen in an attempt to stop her from calling on the wild and powerful mountain furies. At the same time, the Vord launch an attack in the Calderon and begin to slowly overwhelm the defenders, but Tavi and Kitai actually beat the Vord queen and kill her. Since she is the hive leader, this results in the rest of the Vord becoming directionless and uncoordinated. In effect, they're beaten.

With Aquitainus conveniently out of the way now, Tavi rightfully becomes the First Lord and he and Kitai finally marry. Despite the possibility of a sequel, with other, though lesser Vord queens still at large on the Canea continent, Butcher never did revisit this series. I didn't expect him to, but for me these books would make a wonderful film series. For reasons which escape me, no one has ever seemed interested in making them. Maybe Netflix will try it? They did The Witcher, and this is in many ways a similar sort of fantasy. We can hope! Meanwhile I declare this a worthy read and commend the whole series - one of the very few series I've been able to stand to read.

How Not to Die by Michael Greger

Rating: WORTHY!

This book was recommended to me by a weird niece who I love, but who neglected to tell me it was a doorstep of a book. I almost needed a shopping cart to haul it out of the library with. The author is a medical doctor who has made a long study of diet and health, and the book is packed with advice about what's good and safe to eat and what's not. The thing is that he goes into way too much detail and the book reads more like a scientific treatise than a popular book on health. It has copious end notes in addition to the waffling text so be advised that the actual reading text is only about two-thirds of the entire thickness of this tome.

That verbose style turned me off a bit, and I didn't read it cover to cover, but I skimmed and read in detail parts that interested me. There were many such parts. Most of what's in here isn't new or news to vegetarians and vegans, and you could probably get a good feedback out of it from reading only the last section where the doctor talks about his own dietary habits. Follow those or emulate them closely and your health will improve, and also, very likely, your life expectancy. The advice is simple: eat whole foods, fresh vegetables and fruits, and a variety, and you'll be doing the best you can for whatever your genetic inheritance has set you up with.

The author points out issues and problems and explains perceived discrepancies in medical diet advice. For example, a dissenter may argue that fruit has fructose in it - a sugar. Isn't that bad for you? That's why eating whole foods rather than processed foods is the word here. When you eat a fruit, you eat the whole thing including the fiber. It's not just the juice, nor is it just the sugar. It's everything, and one part of the fruit helps to mitigate another, so the sugar is processed by your body as part of the whole meal of the fruit and it doesn't spike the way it would if you drank the sugar, like in a can of cola, for example.

The book is full of useful information like that - about why this works better than that does. And eating whole foods doesn't necessarily mean you have to buy everything fresh and cook it all from scratch for every meal, but the book points out that one price you may pay for buying canned vegetables, for example, as opposed to fresh, is that the canning process often involves adding salt (or sugar, or both). So if you look for 'no salt added' in a can, for example, and drain the fluid from the can, cooking the food in fresh water, you can mitigate a lot of the problems with buying canned food. The same applies if you drain the 'syrup' (read 'sugar' form canned fruit, and just eat the fruit.

The author also has a book out with also the same title as this except for an added 'T' on the end: How Not to Diet. I'm not about to embark on that one! I have too much other stuff on my plate (reading plate), but don't worry, because there are some cooking tips included in this book, such as, for example, how to prepare cruciferous vegetables (Broccoli, cauliflower): after chopping them or breaking them apart, let them sit for a while so the 'damage' the cutting process has done allows time for various enzymes in the veggies to interact and create beneficial compounds which will contribute to your health. The book is full of simple things like that, but there is so much in this book that it's too much to remember. However, if you take away only the message of cutting back on meats and substituting whole, fruits and veggies and some whole grain, you will be well on your journey towards better health, rest assured. I commend this book as a worthy read - or skim!

The Rhythm Section by Mark Burnell

Rating: WARTY!

This was a novel about a woman, named Stephanie, a college student who was supposed to travel with her family on a flight. They changed their flight to accommodate her, but she still wriggled out of going, and that plane crashed killing all onboard. Stephanie went into a downward spiral, and ended-up a prostitute in London, spending her meagre earnings on her drinking and drug habits.

One day she's visited by a low-level journalist named Procter, who tells her he believes the plane was bombed and he wants to talk to her about it, but she has him thrown out and beaten-up by the bouncer. After nearly killing a john later, she goes on the run from her pimp and ends up staying with Procter. Later, he's killed, but not before he's helped her straighten herself out. She decides to take up his quest to find justice for the victims of the downed plane.

I'd seen a preview of the movie and decided it looked good, and then had the opportunity to listen to the audiobook of the novel, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try despite it being the first book in a series. Initially, it was okay, but it was a bit plodding. I stayed with it because this would mark the first time I'd been to see the movie of a book right in the middle of reading the book the move was taken from. Usually the one comes before or after the other, so I was curious as to how it would affect my perception of the book.

In the end it didn't make much difference. The movie was okay, but a bit flat and uninspiring, so I went back to the book, which seemed pretty much the same: taking a long time to get anywhere. I decided to give it one more day of listening, but on the drive home that same afternoon, the book went into this endless, tedious, boring exposition that seemed to go on forever. For literally miles, as it happened, because I was driving, and I decided the hell with this and ditched it. I was about halfway through it, but that was too far: it was not getting it done for me.

Stephanie was improbable as a protagonist, because she was never really believable as someone who could come back from the depth she had sunk to, and actually do the job she'd set herself. Experience if fact proved that she couldn't; she was screwing-up time after time. I think even the author himself realized what a poor job he'd done of the book because he also wrote the screenplay and made a whole bunch of changes to it for no obvious reason other than to fix problems with the novel, but he ended-up making it worse! The movie was a lot more insipid than it ought to have been, with these endless maudlin flashbacks to Stephanie's memories of her family which contributed nothing to moving the story forward. On the contrary: they tripped it up frequently.

Plus Ryan Reynolds's wife Blake Lively did not live up to her name. She wasn't lively at all, not even after she'd recovered her health and was actively pursuing her targets. It just didn't work well. There was little humor, and some attempts at humor failed dismally. For example when she ran her vehicle off the road during a training exercise and Boyd, the trainer, was lecturing her. She pulled the parking brake on his transport and set it in reverse so that it ran backwards off the road into some trees. The thing is that both vehicles were four-wheel drive and so wouldn't have been stuck as they purportedly were.

But this is a review of the book, not the movie, and the book took far too long to deliver 'rewards' that were in the end too miserly to make up for the extended overture which preceded them. I can't commend it, and so it becomes another series, and another author, I shall not be revisiting.

The Perfect Wife by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This authors seems to skip the article (definite or indefinite, it doesn't matter!) from time to time:
“He was only one The Panel would approve in the area.” (the only)
“Admittedly, it had required opening up to man who had killed almost twenty people;” (to a man)
“Whatever the reason, she’d had to go to other” (the other)
“He still didn’t know she’s told Mel about seeing Teddy with the hostess” (she'd told)

This novel needs to be retitled "The Perfect Ass-Wipe." The book is a poor cross between Silence of the Lambs and The Stepford Wives with some Sex and the City tossed in for rude measure. The interactions with the serial killer are pretty much a direct rip-off of Silence of the Lambs ("Quid pro quo, Clarice!"), but it felt like the author couldn't figure out what kind of a novel he wanted to write.

This woman, for an FBI profiler wannabe and supposedly a promising candidate, seems remarkably stupid, and her husband is a jerk, but she can't see it. So on the one hand we're supposed to believe she's really sharp as a profiler, but on the other we're expected to swallow that she's completely dumb when it comes to profiling the motives of her friends and her husband - and his best friend.

She and hubby move to a new elite neighborhood when he's assigned to an office there, where he manages people's financial investments - so they're really well-off. He insists they join this ridiculous elite marina club (which she ought to have flatly-refused as soon as she learned that men (known as Oath Minders) often meet separately from women (known as Hearth Keepers). Seriously? She sure as hell ought to have quit when she learned that one of the activities enjoyed there is free love for husbands. I don't know of any self-respecting woman who would who doesn't vote Republican who would put up with any of that horseshit, but as with everything else, this Jessie girl mutely goes along with every single thing her husband Kyle, dumps on her. And he dumps a lot.

Things slowly deteriorate and come to a head when she catches him snorting cocaine with his friend Ted, and kicks him out. He comes back all contrite the next day promising reform, and she pretty much instantly forgives him. That night, they go to a party down at the marina. She's just learned she's pregnant, but she decides to drink some champagne anyway. My guess is that her sleaze of a husband put something in her drink, because after a couple of sips she began to feel woozy. Rather than have her husband take her home, she let him put her to bed in the cabin on the boat that belongs to Ted! Someone needs to give her a Ted talk! LOL! She has to be a moron to do that, given what she knows at this point.

I thought she'd wake up and find she'd been raped by Ted, but instead she wakes up next to the dead body of this woman she'd had an argument with earlier over flirting with her husband, and she has blood and skin under her fingernails. Instead of calling the police, this imbecile lets her husband talk her into disposing of the body, so now she's completely trapped.

She didn't agree to it outright because she felt so woozy, which ought to have told her she'd been drugged, but she was alert enough to have stopped him and she didn't. For her to even consider doing something like that given what career she was supposed to be following, is completely ridiculous, and I lost all interest in reading anything more about this bozo right then.

It was pretty obvious her husband was the murderer, and he'd bene having an affair with this woman who was going to expose him. It was obvious from the writing, but also from the fact that an author like this one is never going to let his favorite profiler get tied down with a husband and a baby at the start of a series, not when he can follow the safe road most traveled! I don't mind if a book starts out with a stupid character who wises up later, but to have an author depict a woman who he claims on the one hand is sharp and smart, yet who he depicts consistently choosing the dumbest option in any situation which faces her, is misogyny, period.

I resented the time I spent reading even half of this. If she'd been remotely as smart and sharp as was claimed, Jessie (the name says it all in this case!) would have refused to dispose of the body, called the police, and had herself drug-tested - and especially done all this given her career choice! She did the exact opposite and doesn't merit having a story told about her. Warty to the max on this one.

Teen Trailblazers by Jennifer Calvert, Vesna Asanovic

Rating: WORTHY!

Billed as "30 Fearless Girls Who Changed the World Before They Were 20," this book, written by Calvert, and illustrated quite plainly by Asanovic was a worthy read, but it has some issues that bothered me a bit. I list the chapter headings (the girls' names) below and will voice my concerns as appropriate. In general though, this was yet another list that was disgustingly-biased to the USA (60% of those listed were born in the USA), and toward white people (almost 75%). This sends the wrong message. That said, what is there does send a powerful message to young girls about what they can do if they choose to. I just wish it was a lot more diverse.

On another topic, I thought the naming conventions were haphazard to say the least. When I saw, for example, that Jeanne d'Arc was listed as Joan of Arc, whereas Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was given her French name, I thought maybe the girls were being listed by their best-known name, but this isn't the case because for example, Susan Eloise Hinton was best known as SE Hinton (another case - as was done to "JK" Rowling - where Big Publishing™ and its associates are telling a female author they had to pose as a male in order to get sales. Hopefully that bullshit is in the trashcan these days, but I still see many female authors using only their first initials.

• Cleopatra was born in Egypt, but was part of a Greek dynasty which had ruled in Egypt for about three centuries. She was the last of these rulers and exceeded the others who steadfastly refused to speak Egyptian. Cleo spoke several languages, and made a special point for learning Egyptian, because these were very much her people. She perhaps didn't deserve the end she got, but she was pretty ruthless in her time, something this story rather glosses over. I'm not at all convinced that she ought to be an exemplar in a list of those whom modern day young women are encouraged to emulate! I prefer my own take on her in my novel Cleoprankster set in those very years when she was a young teenager, but that's just fiction. In real life, she was very much strong woman, so there is that.
• Joan of Arc tells the standard story of Jeanne d'Arc, the French girl who purportedly led armies. I think the story is less of her leading and more of her inspiring, but still, she did do the job.
• Pocahontas tells a surprisingly honest story of the Chief's daughter (except that 'Pocahontas' wasn't actually her name. Unlike those disrespectful morons at Disney studios who professionally lie about her to sell movies and dolls. No, she wasn't an "Indian Princess" and she didn't fall in love with John Smith; get a clue, Disney. There was a much more interesting story to tell about her, but clueless pandering to the lowest common denominator Disney blew that opportunity. Smith never said a word about "Pocahontas" saving his life until much later so it probably never happened given Smith's despicable penchant for tall tales and self-aggrandizement.
• Eliza Lucas was a British ex-pat who made a business out of growing indigo. She owned slaves which is bad, but she treated them fairly decently from what I understand so there is that.
• Phyllis Wheatley was a West African slave who was essentially adopted by a lonely white woman and who became renowned in her own right as a writer. Wheatley is her white name. Sadly no-one knows or even seems to care about her real name.
• Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a French Rococo/Neoclassical artist who was working professionally while still in her teens.
• Sybil Ludington. The story is that she made a ride surpassing that of Paul Revere, traveling further and warning more people, but there are no documented references to Ludington's ride prior to a book written a century after the purported events. Maybe she did it or something like it, or maybe she didn't. We simply don't know. Very likely she did something quite remarkable and so deserves the recognition.
• Jane Austen needs no explanation!
• Sacagawea is yet another case where once again, romance over ancient American Indians has surpassed reality. This story was exaggerated, but honest enough overall.
• Mary Shelley was a somewhat overrated British novelist, but she did write her first novel - which became legend - in her teens. No mention is made of the nightmare she had which gave birth to the novel. Prior to that, she had been completely at a loss as to what to write. She began it in mid-June of the winter-like summer of 1816. The month spawned another legend too - that of the vampire, which was from some notes Byron had written and then abandoned, and which were turned into the first known vampire novel by John Polidori, who was Byron's doctor. Despite both being considered the lesser literary talents of the four of them it was only he and Mary who actually produced a novel from the challenge Byron had issued for each of them to write a ghost story.
• Anita Garibaldi was a true revolutionary; she fought alongside her husband. Awesome story.
• Margaret Knight invented the square-bottomed bag and the machine to make it and had to fight in court to recover the patent of the thing from some jerk of a guy who stole her idea! It wasn't her only invention, but it is her longest-lasting and best-known.
• Anna Elizabeth Dickinson A renowned (in her time) advocate for abolition (of slavery) and suffrage.
• Elizabeth Cochran Better known as Nellie Bly, she was a fearless journalist who went around the world in only 72 days! Take that, Jules Verne!
• Mary Pickford was an outstanding and peerless actor in her day, a superstar in an era long before superstars, and who - in one year - made 51 movies. These were very short, silent ones, but still - that's one a week near enough! She was also a cofounder of United Artists movie studios along with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Producer/director DW Griffith. She was way ahead of her time.
• Frida Kahlo was an amazing Mexican artist who struggled throughout her life with the aftermath of injuries sustained when she was only 18 in a tram accident. She also struggled with a philandering husband. So what's new?!
• Jackie Mitchell was a remarkable baseball pitcher in the minor leagues just after the turn of the last century.
• Anne Frank was a German Jew who needs nothing said about her by me. Read what she wrote herself if you want to get a picture of this amazing girl whose loss to the world is incalculable.
• Barbara Johns was a civil rights pioneer.
• Claudette Colvin was another civil rights pioneer, this time, black.
• Elizabeth Eckford was one of the Little Rock Nine: the first African Americans to attend Little Rock Central High School and be abused mercilessly for it by racist scum. It's sad to see that era being fostered again by a racist president. The courage of this young girl and her eight associates was off the charts.
• Susan Eloise Hinton became known (as SE Hinton) was a writer while still in her teens.
• Samantha Reed Smith was a cold war peace activist.
• Emma Watson was the girl from the Harry Potter movies who went on to promote artificial looks for women by means of modeling for fashion and makeup. Why is she in this list again? yes, she's done some charity work, but really Does she belong here?
• Tavi Gevinson is a blogger and founder of Rookie as web magazine for teen girls.
• Malala Yusefzai is the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by religious thugs, and lived! She went on to become a major name in advocacy for girls' education.
• Katie Stagliano founded 'Katie's Krops', a nonprofit aimed at starting vegetable gardens wherever they can be grown, to feed the hungry. She's one of the few true heroes in this entire list.
• Emma González is a survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, and now an advocate for gun control. Good luck with that when 40% of the population like to think they can do whatever the hell they want.
• Maya Penn started a business at the age of eight!
• Jazz Jennings is a transgender rights activist.

So the list is interesting and educational and despite the bias I consider it a worthy read because it does something, but it doesn't do enough. I mean, what about including teenagers like Syrian Yusra Mardini? What about ballet dancer Yuan Yuan Tan? What about South African Anathi Mbono who learned her mother was HIV positive when she herself was only 13, and has since gone on to become an activist? What about Amika George, and activist who founded #FreePeriods when she was 17, which resulted in girls who couldn't afford sanitary products getting them for free?

There are very many such people who are not white, but who this book ignores. What about, for example, Weng Yu Ching, who's been fighting for LGBTQIA rights in Taiwan? What about Yara Shahidi, who advocates for girls’ education, voter turnout, and diversity in Hollywood? What about Marley Dias who at 13, founded #1000blackgirlbooks, which had the goal of collecting and donating a thousand books featuring black girls as the main characters which could then be distributed to other black girls to ensure they saw themselves represented in literature? What about the team of 14 South African teen girls who, as part of a high school STEM boot camp, but Africa's first private satellite? And what about Greta Thunberg, who has single-handedly raised awareness about climate change?

Insect Superpowers by Kate Messner, Jillian Nickell

Rating: WORTHY!

This book seemed rather obsessed with ants, but that aside it was a worthy read for any child who wants to learn fun and interesting stuff, learn more about insects, or be a bit grossed out. We're talking about supersonic assassins, decapitators, green bolts, malevolent mimics, aphid imposters, false flashes, weight lifters, mutant grasshoppers, shells of steel, machine gun butts, vomitizers, glue shooters, evil architects, fungus farmers, sonar smashers, super stings, pirate queens, and jaws of doom!

I defy any kid not to be interested in something in there! Illustrated in fine style by Nickell and written breathlessly by Messner, this book is sure to appeal to your kid. Or you. You can pretend it's for your kid. Really. It's ok. I won't tell. Honest.

Strapless by Deborah Davis

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an intriguing biography of two people who intersected when one painted the portrait of the other, and the portrait was deemed scandalous. This result had very different effects on both participants.

The artist was John Singer Sargent. You may well ask why he wasn't named John Artist Sargent since he couldn't sing a note. I asked it, but the book never answered. That's books for you. Moody as hell.

The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Both were American ex-pats, she having moved to France with her mom after the Civil War, and he having moved there to study art. She married a banker and became a much talked-about celebrity despite being merely a socialite. He became well-regarded after having successful exhibits in the annual Paris art Salon.

The thing was that this was in an era where no one blinked at endless classical nudes, and portraits were common. The scandal came about because of one curious thing: Sargent painted Gautreau with one thin strap of her gown partway down her arm. Yes, that was it. And this was in France! And she never really recovered from it. Sargent felt so bad about it that he hid the portrait away for thirty years letting hardly anyone see it. Now it hangs in the Met in New York where anyone can see it. Six years after the original, someone painted an homage to it, and no one blinked an eye. This is why I don't have a lot of regard for art critics! LOL!

The book was well-written and went into a lot of detail about various people's lives and the relationships between the two main characters and other well-known people of the era. It may be too much detail for some, not enough for others, but for me it was fine. I confess I did skim a bit here and there where it was of little interest to me, but I read avidly for most of it. I would have liked to have read more about Singer's art: his techniques and so on, but the author seemed interested only in the size of his canvas! Someone should tell her it's not the size that matters, but what you do with it! That aside, though, I did enjoy it and commend it as a worthy read.

If We Were Gone by John Coy, Natalie Capannelli

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Written by Coy and illustrated finely by Campannelli this book begs us to pay attention to what we're doing to the planet. Does it need us? No! We need it. Humans, even for as many of us as there are now, make up only a ten-thousandth of Earth's Biomass yet we've wiped out over eighty percent of all mammals to say nothing of other classes of life. And still, hunting is legal. The last time CO₂ was this high, humans hadn't even evolved. if all of Earth's history was compressed into a year, then humans wouldn't show up until after teatime on December 31st. That's how late we came ot the party. That's how little Earth needs us!

This book discusses that. Coy's incisive text and Capanelli's excellent (and slightly depressing, I have to say!) artwork depicts how little we would be missed if we disappeared. In fact, from the planet's perspective, right now it would be better if we did disappear. But this book isn't a manifesto to ban humans; it is a plea for humans to wake up and hear those chimes at midnight, and do something to help Earth before it's too late. We need it, and we're going to harm ourselves if we don't do something soon. I commend this book as a dire warning and a worthy read.

I Came From The Water by Vanita Oelschlager

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is an odd book because it comes from a personal account by the author of meeting the young boy who is the subject of this story. Told to her through a translator, it makes a great tale of survival during the Hurricane, named Jeanne, which hit Haiti in September 2004 causing serious flooding and other issues in the city of Gonaïves, which is tucked under the south coast of the northern promontory of Haiti.

The problem is that I have no way of telling if this is true, and neither does the boy. This is the story he told, but there's no way of learning now how well he remembers it, or even whether it may have been augmented by suggestion or by his own imagination over the years. While I have a good opinion of this author and have positively reviewed many of her books, I have to express doubts here. She makes no mention of interviewing anyone who might have recalled finding this boy, which to me calls the reliability of the story into question.

Everyone loves an inspirational story, but all I can say in this case is that it sounds highly improbable, and while it may be true, presenting it as a modern Moses story based on a child's hearsay alone is taking things too far for my taste. Children's minds and memory being as malleable as they are, I have to doubt this and frankly wonder about the motive of a writer who presents a story like this. Because of all these doubts and misgivings, I cannot rate this as a worthy read.

All of a Sudden and Forever by Chris Barton, Nicole Xu

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had never heard of the survivor elm until I read this book. For all I'd read and seen about the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Building in April of 1995 in Oklahoma city, no one ever mentioned this. That bombing seems so long ago now, and has been so overshadowed by so many things since, that it's easy to forget what far too many people cannot: that 168 people died and left behind them loved ones whose pain didn't end that day with the loss of a life, but began instead.

The elm was almost cut down because it was damaged so badly, and embedded in its branches and trunk was forensic evidence: shrapnel from the blast. But it survived and later, people noticed it blooming. When it fruited, the seeds were collected and cultivated and passed out to those who needed them. Those seedlings grew and sprouted their own harvest, and so the progeny of this tree have spread everywhere now.

The tree itself has become a memorial, and this book is a memorial to that tragedy and the tree that survived it and gave hope and solace to others. This book is tastefully and respectfully written, tells a great true story, and is beautifully illustrated by new artist Nicole Xu who is very talented. Her work can be found online and is a treat to see. I commend this book fully.

A Girl Like Me by Angela Johnson, Nina Crews

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a rip-roaring lion of a book in which young women of color stand up for their right to be whomever they want, and we've never needed that more than we do now with a groping, misogynist of a racist president in office backed by a bunch of weak, white old sheep of 'men' in his party and yes-men of that same aged hue in his cabinet.

Defying the nay-sayers, who tell her she can't fly so high, or swim so far, or climb so strongly, the girl at the heart of these stories carries on not out of rebellion or defiance (that comes later when she goes to by a new cape!), but because she knows without a doubt that she can do do the very things others would have her believe she can't and deny her the right to even try. This is affirmative action at its best! I loved this book, the photo-collage illustrations, the powerful text and the strong females who inhabit this world. Angela Johnson and Nina Crews? You rock!

Mexico Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

So another in the Tiny Traveler's series, and if it seems like I'm choosing ones just to annoy the racist president of a certain country I assure you that's not the case....

This one follows the same pattern as the other two I've reviewed today (China and puerto Rico). It features about a dozen colorful illustrations with local language words for various items, places, and customs depicted, and each page contains a search item. The books are bright, engaging, interesting and very educational. Like the other two, I commend this whole-heartedly.

What if Soldiers Fought With Pillows? by Heather Camlot, Serge Bloch

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book may be a little pie-in-the-sky, but it offers some true stories and some basic truths. Every other pages asks a seemingly silly question, such as what if battle grounds were soccer fields and spectators cheered for every team? Or, What if Navy SEALs balanced balls on their noses? Or what if innocent civilians could be airlifted by music?

When you read the accompanying story, each only a few paragraphs long, you realize that the question is not only not as silly as it initially sounded, but is in fact rooted in a real event. Clowns, rappers, children, and even circus performers have helped to bring peace to troubled areas.

Of course, not every idea is always happy. The question about battle ground and soccer fields talks about the success of the Ivory Coast soccer team in Africa, and how friendly soccer games led to a ceasefire. It carefully ignores the reverse situation where a soccer game ended in two nations going to war (between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969). Of course, the underlying causes went deeper than one soccer game, but it's still a fact of life.

But that's not the focus of this book - and rightly so. Instead it chooses positive as did the people whose stories are told here, and that's the right way to go and a useful and inspiring lesson for children everywhere to learn from and emulate. Our president should read this book! I commend this as a worthy read.

Puerto Rico Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Another fun book in the 'Tiny Travelers' series. This one covers your president's most favorite place to hate (after Africa) - Puerto Rico! That's one reason I chose to review this! Anything he hates, I tend to love - apart from Amazon that is! Once again it's a series of about a dozen beautifully-drawn and gorgeously-colored illustrations, each of which imparts a little knowledge of the location, and a hidden treasure to find.

There's a website and a club to join for anyone who chooses, or you can just stick with the fun books, the poetic descriptions, and the joyful attitude. Either way I commend this as a worthy read!

China Treasure Quest by Steven Wolfe Pereira, Susie Jaramillo

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book is both an educational trip through China, whose new year - the Year of the Rat started the day this review was posted, so 新年快乐 (shin yin kwai luh - that's happy new year in Chinese)!

The book consists of about a dozen pages of brightly-drawn and nicely-illustrated images of various places and landmarks in China along with happy kids visiting them. Each has interesting facts, along with Chinese words, their English translations and pronunciation, and a hidden treasure to be found.

This book was a fun treasure hunt and an educational trip. I commend it.

Hidden Picture Puzzles at the Zoo by Liz Ball

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is definitely a book for curious kids with sharp eyes and lots of patience for detail! There are some ninety pages of line drawings packed with hidden items and the guide to those items is included right there in the drawing so you don't have to leave the page to check. If you have the print book (my review copy was of course electronic!) you can also color in the picture after you've discovered the items.

Some pictures are single page, others are doubles, and each depicts a different scene in the zoo and contains fun facts about the animals. Those are, as usual, mostly mammals, but some of them are not so common - such as capybaras and tapirs. There are some birds, reptiles, fish, and amphibians included.

This will be a fun book for any kid who likes to play detective.

A Kid's Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals by Vicki Whiting, Jeff Schinkel

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is an easy and straight-forward way to entertain your child - let 'em loose in the zoo...but not just any old zoo: the zoo of the imagination where they get to draw animals all day long. The drawings included in here, by Jeff Schinkel, along with step-by-step instructions and the space right there in the print book to emulate the examples - run the gamut from...well not A, but Bee to T for tiger (or tarantula!), and include an insect or two, a mollusk, a gastropod, and the aforementioned arachnid. Predictably, most of the animals are mammals. I'm not going to say it's a crock, because that would be a misspelling, but there is one dangerous reptile, and one cute fish to horse around with, but no birds.

That said, the animals that are included are quite diverse, and easy to draw even for the inexperienced and lacking-confidence because of the guides to follow. There are hints and tips, and outlines to add faces to existing drawings in one section. Some of the animals are the entire thing, others just faces, and on that score, there's a section with head outlines, and a selection of practice faces full of weird expressions that your kid gets to copy in the blank spaces. There are cats and crocodiles, gorillas and koalas, rats and reindeer. In short, plenty to provide practice skill and the confidence that comes with it.

I think this is a fun and useful book for any budding artist.

Mission ot the Bottom of the Sea by Jan Leyssens, Joachim Sneyers

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I have to express disappointment in this book. While on the one hand it does have colorful illustrations by Sneyers and it does tell a true story of underwater exploration in the newly-invented 'bathysphere ('bathy' meaning deep - something the book fails to educate on), the sins of omission are too great to let them go.

The exploration depicted here makes it look like it was all men all the time. There is brief mention of Else Bostelmann as an artist, but it makes no mention that she actually went underwater herself at one point - not in the bathysphere - but with a helmet on to make an oil painting, sitting on a chair on the bottom! I think that's at least worth a mention, but worse than this was the complete omission of any mention of Gloria Hollister, which was part of the expedition and who also took some trips down in the bathysphere herself, setting records for deepest dive by a woman.

While I can get with the idea of a book which educates about exploration like this, I can neither commend nor even condone one that seems dedicated to relegating the female contributors to mere support roles. Young girls need to be allowed to understand that they can do anything the men can do and this books fails disastrously in that regard. It also fails in the publisher's seeming lack of understanding that making it clear that women were involved is a selling-point for female audiences. This books seems like it's a boys-only-club edition, marginalizing the female contributions.

Let's Explore Bread by Jill Colella

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a fun and useful book of less than thirty pages, full of good advice, exploration, and a recipe for bread bears! Who wouldn't want bread bears?! I fell in love with the title to begin with, but the content is equally of value.

Using bright photos for illustration, the short texts describe bread in many varieties and how it's used; there's an experiment you can do, and then comes the bread recipe and that's followed by the bread bear recipe!

It would have been nice to have a word about nutrition content, and whole wheat versus white, things you can add to bread - such as nuts and raises, for example, and also about gluten and gluten-free. Not everyone can enjoy bread as it's so routinely offered in stores, so that felt like it was an opportunity missed in educating as to why baking your own is important, but that aside, this is a fun way to gat kids interested in baking and in eating healthily, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Spending and Saving by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

In this third book from the Mary Lindeen collection, the author discusses what to do with all the lovely lucre you've earned from providing the goods and/or services form various careers which were discussed in the previous two books I reviewed today! The others talk about the kinds of opportunities for earning, and what goods and services actually are. The book employs short texts and big colorful photos illustrating the text and tuns to around 30 pages.

It discusses how money is earned and what uses it's put to. There are some things which have to be bought, and others which we choose to buy for fun or entertainment. Some money is spent, and some is saved. The book admirably makes it clear that once the money is spent, it's gone. Children might not grasp that the first time they think about spending, especially if they're some of the kids I see in the grocery store from time to time! Race, circumstances and income are things which kids don't worry overmuch about, so it was nice to see a diversity of people in this book, as it was in all three books I read in this series.

Because the author is a former elementary school teacher, she has wisely set up in the back of the book, a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. I commend this as a worthy read!

Goods and Services by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is another in a series about how people earn and spend or save money. This one goes into some detail (it's about 30 pages long) concerning how people make things to sell (which are the goods), or how they offer a service, and this is what makes the world go round. And here I thought it was simply inertia from the formation of the planet! Just kidding!

The book is colorfully illustrated with photographs and features a diverse 'cast' of people who are growing or making things to sell. It talks about how goods are supplied (from near and far) and transported (trains, and boats, and planes!) and how some services are free, but others cost money.

At the end of the book there's a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. The author is a former elementary school teacher so she knows how this works. I commend this as a worthy read!

Earning Money by Mary Lindeen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a sweet book about how people earn money: through providing goods and services. Another volume in this series, which I shall also review, explains just what goods and services are, and a third book, which I shall review as well, explains just what to do with that money once it's earned!

Using short text and large colorful photos illustrating that text, the book, with commendable diversity as its watchword, shows a variety of people, such as a farmer, a nurse, a teacher, who pursue different careers to earn their money. The book describes how people can earn in different ways: by providing a service or offering goods, and describes how varied jobs can be: quiet or loud, clean or messy.

We learn that children can also earn money from doing chores (providing a service) or making things (those brownies looked awesome!). The book is short - some 30 pages or so - and very colorful, filled with different people from all walks of life. In the back there's a guide to how the book works and how children can learn from it, along with vocabulary and skills information. It could be fun to get a bunch of kids to set up a shop together, and offer work and services for cash (Monopoly cash, of course!). They can learn about real life and about managing money. On which score, stay tuned - there are more reviews to come!

The author is a former elementary school teacher so she has this covered! I commend this as a worthy read!

Sing Freedom! by Vanita Oelschlager, Mike DeSantis

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Here's another from the Oelschlager oeuvre, this time illustrated by DeSantis. The story is a true one: of the singing victory of the Estonians over the overbearing Soviet Union as it was known back then (but it was really all Russia). Estonia (called Eesti in Estonian) is one of the Baltic states, and it sits between the other two (Lithuania and Latvia) and the sliver of Baltic sea that separates Estonia from Finland. After World War 2 (like one wasn't more than enough), Russia began subsuming the smaller European nations along its border, and trying to grind them under its heels into subservience.

Estonia was one of the 14 such nations that resented this and always sought to recover its own identity and freedom. They did this in many ways, but in part, it was achieved through a five-yearly festival of song, where they rebelled by singing a nationalist Estonian song, which the Russians did not like. The Estonians would not give up and in the end, they found their freedom during Mikhail Gorbachev's reign.

This book tells a colorful and enjoyable story about this great and peaceful success, and is well worth reading.

Bonyo Bonyo by Vanita Oelschlager, Kristin Blackwood, Mike Blanc

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This begins a stretch of some seventeen children's non-fiction books I shall be reviewing! Deep breath and off we go!

I've had a lot of success with Oelschlager's books, and this was no exception: it was a lot of fun, as well as informative, and interesting book, beautifully illustrated by Blackwood and Blanc. It's a mini-biography of a young boy who was living in Kenya in Eastern Africa, a country lying just below what's known as the horn of Africa. The boy's name is Bonyo Bonyo, and he loved to go to school That's not a given in Africa. Even if you can find a school, you may have to pay to go there.

These school fees may be cheap compared with what a paid education in the US costs, but people are impoverished there, and even what we consider to be a trivial amount in the US can be an insurmountable obstacle in the so-called third world. This is why we can do a lot by contributing even a little to charities which help with people in such situations. Bonyo had a hard time, and had to travel a long way to get his education, but he was determined.

He did so well in school that he got a chance to go to a college in the USA. All he needed was the airfare! Yikes. That was hard to come by, but through work and donations from friends and well-wishers, he eventually achieved his dream and became a doctor, and now he runs a clinic on his home town and also a practice in the USA. Spoiled as we are for good food, clean water, and a free education in the west, it's easy to forget that others are not so fortunate. It's sad that our millionaire president is too selfish and simple to grasp this. This book is an important reminder to those of us who are open to an education.

The book mentions a college in Texas, not a college in Ohio. While I can find no confirmation of the Texas college attendance, I did find an article online that lists the college he attended in Ohio as an osteopathic college. Such is not exactly a complete medical education. Osteopathy can provide some knowledge of human physiology, but it has only a limited application: to bone and muscle health. It's really not a lot of use for the great diversity inherent in practicing general medicine. In a way, it's a bit like chiropractic (and I could tell you a sorry tale about that!), but at least it wasn't homeopathy! However, that's not so important in a children's story because the take-home message here is one of enduring and triumphing, of courage and persistence, which Bonyo exhibited in spectacular fashion. On that basis I commend this as a worthy read.

If... by Sarah Perry

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the 25th anniversary version of this book of which I was completely unware until I got an email about it asking if I'd like to review it. It sounded good to me, and now I'm happy that I did because this book is beautiful, and amazing, and it's lots of fun. My kids would have loved this too, when they were younger. They probably still would.

The book, some fifty pages long, asks a question and then illustrates it in gorgeous detail and bold colors. The cover illustrates one of the internal pages, which asks "What if leaves were fish," and shows a branch with some fruit and a bunch of shoaling green fish! There are pages showing slumbering dogs as foothills, butterflies as clothes, flying cats, hair made of mice, worms on wheels and dreaming meerkats. The author, in a small section at the back, invites the readers' imagination to run wild, using her illustrations, and combining them or making up stories about them - or dreaming up your own.

This was an amazing, sweet, fun, and wonderful book and I highly commend it.

The Last Single Girl by Bria Quinlan

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those 'Desperately Seeking Validation' kind of stories, where a woman has a deadline before which she absolutely must find a guy, or her life will be in ruins. If done right, it can be entertaining. The Norwegians demonstrated this in a Christmas TV series called Hjem til jul (Home for Christmas - English dubbed on Netflix) which was hilarious and enigmatic at the end, but in the USA land of the trope, there are far too many of these stories that make women look desperate, or stupid, or pathetic, or all three. While I am quite sure there are women (and men) like that, I don't subscribed to the cliché that a woman must have a man (or vice versa, or any mix of the idea).

It can be fun to read one if it's well done, but those are few and far between. This one started out in the fast lane on the freeway to Tropeville; then it seemed to be turning itself around a bit and rather than ditch it, I became interested. Unfortunately, it all-too-quickly took a U-Turn and continued right back to Tropeville, so I did ditch it. I am not a fan of reading novels about stupid women or patently ridiculous situations.

Sarah was purportedly hitting the point in life where all her friends were becoming involved with guys. What? Every one of them had been dedicatedly single to this point and she'd never head to deal with this before? Stupid and unrealistic. The trigger here though was that their New Year's Eve 'girls night out' was being sabotaged because the stereotypical queen bee of their group had decided everyone should bring their man on New Year's Eve, and hang those who didn't have one. Rather than ditch the bitch and find a group of female friends who were more akin to her own situation, or simply go alone and maybe meet a guy there, Sarah buys into this incarceration of a relationship, and in order to recruit a guy, she signs up to this online dating service. This is where Le Stupide began to kick in big time.

She sets up five guys to meet, and makes two dates with the first two at the same location and within a couple of hours of each other. Rather than be honest and tell the first guy that she only has an hour or so because she's meeting someone else, she lets their conversation run on and on until the second guy shows up. He happens to be best friends with the first guy and both of them ditch Sarah because they have some idiot pact never to fight over a girl. What fight? There was no fight here! Neither of them had any claim, much less 'ownership' of the woman they had both literally just met. Yet off they go! Morons.

The guy who Sarah meets in the café, the owner, starts commiserating with her about her fate. It's obvious at this point that he's going to be the one she ends up with, but Sarah is too stupid, no matter how long this goes on, to see that he's interested in her and instead keeps pursuing these rugged guys she thinks will match her. Guy number three is a single dad who forgot to mention this in his profile and shows up with three badly-behaving kids because his babysitter canceled on him. Guy number four is married and his wife shows up and blames Sarah for her own stupidity in sticking with this jerk of a guy. Actually I think that guy was the one who wrote the book blurb, because he sure can't spell 'frenemy'!

So, in short, no. Just no! This was badly-written and larded with trope and cliché, and it makes women look like losers and idiots. Why a female writer would do this kind of thing to her own gender, I do not know, but it's more insuting to woman than is porn, and it's nowhere near good enough for a 2020 vision.

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Rating: WARTY!

After a prison break in a small town, during which masses of convicts get loose and ransack the place, literally raping and pillaging, two years pass and not a single one of the dirty dozen escape planners has been caught. Abusing grant money aimed at rebuilding the town, local police detective Leah Hawkins, with the sanction of several town leaders. is commissioned to go after those men, not to bring them in, but to execute them. Therein lies the problem. Since those idiots at Kirkus called this book 'superior', I should have avoided it like the plague, but I didn't know their opinion at the time, so I gave it the old escapee try, and it fell short. There was too much luck and too many improbable in it. The more I read, the more it took my suspension of disbelieve and mangled it.

I'd been hoping for better, since the main character seemed like she might be interesting. She wasn't. Worse, she was boring. The biggest problem she had was that there was no problem that she had. Everything went her way all the time and never was she in any real danger or any kind of jeopardy. Despite the apparent dismal failure of the FBI to get a handle on even a single one of these dozen escapees in two years, Leah was able to track the first one down in no time at all - living in his mom's old house. Seriously? The FBI didn't watch the place? The same thing happened with escapees 2 and 3. They were found hanging out with friends or relatives who were known to the police. No one checked these places? The FBI didn't watch them?

One of these friends operated a fake ID factory, and Leah was lucky enough to discover a trash bin that apparently had not been emptied in two years and therefore had new names with old faces on driver's licenses and so on, leading Leah to a California location where she was able to get three of them in one fell swoop. Seriously? An illegal operation not once emptied-out incriminating trash in two years? Bullshit. Never did this executor Leah call out to these guys and offer them a chance to surrender. Never did she alert other cops or the FBI to their location si they could be brought to justice. Never once was she drawn-on first, and forced to shoot to defend herself. Time after time, she simply and cold-bloodedly murdered them, despite there being nothing in her history to suggest she would be that kind of person, nor was there any real triggering event which set her on the road to becoming a serial killer. And in the end she paid no price for her own crimes.

It was too much to take seriously. I can't commend this book at all.

The Gifting By KE Ganshert

Rating: WARTY!

This is a supernatural story about a world where science rules and supernatural belief is frowned upon, but where, of course, this one girl has inherited from her grandmother the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Naturally no one told her she has this power, and she thinks she's going crazy. Because this is YA, she is of course completely and unrealistically ostracized because of this one freak-out she has when she and some fellow teens are playing with a Ouija board.

I don't normally read stuff like this, but it's been a while and this one seemed quite interesting; unfortunately, it immediately seemed to be going down the same road to Tropeville that YA writers all-too-often follow like a bunch of blind sheep. This author appears no different, sporting the usual YA fear of being different, and thereby ironically becoming in a real way, the very character she writes about!

The book was a free loss-leader for a series, but I can't generate interest in a series that's written this poorly and with so many clichés in it. It's YA, and in my extensive experience is already a mark against it. Worse, it's in first person, a voice which often irritates me far more than it entertains me in stories.

It seems to be a rule of YA writing that everything is black and white: there can be no room for gray areas or nuance in these stories. Consequently, Tess is so ostracized that her family leaves the area and moves to Northern California where, her parents say, there's an institute that can help her. Her parents must be rolling in money because this whole transition takes only three weeks from Tess's incident to abandoning their old house and moving into a new one! Wow! Privilege much?

The author describes the move: "we jettisoned across the country." That makes zero sense. 'Jetted across the country' would have made sense or even, "we jettisoned ourselves across the country." Earlier she'd written something about 'Judo chopping' her brother for some remark he'd made, but Judo is not a 'chopping' sport. If she'd said 'karate chopping' that would have meant something, but not with Judo, which is a throwing sport a little bit like wrestling. It's not hard to get these things right, and you have to wonder about a writer's dedication when simple mistakes like this are so readily made.

The author makes no secret of the fact that she's something of a born-again believer and her bizarre detestation of science comes through in her writing and spoils the story which felt a bit like she was preaching a sermon rather than relating an entertaining tale of the supernatural. It's so strident at times that it's off-putting and it ruins her writing.

It wouldn't have been so bad if she wasn't so very wrong! Those who believe in these things, talk about having faith because it's not something science can measure, but this is bullshit. If the supernatural world (which I do not believe in, by the way) purportedly has any impact on the real world, then in order to do so it must cause change in the real world in order for it to act or to be detected, and that's something science can measure, quantify and study. There never has been any such evidence.

The believers themselves admit this by repeatedly - and throughout history - making excuses for their god's total absenteeism and inaction! They talk all the time about how we must act. "God helps those who help themselves," they cry, which sounds truly selfish to me, to say nothing of utterly lacking the very faith believers profess they have, but this small part is true: because we help ourselves, no god ever has to do anything! LOL!

That conveniently explains away why no god ever shows! And how we browbeat ourselves: if we succeed, then it's a god's success! If we fail, then it's our failure! How pathetic is that? The Old Testament is full of stories of the ancient Hebrews fighting foes. No god ever helped them to win. This for a supposedly peace-loving religion, but whenever the Hebrews won a victory, it was because they were the chosen people blessed by a god. Whenever they got their ass kicked it was because they were unworthy sinners and direly needed to repent. I call horse-shit on such self-serving and deluded lies.

The fact is that Bible and other religious literature throughout the world is rife with stories describing how people did the work that the god really ought to have done! They did this precisely because there was no god to do it, and this same 'epiphany' runs rampant today! If there were such a thing as gods, we would never find ourselves in the position of always having to do the work! This and the complete lack of any positive evidence for a god or an afterlife is why I do not believe. I'm sorry that writers like this one do not have a sounder scientific education; if they did, they would not make the mistakes this author has made.

But this isn't a review of the author, it's a review of the book and that is sadly lacking. As I mentioned, it's far too full of trope and follows far too many other writers telling pretty much the same story with a tweak-tweak here and a twerk-twerk there. What I long for is the story that steps off that worn-out path and dares to tread where no author has gone before. This novel wasn't anywhere close, and I could not continue reading it. I can't commend it based on the portion I did read which was a recipe for disaster: one more half-baked than well-done.