The Deep End by Julie Mulhern

Rating: WARTY!

This story was first person, a voice I typically detest, but even so I decided to give it a try. I ran into a major problem immediately and gave up on it at once, not wanting to tempt fate and read on in the faint hope it would improve. The story began with the main character strolling out to the backyard pool for a morning swim, and somehow she fails to notice a dead body in the water until she dives in and swims right into it? Was she blind? Did she keep her eyes closed until she dived into the water? It was, quite simply, bad writing and if I start out by reading that in the first few paragraphs I'm sure-as-hell not going to waste my time reading on under the delusion that it will get better. Certainly not in first person I'm not! I can't commend this one, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

Archangel by Sharon Shinn

Rating: WARTY!

After a hundred pages or so of this huge tome of a fine-print novel, I really didn't feel like I'd be very happy trying to read several hundred pages more if the first hundred are not doing much for me. The story had potential I think, but I feel it's been wasted and I'm not a fan of this meandering and waffling style of writing.

The premise is a world set in Biblical times, and in which angels interact with humans in ways the Bible never talked about. The position of 'Archangel' is due for a change of tenure, and Gabriel is up for it. For reasons which go unexplained, he's required to get him a human bride, but one designated by "the god."

Having failed to find his bride at the location he was told she would be, he begins a search for her, but can't find her anywhere. The village has been destroyed - and was razed several years ago, which begs the question as to why he was directed there when there was no 'there' there! That question, again, goes unanswered, at least in the portion I read.

It made zero sense because everyone in Gabriel's angelic circle is chiding him for not getting off the mark and finding his bride earlier, but if he'd done that when the village was still extant, then she would have been a child bride! Seriously? If he'd waited, as he did, until she was old enough to marry then her village was gone. What the heck? It made no sense at all. I don't think the author thought it through.

In another pov, we discover that she, Rachel, is a servant for a family which is organizing a wedding to which Gabriel has been invited. This is where he meets Rachel, purely by accident, but instead of following Gabriel's search and showing him meeting up with her, the author chose to skip to her life as a servant and ramble on about that, before bringing that to a jarring halt while we're forced to back-track to a documentation of Gabriel's fruitless search.

This held zero interest for me and as gar as I'm concerned, was a complete waste of trees. They'd already met at the end of the previous chapter! Why force a flashback on us? It contributed nothing to moving the story forward - quite the opposite in fact. It held it up and I react negatively to dumb writing choices like that. I'm not a fan of pointless flashbacks.

On top of this, what's wrong with this match up? A young woman to an antique angel? I mean let's face it Gabriel's been around since the dawn of time, so why would he have any interest at all in a juvenile human female? That said, Gabriel hardly has angelic thoughts. He doesn't come off as an angel at all, but as exactly how he's portrayed - a regular human male in his thirties or thereabouts. It was bullshit.

It's like that asinine 16-year-old Isabella falling in love with the hundred year old Edward. if she;d been legally an adult and he'd been half his age that would be one thing, but how is it remotely going to work given their massively different life experiences? I'm not one who denigrates May-December relationships; far from it, but in this case it was way extreme, and even more-so in the case of Gabriel and Rachel.

Why would someone of his antiquity and background have any interest at all in a woman who must have seemed like an infant to him? I'm not taking about physical appearance, but about mental compatibility. They would have had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common! Just yuk, and ugh, and blecch!

I never did get why it was so hard for him to find her if it's been divinely ordained that he and she are to wed and sing praises to a god at a ceremony. It made no sense to me, and I quickly decided I wasn't about to expend any more time reading another several hundred pages of this kind of writing. I ditched it and moved on to something better. Trust me, there's always something better! I see no point in wasting my valuable time on something that simply isn't doing it for me, and so, based on the portion of this that I did read, I cannot commend it as a worthy read, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

The Black Room by Luke Smitherd

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a free portion of a novel from Barnes and Noble. Set in England, it turned out to be the start of a novel the author is apparently still writing. He put the first bit out for free, as a teaser for the rest of it, for which people will pay, of course. He hopes. It's a bit like writing a series and putting the first volume out for free. Unfortunately I'd mistakenly thought it was a whole first novel of a series so I was a little surprised that it was so short and ended on a huge cliffhanger until I realized what he'd done! He has several rather frenetic screens of explanation at the end of the excerpt.

This story was downright weird, which is why it appealed to me! I like 'em when they go off the rails or jump out of the rut of most novels, so that was a big plus. This one is about this guy who wakes up in a darkened room and all there is in there, is a screen for him to look at. Very soon he realizes that the screen is the view out of someone's eyes - a young woman's of course, since he's a young guy himself.,/p>

He's apparently in her head - literally, though the interior isn't anything like he might have imagined it would be. As time passes he learned not only more about her, but more about the place where he's confined, which is distinctly strange. He's naked and rather afraid of the darkness that surrounds him so the whole experience is freaking him out almost as much as it does her.

He can't communicate with her at first, and when he finally manages it, she does freak out. Apparently she had issues with voices in her head a while before, and now she thinks her insanity is returning, but eventually they start a working relationship and the guy manages to convince her that this is real and not her own twisted imagination, so they embark on an effort together, to try and figure out what the hell is going on.

That's about where it ends. The story was interesting, but I don't know if it's interesting enough to make me want to read more. I might pursue this. I can't deny I'm intrigued to find out where that premise goes, but at the same time I'm afraid it's going to end up being a dumb story and I'll regret wasting time reading it! LOL!

However, based on this excerpt, I can't do other than rate it a worthy read. It was engrossing and it did keep me reading. The ending was not an ending, so that was a let-down. It's also a very British novel, so for me it wasn't a problem, but some of the lingo might fox non-Brit readers. That's not a negative - just an observation.

I'm not a reader who thinks the only novels worth reading are American or set in the USA, so I delve around and read anything that's of interest no matter where it originates or who writes it. Others may find this one eminently readable because of its 'Britishness'. Or you may find, as I did, that this author uses 'whilst' way the hell too much! Regardless of all that, I commend this one. Besides, it's free, and short, so what do you have to lose, apart from a bit of time?

The Akhenaten Adventure by PB Kerr

Rating: WARTY!

This book, a part of the 'Children of the Lamp' series, did not agree with me, which perhaps is no surprise since it's not aimed at me! The thing is though that I've read many middle-grade novels and enjoyed a lot of them. This one, not so much. I finally got around to it after it had been sitting quietly on my print book shelves forever. Maybe that should have been a tip-off! But the story - some 350 pages long - took an almost forever to get moving, and it made little sense.

It tells you right up front - or rather right in back, in the book description - that the non-identical twins in the story, Phillipa and John (John Gaunt believe it or not - at least the author left of the O'), are djinni, aka genies. Why then drag the story pointlessly on for fully a third of its length before this is revealed to the twins? In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling had it revealed to him that he was a wizard before page 60, and that book was shorter than this one. So why the delay? I have no idea. It seemed ridiculous to me since it was already known what they were.

The problem, and this is only a theory, but the problem as I see it is that writers get lethargic when creating a series and drag everything out to fill lots of volumes so they can stick it to the reader for the cost of yet another novel in the series. It's not about entertaining the reader and giving value for money; it's about putting in the least effort for the maximum reward, and Big Publishing™ encourages this big time, of course.

Shame on such writers. Shame on such publishers. This is one of many reasons, and with few exceptions, that I detest series and why I self-publish. Writing is what's important to me - not milking money from people, especially in times like this with ten million people - and disproportionately minorities, teens, and women - out of work.

The kids meet their uncle Nimrod (yeah, really!) in a dream they have while having their wisdom teeth extracted, and they persuade their parents to let them fly to London to visit him. Why London? I don't know: a Harry Potter 'Brits are cool' diversion? It was pointless.

Why not have their Uncle living in Egypt, which is where they went next? Arab-phobia? It felt rather bigoted to me to have the story be about a race of people whose name is of Middle east origin, and then deny that derivation by starting it in the US and then moving it to London with the Middle East coming in third. But this is another problem with novels and too many movies. If it ain't USA, who cares? How small-minded. And how mercenary.

So the story was slow. Worse, it was not particularly interesting or original, or adventurous, and it didn't draw me in, make me like or even respect any of the characters, or make me want to read beyond about half way, which is more than I ought to have read, for sure. I can't commend this based on what I read of it.

The First Sister by Linden A Lewis

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is the first in a trilogy ("The First Sister"). The thing is that there was nothing on Net Galley to indicate this was part of a trilogy. I would probably have not requested it had I known, because I've had little success with YA trilogies. But you work with what you have, so here goes! It was described as "Combining the social commentary of The Handmaid's Tale with the white-knuckled thrills of Red Rising." I did not like The Handmaid's Tale, and I'm not familiar with Red Rising at all, but the book description interested me, so I went ahead and selected it for review.

Unfortunately, and this is doubtlessly because it's a trilogy, the book took forever to get going and moved at a lethargic pace, while paradoxically doing next to nothing in terms of actually starting in on a story. Combine this with the multiple PoVs, all in first person - a voice I despise - and a tedious audio diary transcription from one of the characters who was unimaginatively named 'Hiro', and it seemed that the characters in this book were conspiring to irritate and bore me.

First person is so two persons ago, and very quickly I lost all interest in Hiro's non-story anyway. I began routinely skipping their sections. Even so, I made it only to 25% of the way through before I was forced to DNF this novel as a cause infâme, which is the opposite of a cause célèbre. Life is too short to spend it on stories that don't inspire, excite and engage. Your mileage may differ. I hope it does. It would be a sad world if we all liked the same things.

My first real problem was that I didn't buy into the scenario where there would be, in the future, a religious order of sacred prostitutes, nor was any help given to the reader as to how this had even come about. Instead we were simply presented with the fait accompli of a going concern. and expected to run with it. For me it was too thin, especially since the author was surprisingly coy about what exactly it was that these women did. Apparently there were three only on this entire troop ship, one of whom was reserved solely for the captain. The other two evidently had their work cut out for them, whatever it was.

The whole point of volume one of a series is that it's a prologue. I don't do prologues and I don't like volume 1's for that very reason, so it was ironic to me that this one told us so little about the world we're in. The comparison to Red Rising may or may not be apt. I can't speak to that, but personally I'd feel insulted were my work to be compared with someone else's like mine is a poor clone rather than something original, but as long as we're making comparisons, for me, a better one is to Star Trek, and it's a negative one, I'm sorry to say, because Star Trek has this same problem. In this story, just like in Star Trek, we have people doing everything, with not a robot in sight.

What happened to all the robots? We have them today in volume and they're getting better and better. So what went wrong? Was there a robot plague and they all died out such that there are none for the military and so human cannon fodder is required as usual? And on that score, why are there no sex dolls in the future such that women are required to serve as something for the men to masturbate in? But why would men prefer that if the women aren't very attractive? At one point in chapter 3, I read this: “She’s handsome for a woman." I'm sorry but WHAT?!

Again, we have sex dolls today and they're becoming more and more lifelike, but while they're a long way from being remotely human in any way, this story takes place well into the future. And still: no sex toys? It doesn't work without some sort of explanation as to why there are none and so there have to be actual humans in servitude to men - and on a ship captained by a woman?! Naturally there has to be human interest, but the trick of writing a good human interest story is to set it in a realistic future and still make it work. This future felt artificial and sterile. Humans are still doing all the fighting in person? There are no robots? No drones? No AIs? It didn't work for me.

Why would these women voluntarily have their vocal chords disabled or removed or whatever it was they had done with no explanation as to why, and give up their voice? Isn't a voice part of a good sex life? Obviously these women were not allowed to just say no, so their voice would have been useless for that, but why were they denied any expression of pleasure, whether real or just faking it? Women are fighting right now to have a voice, and yet in the future it's gone? Why? How did it happen? In the portion I read, that question got a Trumpian response: no intelligent answer, just redirection and deflection. Why would adherents of a female-oriented religion, with a goddess at its head, put themselves in physical service to men? We get no answers - not in the 25% I read. I needed more than this novel was apparently willing to provide, and that's one of the reasons why I began writing myself, so maybe it's not a bad thing!

As the book description tells us, "First Sister has no name and no voice." Even without a physical voice, she could still have set herself apart and showed some backbone, but she did not. Perhaps she grows a spine later, but will she also grow integrity? She's lacking that, too. She was so pathetic to me in that first quarter of this novel that I couldn't bear to read any more about her. I've read too many real-life stories about people in her position who have shown their mettle. I'm not interested in a fictional one who doesn't appear to have any, let alone know where to find some and I'm not about to read three novels where one would do in the faint hope she'll get some in the end.

When I open a new novel I'm always hoping to be shown something new; something different; something I've longed for without, perhaps, even realizing it. I've read many novels like that. Sadly though, I've read many more that were not like that at all: ones that took the road most traveled instead of least. It's nice to be surprised, but that didn't happen in this case. While I wish the author all the best in their future endeavors, I can't in good faith commend this particular one as a worthy read based on what I experienced from it.

Fly Girls by Keith O'Brien

Rating: WORTHY!

Fly Girls details the lives of a handful of early female pilots back when air travel was new, largely experimental, and very dangerous. The story of these people proved to be highly engaging. My only disappointment was the lack of images - it would have been nice had there been a pic of each of the pilots covered in the narrative, but of course that's the price we pay for listening to an audio book! I don't know if the ebook or print book has such images, but pictures can be readily found online of both the pilots and the airplanes.

The book is subtitled "How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History," but it never really made it clear who these five were. That picture only emerged slowly over the course of the book. The blurb, which usually the author has nothing to do with, identifies them as Louise Thaden, Ruth Nichols, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Elder, and Florence Klingensmith.

It was paradoxically Earhart, not a great flyer, who got the lion's share of the story and Klingensmith who got so little. The blurb was highly inappropriate, too evidently written by a guy and breathlessly describing Thaden as a studious pilot, mother, and wife, although why 'mother and wife' were in there is a mystery. Have you ever read of a male pilot being described as a 'father and husband"? I haven't. In the same blurb, Ruth Elder is described as "gorgeous." Why? She looked like most other women of the 1920s did! But the question is, was Chuck Yeager or some other male pilot ever described as gorgeous? I don't think so. This is a serious and ongoing problem with Big Publishing™.

Other than that, the only real complaint I'd have was this one section which rambled on endlessly about this guy Cliff Henderson, who was instrumental in setting-up air racing back then when it was a new and exciting thing. Why the author chose to go off at a major tangent with him in particular, I do not know. Many men were mentioned, of course, including some air pioneers with renowned names like Beech, Curtiss, and Fairchild, with a few details given in each case, which is entirely understandable, yet none got the treatment Henderson did. I guess it's hard for some authors to leave all that research unused, but it was annoying and it felt inappropriate and rather insulting to the five women and the other female pilots about whom this book was purportedly written.

Other than that, the writing was good and engaging, although perhaps fanciful here and there, the author claiming to know what these pilots were doing, and thinking and saying when clearly that could not have been the case. In some cases there were diaries and newspaper reports and so on, and books (Amelia Earhart wrote one) which supplied authentic and interesting information, and O'Brien did his research, but I've never been a fan of fictionalized accounts creeping into an otherwise non-fiction book.

One of the most interesting sections (aside from Earhart's cross-Atlantic trip) was the 1929 Women's Air Derby. This was of course re-named the "Powder-Puff Derby" when that jackass, so-called comedian Will Rogers disparaged it as such, and the newsmen got hold of the story. The race was from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland over several days. Despite disparagement from men, out of 20 pilots who began it., only six failed to finish, which is pretty impressive in an era of relatively untrustworthy airplanes and multiple technical issues.

One competitor died when her plane lost an argument with gravity. She apparently had engine trouble and was trying to set down on a flat area close by a river, but ended up crashing. She'd evidently tried to use her parachute, but deployed it so late that it didn't even have time to open before she quite literally hit the ground. Her name was Marvel Crosson.

Amelia Earhart was in that race, but came third. She would have been fourth had Marvel not crashed. The men who organized it put all kinds of obstacles in the way, such as telling the women the airplane had to have horsepower 'appropriate for a woman'. One of the contestants, Opal Kunz, owned and flew a 300-horsepower plane that was disqualified as too fast for a woman to fly, so she was forced to find a weaker one! There were incidents suggestive that maybe some of the women's planes were sabotaged - like when one woman discovered gasoline had been put into her oil tank in place of oil, and so on.

One of the biggest critics was a man named Haliburton - yes that one - who founded the company that Dick Cheney had ties to, and that has a string of issues tied to its name including some during the mid-east conflicts. Haliburton was convinced women didn't ought to be flying at all - that they ought to be home having babies - and probably barefoot and in the kitchen! He likely would have died of apoplexy had he lived until 1993 when Jeannie Leavitt became the first female fighter pilot. She was the one who trained Brie Larsen, the actor, so she could pretend to be a fighter pilot in the Captain Marvel movie. Shades of Marvel Crosson!

This book was sad at the end. Of the five girls the story covers primarily, Amelia Earhart disappeared without a trace, as most people know, but the other four, despite typically accomplishing more than Earhart did, are far less well remembered and most are equally sad.

It's not a spoiler to relate the historical record: Florence Klingensmith died young, in a crash. She demands a movie be made about her life, feisty daredevil that she was. Ruth Nichols almost died in a crash and spent the last few years of her life depressed and in pain from assorted injuries until she committed suicide. Ruth Elder also attempted suicide, but was discovered in time, and she went on to live up to her name, dying at the age of 75. Louise Thaden seemed to be the only one who escaped those problems, perhaps because she had a happy marriage and children, and she died last of all in 1979. As I said, it's a real shame that Earhart is better remembered than any of the others; all of them deserve to be remembered.

Despite its sadness, and despite how angering it is that these women were constantly kept down and demeaned for their gender, I commend this book as a worthy read. It demands to be read. People need to know how far we've come and then maybe they'll better understand how far we still need to go.

Ellie Jordan Ghost Trapper by JL Bryan

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an ebook I got as a loss leader for a series. I'm not into series - they tend to be derivative, repetitive, and boring, and the first volume is nothing but a prologue. I don't do prologues, but the premise for this particular volume sounded interesting and as a stand-alone story, it proved readable in the end.

Just as the title says, Ellie Jordan is a ghost trapper. This story takes place in a society where there's wide belief in ghosts and hauntings, and where evil and vengeful spirits exist, and her job is to catch them. Her job is made easier because of people's beliefs and that fact that even people she hasn't met have heard of her organization. The detection part of her work comes in finding out who the ghost is and what it's needs are so it can be lured into a containment vessel and removed.

Nowhere does the story go into anything about whether Ellie needs to be licensed by the City of Savannah, Georgia to do her job, or whatever, which seemed a bit strange given how her job seemed to be treated very much like any other service job! Pipes blocked? Call the plumber. Ghost infestation? Call Ellie Jordan!

It does go into how she became a ghost trapper though, and commendably not in a flashback, but in a decently-written trip down memory lane. She works for a guy who used to be a police detective. They met when her house burned down when she was in her teens, and have stayed in touch. When Ellie graduated college, she went to work for him, and he's been grooming her to take over the business.

She gets called to a house haunting that seems run of the mill, but once the ghost is removed, things get worse, not better! It seemed a bit obvious, but not too obvious, what was going on, so that wasn't a problem for me, and I liked Ellie's relationship with Stacey, the photographer who's new to the business and so serves as the reader's link to learning about Ellie's job.

There's also a new guy drafted in, and I wasn't sure what purpose he served. The story would have been fine even without him. The only function he actually appeared to fulfill was that of Stacey's future love interest, which is a good reason not to like series. There's no point in having him in this story and if all he does is set up a later romance, then I can do without that and so can the story.

There were one or two writing problems, but nothing big. At one point I read (of a door), "It was sunken at the back of a small brick porch under the shadows of a sharply peak roof." This to describe a door under a portico, which would have saved a lot of writing if the author had only looked it up. It's not hard to find this information these days. But given what he wrote, it should have been 'peaked roof'. At least he didn't write pique roof! LOL!

Another instance was where I read, "I nodded, eased the door closed, and slid the deadbolt back into place." Again, the wrong term was used. A deadbolt is a lock, not a bolt as such. Doors these days usually have the regular lock and a deadbolt right next to it (below or above) which is turned with a key from the outside, and a rotating latch on the inside. The bolt Ellie was referring to here was a regular slide bolt. The deadbolt is called that precisely because it cannot be slid across like a regular bolt.

Finally there was: ' "Thank you," I said, though I had no intent of drinking it' - which should have been 'no intention' not 'no intent' unless you put 'to' after it in place of 'of' and remove the 'ing' from 'drinking'. I guess that would have made it passable. There was one more thing that bothered me. It was when Ellie referred to someone's spouse: "The wife, a pretty woman named Elizabeth Sutton" I didn't get why her looks were relevant.

This was first person voice, and as such it was Ellie's opinion, not the author's/narrator's (if I might make such a dubious distinction!), so it's not entirely unreasonable, but it bothered me because first of all, her looks were irrelevant! It's not like Ellie was judging a beauty pageant!

Secondly it didn't seem like the kind of observation Ellie would make. She wasn't given to classifying women by their looks, whereas a male author tends to be, and far too many female authors too. I don't find this focus on women's looks to be useful or appropriate unless there's something specific about her looks that's relevant to the story. It serves only to demean female characters and by extension, women in general. It's one thing to have a character say it; it's entirely another to have the author say it, even when it's supposedly the first-person voice character's comment.

This is one reason why first person voice irks me, and although it was not so bad in this story, I'm about ready to quit reading such novels period. I've already ditched all of my print book first person novels unread, and I certainly refuse to buy any more such novels unless there's a really good reason to, but lord knows how many I have infesting my large collection of unread ebooks!

But I digress. Back to the topic of classifying women by their looks: we need to be better than this, and YA novels are particularly egregious on this score, even when written by female authors. There are other things an author could have written, had they honestly felt it to be necessary: 'an intelligent-looking woman' maybe? An intense looking woman? An energetic woman? A harried woman? An easy-going woman? A woman who looked tired? A woman with sharp features? A woman with soft features? But unless there's a solid narrative reason for categorizing her, why not just say, "His wife's name was Elizabeth, and she...'? If you're not going to describe her husband as a 'handsome fellow' or something like that, then why go out of the way over his wife? And why 'The wife'? Why not 'his spouse' or 'his partner'?

Other than these few negative criticisms, the novel wasn't bad at all. I do not feel any great urge to go read the next one, but I might read another at some point down the road. As it stands, I commend this as it is as a worthy read.

Dinosnores by Sandra Boynton

Rating: WORTHY!

How can you not love a children's author who carries a name like Sandra Boynton? It's not possible! LOL! This was a cute and colorful rhyming book about dinosaurs and bedtime. It was short and simple, and fun and sweet and might just work to get your kid to sleep! On that basis I commend it as a worthy try at least!

A Trace of Copper by Anne Renwick

Rating: WARTY!

I like the idea of steampunk as a genre, but I seem to have had little success with that genre from what I've so far subjected myself to, and this audio book was no exception to that pattern. I could not get into it and DNF'd it before long. It did not help that this was the first in a series (An Elemental Web Tale), and I'm not much into series. The first volume is always a prologue and prologues and me definitely do not get along.

In this story, Doctor Piyali Mukherji, a recruit to an organization called "The Queen's Agents." I like a good Indian woman in a story and have enjoyed such stories in other genres. I'm in a sort of delayed process of gearing up to write one of my own, but in the case of this particular novel, I could not get up any head of steam, and I found myself caring less and less what she was up to, because it just seemed so rambling and uninviting. It went on and on and I couldn't focus on it at all. It was a bit weird frankly.

Her investigation was in Wales, which is also something I'm interested in normally. I love the Welsh accent and have visited wales myself more than once, but again, in this case, it failed to stir me. This 'reuniting' of Doctor Mukherji with an old flame, Evan Tredegar, and the kindling of past and alienated desires I could have done without. It's a tired trope and it offered nothing new.

The real question though is how was this steampunk? It was really an epidemiological study with nothing steampunk about it. It could have been any genre, so there was that strike against it, too. Maybe steampunk played a larger part in the story later, but I couldn't stand to read that far, having had my interest badly squandered by the uninspired writing.

So there's the real problem in a nut's hell: it (at least theoretically) has steampunk; it has a potentially strong Indian woman as a main character, and it was set in Wales, and yet this could not hold my interest! I can only conclude that the problem was not me, but poor writing which failed to engage me, and misrepresentation by the author and or the publisher as to what this book was really about, and what it had to offer the reader. I can't commend this based on what I read.

Finding Tranquility by Laura Heffernan

Rating: WARTY!

This was an ebook about this married guy, Brett, who is terrified of flying, yet he's supposed to fly to LA on 9/11 to interview for a job so he and his wife Jess can move there, so she in turn can attend med school. He panics and gives his boarding pass to another person who boards the plane which ends up flying into the World Trade Center.

Realizing he's now considered dead, he revaluates his whole life and suddenly realizes he can face the truth about himself which is that he was not happy in his life, in his marriage, or in his body. He feels like his wife can do better, so he 'stays dead' and travels to Canada. How that's accomplished is a bit too convenient in that he finds a passport stuck in a pocket in an old backpack he gets when he sells his clothes and suitcase to get some cash. It's a woman's passport and the owner conveniently looks rather like him and is the same age. It's far too convenient in fact, but he dresses as a woman - something he's always secretly felt he was inside, and she starts a new life as Christa.

Over the next eighteen years, Christa completes her sex-change and then by accident runs into Brett's wife, who despite the physical changes, realizes that this woman is her supposedly-dead husband. Yeah, it was highly improbable at best, how this was set up - the passport and the accidental encounter with the ex, but to begin with, it wasn't as bad as it sounds so I stayed with it.

The thing about this gender change story is that Jess was pregnant on 9/11, but neither of them knew it when Brett disappeared, so now Christa has a son who's almost eighteen. They finally all meet up for Canadian Thanksgiving and everything seems to be going well, but you know there's going to be a fly in the ointment.

Jess rather impulsively consults an attorney - a guy she'd briefly dated, after she fled back from the hotel in Canada to the US after meeting her ex. She was confused, and angry and fearful, and she confided in the attorney about what had happened and asked about the legal implications from her being the recipient of a $250,000 insurance policy payout, plus getting some money from the 9/11 fund - money which all together, put her through med school. This attorney seemed to be highly-biased against transgender people and the meeting did not go well.

I had a brief feeling that this lawyer was dishonestly going to try to spoil this blossoming relationship by outing the husband, but that's not what the blurb says - it talks of complications after the real Christa resurfaces, and that's what happens. The real Christa turns up and starts trying to blackmail the fake Christa, so Jess invites her spouse to move back to Boston with her and her son.

They all seem to be getting along, so they sneak Christa back into the US and then Christa gets into a fight with a guy at the last football game of the season for her son, and gets arrested for no apparent reason. She gets fingerprinted and they discover she's really Brett who supposedly died twenty years ago. People who live next door and across the street sell their houses when word gets out that a resurrected guy, now a woman is living there with his wife. This went beyond improbable, yet there it was, on top of too many other improbable events. A little bit of improbable is fine, but when the whole books seems to be depending on it, it's too much for me!

On top of that, their son Ethan gets into a fight with some of the guys on his basketball team - and this is after he's specifically told Christa when they first met that there are several people at his school who have two moms or two dads. It felt like this writer was just making-up stuff as she went along, trying to lard the story up with drama without considering what she'd already written.

I know that real-life transgender people have problems and can be subject to bullying, and threats, and have even been murdered, but this story felt a bit like it was cheapening those real tragedies by tossing far too much conflict into the story and losing sight of what ought to have been a love story. Instead of that it became a soap opera, and that doesn't appeal to me.

So! There were a lot of really improbable and highly convenient happenstances and coincidences in this story that could probably have been circumvented with a little imagination, and because that wasn't done, and yet more were accumulating the further I read, I quit this story about three-quarters in. It was just too much. A far simpler story would have been better, but his writer obviously didn't know when to stop gilding her lily. I can't commend it as a worthy read.

Hey Black Child by Useni Eugene Perkins, Bryan Collier

Rating: WORTHY!

Written well by Perkins and illustrated finely by Collier, this book sends positive messages and comforting affirmations to young black children, reassuring them that they can do and be whatever they dream of if they stay the course. It's a good message to send, especially at times like these when people are feeling despairing, fearful, and lonely.

Sometimes I have mixed feelings about books like these because there are no white people or people of any other race depicted here, so in that sense it's racist. Books like this need to be more inclusive, but given the important message it's trying to send, I was willing to overlook that on this occasion, so I commend it as a worthy read.

What a Wonderful World by Bob Thiele, George David Weiss, Tim Hopgood

Rating: WORTHY!

I liked this because it was something different. The words are taken from the song by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss that was written for Louis Armstrong and released in 1967. It was a huge hit in the UK, although not so much in the US where the idiot owner of the company Armstrong has just signed for, refused to promote the song! He was wanting another "Hello Dolly." Moron. They had to lock him out of the recording studio because he was so disruptive!

Illustrated by Hopgood, the book is just the kind of reassuring, feelgood book the world needs at times like these, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Good Night Biscuit by Alyssa Satin Capucilli, Pat Schories

Rating: WORTHY!

Biscuit is the ultimate clinging and OCD puppy. He won't go to bed unless everything is just so. He needs the bed plumped up, his blankie, his doll, a goodnight story, a goodnight kiss...and then he wants to start over again! In fact, he really takes the biscuit. Hopefully though, by the time you've read this book to your child, the child will be snoring little kiddie snores and fast asleep and you won't have to go through all this stuff! The book was charming: simply-written by Capucilli, and nicely-illustrated by Shoires. I commend it as a worthy read.

Love You Forever by Robert Munsch, Sheila McGraw

Rating: WARTY!

This was a bizarre pasteboard children's book about a creepy mother who treats her child like a baby even when he's a grown adult. It was entirely inappropriate and I can't believe it was ever published as a children's book. Shame on Firefly Books. This is more like a Stephen King horror story than a book about love.

it starts out perfectly fine with a new mother loving her child, but as the child grows older she becomes more like a stalker than a mom. She spies on her child, as a teen, sleeping in his room - opening the door without permission to watch him in bed. When he moves to his own house, she literally breaks in a cradles him, sitting on his bed? WTF? This book is a sickness in print. Stay way from it if you don't want to warp you child.

Glory Season by David Brin

Rating: WARTY!

This is a seven-hundred sixty-some page tome of a tombstone of a novel, and the reason for that is not that there's a huge story to tell, but that the author is so obsessed with world-building that he forgets to actually tell a story.

It's supposed to be about two sisters: clone-twins in a world where winter twins are nowhere near as appreciated as summer twins - why is never really explained. Rather than stay with their clan as summer clones do, they must leave to seek their fortune. It takes almost a hundred pages - a seventh of the story - before they actually leave the city! Most of those pages are taken up with world building - in a world they're due to leave, so why expend all that time on it?

If it had been done beautifully, that would be one thing. I'd still consider it a senseless waste of time, but it would have been readable. The problem is that it's not done beautifully. The author seems like he's obsessed with tossing in every flitting idea that crosses his transom and creating endless races of people, each of which is given a cursory mention and we move on. It was pointless because none of it stood out, and nothing was memorable or even interesting, nor did it contribute a single thing to the story unless endlessly-waffling confusion was actually the author's intent.

I quickly tired of this and gave up after a hundred pages or so. I have better things to do with my time than read another author's listing of all the alien species he thought up, but had never found a novel to fit them into so he decided to use this one as his waste disposal unit. This is the third Brin I've tried to read. The first, Kiln People, I read a long time ago and really enjoyed, but the last one, and now this I have not, so I guess I'm done with this author now. I can't commend this based on what I read of it.

The Dragon Choker by Stephanie Alexander

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata:
"...the more likely her husband would give up and returned to his own chamber." Returned need the -ed suffix removed.
"He must think thusly at times" - 'thusly' isn't really a word. The 'ly' needs to be omitted.
"...and since they both knew the way they let themselves in." - this needed a comma after 'way'.
"She lit on the muddy ground..." - unless she shone a flashlight on it or set fire to it, lit is the wrong word. It needed to be alit or alighted. Either is acceptable.

This is volume two of a series based on the Cinderella fairy-tale. There are several quite varying "Cinderella" stories though history, originating from as far and wide as Greece and China, but most people tend to think of Cinderella as the version written by Charles Perrault in 1697, titled Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre ("Cinderella or the little glass slipper"), which is where the Disney Fairytale Mining Corporation™ lifted the premise for the animated version it put out in 1950. That's the version that introduced the two evil stepsisters, the glass slipper, the pumpkin and all that, and upon which this novel is loosely-based.

I haven't read volume one of this series, and I'm far from convinced I'd like it if I did, so I wasn't about to try reading that before I started on this one. Since I'm not very much into series, whether I'd end up liking this one was the question. I started out quite happy that it wasn't written in first-person voice - which I despise, and which would have decidedly turned me off it, so I commend the author for that wise choice.

It was decently-written for the most part (subject to occasional grammatical and word-choice errors, some examples of which I'll list below. It did keep me engaged for a while, but as time passed I started losing faith in the author and consequently my interest in the story waned considerably. I also had problems with some of the plot choices and with the portrayal of Eleanor, which I think belied the book description - or more accurately the book description misrepresented the novel.

It was from that description though, that I had become intrigued by this story, being led to believe that the novel was something bit different from the usual premise. The not-so-happily-ever-after induced me to request it for review. The description began, "Eleanor Brice Desmarais, she of the cracked glass slipper and unladylike intellectual propensities" and that caught my attention. 'Desmarais' is French for 'of the swamp' so maybe there's some history related to that in volume one. Or maybe not! I can't speak to that. Character names are important to me so I tend to have them mean something which may not always be apparent to the reader, but maybe I read more into other authors' choices than I ought.

This promise of 'unladylike intellectual propensities' however, failed to materialize unless all that the person writing that description meant was that Eleanor had a sexual appetite. Oh how scandalous - a woman enjoys sex! Who knew?! Seriously? But if that's the case, then the writer of the description needs to get an education regarding the difference between intellectual and sexual.

The really sad thing about Eleanor though, and the tragic paradox of this story is that she's purported to be the people's princess, and yet she was risking bringing down shame on herself and the royal family by her uncontrolled behavior. This is hardly how a great princess behaves. She seems to have been modeled on Princess Diana, but unlike in that real life case, Eleanor starts her affair long before she's ever built-up any credibility by demonstrating a generosity of spirit, a warmth, and a caring attitude that the real life Diana did before she embarked on her affair. There's a huge difference between the two.

I think intellectual is sexy, but if it was merely used as a euphemism for sexual propensities, then it was a cheap shot. If it actually meant intellectual, then it missed the mark because Eleanor did not come across as any such thing. Quite the opposite. She spent all her time pining for Dorian, the best friend of her husband, Prince Gregory. At one point Eleanor mentions Dorian's "girth" and from that I could conclude only that her 'intellect' seemed decidedly low and her interest in him had nothing to do with love since they never seemed to have any conversation that didn't revolve around their physical trysting.

The story was boring because this was all she ever did. There was one brief interlude where she was visiting the poor and talking about opening school for girls, but that was a bump in an otherwise featureless romp, or unending talk of romping, or unending wishful thinking of romping, with Dorian. She didn't even spend any significant time with her child - not according to how this was written up to the point where I quit reading it, about a quarter the way through. Maybe things changed later, but I had zero faith, given what I'd read thus far, that it would improve. Eleanor was a one-trick pony (interpret 'trick' however you like), and she wasn't remotely interesting to read about.

I can understand that a woman who is unhappy in her marriage may seek solace elsewhere. I don't have a problem with that, and missing the first volume may well skew my perception, but did Eleanor even try to resolve things with Gregory or did she just leap right onto Dorian's girth? I know Gregory could be a bit of a jerk at times, but overall he did not seem to be a bad person, yet Eleanor was willing to spend all kinds of time on sexual technique with Dorian. Could she not spend any time at all working on her marriage with Gregory?

This perception diminished her in my eyes, and led me to the conviction that she's not much deserving of sympathy or support. Like I said, without having the first volume under my belt, maybe I'm misjudging her, but frankly she seems like a bit of a sleaze here. It's not a good look on her! If once in a while she'd expressed some regret or harked back to earlier times when she'd tried to work with her husband to make their marriage a good one and been rejected by him, that would have changed my perception of her, but in this story she's all Dorian all the time and it's tedious.

This book seriously failed to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test (after a fashion) because all Eleanor could think of was how to get with her lover. She had a one-track mind. Talking of Disney, it's like she had no life that wasn't animated by Dorian. After I'd read that book description, what I'd been hoping for was someone like the princess in my own novel, Femarine which really did have a different mindset from your usual princess story.

The very reason I wrote that was to offer readers some sort of an antidote to the disturbing plethora of stories about simpering, compliant princesses and their wilting addiction to princes charming, and it seemed I was not wrong because there is a readership for the road less taken. I just wish publishers and other authors would embrace that more, but it seems all they want to do it retread this old story, and even when a slightly different direction is taken - like this one attempted, the original prince is merely replaced by a new 'prince' and off we go, stuck on the same old rutted road - or rutting road in this case!

This is why I tend not to believe book descriptions much, because I've seen so many misleading ones, and it bothers me that they often seem to have been written by people who haven't read the novel, or in the case of YA stories, by people who seem to have completely missed the point of the #MeToo movement. But moving on: Eleanor is the Cinders of this story, having the slipper and the requisite two stepsisters, although as in the Drew Barrymore Ever After movie which I enjoyed, one of the sisters is friendly toward Eleanor. The other, Sylvia, is very much antagonistic and deceitful. Fortunately, she does not know that Eleanor has the hots for her husband's best friend Dorian, for that would be a disaster she'd dearly love to exploit.

I have to say a word about poor Sylvia. I was not a fan of hers, but she's after Prince Gregory. In her pursuit, she's doing nothing worse than Eleanor is doing, and arguably better since, unlike Eleanor, Sylvia isn't married! The problem is that she's portrayed as some sort of marriage wrecker or trouble-maker! When Dorian sees what she's up to he makes a mental note to tell Eleanor. The thing is that Gregory is known for quite literally whoring around, and Eleanor is already getting down to it with Dorian, so why slut-shame Sylvia? It was inappropriate at best, and it wasn't the only case where a woman is demeaned in this book.

On another occasion I read, "Pandra was twelve years his senior, but she was amazingly well preserved for all her years of use." What? That means she was only 38, not old by any means. Saying she was amazingly well preserved is ageism without a doubt. It's one thing to have a character say something like that about another person; it's an entirely different thing to have the author say it - and that comment wasn't in a character's speech - it was in the narrative! Now you can argue that it was intended as the thought of either Prince Gregory or Dorian, but that wasn't indicated as such, and if it was indeed Dorian's thinking, what does that say about his attitude toward women?

At a ball, Eleanor is recommending Dorian ask this one girl who'd shown an interest in him, to dance with him. This was not because she wanted Dorian to, but because it would be a diversion from their mutual horniness. After that I read, again not as speech, but as narration, "In truth, Patience had been an obvious dingbat." It's like if you're not part of the small specific set of people of whom Eleanor approves, then all you merit is insult. It really turned me off her. This was not the 'intellectual propensity' girl I'd been promised - someone deep and interesting, strong and motivated, fun to read about. She was just the opposite and I didn't like her.

And 'dingbat'? The term has been around for a century, but it's hardly terminology from the Cinderella era! I know you can't write a novel in ancient English - it would be tedious to read, if not impossible! - but you can write it with a bit of an atmosphere, ans a nod and a wink to the period in which it's supposedly set. This one was written with such a modern outlook that for me, it kept tripping up the narrative, making it seem like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be ancient or modern.

In this world, it is, of course, a capital offense for the princess bride to have an affair, even with the prince's best friend, so one has to wonder about Dorian's love for Eleanor when he willingly puts her life at risk by continuing to see her for sex. She's obviously so weak-willed that she can't help herself, but you'd think he'd be strong for her, if he cared. On the other hand, he's reported as someone who's been lucky to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases since he cannot for the life of him keep his junk in his pantaloons. He's had sex with so many women, he's lost count, so maybe his integrity is as poor as hers and his backbone just as flimsy. At any rate Eleanor has no reason to believe she's not just another conquest. Not from what I read anyway.

I began reading this with interest and quickly encountered an unintentionally amusing scene which brought the novel some credit by putting me in a good mood. That was sadly dissipated with disturbing velocity by further reading, and in truth it was another writing issue. An exasperated Eleanor is mucking-out the stable where her unicorn is housed. She's not doing this because she has to, but because she needs something to take her mind off her frustrations. While she's thus engaged, her husband and Dorian come down to take out the prince's horse, Vigor, for a ride.

In what I consider to be an amusingly unfortunate juxtaposition of ideas, I read, "Gregory kissed her again. This time she felt the flick of his tongue. He mounted and she held Vigor's bridle." Now, who or what exactly is he mounting - his horse or his bride? LOL! I assume it's his horse, but it just goes to show that one needs to be careful when writing narrative! There really needed to be something between "his tongue" and "He mounted" to distance the two actions. On a more adolescent note, it also struck me that the very title of this novel is rather unfortunate. To be clear: the Dragon Choker isn't a teenage boy's slang term for masturbation. It refers to a beautiful necklace that Prince Gregory buys for Eleanor and for which she shows little gratitude. Again, unlike the necklace, she came off in a bad light.

So, in short, I did not finish this novel. I gave up on it because the more I read the more I disliked Eleanor and the more I disliked the story. It felt like there were problems with the plot that could have been avoided with more sensitive writing, and with a better portrayal of Eleanor (and maybe a somewhat worse portrayal of Gregory). Eleanor comes across not only as having no character, she doesn't even have any depth - and certainly no intellect, let alone any sort of propensity at all to growing one. She wasn't interesting and I did not want to read any more about her. I wish the author all the best in her writing career, but I can't commend this one as a worthy read.

Titan by François Vigneault

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a graphic novel in limited colors by a Canadian artist and writer. While the art isn't completely to my taste, I didn't think it was awful, but I didn't get the warm colors. Titan is almost a billion miles from the sun, and it ain't warm out there. I felt the color palette ought to have been blues, not the warm colors used here, but that's just me. Once I got used to it, I didn't really pay it any attention. I focused on the story, which after all is the most important part, otherwise it's just a picture book. While that can sometimes work, I prefer a good written story to an implied one. I have to say up front that this is a very graphic novel with sex scenes, so be warned!

The story begins with "MNGR" (everyone who has a title has it capitalized and with no vowels in it in this story!) João da Silva landing on Titan to get the mining operations back up to speed since they're been falling off lately. The atmosphere - among the living inhabitants that is - is stressed and full of fomenting revolution. The moon, the largest one orbiting Saturn and the second-largest satellite in the Solar System is populated by genetically-amped-up WRKRs who are significantly larger and tougher than humans. They mine hydrocarbons, although exactly why is rather glossed over as is why they have genetically adjusted miners as opposed to robots.

The atmosphere of Titan itself wasn't well-represented. It was shown as rocky whereas it's really an ice moon - and the ice isn't water, but methane. In short, it's really nasty out there. Everyone is wearing a space suit and helmet so it's not until they get indoors that João finally gets a look at Phoebe Mackintosh, who will be his liaison during his work to reorganize and ramp up the efficiency of the Titan operation.

Rebecca is kind of sexy despite dwarfing João in size, and she speaks a sort of patois which is fortunately quite intelligible (I don't know if this originated in English or French, Vigneault being Québécois). Anyway, they bond together and survive a revolution, but they don't remain together at the end which I found rather sad, especially since they discussed it during their encounters, one of which is quite graphic and very sexual. I loved their coy talk afterwards!

I applaud the author for telling an interesting story and for showing a rather asymmetrical relationship without any fuss or judgment. It was entertaining and a fun read. I was sorry the translation went the road most traveled and referred to Earth dwellers as 'Terran'. I have no idea where that began, but it's always struck me as stupid. No one has ever referred to humans as 'Terrans' except in sci-fi and to me it sounds ridiculous - like we're all a bunch of tortoises or something. But that's just a pet peeve of mine. I don't know if the original did this or if this was just the translated version.

Overall I found this to be entertaining and engrossing, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Ill Wind by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad aka Rachel Caine aka Julie Fortune

Rating: WARTY!

This urban fantasy novel title shares my initials, and I have to live up to its title here, because, while the first time I read it, it wasn't great, neither was it awful, so I got the next two volumes thinking I might get into it. In some ways the story has a good premise, but in others, it's trope and cliché and I've moved on from that because of so many substandard and/or otherwise disappointing reads I've been through. I much prefer the road less-traveled these days because I've become so tired of reading the same old stories under supposedly different, but instead just are highly flimsy guises, and this novel is far from a road less traveled. So in the end it really was an Ill Wind for me.

It harks back to the ancient idea that there are four elements: air, earth, fire, and water, which is patent nonsense, but under this premise, the protagonist is a powerful weather warden (the series title). Weather wardens control the weather which means all of us ought to be really pissed-off with them, because they sure aren't doing much of a job. By that light, we ought to be extra pissed-off with Joanne Baldwin since she controls two of the four elements, and that, apparently, is rare.

Joanne is on the run from someone or something, and desperately trying to find her heroic guy to rescue her, and that 'damsel in distress' motif is a problem for me, especially since we don't learn very quickly exactly what she's supposed to have done, although the blurb talks of "accusations of corruption and murder." I have no clue exactly what it was she's supposed to have done because the story was not that memorable, and it's irrelevant anyway because you know for a fact it will turn out that she was set up.

But I gave up on the second reading far too early to get that information refreshed because I really didn't care to read it again. I don't even recall why it needed to be such a mystery except as a rather ham-fisted attempt to lure the reader on. It didn't lure me on as I recall. I was more interested in Joanne and her powers, but that interest was somewhat diluted by her desperate need of a St George.

So all I can say is that this didn't really do it the first time, and although I resolved - for whatever reason - to give it a chance, on closer examination, it failed. But what I lose on the read-about, the local library gains for its book carousel, so I can't complain too much! But I can't commend this either.

Fire in Frost by Alicia Rades

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this ebook right around the fifty percent mark. It had started out pretty decently and in spite the first person voice which I typically detest, I was getting along with it and growing interested in the main character, but the more she felt her psychic powers coming in, the more stupid she got it seemed, and if there's one thing I can't stand to read, it's a YA novel where the female author seems absolutely determined to make her main female character as dumb as a brick. I quit right after an incident I shall describe below. I can't commend this based on the half of it that I read.

The basis of the story is that young Crystal has a psychic mom, who of course in the tradition of YA novels like this, has never told her daughter a thing about her powers and her daughter wasn't smart enough to notice. Of course her daughter is the most powerful psychic in several generations, and when her period starts, she starts, first by seeing the ghost of a dead classmate, who died in a house fire the year before, and things escalate from there to the point where the daughter magically seems to be able to do anything.

I'm not a fan of the road most traveled, so I started losing faith in this author when this business of her powers arriving at puberty was introduced. I was even willing to let that slide if the story was good, but it got worse. She 'connected' with a crystal ball (her name's Crystal, get it?!) at her mother's new age shop. The ball wasn't even crystal, it was glass, and I began to wonder why the author hadn't simply named her character Crystal Ball. When she tried to use this glass orb, she had to light candles first. So there was nothing new or different here, the author taking the path of least resistance, otherwise known as Lazy Avenue South.

In the ball, Crystal saw a dark figure kidnap a young girl from her bed. Of course, it being the way of things having to be so vague as to be useless in these stories, there was zero information about who this was or when it had happened. Instead of being fascinated with her powers working so well, and trying to learn all she could about what was going on, Crystal freaked out and threw the ball on the floor, and it didn't break!

The very next morning, she's toasting a bagel and turns on the TV supposedly for the weather (apparently Crystal doesn't have a cell phone - maybe she uses a crystal radio...), she catches an item on the news about a young girl being abducted from her home and is too stupid to put two and two together. She just blindly turns off the TV and leaves for school.

Crystal has a best friend named Emma and despite this purported BF status, they neither of them seem to tell the other a damned thing, which serves only to betray the author's claim of their supposed closeness. I was willing to let that go until it got really bad. Here's one incident, as an exemplar of how bad it was. Crystal is in the restroom with Emma, who doesn't know she's psychic since her powers have only just come in.

Crystal is obsessed with people accusing her of being a witch if this gets out and her being shunned at school which is why she's told no-one. Why in this day and age would anyone accuse a psychic of being a witch? Far too many idiots actually believe in psychics - they pay good money to have their fortune told and so on. Why would there be a witch hunt? None of this made any sense to me, especially in light of the fact that the very reason her mother had settled there to begin with was the prevalence of people who live there and who have psychic abilities.

Anyway, Crystal finally decides to come clean with Emma, so they go into the bathroom and check the stalls, which are empty, and Crystal reveals her secret. Then Emma leaves and Crystal uses the stall. Finally she comes out and starts washing her hands, and another stall opens and this other girl is there who has apparently been there all the time and heard everything!

Excuse me? Didn't the author just say they checked the stalls to insure privacy? So how did they miss her? Does she have the power to make herself invisible? Frankly, I think the author just lost track of what she'd written, or simply didn't think it through properly.

I mean if all they'd done was to glance idly under the doors and left it at that, and the character who eavesdropped had been established as someone who sneaks into bathrooms to spy on people, then yes, maybe, but the author established none of that. She didn't say they looked under doors, she wrote that they checked each stall! This was really bad writing. The author isn't a bad writer per se, but some of her plotting was awful, and to use the old 'I heard it through the bathroom vine' trope is sadly unoriginal and lacking in imagination.

This other girl hiding in the stall threatens Crystal that if she doesn't help her, she'll tell everyone about her psychic powers, and expose her, and Crystal immediately caves-in, fearing being branded a witch! LOL! In reality she could just have claimed that everything this girl is saying is bullshit and got Emma to back her up. It turns out his other girl thinks her best friend Kelli is being abused by her boyfriend Nate, and she wants Crystal's help to prove it. If that's the case, then why not just say that to Crystal right from the start and ask her for help instead of threatening her? Again it made no sense! There was no feeling of female camaraderie here at all.

Crystal seems really reticent about telling Emma anything, and vice versa. This made no sense given they're supposedly best friends, but Crystal outright lies to Emma about why she has to sneak off after school. She has to sneak off to meet this girl who apparently couldn't tell her a thing about what she wanted in an empty bathroom, and insisted they meet later! This made zero sense either. Even when Crystal knows this is a good and useful thing to help with, she still lies to Emma about it. Why? It made zero sense.

Having seen Crystal talking to his girlfriend, this guy Nate threatens Crystal, pinning her against the locker and holding her by her throat, and all Crystal does is cower down wondering how she will ever get proof that he's abusing his girlfriend, instead of thinking, "He just abused me! I'm going to report him to the principal!" And why would Nate even care about one single short exchange he'd witnessed from a distance, between Crystal and his girlfriend? Not one thing in this whole series of events made any sense at all. It was really poorly plotted.

So characters who'd started out quite engagingly, were suddenly stupid and cardboard-thin and it really made the story go downhill. It's not that the whole novel is badly-written; some of it is quite well put-together, but it just didn't feel realistic any more when all this stuff began to go down. It felt like poor-quality fanfic. It was poorly designed, and completely unacceptable as a viable story. I can't commend it.

La Dame aux Camélias aka Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils

Rating: WARTY!

Purportedly based on the real life of Alphonsine Rose Plessis, a French courtesan and popular mistress who died at the age of 23 from tuberculosis, and whose belongings were auctioned-off to pay her debts. Alexandre Dumas fils had an affair with her for about a year, and wrote this semi-fictional account it after her death. His novel became the basis of Verdi's La Traviata

That's how this story begins, with the unnamed narrator learning of such an auction, at which he buys a sort of diary. Madame Gautier (this is how the woman is referred to in the novel) never was Camille. She was Marguerite, and the title of the book in French was La Dame aux Camélias from which 'Camille' was derived, but this novel isn't really about "Camille" - it's about this guy Armand Duval's take on her. Duval is obviously Dumb-Ass himself, and that's how the story goes - or fails to. It's so meandering that it makes the Delta of Venus!) look like Love Canal.

I couldn't stand to real more than a few chapters. It was boring. I kept hoping it would get better, but it never does. It felt like a very selfish novel to me, and far from anything that could be seen as honoring a woman he supposedly had feelings for. I can't commend it base don what I read.

Sub-Human by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't like series. The first book can only ever be a prologue and I don't do prologues, but sometimes a book description makes it sound interesting enough that I bite and taste the sour when I was expecting sweet. I have to confess to my own part in this inexcusable crime because even the description had warnings in it that I chose not to heed.

The story is about Craig Emilson who is "a young doctor" why his age is important to the blurb-writer I have no idea, but it goes on to say that he's "sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III" when in fact he volunteers. He enlisting to become a "Special Forces suborbital paratrooper", but why a doctor would do that is completely glossed over.

He's "selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history-a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong Artificial Intelligence." Why him again is glossed over. Why not drop a bomb on it? Why send a doctor when one isn't needed? Why make your main character a doctor instead of a computer scientist? The feeling I got, the further I read into this, was that it was very much fan fiction, and not well thought through - the author going for melodrama instead of realism. That's never a good thing in my book.

My first inkling that this was not for me was right at the beginning where the doctor is being injected with some sort of nano-bobs. Those are like thingumabobs, but they infest sci-fi stories. These are supposed to help maintain his respiratory system when there's no oxygen. Why this was necessary goes unexplained so obviously it was to get the main character and this nubile doctor together. Telegraph much? That wasn't the problem though. The problem was the inappropriate behavior of the young (naturally), attractive (of course) female doctor who hits on him. I'm like "What?!" Here's the exchange:

"You're married, huh?" the doctor asked, apparently rhetorically. Craig nodded anyway. "That's a shame. You're way too handsome to be married. Handsome young doctors like you should be single. Then single doctors like me could marry you instead."

From that point it was obvious that those two would end-up together, so his present wife needed to be dealt with, and that conveniently happens when she thinks he's dead after the mission (or at least brain-dead, which she got right), and so she happily married a sixty-year-old guy (ie twice her age) with whom she's been working and of whom she denies having any sort of relationship when her husband got jealous in an earlier chapter!

That phone call was a joke. At one point she warbles sickeningly, "I never miss a call when we schedule it, baby, and I never will," and then very shortly afterwards says, "Don't 'baby' me, Craig! I'm not a child!" Excuse me? Isn't that precisely the same thing that you just did to him? Like I said, the writing is amateurish and thoughtless.

Another example came in that same section. He says, "I'm not brilliant like you." And she responds, "Not brilliant? Craig, you're a doctor!" I'm sorry but that doesn't necessarily follow. There are doctors who are brilliant, but there are also doctors who are idiots. On top of that he uses stock phrases like "In this brave new world of ours..." which about made me barf, and there's a robot which is named Robbie. And not after Margot, I'm sure.

In short, this was pathetic and a waste of my time. I couldn't stand to read more than about five chapters, let alone a whole series, because it was so sickening to read. I can't commend it. It was pathetic.

The Taker by Alma Katsu

Rating: WARTY!

This had sounded good from the description, but it sounded less good when I realized it was merely a prologue to a trilogy, and worse, it was written in mixed voice, with short, third-person interludes that segued into lengthy first-person flashbacks. This is not my kind of a novel. It's a tired, unimaginative, and clunky format. In short it's exactly what I'd expect from an author who boasts a BA in literature and writing, and an MA in Fiction, and especially from someone who apparently studied with novelist John Irving. I read about fifty pages of it, and it was so lethargic that I gave up on it out of tedium.

The story made no intelligent sense from what little bit I did read. I don't get how someone with supposed academic qualifications needs three novels to drag out a single-novel story. But I understand that kind of rip-off does pay well for both publishers and author, and let's face it: it's pretty much all she wrote.

This doctor, in a small New England town, goes to work on the night shift and is delivered a police detainee who is suspected in a murder - to which she confessed when found by a police officer. She wore a blood-soaked shirt, and was walking without a coat on a freezing night. The police brought her to the hospital for evaluation, and the doctor could find nothing wrong with her physically, but she started telling him a story of herself and her partner - a man she killed at his own request. They were she claimed, extraordinarily long-lived people. She kept urging the doctor to let her escape, but if she'd really wanted that, why not do it when she was free instead of wandering down a highway to be picked up by the police?!

Like I said, it made no sense, the first person voice was ridiculous - as it typically is. There's no way she had that kind of photo-perfect and audio-perfect recollection after all those years, so it lost all credibility for me. The idiot doctor was buying into everything she said without a shred of professional interest in her mental condition, or any sliver of disbelief, so he wasn't remotely believable as a medical practitioner. A case like this screamed for psychiatric evaluation, but nowhere was that discussed.

Even granted all that, her story needed to be nowhere near as detailed as it was. It felt like an amateur attempt at telling a story where no thought had been put into how it would all sound. The author seemed overly-enamored of the framing technique as befit her academic mind-washing: distressed beauty tells story to handsome rescuer, and they fall in love. Barf. No. Just no.

Please don't tell My Parents I'm a Super Villain! by Richard Roberts

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not much for series, but once in a while one comes along that makes me want to follow it, and if this series (this is book one of three as of this writing) is as good as its opener, then it will definitely be one I follow. Note that this novel is in no way representative of the real world and to judge it by real world standards is wrong. It's an off-kilter fantasy world, and it's in that context that I review it here since it's neither wilder nor more sensible than your average super hero graphic novel!

In the version of LA where she lives, Penelope Akk lives in a superhero world and has superhero parents. Mom was once a super villain, and dad is a tech genius, so it's hardly surprising their daughter turns out to be a mad scientist. Penny's skills start coming in far more aggressively than most do, but they also come spasmodically. That's nothing unusual, but the nature of Penny's skills deceive her parents, who pay her nowhere near the attention she deserves because they're supers themselves and always too busy. They may regret that.

Penny's real problem though, is that she creates things that typically work weirdly, and she has no idea how they work, and often no memory of the actual creative process at all. In the back of her mind they make sense, but she's never able to grasp that and pull it up front into the light. She invents some cool gadgets though, and what better way to test them out than with some good, old-fashioned villainy? I really liked Penny because she's a smart, strong young woman who never gives up and is always learning.

Teaming up with her friend Claire, and her other friend Ray, the trio becomes "The Inscrutable Machine" - talented and super-coordinated villains, whose success goes way beyond what their age would suggest they were capable of, and once Penny - now known as Bad Penny - has invented a few cool gadgets for her friends as well as a serum that brings on their powers too, they really take off. Claire becomes the extra-charming 'e-Claire' and Ray becomes the super-strong, super-fast 'Reviled'.

Their capers, beginning quite accidentally, become almost legendary, and bring them to the attention of Spider, the biggest villain of all, who is apparently an actual spider (although I had my doubts). It becomes ever more difficult for them to withdraw from their super villain life (it was so much fun!) and retreat to a life of super-heroing which is what Penny really wants. Or is it?

When Spider blackmails them into pulling a couple of jobs, Penny finds herself having to come down firmly on one side or the other. But how can she do that, save the city, beat Spider, and preserve her anonymity? Because the last thing she wants is for her parents to learn that she's a super villain! Yes, sometimes their thinking can be whack, and their motives a bit obscure, but they're so engaging that you can't stop wanting to know what scrape they'll get themselves into next - or how they'll get out of it. This is where Penny's unmatched, but totally not understood genius comes into play. Some of her inventions have a mind of their own - literally.

This book is one of the best I've ever read, despite it being aimed seemingly at a middle-grade audience. It's inventive and funny, and completely believable even as the fantastical world the author creates is outrageous - and beautifully put together with a cast of amazing and creative characters. There are some classic super heroes (my favorite is Marvelous) and super villains (my favorite is Lucy Farr). Note that these names are taken from an audiobook so the spellings may be off! I thought this was a fun world and a great book, and I commend it as a worthy read.

The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a quite long, and a heavily-referenced and indexed book about the intelligence of birds, how it works, how it evolved, what it's used for, how it expresses itself, and why some birds seem to have a lot more of it than others - and what this means going into an uncertain and climate-changing future. The book is full of stories and studies, as well as anecdotes, and is well-written and fully-engaging. It's packed with fascinating insights and fun facts, and covers a truly wide range of birds - and not just in North American but across the world. I found it enthralling and highly educational.

If I have a couple of complaints it would be that there were no pictures here. It's possible, of course to go look up online the birds that are mentioned, but it's a nuisance. It would have been nice had each bird discussed had a color picture to go with it. There are some line drawings, but these are used to separate the sections of the book, not to illustrate the text.

The only other complain is that while a lot of studies are discussed in the book, there is no information on what happened to the poor birds? Did the studies involve euthanizing them or where they merely captured, tested, and released? Some evidently were from what I gathered from the text, but in the case of others, their fate went unrevealed, and the studies didn't seem like they were non-invasive. It's all well and good to discuss the intelligence of birds, but if scientists are raping and pillaging nature to get this information on these birds which in some cases are threatened, then it seems to me I'd rather be ignorant about their intelligence than kill them off just to satisfy human curiosity! Maybe that's just me....

It wasn't the author who was doing this of course! She was merely reporting, but for a good reporter, especially one who seems to be so invested in her subject, you would think she'd have a care for the welfare of the subject. That aside, I did enjoy reading the book. It was well-written and it was a worthy read, so I commend it.