Longshot by Sean Platt, Johnny B Truant

Rating: WARTY!

These two authors, under the slightly altered names of 'Sean M Platt' and 'Johnny Truant', wrote "The Fiction Formula" a seemingly paradoxically non-fiction audiobook which claims to teach a reader "All you need to know to be a full-time storyteller" but I have say I have grave doubts about such books.

Have you noticed how these books are nearly always written by people you never heard of, much less saw their names on any best seller list? It seems clear to me that such people make their money not from selling fiction, but from selling books and/or running courses that offer to make a person into a best-selling author. My problem with this is that, to begin with, it's not possible, and secondly, I have to wonder how they propose to do that for others when they haven't done it for themselves.

I've heard it said that everyone has a story to tell, but even if it were true, it doesn't mean that the story is interesting, or that a person can write their story and have it sell no matter how much coaching and encouragement they get. That's why we have ghost writers!

The two authors in question here started up the "Sterling & Stone Story Studio" which for all I know could be an author mill or it could be legit. I honestly don't know, because from their website it's impossible to tell just what it is they do or how they do it. Naturally, if they're charging for their 'tuition' or whatever it is they offer, they're not going to give you everything up front for free, but for a website like this to not give so much as an outline of what their expectations of you are, and what their requirements are in return, will always make me suspicious.

They claim they have put out about a hundred novels since 2011, but to me, for multiple writers that's not very impressive. Counting my children's books, I've put out over well over fifty all by myself since 2013, yet I don't consider that any great achievement. The thing is I don't know how they work there: whether it's a tutoring arrangement or whether they have people write stuff like in "James Frey's Fiction Factory" or whether it's some other system.

Their website offers no help. None of the author's names on the website meant anything to me. None were familiar. Not that I've heard of every writer and not that a writer needs a best-seller to make a living from their craft, but you'd think, if this method was so spectacularly successful, there'd be one or two names that that your average reader might have heard of. I hadn't, and I've read a heck of a lot of books in all genres.

This, to cut a long story off, is how I came to read this novel. When I read about their audiobook I looked them up on Barnes and Noble to see what they'd written, and recognized none of it, but the first four books they had on offer there were all free - probably as loss leaders for series, which I will have little to no truck with. I ahve ot say here I ahve doubts abotut he vlaue of an audiobook in that genre to begin with, but the ultility of that format for this kind of a book is a separate issue.

Anyways, I picked one of their novels at random and started in on it to see how well these people - who claim to teach others how to write - write themselves. Maybe I was wrong in my take on their offer. Maybe I'd missed something. The best way would be to read something they've written and see how it compares to other things I've read, and I have to say: I was not impressed with their trope effort.

I've often wished I had a co-writer - someone to talk over my stories with and maybe share some writing, but I've never had that. Of course, on the other side of that coin is how well a pair of writers will fare. How do they work? Who writes what? How do they resolve conflicts? Maybe it's better to write alone! The thing is that when I launched into this novel, I found nothing new, or startlingly original, or particularly inventive. It was just your boilerplate writing about alien invaders have arriving around Earth and failing to communicate with the locals.

In this particular regard it was just an Independence Day redux. The thing is that there was zero backstory. Admittedly, I skimmed a lot of this, and I DNF'd it, because it was boring as all hell to me, but in what I read, I came across nothing which explained what had happened from day one here. I didn't want a flashback or an info dump, gods forbid, but you'd think the writers might have put some effort into filling out the story a bit, with a word or two here and there. No. They had other plans.

Instead what we got was a soap opera, and the conversations these jackass characters had were unreal and unlike things they would likely say to each other if this were a true story. Worse than this though were the clichés: women doing the screaming, ridiculous and unnecessarily gory alien robots (or wildlife whichever it was - I didn't stay to find out), inexplicable violence, the alien vehicle they interacted with being cold as ice, advanced aliens who were improbably and brutally violent, and so dumb they evidently couldn't communicate with the locals, and it went boringly on and on. There was nothing to see here: nothing new or surprising, or remotely interesting. This a formulaic encounter of the worst kind. it was a flimsy sci-fi veneer over a daytime TV show.

So we got into the story with no idea how the aliens had become so dominant, why the world's militaries could not fight them off, and so on. The problem for me was that instead of a story about alien invasion, we got that as a backdrop for a soap opera among the enforced residents of a Las Vegas casino, and there's nothing more boring than that - the switch and bait of offering an alien invasion story, but making it all about these uninteresting people - none of whom I liked at all - is not going to make me read it. Normally I would not have picked up a book like this where a 'ragtag band of people' is involved. There's nothing worse.

The idea is that these people encounter a dying alien, How they determined that is a mystery. This is where I quit reading, so maybe I missed that, but according to the blurb they have to (warning: 5-alarm cliché ahead) transport the sick alien to area 51 - and no doubt save the world by curing him, her, or it. Yep! This was the alien motive. They thought Earth was an ER! I'm sorry but this is really bad writing and based on what I read of it, I sure wouldn't pay - or even get for free - any tutoring these authors have to offer. I can't commend this novel at all based on my experience of it, and I'm done with these writers and anyone else in their stable.

Ninja Girl Adventures by Melissa G Wilson, Phil Elmore

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was an ebook that rubbed me the wrong way from the off. I had some real problems with it. The first chapter launches right into an action scene and cuts off at the end of the chapter with a sword swishing through the air, but we know that Moira, the middle sister of the three the story is purportedly about, is not - as a main character - going to be killed in the first chapter. So, for me: no cliffhanger really - certainly no dramatic tension. I don't like that in books, nor in movies, nor in TV shows. It's just annoying, if not infuriating.

That wasn't what bothered me though, nor was it the fact that this is yet another series launcher, meaning that this is really a prologue, nothing more. There was nothing on Net Galley, nor on the book cover to indicate this though. If there had been, there is a good liklihood that I would not have asked to review this. I know authors like to write them and publishers love to publish them because they can be cash cows, but that will never be my motivation, and even that aside, I'm not much of a fan of series. To me they're lazy and derivative, being essentially the same story told over and over with precious little added to try and leaven or freshen the volumes.

What bothered me to begin with is the fact that I detest flashbacks unless they're done well, and to me there's nothing worse than launching into a story and then slamming on the breaks and bringing it to a screeching halt, before grinding it into reverse and backtracking. I thought that maybe it was just the next chapter so I began skimming and I realized: no, it's the entire novel that's backstory! The action part doesn't start again until chapter 25 (out of a total of some 27 chapters!). The first part of that late chapter acknowledges how appallingly long it's been since then, by essentially repeating word-for-word the last few paragraphs of chapter one!

To me this is bad writing. It's a huge no, and it turned me right off reading any more of this novel. That's not the only problem (and I'm not even going to talk about the common misuse of apostrophes in the book description!). For me I thought the ninja portions of the story might have imparted some life-lessons for young children based on that lifestyle, but this didn't seem much to be the case.

Originally ninjas were nothing more than spies - the James Bonds of their era which was around the fifteenth century (with possible roots running earlier and influence later). They learned stealth techniques and covert behavior, but were considered dishonorable precisely because of all this sneaking around! From what I could see of this story (and here again, I did not read it all) it seemed that it was much more focused on the mystical - which was never a part of the 'ninja code'. They had no magical powers (no one does!) and did not shapeshift into animal forms. A much better parallel for the Ninja life would have been to have drawn one with the resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War Two.

But even there you would have issues because, being of medieval times, Ninjas had no firearms. They were all about swords, knives, and other inventive metal weapons such as shuriken which were employed. Note that shuriken referred not just to the 'star disks' that are so fondly used in movies featuring these characters, but also to a variety of small weapons known collectively as shuriken. The thing is, in modern times, ninjas would have to be exceedingly skilful otherwise they would simply end-up being shot to death, so to present these behaviors and try to update them makes little sense - unless of course you had planned on using their methods to teach life lessons which doesn't really seem to have been employed much here.

On top of this the sisters, other than, of course, the super-heroic Moira, are kidnapped and yet nowhere does there seem to be any real effort at a police investigation. They're bypassed in favor of ninjas! I get that this somehow has to happen if the planned story is to be told, but to remove it so far from reality with so little justification doesn't get it done for me.

While it's never a good idea to teach kids to go outside the law, for the sake of a good story you can get away with it if it's done well and you can also somehow justify it, but as far as I could tell, that doesn't even seem to have been attempted here. It's just, 'oh, the hell with the police, let's take the law into our own hands', and I've seen that cliché too many times tossed in like bacon sprinkles on a salad in the forlorn hope that it will somehow improve limp lettuce and soggy tomatoes, and it doesn't. When you add this to the overdone trope of the black sheep of the family, of the poor ability to recognize who's behind the evil, of the bypassing of the law, of the improbable heroic rescue, it's too much. You have to ask what's really new here and how have these behaviors been justified, and the answers seem to be: nothing much and not at all. For me that's a serious negative.

One final problem is that the story is presented as one about sisters ("sister power at its best"), which I was ready to enjoy, but the truth is it's really all Moira. The other two sisters combined garner for themselves nowhere near as many mentions as Moira does, and Moira did not strike me as a very appealing character, to be honest. In view of all of this, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Moon Pig by Celina Lagnardo, Leo Lagnardo

Rating: WORTHY!

Why so many writers want to associate a pig with the Moon I do not know, but there are a few out there! Pig Jumps Over the Moon by Jeff Dinardo is one; The Little Pig, the Bicycle, and the Moon, by Pierrette Dubé is another, and The Pig Who Sang to the Moon by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a third. I haven't read any of those, but I did read this one and was amused and pleasantly impressed with it. It paints a fine porktrait of an animal with a mission and a strifng ambition.

"Pig" dreams of visiting the Moon, and through diligence and hard work manages to put together a rocket and a space suit and heads on out there to do just that, landing safely, exploring, and returning in time for dinner. The writing is sweet and the pigtures amusing. I commend this as a worthy fantasy read for young children.

Little One You Are the Universe by Zeni Shariff

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a small format young children's illustrated book about elephants that seems at first glance to be a bit 'new-age-y', but it's really an entertaining and nicely-illustrated book about friendship. Young elephants Lotus and Adia meet at the watering hole one day and learn to overcome their shyness. Over time they become good friends, but they're separated when they are taken captive by humans and forced into labor camps, one of which involves railroad construction, the other of which involves mining.

While I disagree with the anthropomorphization of animals, it's not overdone here, and elephants are without a doubt intelligent and sensitive mammals who reflect human emotions and behaviors in small ways. But I don't doubt that two elephants who have grown up together would miss each other and that's what happens with these two, until they find themselves, after a long journey, brought sweetly back into each other's orbit.

This was a fun book and nicely-done both in the writing and in the artwork by the author. I commend it as a worthy read.

Fires of Alexandria by Thomas K Carpenter

Rating: WARTY!

Taking place a century after fire burned down the library at Alexandria, this story revolves around two protagonists: a barbarian who somehow walks around Alexandria wearing furs without issuing a drop of sweat or having any inkling it's even remotely warm there. The other is a woman posing as a man and whose name Heron. Heavily in debt, Heron accepts money from the barbarian to resolve who set the fire and why.

Both the author and the barbarian he writes of seem completely ignorant that these questions have been answered already! That information has been known literally since the year zero! It was Julius Casaer who ordered the fire - not to burn 40,000 scrolls in the library, but to burn some ships that were docked in the nearby harbor. The fire got out of control. Mystery solved.

That wasn't why I quit reading this and DNF'd it. The reason was the poor writing and the interminable introduction to the story during which literally nothing happened save for the decriptive writing, which alienated me from both main charcaters. If I'd initially paid a bit more attention I would have noted that the book cover had the word 'saga' on it and I could have saved myself the trouble of even picking-up this one in the first place! My bad. I really need to learn my lesson here.

I can't commend this one at all based on what I read of it.

Fallen Women by Sandra Dallas

Rating: WARTY!

This was another old pritn book from my shelves that I'm slowly going through and reading whatever catches my eye that I haven't read already. Set in 1885, the year that Grover Cleveland was sworn in as the 22nd President of the USA, the Cree massacre of settlers at Frog Lake too place, Gottlieb Daimler was granted a patent for the first motorcycle, 'Jumbo' the elephant died in the PT Barnum Circus train wreck, and Dr Pepper was served for the first time!

Louis Pasteur also successfully tested his rabies vaccine and it's a pity it could not have been used on this novel in which protagonist Beret Osmundsen travels to Denver, Colorado, where her younger sister has been murdered. Lillie worked in a house of ill-repute, and Beret is determined to see justice done, despite her disapproval of her sister's life. The book description has it that Beret's "investigation takes her from the dangerous, seedy underworld of Denver’s tenderloin to the highest levels of Denver society. Along the way Beret learns the depths of Lillie’s depravity and must reconcile these with her memories of the innocent young girl of their youth."

I don't knwo where my thought processes were at when I picked this up. I should have set it right back down having read that much, but it seemed at the time - I'm guessing! - to be a potentially interesting period novel. It was not. I made it through six tedious chapters and grew rapidly tired of the constant flashbacks. I want to follow events now! I don't honestly give a damn about the main characters' pasts. Now is what I'm interested in, even if 'now' is over a century ago. It's why I bought the book. If I'd wante done set in 1875 or whenever, I'd have bought that one instead!

The problem is that even had there been no flashbacks, I would still have ditched this, because neither of the two main characters was remotely appealing to me. Worse, I quickly grew to dislike them both: Beret and the lout of a police detective who she was working with. Given the way that character was drawn, I saw no reason why he would agree to let her be involved in the investigation, and she had nothing that appealed to me in terms of being an interesting person or a memorable character. Like I said, I DNF'd it and did not regret it because I was able to move on to a much more interesting book! I can't commend this. Instead, I condemn it.

Samantha Gets Brave by Melanie McClay

Rating: WARTY!

This felt like it was written a bit young for middle grade readers, but it's been a long time since I was twelve or thirteen (the age of the protagonist), so who knows! It's a short novel about a girl named Samantha Taylor who is shy and timid and who slowly learns to take her place in the world. It has been expanded into an ongoing series, so I understand, and if you or your middle-grader likes it, there's more to read after this volume. For me, though it began well, it felt a bit plodding and the characters didn't seem too smart, so although I began by liking it, the more I read, the more problems I had with it and I DNF'd it about a third the way through.

The tale was interesting enough and moved at a decent pace to start with, but once the treasure hunt began, it slowed painfully and the characters seemed utterly unable to grasp the simplest of clues, or to resolve the easiest of problems. The book description has it that there's a "forbidden forest, an injured wolf, and a forgotten tale of lost gold" so that sounded pretty intriguing, but the forest wasn't really forbidden, the wolf behaved far too much like a pet dog rather than a wild animal and never at any point was any concern raised that it might be rabid, and the lost treasure wasn't actually forgotten!

Neither was its location: the treasure never was actually discovered. Fortunately the wolf wasn't rabid, and though it was quite young it was hardly a puppy. It was injured and I think that the author thought the kids taking care of it would somehow magically domesticate it, but it doenslt work like that. Given that wolves usually hang out in a pack, where were all the others? There was no mention of any other wolves, nor any concern over them showing up - not in the portion I read.

Samantha's bravery starts in that forest when she decides to walk the two miles home form school along a hiking trail in the forest rather than take the school bus after a particularly trying day. She'd rather be alone, but you're never alone in nature, and things start happening right then and there. Fortunately she has my namesake to help her out in a pinch, and the strange friendship begins. I found her growth from her initial nervous state to be a bit pedantic, but otherwise not too bad, if belabored somewhat.

I had a few issues with the story though, such as when I read, "They started showing up to school in skirts and fitted tops that showed off their legs and sometimes their midriffs." I was amusedly thinking, "how does a fitted top show off their legs? But it's just the poorly-considered juxtaposition of words that's confusing. Another instance was where I read, "up ahead a black crow cawed" but all crows are black in the USA (unless you happen upon an albino). There's a gray crow, but that's out in Indonesia, so describing it as a black crow seemed redundant. The author didn't seem to know much about the natural world she was trying to represent, and this cropped-up several times.

There were a couple of other issues, like where I read, "Her whole body was shivering and shaking as she tread water." The past tense of 'to tread' is 'trod', not 'tread' and certainly not 'treaded' which the author uses later.

At about that same point in the text the two children, and a man who was helping them, were looking to cross a ravine. It was only 40 feet deep and fifteen feet wide and it would not have been hard to find a way to descend one side and climb the other. The children proved this by finding just such a place quite quickly. The problem was that the outdoorsman's first 'solution' to this problem was to fell a tree and let it drop across the gap. I felt that this was setting a bad example, and not just because a twenty foot tree is heavy as hell, and the guy would need some serious help to manipulate it into a stable position, even if he succeeded in felling it perfectly across the gap at first try (he didn't).

It sets a bad example because we desperately need all the trees we can get, since they're the only entity which is serious about combatting climate change. Trees alone cannot do it, admittedly; we need to get the CO₂ out of the air to fix it, but cutting down trees never helps. If it had been done for something critical, then I could have let that slide, but it sure wasn't, and to have this go right ahead without a word about what killing this tree meant, was not excusable for me.

Even if we set all of that aside though, there remains still the fact is that this tree was in a forest that was on land none of these people owned. They had no permission to take an axe to anything, yet they assumed they could do whatever they wanted. This and the climate change angle are very bad precedents to set for children, especially in an era of selfishness and 'me first' self-entitlement that's been coagulating around us over the last four years. Some of these issues are minor quibbles that don't make or break a novel. Others are much more serious and writers need to be aware, especially in a children's novel, of what kind of an impression they're putting into young people's minds.

At one point, due to the stupidity of one of the characters, the main characters are attacked by wasps and have to run and jump into a small lake, like this is a cartoon. The whole thing was unrealistic. This boy was spying on the others and when he thought he'd been seen, he ran off. He had no idea the others would track his footprints, so there was no reason why he would climb a tree. It seems more likely that he'd keep running, or he'd double back to spy on them some more, from a different location.

This was written like he knew he was being followed, even though he couldn't have. Even if he did, it's more likely he'd try to hide in undergrowth than climb a tree where he'd be pretty obvious - and especially not climb a tree by a wasp nest unless he's painfully stupid. It felt like this little part was lifted directly from The Hunger Games!

That wasn't the real problem though. It was the wasps! After the attack, I read, "He started picking the stingers out of his skin." The author doesn't seem to get that it's not wasps that leave their stingers. It's bees. A wasp stinger can occasionally break off or get left, but it's rare. The author should have learned this if she wants to write about it.

Also wasps do not have a deadly vendetta against people who disturb the nest. They will fly around randomly, and home in on perceived offenders, but usually they won't stray more than fifty or a hundred feet from the nest in doing this. Young children, dogs, and even an older man would not have a problem running away, and certainly wouldn't need to jump into a lake or pond to escape them. This whole section was misleading when it could have been educational.

Another problem is that these kids knew this other boy, Billy, was lurking around in the woods. They also knew he was trouble, but it was like they had this constant blind spot where he was concerned, so they never took precautions thinking he might be around or spying on them, and whenever they felt someone was watching them, or they saw this kid spying on them in the distance, they never immediately thought it was Billy, despite wracking their brains about who it could be.

For that matter, nor did the author account for him being in the woods in the first place to even start following them. The woods didn't seem like the kind of place a kid like Billy would hang out. He was more likely to be at the mall shoplifting, or playing videogames at home. This lent a certain degree of implausibility to the story in and of itself where he was concerned.

There was also a mistake in the book description where the section addressed to teachers says, "This realistic fiction book is chalk full of subtle lessons about bravery." I think the author meant 'chock full' but maybe it was a play on words: you know - teachers and chalk? LOL! Again, a minor thing. Often authors don't get to write their own book descriptions, but I think that wasn't the case here since this author publishes through Smashwords, which is a self-publishing platform that I abandoned several years ago because I experienced far too many issues with them. Life has been a lot easier for me since I started dealing directly with the platforms I publish on, although there are always issues of one kind or another!

On a slightly different topic, but also tied to Smashwords supposedly being picky about formatting, there was an inexplicable and problematic formatting issue in my ebook. It resulted in the lines of text breaking oddly. The new line would start indented right below the roevious one, even though it wasn't a new paragraph. The impression I got was that the break represented an actual hard break in the line as it would appear on a full sized-page, but because I was reading this on my phone's narrower screen, these hard 'carriage returns' resulted in the odd formatting. I tested this on my iPad and sure enough, it appeared to be the case that it's hard-formatted for a specific text size, and using hanging paragraphs with a ragged right edge, so it doesn't flow properly when you change typeface or typeface size.

Any one, or maybe even two or three of these issues wouldn't be an insurmountable problem, but to have so many of them in a book with largely uninspiring characters and a rather limp story was a bit too much for me to declare this book a worthy read. There may well be middle-graders who will like this. I can't really speak for them. All I can do is to judge this based on its entertainment and educational value and I personally found it lacking in both. It came off poorly in a comparison with some other middle-grade novels I've read and enjoyed. I found this particular book, on balance, to be disappointingly less than a worthy read, and for the reasons given, I cannot commend it.

Vital Dust by Christian de Duve

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of my favorite books and covers a topic that doesn't get as much attention as evolution. It covers the origin of life - I mean it had to come from somewhere before it could evolve, right? LOL! De Duve died almost a decade ago, but he has left us a treasure here which covers every aspect of life from non-life, with the available evidence (as of his writing this book in 1995).

The book is extensive - some three hundred pages plus an extensive bibliography, glossary and other supportive material, such as additional reading suggestions. It's divided into several broad parts, starting with one on chemistry, and following that with how the genome came to be, moving on to how cells formed, the first 'real cell' as we know them today, multicellular life, and the development of intelligence.

Each part is subdivided into sections going into more detail on various aspects on the main topic. For example, The Age of Chemistry is split into sections on the search for origins, the first catalysts of life, fuel for emerging life, and the advent of RNA.

I whole-heartedly commend this as a worthy read.

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a really superb book about a prediction made by the theory of evolution which was followed up by the author and resulted in the momentous discovery of Tiktaalik. ("We were the Tiktaaliks. We were exterminated" - a little bit of Doctor Who humor there...). There was a gap in the flow of evolution from what one fossil (Panderichthys) represented as a fish, and what the next fossil in line (Acanthostega) represented in terms of fish coming out onto land over time. Panderichthys was some 380 million years old. Acanthostega was around 365 million years old.

You see that fifteen million year gap? That's the kind of thing that creationists like to point to when they make their baseless claim that evolution is "just a theory". Since they can present no scientific evidence supporting their position, creationists are necessarily reduced to pointing out what they blindly believe are gaps or errors in the scientific theory of evolution.

The author, Neil Shubin, and his colleagues decided that if there was a evolutonary link between Panderichthys) and Acanthostega - while not necessarily a direct one between the two, but if there existed any such thing - It would be found in rocks datable between those two fossils. Such rocks were to be found on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, so Shubin and co went there and dig - and lo and behold, they found the transitonal form exactly where prediction said it would be, and evolution was vindicated once again.

This book covers more than just Tiktaalik though. It goes on to discuss several curiosities we humans have which cannot be explained if we were specially created by a god, or if we were intelligently designed - because we are most assuredly not intelligently designed, as Shubin demosntrates. What Shubin shows here is that you can only explain various traits, organs, and behaviors we humans exhibit, by evolution. They're inexplicable, not to say inexcusable, if there was some sort of intelligent design! I commend this book completely.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

One mroe book of Dawkins's to fnish up my set of reviews, and this one was awful! Just kidding. No. Richard dawkins write and awful book? never! This was another excellent one. The title refers to idiotc creationist (is that a tautology?) William paley and his claim that if he found a watch lyign onthe ground eh woudl assume an intelligent creator had made it. he woudl not assume that it arose through mutation and such over time, btu his anaology is flawed, as Dawkins shows.

Dawkins goes on then to completely undermine the creationist claim that complexity cannot arise by itself (it actually doesn't - it arises from the alws of physics and chemistry!) by tackling their prize argument - that of the eye. There is actually a short documentary - which may be on You Tube by now, for all I know - and which takes its title and content from this book. In it, a very young-looking Dawkins makes the same argument with video support. I don't think it's his best documentary, but it's worth a look if you're a Dawkins fan.

In the video he demonstrates the "biomorphs" which he discusses in this book. I was never very impressed with those visually, but in the underlying workings, they do handsomely demonstrate how a small tweak in one "dimension" (the biomorphs have eleven, if I recall, one for each of their 'genes') can have disproportionate effects on the overall appearance - something the creationists simply don't get - along with everything else they don't get about evolution.

So overall, I commend this book as well worth reading.

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

Last but by no means least, this is I think also in my top three. Or four! There are so many to choose from. This is another one taking aim at the evidence-free non-science (read: nonsense) of creationism by addressing the baseless creationist claim that evolution is too improbable to have happened - hence the title! With his usual wit, solid facts, clear arguments and fine writing, Dawkins takes the creationists to the cleaners and makes them pay for the job. I commend it fully.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

In the way that The Greatest Show on Earth was a paean to evolution, this book does the same thing for science in general. It's divided into intriguing chapters thus:

• The Anaesthetic of Familiarity
• Drawing Room of Dukes
• Barcodes in the Stars
• Barcodes on the Air
• Barcodes at the Bar
• Hoodwink'd with Faery Fancy
• Unweaving the Uncanny
• Huge Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance
• The Selfish Cooperator
• The Genetic Book of the Dead
• Reweaving the World
• The Balloon of the Mind

I commend this as a worthy read for the passion, the science, the arguments, and the great writing.

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

This is an unabashed paean to evolution and a direct refutation of creationism, lining up as it does, evidence for the former, and kicking down the flimsy lies and evidence-free claims of the latter. It ought to be a school textbook with every student required to read it. I commend it heartily. This may well be my favorite Dawkins book; certainly it's in the top three and I commend it unreservedly.

River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

This book digs into the origin of life rather than the evolution of life, and while the two are separate sciences, they do have a lot in common in that at some point there had to develop a molecule that could survive and replicate itself, as well as change over time in order to survive and thrive in the changing conditions in which it found itself. That's all that evolution is when you get right down to the genomic level. The book also looks at where life might go which is really nothing more than speculation, if somewhat informed speculation. But it's a fun read and I commend it.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

So here's the one that started it all. Originally published in 1976, the book took a different approach from most books on evolution and started from the perspective of the gene and the genome in general, almost imparting a personality and ambition to genes to propagate themselves at all costs. Dawkins presents it as a sort of a competition, with the most ruthless genes succeeding and weaker ones be damned. In a way it makes sense, but like any perspective on science, it's not the whole story, hence the criticism and controversy this book has stirred up. The fact is though, that it does help sometimes to turn a topic on its head and think outside the box in order to gain a deeper understanding. That's what this book did and why it became so controversial and garnered criticism. I commend it as a worthy read.

A Devil's Chaplain by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

This is a collection of Dawkins's essays and is divided into sections containing ramblings on various topics with section headings such as "Science and Sensibility," "Light Will be Thrown," "The Infected Mind," "There is All Africa and Her Prodigies in us" among other topics. The essays, of which there are over thirty, cover a variety of subjects including evolution, fossils, ethics, religion, and as the book cover suggests, "reflections on hope, lies, science, and love." While this is not my favorite of his works, and may be a bit far ranging for some readers, I commend this as a worthy read for anyone who wants a complete collection.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

I've read a heck of a lot of what Dawkins has written and it's hard to believe that I've never published a review of any of his books yet, so that gets set straight right now, right here! The first book that brought him to prominence was The Selfish Gene getting on for a half century ago now, and that's one that also set the precedent for controversy that has followed a lot of what he's done and written since. He's been putting out books every few years and also doing TV documentaries. This particular book came out in 2006.

The aim of it is to undermine religious arguments claiming to establish the existence of a god. The book has been criticized for failing to tackle some arguments, but it was never Dawkins's intention to write a definitive refutation of all religious arguments, especially not the ones he considered have been refuted long before he published this. There are other books for that such as Atheism, the Case Agaisnt God and The Atheist Debator's Handbook which I shall review on another occasion.

This book covers questions of whether any god exists - what the ideas are - what people believe, and then considers the arguments for any god's existence - the so-called religious "proofs" from yesteryear, including Thomas Aquinas's "proofs" and so on. Chapter 4 is titled "Why There Almost Certainly is no God" with Dawkins characteristiclaly taking the scientific perspective which errs on the side of caution rather than stridently staking out a position which is what the creationists and other believers do. He points out that the proposition is so lacking in evidence or support that it's really not worth considering seriously.

In subsequent chapters he discusses morality, why religion isn't harmless (as if that wasn't self-evident), and childhood abuses. The book is a solid refutation of religious belief and dominance in society, and is a good starting point for any atheist to educate themselves and arm themselves with some good solid arguments to refute religious claptrap and bullshit. I commend it.

Evolution and the Myth of Creationism by Tim M Berra

Rating: WORTHY!

Coming off the release of yet another children's work of fiction, and before I start on the next, it's time to look at some non-fiction print books that I've owned for a while, read some time ago, and never got around to blogging. These will all be science-based works, mostly about evolution, that have been useful to me, educational and helpful.

It's been a while since I've done battle with the idiot creationists, the main reason being that it's a waste of time. There is no creation science. It does not exist in any way, shape, or form. There is creation religion - blind belief unsupported by any evidence - and it's a waste of time arguing with those who swallow those lies, because there is no amount of fact, or evidence, or science, or truth that you cam set before them that will ever impact in any way upon their brainwashed hive mind. But if you want to take on that hopeless challenge, or evne just be better armed to defend your own scientific views, these are some of the boosk you might find useful to have on your reading list.

The first is Tim Berra's work. At the time he wrote this, he was a professor of zoology at Ohio State university - that is, not some hydrologist or electrical engineer, or some other field entirely unrelated to biology, paleontology, physics, or cosmology like the real scientists are, and the creationists most certainly are not!

Berra's book is simed at open-minded readers (i.e. not creationists!) and laid out in lay-person's terms. It's divided into the following five sections:

1. What is Evolution?
2. Geologic Time and the Fossil Record
3. The Explanatory Power of Evolution
4. The Evolution of life and the Rise of Humans
5. Science, Religion, Politics, Law, and Education

The book is only some 140 pages long, not counting the extensive appendices and other supporting materials, but it competently covers, and in sufficient detail without being exhaustive or exhausting, enough of the basics about how science works to get you up and running. It explains why evolution is not a theory as expressed in everyday use, but a scientific theory, which is a different thing altogether, and it goes into what evidence supports it, giving many, many examples of evolution at work, and how we know what we know. In short, this is a solid beginning for anyone honestly trying to understand evolution, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Moonburner by Claire Luana

Rating: WORTHY!

If this author's name had been Claire Luna that would have been perfect, wouldn't it? Or maybe even better had it been Clair de Lune! LOL! I have a policy never to read books that have words like 'saga', 'chronicles' or 'cycle' on the cover. It did not say that on this cover, so it was only later that I discovered this was part of a tetralogy - or perhaps more accurately, a trilogy with a prequel added as an afterthought (maybe).

But I did read it and as it turned out, despite an issue or two here and there, it was a worthy read! That's not to say I will read any more of this 'cycle' (seriously WTF is a 'cycle'? Could it be called a bike? Maybe I'll write a bike one day. Or maybe I shall write the first Cycle Saga Chronicles?). But I digress. To me, this book was complete in itself, and certainly I feel no compulsion to pursue this story any further, which begs the question: why did the author?

I dunno. I guess there's pressure in the publishing world to write trilogies rather than standalones because they can vacuum up far more money from readers even if you give away the first one for free or at a discount. I will play no part in that. All of my books are standalones and complete in and of themselves, and many of them are free, especially during these difficult times when people are stuck at home so much.

This is because I don't write in any hope of becoming rich or milking money from readers. I write because I have to. I have no choice. If I'm not writing I go into withdrawal! Yes, my name is Ian Wood and I am a creative fiction addict. It's been about a half-hour since my last fix.... So, even if my novels are set in the same world as other stories, they're still standalones - except, that is, for the Little Rattuses™, but that's a children's series and with children's books, the rules are out the window - as indeed were The Little Rattuses....

Anyway, let's focus here. This story is about Kai - a young woman a few months from her momentous eighteenth birthday when her Moonburner powers are supposed to manifest. But it's a problem with Kai because she lives disguised as a boy, in a Sunburner village and they're at war with the Moonburners. This is actually more of a battle of the sexes because women are predictably of the Moon, and men of the Sun.

But of course Kai is outed and exiled. She survives against the odds and eventually is taken in at the Moonburner academy. That's not what it's called, but it's what it is - a special snowflake story with the Harry Potter-esque Kai arriving at Moonwarts. "You're a Moonburner, Harry!" The thing is that it's written well-enough that it doesn't feel trope-y or clichéd for the most part, and I appreciated that.

Why Kai's powers are supposed to manifest themselves at eighteen goes unexplained. There really is no difference between a person on the last day of their seventeenth year and the first of their eighteenth, so it's purely arbitrary and no explanation is given. I was willing to let that go despite that fact that's it's so trope that these powers arrive at eleven, or thirteen or whatever. It's usually an odd year for some reason, and it never really has any justification.

Anyway, the power allows her to utilize the Moon's light to do somewhat magical things. Why the Moon's light is different from the Sun's goes unexplained. Let's face it, the Moon makes no light of its own; it's just really good at reflecting the sun's light, so why are these two - Sunburner and Moonburner - different? That's another thing that's not gone into. Again I let it go.

I didn't get quite why Kai had to be raised as a boy, but maybe it was to do with her hair? I think I missed something somehwere, because on the one hand I thought the Moonburner's hair was supposed to become silver (the Sunburner's becomes gold) on her birthday, but apparently Kai's was silver from birth and her parents had to dye it to hide her true nature otherwise she'd have been left in the desert as a baby to die. This harks back to the ridiculous myth that the Spartans did the same to their children who were deemed unworthy. Maybe I misread or misunderstood something about the hair, but why there was no outrage about this barbaric treatment of newborns is left unaddressed.

Moving along, when Kai starts her classes at the Moonburner citadel, she also begins to learn that things are not what they seem and becomes involved in a literal underground. She also falls for the trope muscled Sunburner dude, which was sad and predictable for me. I don't know whether this is wish-fulfillment from these female authors or whether it's just that these book are conceived while these authors are ovulating, but it's insulting, you know? Anyway, in this particular novel, it wasn't dealt with too badly by the author, so I appreciated that, too.

Overall it was very readable, and I enjoyed it. I liked Kai as a character and enjoyed her gradual rise. It felt natural and organic, so there was nothing forced or magical about how she grew as a character, and that's both unusual in a YA novel and very much appreciated by me as a reader. I commend this novel as a worthy read.

The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch

Rating: WARTY!

This was a print book I picked up somewhere a long time ago, and just now got around to reading. Frankly, it was boring. Parts were interesting. Many parts were very saddening and even anger-inducing, but that said, it's history and there's nothing we can do about it now except to resolve to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again.

The truly sad thing is that even though we, as individuals, may resolve that and mean it, things are really no better now than they were. No, we typically do not have torture chambers and an organized pogrom against 'others' as we had back then, but people are still demonized, villified and harassed for their beliefs, or their skin color or their sexuality, or their weight, or something else, even in a country like the USA. We've seen this dehumanizing villainy stoked and encouraged by people in positions of power over the last four years in particular, and hatred, division, detestation, and denial have almost become the norm.

With regard to this book, the problem is that it seemed so repetitive. Even as it talked of different locales and different inqusisitors, the talk was largely the same - I mean there was not a lot of variation in how they did this grisly work from one year to the next, or from one country to another. It's the same thing over and over, and the kind of extended exposure to these stories in a book like this seems to serve only to inure and numb people to these horrors.

It saddens me to have to report that I grew bored of it by the time I was about halfway through, and DNF'd it. I can't commend it as a history book unless you're really into documentary detail about the horrific way humans have treated one another through the years, but the religious torture of people still continues in a less organized and less aggressive way.

As I post this, news has just come out of the now right-wing US Supreme Court siding with religious idiots in allowing them to gather en masse - for mass - meaning that Coronavirus, which is already out of control in the US, is now being encourgaged to attack and slaugther many tens of thousands more people than it has already. The fallout from this is going to be horrific. It could be prevented, but selfish, rank stupidity rules this year, it seems.

I don't recall what I was expecting from this book when I bought it, but perhaps my feeling for it has changed since then. Anyway for me, this one was not a worthy read for one reason or another.

Little Red Sleigh by Erin Guendelsberger, Elizaveta Tretyakova

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a sweet book written by Guendelsberger and finely-illustrated by Tretyakova which relates the charming story of the little red sleigh who sets out to find fulfilment in life. It was really well put-together, and I appreciated that nothing was done to try and anthropomorphize the sleigh: it was always a sleigh and always looked like one. It never pretended to be anything different, but still it had a personality which came through to the reader.

I guess if you wanted to be perverse, you could argue that maybe it would have been a better story if the sleigh had been represented as trying to better itself, but that fact is that it was doing exactly that, even as it remained true to its purpose and I liked that. It wanted to be the best it could be at what it was, and that's inspiration enough. I commend this as a worthy read.

Santa.Com by Russell Hicks, Matt Cubberley, Ryley Garcia

Rating: WARTY!

This was an overwrought story about corporate take-over, and modernization, and mechanization, and the heroic elf who rescues Christmas despite his being held as a slavish toymaker! Usually I might get with a story like this, but this one didn't move me at all. To me it was so overdone and confused that I just could not get with it. I can't commend it.

Pete the Cat's 12 Groovy Days of Christmas by Kimberley Dean, James Dean

Rating: WORTHY!

Here's a fun Christmas book (again, it ain't cheap, but it is a hardback) that takes a new riff off the 12 days song, including fuzzy gloves, guitars strumming, and ugly sweaters. It does mention cupcakes which once in a while are fun, but you wouldn't want to eat them every day for twelve days if you know what's good for you! That aside, the book is amusing and well-illustrated, and makes for a worthy read.

The Night Before Christmas by Major Henry Livingston Jr, or Clement C Moore

Rating: WARTY!

Having said that in my previous review, if you're a die-hard traditionalist (see what I did there - got a non-Christmassy Christmas movie mention in my review?!), you can always go get that abominable poem here (for a price - all these Christmas books seen to be expensive hardbacks), and suffer through it with your family. This one ain't bad - it has the poem, and decent illustrations, but it shows santa smoking a pipe, and I wouldn't buy it, nor would I recommend it because the title isn't even the title of the poem! It's actually called: A Visit from St. Nicholas

Dasher by Matt Tavares

Rating: WORTHY!

So it's time for the grouch to review a few Christmas books even though it's not even Thanksgiving as of this post. I'm not a big fan of Christmas, in particular the crass commercialism that starts in friggin' September for goodness sake. For me, Christmas has typically been the chance to celebrate the winter solstice and see some good movies on TV, so if you set me up with a drink, some decent food and a couple of decent movies and then go off and play all the games you want, and try on all the sweaters and pajamas, and slippers you desire, and I won't care! I'll be happy!

You know, I've never bought into those dumb reindeer names that everyone but me seems to have inexplicably embraced, because I never grew up with that abominable poem in my head. I have two problems with it and one is the sheer sexism in the explicit claim that only male reindeer can pull the sleigh. And for that matter, even the rather racist stance that only reindeer can pull the sleigh. One thing I agree on with this author though, is that I always did feel that Rudolf got way more credit than he deserved for the gig, so I applaud Matt Tavares in bringing Dasher (or whatever his real name was) to the fore in this story, which is well-illustrated, nicely-written and tells and decent story.

Mindfulness for Little Ones by Heidi France

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a worthwhile book about encouraging children to be more aware of their surroundings and their inner feelings. It's never a bad thing to bring that sort of awareness to children, and people tend to forget how rich an environment it is for young ones, especially having come into the world inclined to put everything in their mouth!

While that's not a great idea, especially as one grows older, that same curiosity about sight, sound and texture should not diminish as we age, but become more important in terms of staying grounded, and staying in touch with our surroundings.

Environmental awareness isn't just about safety, although a book like this can seriously help with that, and it's especially important to try to remain calm and focused in this age when we we're stressed over a pandemic disease that thanks to the appalling incompetence of leadership at the highest levels, is running unchecked through the USA, on top of racism, LGBTQIA discrimination, misogyny, as well as the poisoning of the planet and our heating of it almost to the point of no return, all of which has gone unchecked, if not exacerbated, over the last few years.

It doesn't hurt to be sensitive to what's going on in the world. It doesn't hurt to know what's going on inside ourselves either, especially when health concerns are growing. I commend this book as a worthy and educational read not just for children but for the adults who might read it to those children.

No Reading Allowed by Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter, Bryce Gladfelter

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a fun book about the English language and how the same-sounding sentence can mean two different things because of the way the words are spelled. The book has pairs of sentences, some full page, others quarter page, written by Carpenter and Haldar, with fun illustrations by Gladfelter. They include items like: The children scarfed the mousse The children scarfed the moose Beware the sharp turn Beware the sharp tern And so on!

I found this to be an entertaining, amusing, inventive, and educational book and I commend it as a worthy read.

Kamala and Maya's Big Idea by Meena Harris, Ana Ramírez González

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second of two children's books about Kamal Harris that I read. The author is Kamala (pronounced Kom-a-la) Harris's niece. The book tells the inspiring story of these two girls' struggle to get a children's playground up and running on an empty lot at the apartment complex where they lived.

Despite almost universal apathy by the adults, the two girls were resolute (that's good to be, especially if you're a girl and maybe used to being talked down, dismissed, or diminished). The girls made a plan and stuck to it, and they fought and struggled and made it happen - and there was the playground that all the kids could enjoy. An inspiring story that's true! We're going to need that selfless resolution in the White House to overcome the dire depredations and selfishness left as a legacy by the worst president in US history.

Kamala Harris Rooted in Justice by Nikki Grimes, Laura Freeman

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first of two children's books about Kamal Harris that I read. This one is a biography written nicely for children by Grimes and illustrated elegantly by Freeman. It follows Kamala (that's pronounced Kom-a-la), now vice-president-elect (as of this review) from her childhood, through school, law school, and her various public service jobs up to the point where she became a senator. It's not updated for very recent events - it ends at her run for senator - but it tells an inspiring story and it makes for encouraging reading, and for hope for the USA for the next four years that too many people have become desperate for under the recent cult and dictatorship.

The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock

Rating: WARTY!

This was another waste of money from Chirp with whom I've had some success in garnering audiobooks for my collection. Read less than satisfactorily by Graham Halstead, the book is ostensibly an autiobiographical novel. I'm not sure if that's supposed to reference something Biblical - with the author's name being a twice told 'rock' set in stormy waters - and I really don't care anymore. This is the second novel by this author that I've tried to read and I didn't like the previous one (The Shelter Cycle) either! That novel also contained a creepy character. That was two years ago and unfortunately I'd forgotten I'd disliked his previous effort so much, otherwise I could have saved my money in not buying this one!

The story was set in a wooded area, with cabins, bordering Lake Michigan, but despite that, to me it was boring as hell with the author rambling endlessly into descriptive writing much as he rambled through the woods, but without moving the story forward in inch. He seems obsessed with the word 'shadow', or shadows', or 'shadowy' and after a handful of chapters I gave up on it because I lost all interest in what had sounded, potentially, like an interesting story, but which became an author's obsession with his own love of his own voice. None of the writing interested me in either the characters or the surroundings. It did give me an idea for a story so it was not a total loss, but whether or when that might get written is unclear at this point!

The author tells a story of his stay at the cabins and his other obsession, which was a young widow by the provocative name of Mrs Abel. I immediately suspected her of having murdered her husband (note the name, 'Abel' - another Biblical reference?!), but I lost interest in pursuing the story for the purpose of discovering what actually was going on. Frankly, the way this was written, the narrator (the author if this was indeed autobiographical) comes off as a creep and a stalker. I cannot commend this at all based on what I heard of it.

The PG Wodehouse Collection by PG Wodehouse

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook collection of short stories and a novel. I'd already heard the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves, in a separate audiobook and liked it, so while I resented having to buy it again as a part of this collection (come on Chirp, think about what you're doing!), I was interested in the short stories. I now wish I had not been tempted because this was an unpleasant mess. The weird thing is that if I'd bought this first, I might never have made it to the novel because I was so put off by the stories preceding it.

Originally, I had listened to the novel with mixed feelings because on the one hand it featured the most appalling snobbery and privilege, but this was offset on the other by the absurdity and humor which softened those harsh edges. In this collection, there was no absurdity and little humor, so all that was left were the distasteful parts, and that didn't sit well with me.

Neither did it help that while Simon Jones, who read the novel I originally had heard, did a great job, BJ Harrison, who reads this collection, is nowhere near as good. Consequently, I was neither amused nor entertained. The stories included are as follows:

• Leave It To Jeeves (1916)
• Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (1919)
• The Aunt and the Sluggard (1919)
• Death at the Excelsior (1976)
• Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg (1919)
• Jeeves in the Springtime (1923)
• The Man Upstairs (1914)
• Jeeves and the Chump Cyril (1923)
• Jeeves Takes Charge (1925)
• Deep Waters (1914)
• The Man Who Disliked Cats (1914)
• Extricating Young Gussie (1917)
• Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Why they're in that particular order, I do not know. Clearly it's not chronological. The stories seem to have been randomly tossed in there, so there's no flow of anything. Several were not about Jeeves or Wooster. These included Death at the Excelsior which was a boring detective story, The Man Upstairs another boring story about a man and a woman living in apartments one above the other, Deep Waters about a man who fakes being unable to swim to make time with an attractive woman he sees swimming, and The Man Who Disliked Cats about some dude who seeks to have his girlfriend's cat kill her parrot so she'll get rid of the cat, which he dislikes. Those latter two had the potential to be truly funny, but they were not, neither of them.

I was seriosuly disappointed in this collection and do not commend it at all, unless you're getting it solely for the novel at the end, but I can't speak for that having not listened to it in this version.

Lost Animals by Errol Fuller

Rating: WARTY!

This book has about 170 pages of birds, featuring grebes, parakeets, pigeons, rails, warblers, and woodpeckers, and only some 60 pages of other animals, all of which are mammals and there are only seven of those: thylacine, greater short-tailed bat, Caribbean monk seal, Yangtze River dolphin, quagga, Schomburgk's deer, and the Bubal hartebeest. Naturally there are no plants because the title forbids it, but I have to say I was disappointed to see no fish, amphibians or reptiles included.

While this is educational, I think a much better and broader job could have been done. It's like the author just tossed in whatever random critters he happened across and made no effort to diversify at all. What's least shocking is that all of these extinctions are because of humans: hunting, deforestation, other destruction of habitat, and so on. It's the same old selfish, short-sighted, and clueless story, and things are only getting worse with climate change, so while this book does offer some insight into how badly we're screwing our grandchildren - even our children - out of their heritage, it really could have been a lot better, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read as is.

The Influencer by RTW Lipkin

Rating: WARTY!

This was one that was of interest to me because I'm currently working on a middle-grade novel about the evils of social media, but this book which thankfully has nothing to do with anything I'm writing was completely useless as either an inspiration or a caution, and it sadly was not even a form of entertainment, because it was so badly written as I realized when I read, early on, "After a few weeks I got more very used to other things too."

The author uses some nonstandard contractions like "to've" to represent 'to have' and it was just silly, and it felt amateur and and annoying, but that wasn't even the worst part. First person voice, for me, is the most worthless and inauthentic voice you can write in. It rarely works and it's usually annoying. This one was worse because the two characters were so clueless, and unrealistic, and both of them were using their own first person, meaning that the author had to prefix each chapter with the name of the person writing it, which is clunky at best.

I'm like, what, did these two unequal and antagonistic persons collaborate to write this story? How did that ever come to pass? Seriously, I thoroughly detest novels of this type because they are as fake as it's possible to get and when I read, I want to get lost in the author's world, not keep being reminded of how shallow and threadbare it is. I want to buy into it and get lost in it, and this author denies a reader that opportunity.

The story is of Claude, a computer programmer, and Ash, his creation, which is (we're told) an AI designed to pose as an Internet influencer pushing fashion and make-up. What Claude knows about fashion and make-up, and how he knows it is a complete mystery since we're never told (not in the seventy pages I read anyway), but what the author knows about AI's (artificial intelligence) is starkly apparent: very little, if anything.

There were two problems here, the first being, why would the programmer need an AI to do what he wanted to do? He doesm't. He just needs a computer representation of an attractive woman, since he's doing all the controlling and not letting the AI develop on its own. That story was already done in the 2002 movie Simone which was written, produced, and directed by Andrew Niccol abs starred Al Pacino. Unlike that movie, this story makes no sense and screams that the programmer is an idiot. That diagnosis is further confirmed by Claude being constantly baffled by how his AI manages to learn things. What? Sorry but no, this sucks.

I found myself skimming from very early on because the story, particularly the Claude parts, were so boring and whiny. The Ash parts were hardly better, so it's rather generous for me to claim I 'read' seventy pages, and frankly that was too many. I ditched this DNF and I'm done with this author.

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a charming and unsophisticated novel published almost a century ago in 1924, and it eventually turned into a series. I'm not a series fan and with few exceptions, I usually don't even finish the first novel if I ever start a series, but I was curious about this one because it's so old, and so well-known, and I have never read any of this. There was a revised and somewhat altered version published in the reverse year (42 as opposed to 24), but the one I read was the original '24 version and I think it's better.

The story is of four orphaned children named Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny who take up with a semi-kindly baking family. The kids overhear the family's plans to return them to their grandfather who for reasons unexplained, the kids think is the next thing to evil. They slip out in the night and start hiking down the road, heading into the field to sleep inside a haystack when daylight threatens to expose them. Later they overhear the baker couple passing on the road and learn that they're going as far as a certain village to try and track down the kids, but not as far as this other village, so the kids decide to go to the other village.

Now this story is old and it sure wasn't written for people my age, so I have loosened my criteria somewhat in reviewing this, but I have to say right here that it's a bit simplistic, and a bit of a Mary Sue kind of a story. There aren't any real threats or crises, and everyone behaves perfectly and does the right thing all the time. Henry, the oldest, lucks into a job and finds regular and generous employment with a very kindly family. The man of the house is conveniently a doctor for when one of them gets sick. They luck into finding the boxcar very quickly, and it's conveniently near the village they were walking to, as well as near a stream where they can get water and bathe, and as well as near a dump where they find all kinds of discarded items they can use to furnish their home. A dog quickly shows up injured (a thorn in its foot) and proves to be a very smart and loyal watchdog, and eventually they are all united with a family member who is rich and kindly, and so on!

For me that was a bit much and I have no desire to read more of the same, but I have to add that it was also a charming feel-good story, which anyone can use right now, and I think young kids in particular will probably enjoy the adventure and the kids fending for themselves and making a home in a boxcar. It's also educational in a way with regard to how the children behave and think positively, and find ways to make things work for them, so on that basis I commend it as a worthy read.