Simply HTML5 by eBookLingo.com

Rating: WARTY!

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

I’m not sure who wrote this or what they were trying to achieve with it, but frankly it was a mess. Regardless, it's a shame the actual authors didn't get a mention. Anyway, I read this as I typically do, on my iPhone, and the layout was really bad. The contents list occupied no less than sixteen screens and was so poorly laid out that it was useless for any practical purpose. I checked this out on my iPad for comparison and it was only marginally better on that.

The layout of the book itself wasn't much of an improvement, with one topic running into another in a way that was messy and confusing. There seemed to be no overall plan and there was a lot of repetitiveness. I wondered if this was another example of a book being written as a print book, with the ebook version being tossed in either as an afterthought or as nothing more than a means of allowing reviewers such as myself, who don’t merit print versions, to at least see it. If that’s the case, then it did them a disservice because it was a mess and, I assume, poorly represented the print version.

The contents table was a prime example, because it was supposed to be tappable - in that you could tap on a heading and go there, but it had a long series of periods leading from the section title to the page number. Page numbers are irrelevant in an ebook. All you need is the link to tap on, but the links were so close together and so close to the edge of the page that you were more likely to swipe to the next or the previous screen than to go to the chapter heading, or you were equally likely to go to the chapter heading before or after the one you thought you were tapping. It could have been a lot better.

The HTML examples used in the book consisted of the HTML text first, then a green and white divider, and then the HTML as it would be seen on a browser (specifically in this case FireFox 80.0.1). I used 84.0.1 to test some of these examples and ran into issues with them – notably the ‘draggable’ attribute, which simply didn’t work. Other attributes did work. Some of the examples, though, made no sense. At least not to me.

Let me just say at this point that I’m far from an expert HTML coder, but I do use it on my review blog. I don’t go in for anything spectacular or fancy, but I’ve been doing it a long time, so I do have experience and I do understand the principles well. I also have some amateur programming experience in other languages, so I’m far from a newbie at this, but as I said, by no means an expert. I pass this information on just to say that my problems with this are not from a lack of familiarity with this sort of thing.

So when I read this: "HTML attributes values are generally case‐insensitive" and then just a couple of paragraphs later: "In HTML the tag and attribute names are not case‐sensitive but most attribute values are case‐sensitive" that's not my lack of understanding, it’s a direct contradiction! If it had been just one or two things, I would have thought little of it, but I kept on encountering problems of this nature.

For example, I read later, "Now their are some HTML attributes that are called boolean attributes." The word 'their' should be 'there' (there's no there, there! LOL!), but that wasn't the real problem. The problem here was the poor description and the examples. I read, "A boolean attribute when placed in an HTML element represents a true value, and when not placed in an HTML element the boolean attribute represents a false value." If it’s not placed, it’s not an attribute? Well duh! It just seemed pedantic and too wordy.

The book doesn't explain this, but a Boolean value, named after George Boole, is an either-or, a plus or minus, a 'yes' or 'no'. It’s one or the other with nothing in between. It’s the way digital computers work: everything to them is a one or a zero (or technically a low voltage - like four volts - representing the one, or an even lower voltage - 2 volts - representing the zero), but the examples given don't make sense. After several examples of this type: <div itemscope=itEmScOPe>This is a valid HTML boolean attribute. </div>, we get a last one like this: <div itemscope="true">This is NOT a valid HTML boolean attribute. </div>, but this is precisely the same as the others - text within quotes! How is it any different? It’s not made clear what's being said here, and this whole section ends with: "I think you get the point of what is a valid and not a valid boolean attribute from the above example." No, I actually didn’t!

In another example, demonstrating the use of the paragraph elements, the code showed this:

Here is an example of the HTML<p> element below. <p>This is the first paragraph.</p> <p>This is the second paragraph.</p>

Which should work fine, but the example output showed this:

This is the first paragraph. This is the second paragraph.

Note that there's no paragraphing at all - it’s two sentences in the same paragraph!

Here’s just one more example: <p>The misspelled word <u>pharoah</u> should be spelled pharaoh.</p> This is valid HTML code and should result in the word 'pharoah' being underlined, but the example they showed for the output was this: The misspelled word pharoah should be spelled pharaoh. In other words - no underlining!

It was this kind of problem combined with a seemingly haphazard approach to teaching the reader how to use HTML that turned me off this book and made me DNF it. There is a need for books like this, but this one seemed too scattershot to really teach things in a logical and meaningful way. I think instead of the host of tiny unconnected examples it offered, the book should have oriented itself around creating a whole web page, but doing it in step-wise fashion, each new section of the book focusing on one aspect of HTML, and each adding new things to the overall page, teaching the reader how it all works as it goes.

In that way the reader could have created one page, stored it on their computer, added the new bits to it as they went along, and enjoyed watching the page grow in their browser. In this way they would have created something that worked, and that they could see improve as they went along. They could then later adapt it for their own purposes if they wanted, being confident they knew how it all worked, instead of typing in seemingly random bits of HTML which do only unrelated things, contributing nothing to any organized, overall web page design for the reader, who see zero growing from all their efforts.

But that's just me. I like the step-wise and the logical for books like this, and this one seemed to dissipate too much effort on going every which way without trying to build a coherent whole out of what was being taught. It’s for these reasons that I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Why Balloons Rise and Apples Fall by Jeff Stewart

Rating: WORTHY!

Life is short and books are long - if not within the covers, then when referring to how many books there are otut here int he world demanding to be read!

That's why I'm glad this was a short, fun book about physics. I could have happily continued reading had it been longer. It's an easy read and makes concepts quite clear - for the most part. There were a couple of times I had to do a double take, and while I don't for a minute profess to be a physicist, the things seemed off to me. I shall mention those below, but overall, this book was well-written, fun, and entertaining, with a nice sense of humor running through it and plenty of readily understandable explanations about what are, let’s face it, often difficult concepts to get one's mind around.

The book has a series of short sections, starting with asking what physics actually is, and each covers a different physics topic. Nothing important is left out, not even relativity and quantum mechanics, so if you want a basic grounding in physics, this is a great place to begin. It covers: astrophysics, electricity, energy, forces, heat, magnetism, matter, motion, all delivered well and educationally without straying too far into technical jargon or obscure explanations.

I ran into a problem on page 55 in a boxed section discussing an experiment by Dutch philosopher and mathematician Willem Jacob 's Gravesande, who experimented with dropping brass balls onto a smooth clay surface and measuring the depth to which the balls penetrated the clay, deriving a formula from it. Émilie du Châtelet made subsequent use of this, but she gets no mention in this book. The author talks about the brass balls falling at different speeds, but as he points out in this same book, acceleration under gravity is constant regardless of the weight of an object! So speed would seem to be far less relevant than mass in this case? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seemed odd to me.

The other issue I had was on page 92, where the author was discussing inflating balloons. He said that once a balloon is inflated and sealed, the pressure inside equals the pressure outside, but I for the life of me could not see this. The air in the balloon is under pressure - it has to be to inflate the constricting rubber (or whatever) of the balloon skin. If it equaled what was outside, then surely the balloon wouldn't sink to the ground as they typically do, but float at whatever height you set it? Again, maybe I'm missing something here, and maybe it’s purely the weight of the rubber that's causing the balloon to sink rather than the extra weight of the compressed air inside, otherwise it would float, but it seems to me that the pressure inside has to be greater. If it were less, the balloon would rise, surely? The author seems to admit this himself a paragraph or so later when talking about hot air balloons.

But whether this is a mistake of some sort, or whether I'm up a gum tree takes nothing away from the overall quality of the book, which I commend as a worthy and educational read.

The Witch Hunter by Nicole R Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

It occurs to me that every novel is really a two-in-one. There's the novel the title suggests to a potential reader, and there's the actual content of the novel which the reader ends up wading through or swimming in as the case may be. When I see a novel titled "The Witch Hunter" I expect it to be about witches. I don't automatically think, 'Oh, this novel is about vampires'. But believe it or not, this one is. Hence my distaste for it. Vampire novels suck, and not in a nice way.

I blame myself entirely for this. The novel has the word 'saga' on the front cover, which is a huge no-no to me, but nevertheless there are doubtlessly some older books I have in my collection that may sport this logo, or even a newer book or two that may have bypassed my admittedly lax screening process and made it into the collection without my properly registering it. This is one of those books, quite evidently. And it predictably sucks.

The first problem is that we have vampires who are decades old, yet who do not remotely behave like they've lived that many years. I have yet to encounter a vampire who does. Vampire stories are completely unrealistic to begin with, but even setting that aside and buying into this world for the sake of a good story doesn't actually get you a good story. Who knew? All it gets you is one that's entirely, ridiculously, unrealistic even within its own framework. This, in a nut sack, is my problem with vampire stories.

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The second problem is the vampire tropes. No one is willing to try anything new so all vampire stories, including this one, end up sounding the same. Boring. This is my other problem with this particular one: it was boring from the off, and I quit after only five percent. I confess it's all my fault for even starting to read a novel with the word 'saga' on the cover, but based on my small sampling, this is warty.

Cold Press by David Bradwell

Rating: WARTY!

This backlog of reviews is defintiely more nagative than positive, I'm sorry to say! I've been away from Britain for so long now that I like to read a good Brit novel from time to time, to reconnect in a relaxing way that doesn't involve airports and rental cars, but this really wasn't the escape I'd been hoping for. I think any novel that has to announce itself on the cover as "A Gripping British Mystery Thriller" has some sort of an identity crisis. It's also listed as "Anna Burgin book one" which means a series, and so I'm usually not interested, but I started reading anyway and I got what I deserved.

For reasons unknown, it's set in London in 1993. London I can understand. 1993 not so much. I'm not a fan of novels set in the past, but I let that slide. Investigative journalist Clare Woodbrook is working on an exposé of police corruption, specifically of Detective Chief Inspector Graham March. Now you know from this that when Clare goes missing it's March who's going to be looking for her, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. Predictable.

Clare of course took off one afternoon for a secret meeting and despite Danny being her investigative assistant, she tells him nothing about this 'risky venture' she's embarking on, Clare's a moron. Her behavior is predictable in a story like this, and realistically, it makes no sense. Danny has a 'flat mate' - someone who shares an apartment (called a flat in Britain) with him - who is a " feisty fashion photographer" named Anna Burgin - the one of the series title. She doesn't appear until chapter five and when she does, there's an abrupt shift to first person - a voice I typically detest and a shift in voice I abhor.

That was when I quit reading because I was already sick of this dumb book by that point and first person voice just made it ten times worse. It's like shifting down from third gear to first. Obviously there's no reason to ever do that, and it turned this novel into a grind for me. I can't commend this based on what I read of it. I sure wasn't about to read some 300 pages, let alone a whole series of it.

Underground by Chris Ward

Rating: WARTY!

The premise for this book sounded interesting, but I could not get into it at all, so I didn't get far before I DNF'd. This is based on what I did read. To be fair it's not aimed at me but at a much younger readership; even so I've read many books in that age range before, and enjoyed a lot of them. This one just didn't get there for me because it came across as stupid - with stupid characters in a future dystopian London doing stupid things for no apparent, let alone logical reason. And when I say logical, I mean from their perspective, not from mine.

That's when I felt I could no longer buy into this premise. It was too much of a leap from these characters, none of whom I liked, to what the author evidently expects them to do. Plus it's yet another trilogy where a single volume could tell the story, so no thanks. Some publishers and authors seem to think it's fine to take three times the money from a child to a story that could have been fitted into one volume if it had been told right. I don't like that kind of mercenary approach to children's books. Or any books. That's why so many of mine are available for free, especially during covid times.

For those who're interested, the premise is that this young girl Marta Banks is the leader of a group of young kids who take reckless rides hanging onto the speeding tube trains on the London Underground (London's subway system). How this worked I never could figure out from the sketchy description given in the opening pages of the book, which describes it as a wooden "clawboard." I have no idea what that is or even if it's a real thing that I'm supposed to know about for the purposes of reading this. Well, newsflash, I don't!

So I was at a loss as to what they were actually doing. At first I thought maybe they were using some sort of a sled which they somehow hooked on to the train as it went by, but it made zero sense to me. After I re-read it, it seemed more like they were just hooking onto the side of the train, and then jumping off, but the whole thing was vague and too stupid for me to waste my time on trying to figure out.

One of the guys fails to 'make the jump' and when they go back to see how he's doing, the text reads, "Paul was huffing like an old man trying to start a car...." Ignoring the age-ism here, I don't know how old this author is, but what is it he thinks is involved in starting a car? These days (and this novel is set in the future recall) it invovles involves pressing a button, but there was a time, way, way back, that it involved rotating a crank handle plugged into the front of the engine. I can imagine if someone, old or not, had been doing that fruitlessly for some time, they might be huffing and puffing, but in the future why would anyone be doing that? This is where I quit reading this.

The book blurb claims that Marta is "a girl who risks death every day in the abandoned underground stations of London," but if the stations are abandoned, why are the trains still running? Is it just a few stations that are abandoned? Why? I dunno. The authors doesn't tell. How did the kids get in there? If they break in and are not supposed to be there, why are they not reported by the train drivers? Or are the trains automated and have no drivers? In which case why aren't the kids reported by the passengers? The train has windows. If it's purely freight, why the windows? I got this impression this wasn't too well thought through, and that impression seriously dissuades me from continuing on in a novel - any novel.

Some people might argue that I haven't read enough of this to review it, but they're wrong. If you start reading a book and immediately it starts turning you off reading it any further, then that's a review in and of itself. I'm not telling anyone not to read this; I'm telling you that I didn't like this book, and I told you why. Deal with it!

The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand

Rating: WORTHY!

Here we go! New Year, new plan. Why or even how it takes 26 hours rather than 24 for everyone to gather in the new year is baffling to me, but I love it because of that! For my part, my efforts from here on out will be to my own material rather than to reviewing the work of others. I began this review blog in the hope that I would achieve two things: the first was to learn from analyzing the work of others, and the second hope was that others might be tempted to read my work based on the sort of reviews I put out.

I tried to avoid merely championing my own writing, but I was not shy of mentioning my own work if it was relevant to what I was reviewing. While the first hope was realized in that I did get some good insights to how and what I wanted to write, the second was not. I guess people have no loyalty to writers these days and I can't blame them. You gotta read what trips your trigger!

What I learned was more of a negative than a positive, in the sense that I knew exactly what I didn't want to write. Everything else came from that and going forward, I intend to travel that same path and build on it, with a diversion here and there. One of these diversions I'm going to be setting up for publication today, although it won't actually be available until later in the month. In fact today marks the setting-up of three books all of which will be published this month. Hopefully this is symbolic of a work ethic I will embrace this year and beyond. Once again I embark upon a voyage in the Weal Sea!

But to this review, which is short and sweet, just like the book! This audiobook was read beautifully by Jane McDowell. It was short, yet replete with information about foxes. Most of it is of the British "red" fox, but it covers foxes in general, with specific examples from different parts of the world, and in doing so it imparts an overall picture while giving engaging and fascinating details of a fox's life in Britain. There's so much to learn about this misunderstood member of the dog family.

The author, a mammal ecologist who has studied foxes for many years, challenges many misconceptions about these mammals while educating the reader to the realities of it, which are much less scary and far more charming. In additional to revealing an extraordinary story about what foxes are and are not, and how they live and move and have their being, including their contributions to the environment, she also discusses how we might move ahead successfully together with them through neither vilifying nor holding foxes in adoration. I commend this as a worthy listen.

Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

Rating: WARTY!

For my very last review of 2020 before I take a well-earned break after fifteen straight months of 33 reviews a month, I'm sorry to report that it's a negative one! I don't even remember how I came to get this book, but now having read some of it, it seems to me that this is very much a rip-off of the BBC television serial Torchwood, specifically the fourth season, Torchwood: Miracle Day which was transmitted by the BBC in the summer of 2011, as well as on Starz in the USA. This novel trilogy was first published three years later, in 2014.

Like in Torchwood, death takes a holiday, with people failing to die even though they have a terminal illness or are 'killed' in battle. In this novel the reason is that 'Death' is looking for his cobweb bride and won't collect another body until he finds her. No one apparently has any idea what that means, nor does 'Death' enlighten them, which seems ridiculous to me. Thus the beginning of the novel describes - in the most disturbingly graphic terms - illness and horrific battle injuries, which turned me off. A bit of that to establish the story I can read, but when it seems to go on forever, and ever more graphically, I'm not a fan.

From there it devolved into a rambling story that seemed to go nowhere, switching characters almost as much as it switches paragraphs, and I lost both track of it as well as interest in it. I DNFd it, and I can't commend it based on the portion of it that I could stand to read.

Goodnight, Santa by Dawn Sirette, Kitty Glavin

Rating: WORTHY!

For my very last children's christmas book review of 2020, I can't think of a better one than this one. This sports a light-up Moon - which isn't as impressive as it sounds, but is activated by a hidden pressure button on the cover. It also has a battery accessible (and turn-off-able!) module at the back, so there won't be a time when it runs down and becomes useless.

What I loved about this book, and what put it over the top as the best one I've seen this year, was the silhouette illustrations by Glavin, which are beautifully done; the book is worth getting just for those alone. The girl and her plush toy want to say goodnight to Santa, and end up taking a rather magical and Moonlit stroll through the winter landscape saying goodnight to everyone but. It's a fun and inventive book and I enjoyed it.

Merry Christmas, Mouse by Laura Numeroff, Felicia Bond

Rating: WORTHY!

Mice are always a lot more enjoyable in books than in real life aren't they? The mouse here is called Mouse and previously appeared in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie which sounds like fun just from the title. Mouse is intent upon decorating the tree and enjoys counting as he does it, so this Christmas story educates as well as entertains. And it's cute! It's a colorful pasteboard book written by Numeroff (she does the counting, get it?!) and illustrated by Bond, Felicia Bond.

Here Comes Santacorn by By Danielle McLean, Prisca Le Tandé

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another pasteboard book with glitter on the pages no less, and in it, the reindeer have colds and are unable to pull the sleigh. Fortunately, there's the Yulicorn who sports a candy cane striped horn, and who can help. The Yulicorn can pull Santa's sleigh by herself, as the rhyming text by McLean explains and the sweet illustrations by Le Tandé nicely demonstrate. A fun Christmas fantasy.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: A Christmas Activity Book

Rating: WORTHY!

No one gets credit for putting this together which is why I tend not to review books of this nature, but it's Christmas, so here goes, this once! This is exactly what it says. Most of the sixty-some pages are coloring pages, but others are word searches, or puzzles or of the word-scramble and 'find your way home' sort, and it includes everything from the old Christmas animated cartoon: the North Pole (which in reality is melting fast, so get it while it lasts!), the Island of Misfit Toys, and the Bumble, as well as Rudolf and Santa, and the misfit elf. And it comes complete with five colored pencils sporting pencil toppers of the main characters. This will keep your kids occupied while you get at the egg nog and the Christmas movie! Or even take that nap!

Merry Christmas, Baby by Dubravka Kolanovic

Rating: WORTHY!

Part of a " Welcome, Baby" series, this one is another colorful pasteboard book about Christmas for young 'uns. There's a shrinking concentric set of holes through the cover and the first few pages, colored in green and red, and inviting inquisitive chubby fingers to poke around and explore. The book is essentially a series of cute animal images with minimal text. It's a great way to introduce a growing and curious infant to Christmas traditions, if that's where your culture leans. Even if it isn't, it never hurts to educate a kid about traditions celebrated by others, which was the aim of my own The Very Christmassy Rattuses book for young children. We seriously need some inclusivity right now.

The Snowiest Christmas Ever by Jane Chapman

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a sweet and nicely-illustrated color pasteboard book about a family of bears, the children of which wish for snow, and that old adage about 'be careful what you wish for' comes into full fruition as the house is almost literally inundated with snow. It comes in the windows, through the door, and down the chimney, but in the end, the family manages to cope and enjoys some play and some sledding. It's a cute and fun story for young kids who like snow or who might never even have seen snow but would like an idea of what it's all about. Of course these books never tell you about the downside: how cold and dangerous it can be, but that has no need to be a part of this story!

Never Say Spy by Diane Henders

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first in a series. It’s one of those annoying series where every single title has a keyword in it. Often the keyword is the improbable name of the main character, but in this case it’s 'spy'. Tedious. What's the fear here - that readers are so shallow or so stupid, or both, that they can't recognize this book is by the same author as that book? Personally, I don't write for people that stupid. Even my children's books aren't aimed at adults who are so lacking in basic mental wherewithal. You don't have to be particularly smart or highly literate to read my books, but you do have to have a functional cortex.

The plot is that "middle-aged Aydan Kelly" is mistaken for a spy and then evidently becomes one since this series runs to another dozen novels at least. It's one of those wishful thinking deals, especially when the main character is pretty much (give or take a few) the same age as the author. But note that age: the main character is 46. There's nothing wrong with that until something happens in the first chapter which I shall shortly get to.

I actually applaud the desire for an author to promote an older woman as a main character in something that's not a pure romance story or one of those tedious multi-generational stories, or the even more tedious 'old friends reunion' stories where a tragic or dangerous secret is unleashed! The problem is that this is a series starter and a first person novel, which sets it up to fail in my long and bitter experience with these things, because a series is essentially the same story told over and over again with a few tweaks. I know it's beloved by authors, because they can lazily recycle the same characters and plots, and by publishers who can vacuum up the profits from their hopefully addicted 'users', but first person is worst person for me, and I have a problem with series unless they're really well done.

Case in point: the story begins with Aydan waking up from some sort of unconscious state to find herself with a paramedic standing over her. Yet her first person voice description is perfectly fluent and natural with no memory gaps or confusion. This is why first person truly sucks as a descriptive voice for a novel. It’s completely unrealistic and nauseatingly self-centered. I began skipping sections of this from almost the first page because of the tedious predictability, although kudos to the author for having a doctor introduce himself with "I'm Doctor Ross" rather than the absurd, "My name is Doctor Roth." No, dipshit, your name is Roth. Your title is Doctor. No, I don't cut slack for crappy writing, especially when I'm already annoyed by the first person voice. Recently I went through my unread print book collection and summarily tossed out everything that was in first person even though I hadn't read it because I was so profoundly sick of this voice!

The book description isn't typically written by the author, but it's often written, it would seem, by some moron who hasn't even read the novel. That has to be why this one claims that Aydan is a bad-ass, yet she's still wearing her wedding ring despite her husband having gone two years before. That doesn't translate to 'bad-ass' to me. Where I quit reading this was in the first chapter when - seeing a guy who is described insultingly as 'beefcake' come out of her trunk and into the car, bearing a gun - Aydan slams on the brakes and dives out of the car, which has already begun moving again, and rolls away as the car continues on downhill. No. Just no. This woman is 46, remember? She's not an athlete. She's a bookkeeper. This is not to say that no bookkeeper is fit, but this one 'flung' herself out of the car as it was 'picking up speed'? Was she on some of that speed I wonder? It was far too improbable. No. A bad ass would have disarmed the guy and demanded an explanation from him. This woman is not a badass. She's an idiot.

The stupid book description also has it that this woman has a penchant for profanity, but a search of the book, out of curiosity, revealed no use of any four-letter words other than 'shit'. So profanity is a lie. Maybe the text claimed she used profanity such as where it read, 'after a few moments of heartfelt profanity", but there isn't actually any, other than that one word which is used many times. So again, book description misleading. Which I resent. I gave up on this because it’s not up to my standards for a good read, and I will not commend it based on my introduction to it. I'm done with this author.

Shades of Treason by Sandy Williams

Rating: WARTY!

The most memorable thing in this novel was the short sentence, “You burn, I burn, Ash.” Ash is the abbreviated last name of the main female character. I don't think the author realized there was unintended humor in writing that. Or maybe she did. But it seemed emblematic of this novel: one I had begun to like, but which by fifty percent of the way through had devolved into such a dumb-ass romance that I couldn't stand to read it anymore.

Thoughtless phrases like the one mentioned above littered this novel, so even as I started to like the main character and started to get into the story, these still brought me up with a short sharp stop every now and then. At one point, I read, "The second grabbed her arm, the arm connected to her dislocated shoulder." If it’s dislocated, it’s not connected, and vice-versa. I know what she's trying to say, but there are much better ways of saying it that evidently went unexplored there.

Another laughable line was: "She kept navigation on manual, took the controls, and banked away from the Obsidian." Spacecraft don't bank. Aircraft bank because they have to. Spacecraft don’t. Again, thoughtless writing. Another was a Star-Trek-ism: "She was as still as a Caruthian deer." On Star Trek (I don't even watch it any more, but unfortunately the memory refuses to fade) they were always talking about 'planet of origin-Item' as an indivisible pair. It was laughable. Same here. Why a Caruthian deer? Why not just a deer? Do Caruthian deer turn to stone when they become still - à la a weeping angels from Doctor Who? I doubt it. Just 'a deer' would have been fine. You don't need to specify the planet it came from because such a reference is both pretentious and meaningless. And poor writing. One last one: "You’re anomaly is unresponsive, Commander." She doesn't mean 'you are anomaly'; she means 'your anomaly'. Again, inattentive writing. As writers, we’ve all been there, and one of these once in a while is forgivable, but so many of them were too many.

In terms of the story itself, the anomaly is Lieutenant Ramie Ashdyn, or Ash for short. Nowhere in the 50% I read is an anomaly actually explained. It references a certain type of person, but how or why they're considered anomalies I cannot tell you because the author couldn't tell me. This genetic condition (or whatever it's supposed to be) appears to render them into a super soldier or spy or whatever is it they choose to do. Why does this happen? I don't know.

So anyway, Ashdyn is an anomaly and of course even more anomalous than others because of her attitude. I enjoyed this to begin with because it made her badass - that is until fifty percent into this story, when the romantic bullshit between her and her commanding officer became far too big a part of the story and entirely inappropriate for three major reasons. The first of these was that he was her commanding officer - her superior, her authority figure, and therefore this was entirely wrong. The second is worse, believe it or not. This superior officer - who she referred to as 'Rip' - were given unnatural mental control over their subordinates through the use of some sort of compulsion brainwashing, which meant these subordinates were unable to refuse a special type of command the officer could issue. The command could be anything, but when issued in the right way, they had no choice but to obey it. In short, they were slaves. Again, having sex with someone under that kind of control is entirely inappropriate.

The third reason was simply ridiculous, and I guess I should have paid more attention to the 'Shades of' portion of the title here. While it's a gray area, I do take full responsibility for my lack of focus here. Ashdyn has been off these special meds she takes and so is extraordinarily weakened (because she's an anomaly). On top of that, she'd been tortured for an hour, including having too-tight manacles on her limbs, and having at least one finger deliberately broken as well as having some device that causes extreme pain, but not damage, applied to her head several times. She'd been in a fight - both physical and using weapons - had stolen a space transport and crash-landed on the nearby planet, hiked in her increasingly weakening state through a forest, and then been forced to roll down the side of a canyon in order to escape being shot. In other words, she wasn't beaten, but she was battered and bruised, cut and damaged, with lord knows how many broken ribs and pulled muscles, and at the end of her string.

After all of this, and while washing off in a river - during which of course she has to get naked in order to get 'properly clean', as does her finely-chiseled and muscular superior officer - she's entertaining sexual thoughts about him - all her injuries and pain completely forgotten. This is the woman whose fiancé betrayed her, yet she has zero thoughts about that guy: not a sliver of a longing, or a regret or anything, and yet now she's suddenly lusting after this rugged commander for whom she's had zero feelings until he all-but beats up on her while she's manacled. I understand that later she has sex with him. But thankfully, I didn't read that far. I'd like to invite the author to abuse herself to the same extent she dictates that her female character gets abused and then see how sexual she feels after it. My guess is that her answer will be 'not bloody much'.

I can see a guy writing bullshit like this, but a female author? I don't get it at all. It’s entirely inappropriate and all it achieves is to turn what was shaping up to be a fine and strong female character into the wilting violet star of a cheesy Harlequin southern romance. It’s barf-worthy. This novel is warty to the max and I don't see where it can possibly go that's intelligent after this. Wherever that turns out to be, I don't want to go there with it. Half of this was too much by half.

Ghost Legion by Andreas Christensen

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is your standard alien invasion deal, and those can be entertaining, but this one seemed so full of clichés and it was badly-written. Plus it’s the first in a series and I was already off-put by this volume, let alone the prospect of reading a whole series like this.

The story is that aliens came 18 years prior to the start of the main story. This ebook had an introduction, and a prologue, both of which I skipped, so chapter one began 'eighteen years later' - that is almost two decades after the birth of the main character. The book blurb claims that " A race of conquerors from deep space had set their eyes on Earth´s riches." I guess these guys are from deep space as opposed to that shallow space we’re always hearing about. But here’s the thing - what riches? What is it that Earth has that some random uninhabited and therefore, ripe for the plucking planet doesn't have?

I liked the 2011 movie Battle: Los Angeles even though it was also clichéd, but one of my problems with that movie was the claim that the aliens liked Earth because of the water - their technology was based on it. The thign is that at least three moons in our solar system have abundant water which they coudla hve had without a fight. Water isn't that rare in space, either. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and oxygen is the third most common. Water is merely oxidized hydrogen. All you need to do is burn hydrogen in oxygen, and hey presto, you have water!

Aside from that, Earth isn't made of anything that doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe, so clearly it wasn’t water that brought the aliens to Earth in this story. Was it physical resources? Earth has nothing that other planets do not have! Was it food? The chances that aliens would be adapted to be suitably nourished by food growing on Earth are a bit on the slim side. You have to evolve with your food, so unless their own planet was pretty much exactly like ours and they had something like parallel evolution to ours, which is a long shot, then what exactly is the attraction of Earth - a planet they would have to fight for in order to garner for themselves these things? That was never made clear. But I have a hard time buying this premise in a story like this unless the author really does some work to specify why Earth is truly the only place that can satisfy their needs. This author didn't do the work.

That wasn’t even the worst issue though. The blurb went on to say that humans chased "them off Earth and most of the Solar System" but it didn't say why they didn't finish the job. Instead, it insists that the "war still rages on, and every year young people are sent out to die, far away from Earth," but why is this? We already have pretty sophisticated robot technology today. This author is saying that in an age where we can fight a winning battle across most of the solar system, we don't have military robots, drones, or other automated weapons to deploy? They don't explain why it was such a battle given that these aliens - admittedly arriving prepared - managed to give the entire population of Earth and its mighty militaries and its considerable manufacturing resources such a hard time. The aliens were necessarily outnumbered and fighting with limited resources. Why was victory so hard won and so incomplete? I don't know and the author evidently doesn't care.

So not only was the plot lacking considerably in oomph, so was the writing. I read at one point early in the novel, "For a millennia." No! The singular is millennium. Millennia is plural. A writer should know this and so should any editors they hire. At another point I read, "... Jews and Muslims, Christians and Atheists, blacks and whites, all united in one single purpose..." so apparently the author believes that 'blacks' and 'whites' are religions, but Hinduism isn't? Atheism is?! Either that or he needs to word his sentences better. Later I read, "Ethan looked at Julian and heaved his eyebrows slightly." I'm frankly not sure how one heaves one's eyebrows slightly. I can see someone lifting them slightly, yeah. I can see them raised slightly, but heaved slightly? It doesn't work, and given how many of these irritations cropped up in the first few pages, neither does the novel. Not for me anyway.

The author apparently thinks we’ll still be using the same weaponry when we have advanced space travel rather than having advanced our weapons at the same rate as our space travel abilities. Worse than this, when Ethan decides for no apparent reason to join the military, the testing is ludicrous. They get some tests on a computer and later their 'decision-making' test consists of whether they choose to go get a soda in the lounge or go down a dark corridor into a room. That's it! That's the entire test and Ethan passed it. The next day they’re led into an area where they have to fight this trained soldier. They all lose of course, and most of them get injured. It was like a direct lift from Divergent, and that's where I quit reading. Divergent sucked, and this story is no better. It's ridiculous, pathetic, and totally unrealistic.

A Christmas Cruise Murder by Dawn Brookes

Rating: WARTY!

Read by Alex Lee, this audiobook interested me because I published a cruise ship murder mystery myself some months ago and I was curious to know what another author would do with one. This one with a Christmas theme sounded like it might be fun, but I was wrong! My bad! I could not stand this novel and I ran from it after about five chapters. There were two problems. One was the reading voice of Alex Lee which I did not like at all, but even had the voice been magic in my ears, I still would have given up on this because of the writing style.

This is the first book in a series and I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of series as a general rule, but the first problem here for me is the absurdity of the premise - that a female police constable (later a detective constable and presumably later a sergeant and so on) goes on seven cruises and on every one there is a murder! I'm sorry but no. This is just as stupid as the woman who retreats in disarray to her ancestral home, opens a cupcake shop in this tiny village, and then finds it's the murder capital of the world. No! By far the most common crime on cruise ships is sexual assault, and even that is rare. The truth is that there are 25 times fewer crimes on a cruise ship than in your typcial city - at least as far as an American survey indicated. Maybe Britain is just the opposite....

So this Brit police officer, Rachel is looking forward to this cruise to the Canary Islands with her new fiancé. Her old fiancé is long gone, but evidently makes an appearance in a later book. I guess Rachel's life is just improbably brimming with coincidences. Her plans are scuppered when her new fiancé is called away to Italy to solve a hotel crime. I guess the Carabinieri are completely incompetent.

Another improbable coincidence is that, on the bus journey to the dock at Southampton to get on board, Rachel ends up not only speaking with the murder victim (the ship's Maître D) before he's murdered, but also gets her hands on his wallet which he conveniently leaves behind him on the bus, and which, unless I missed it (I listened to this while driving so my attention wasn't always focused on the story), Rachel never turns in and the Maître D never misses!

Another annoyance was the obsession the author seems to have with people's hair. We always get a hair description no matter how irrelevant it is. To me, unless the person's papeparance is critical to furthering the story it really doesn't matter what they look like and a brief sketch is plenty for me. To go into too much detail or worse, to do a Stephen King and deliver a not-so-potted history of the person's life is an annoyance because it brings the story to a screeching halt for no reason at all. I do not like that kind of writing.

The book description itself tells us what's wrong with this: "Rachel can't resist snooping once she suspects an element of foul play" Snooping. That's the operative word, including breaking into a crime scene with no authorization whatsoever. If the cruise people had asked for Rachel's help, that's one thing, but it's not her jurisdiction. It's the jurisdiction of the Hampshire Constabulary, since the murder took place while the ship was docked and is, as far as I could tell, discovered before the ship has even left British territorial waters.

I thought this might be different from your typical 'cozy mystery', which I avoid like SARS-CoV-2, but no! Even though the main character is a police officer, it turns out that she's still an interfering person who withholds evidence and breaks the law in her selfish and crazed pursuit of a murderer. In fact, one could argue here that so many murders take place around her that she's somehow a trigger for them, and in light of this, ought to be banned from cruise ships altogether. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

How Did They Do That? by Caroline Sutton

Rating: WORTHY!

I label this as a worthy non-fiction book, but this is sometimes in a loose sense because there seem to be some stories in it where fact and fancy have not been adequately discriminated, but overall I enjoyed it. It makes for a great restroom book because although there are three hundred pages of short (some longer, some very short) stories of the origins of various things, ideas, and people, and so on, most are quite short. The stories are eclectic and no attmept whatsoever seems to have been amde to organize them by any method - topic, category, chronology or otherwise.

The stories themselves are fun though, educational and intriguing. They're largely US-centric, be warned, but not exclusively so. They may cover the building of the Great Wall in China, the building of the Empire State building in NYC, the secret marriage of Mae West, the origin of coffee, Ford's union-busting brutality, how they made Superman fly in the Christopher Reeves era, and who made the first parachiute jump.

I found the book entertaining and fun, and I commend it as a worthy read.

I've Loved You Since Forever By Hoda Kotb, Susie Mason

Rating: WORTHY!

Written by Kotb (coat-bee), this hardback color book for young children is beautifully lyrical and rhythmical. When I say it could put you to sleep I mean that in the nicest way possible. Mason's illustrations are simple, but well-done and nicely-colored. The text is reaffirming and persuasive, and the whole effect is quite warming and enjoyable, especially for young children. Hoda Kotb is a main co-anchor for NBC's morning 'Today' show and her story, written to celebrate her adoption of a child, takes us through several scenarios of lasting and powerful love for one's children. I commend it as a worthy and inspiring read.

The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton

Rating: WORTHY!

I loved this author's Dinosnores book, and I adore her last name which is so irrepressibly perky, so I wasn't surprised that I enjoyed this nicely-illustrated hardback for young children either. And who can possibly have a beef with a book that teaches these children how to go to bed and more importantly, how to go to sleep? A group of animals on a boat go through their bedtime routine and while I'm not sure about exercising after a bath as opposed to before it, in general the routine is pretty good one, involving getting good and clean, getting some exercise, brushing teeth and getting into pajamas. The book is rhyming, and fun, and colorful so what's not to like? It did not put me to sleep while I read it, which is paradoxically why I liked it!

The Very Hungry Caterpillar's Snowy Hide and Seek by Eric Carle

Rating: WORTHY!

The phenomenally successful Hungry Caterpillar is back in this winter adventure. How this works exactly given that the caterpillar became a butterfly half a century ago is a bit of a mystery, but I'm not going to rate this book negatively just because of that! LOL! Described as a 'A Finger Trail Lift-the-Flap Book' this colorful hardback tells a story of searching and finding, and encourages the young reader to open flaps and follow finger trials, so it's a very tactile work, perfect for curious youngsters. The caterpillar gets to meet penguins and polar bears, reindeer and Santa Claus, and generally has a fun time as will, I'm sure, your toddler. I commend this one as a worthy read.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Rating: WORTHY!

I've enjoyed this author's books for children (3 out of 3 prior to the present one) and this one upheld that tradition. Frankly I can't believe I haven't reviewed this one before now. It's not a Christmas book, and the reason I do it now is because the author has a Christmas book out which I shall also review up next. This one is a counting book - a colorful pasteboard for young children that documents this voracious caterpillar's chomping through one of this, two of that, three of the other, and so on, not ad infinitum fortuantely. I'm not convinced that caterpillars really eat some of the things this one did, but it was very hungry!

I commend this as a worthy read with a joyous ending for young children. Count on it!

Little Blue Truck's Christmas by Alice Shertle, Jill McElmurry

Rating: WORTHY!

Written by Shertle, illustrated by McElmurry, this is another colorful hardback for young children, about the little blue pickup truck who must deliver five Christmas trees, although it seems less like a delivery as such than it does the truck hustling these trees to whomever it could find to buy them! But it finds a buyer for each and every tree, especially the last one which looked like maybe it wouldn't have a home for the holidays! A fun Christmassy sort of a story, which I commend.

How to Catch a Reindeer by Alice Walstead, Andy Elkerton, Adam Wallace

Rating: WORTHY!

So, it's the most reviewing time of the year - for some more children's books for Christmas, that is! This hardcover picture book for kids was beautifully colored, well-illustrated, and amusingly-written in rhyme. I've never bought into the 'A Visit From Saint Nicholas' reindeer-naming scheme, but this book does. It's about a reindeer trying to catch-up to Santa's sleigh, and about people who for reasons I was unclear about, are trying to catch the reindeer. They don't succeed, but the reindeer does, as we know she would all along.

Some people might take issue with a female reindeer with antlers, but believe it or not, female reindeer - aka caribou - do grow antlers. They're the only species of deer where females do. Why? You'll have to ask them. So reindeer are a good emblem for equality of the sexes! At least in that regard. They shed their antlers, which are bone, not horn, after the males do, so if you see an antlered reindeer in the spring, it's a female, not a male. Very confusing, huh?

But I digress. I commend this book as an amusing and colorful read.

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook which I enjoyed immensely. It's a spoken version of a 1983 novel. I first came to this, as I imagine many people did, via the excellent Netflix series starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and it's like they took the TV show directly from the book with very few changes, often lifting dialog directly. Subsequently reading the book - or rather listening to it read beautifully by Amy Landon - was never boring though, because it was so well-written and it has its own vibe. It's also really is amusing at times.

If I have only one criticism, it's that there's rather too much chess in it for my taste. I can play chess, but I'm not a chess player per se, so I wasn't remotely able to follow the games described in the novel. The TV show had the benefit of showing the players moving pieces on boards, but it never focused on the board for long, so it wasn't possible to really follow the moves or the game there either. Maybe a seasoned chess player could, but I couldn't. In the novel it was considerably less clear, and so I felt the chess was somewhat overdone, but it wasn't deathly to listen to, so it wasn't bad. Apart from that, I really enjoyed the novel.

The story is a fictional one, of a character named Beth (Elizabeth) Harmon, who is abandoned by her father and later loses her mother and ends up in an orphanage where she discovers an interest in chess through encounters with the janitor. She discovers she has an innate skill at the game. Beth is unexpectedly adopted by the Wheatley family and is again abandoned by the father figure, but develops a close relationship with her new mother, who has no interest in chess, but who encourages Beth to play in tournaments once she realizes that money is to be made. Mrs Wheatley isn't mercenary though, and she and Beth develop a sweet and very functional working relationship when it comes to chess play. It was a joy to watch - and then listen to - how their relationship grew and how they navigated sometimes thorny days.

Beth has set-backs, but grows and learns, and excels at chess, rising through the ranks of players to become a US champion - and then has to face the Russians, whom she fears - one in particular. I loved this novel and I wonder, sometimes, if that's because in many ways if mirrors my own novel, Seasoning which is not about chess but about soccer. Anyway, I commend The Queen's Gambit as highly entertaining, beautifully-written, and very readable - or listenable. Or watchable!

Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders

Rating: WARTY!

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

This was a YA novel in ebook format. Unfortunately it's the start of a trilogy. I'm not a series fan because the first volume is necessarily a prologue and I'm not a fan of prologues especially if they have a cliffhanger ending. Worse even than this, is that this novel was also a first person voice one. Again, not a fan at all. First person is the weakest voice to me. It's the most unrealistic and the most selfish - "Hey lookit me! Listen to me. I can remember whole.

This novel started out pretty well and the first person wasn't nauseating. Some authors can carry it off, and evidently this one can do it, so it started really well and drew me in. I htought maybe this woudl be one of the rare exceptions that engaged me, but once the aliens started showing up, I began to feel like I was reading a children's book rather than a YA novel. It seemed to be pitched a little low when it came to reading level.

It's about this young girl, Tina, who believes - because of what her mother has told her - that she's an alien baby disguised with human DNA - a reincarnation of an earlier alien who died saving her crew. At some point, Tina is going to be picked up by these aliens to save the day she believes, but at that same time, her life will be endangered by the enemies of those aliens.

In that regard it's a bit like Harry Potter! "Yer an alien, Harry!" LOL! So we have a special child, hidden with a parent who is not their own (or in this case only partly their own). It makes for an attractive premise if it's done well, and this one initially was. If what her mom told her is true, it should make for a weird and interesting story, but if her mother has fed her some fiction, it's a cruel thing to do. This intrigued me.

I really enjoyed the opening chapters with Tina and her best friend Rachael hanging with each other. They truly came across as being lifelong friends. They had each other's back and they were very close. As is my wont in too many YA novels, I actually began liking the sidekick more than I liked the main character. I don't know why this is, but it happens a lot! That slipped a little about 20% in, unfortunately! Before that, though, was the issue of Rachael being bullied.

I don't doubt there still is bullying in schools, but the way this author had it was that the bullying was rife, open, and completely unchecked. I found it to be a bit too much of a stretch to be expected to believe that not a single person in the entire school - not any other student, nor any teacher or auxiliary staff member even noticed it, let alone was intent upon doing anything about it. It was, as it is in most of these stories where bullying is involved, overdone. Bullying is a serious problem and it needs to be stamped out, but it cheapens the whole problem if it's made into a caricature like it is here.

I am not a fan of info dumps, flashbacks, or intensive backstory and this novel began with little to none. While on the one hand I appreciated that, for me I could have used a little more than the author offered, because in starting to read this, I had questions that were not being answered. I had to wonder how this supposedly semi-alien child was even conceived given the differences in DNA between us and the aliens.

Chimpanzees are as close to humans as DNA gets without actually being human, and it's not possible (nor remotely desirable!) to hybridize a chimpanzee with a human, so how would it work with totally alien DNA? Maybe the aliens have seriously advanced technology, so I let that slide, but that itself raised other questions down the line, and it wasn't the only issue.

The thing is that Tina has been raised from infancy apparently without any doctor at any time discovering that she was a hybrid! I mean she must have had medical exams and the required vaccinations, right? But her partly alien body didn't react? No doctor noticed anything out of the ordinary? And how did mom explain this baby suddenly arriving in her life? I assume, since it has some of her DNA, that the child would identify as hers if tested, but how did she explain its magical appearance after having shown no signs of pregnancy? And if this deceased captain was so very valuable, why not make a score of clones? Why just one?

So while I was certainly interested in the story because it was different, I confess I was a bit skeptical about it as I started in on it. Again I decided to let this slide and go with it. The problem with doing this though, is that while some issues, even quite large ones, can be forgiven for the sake of a good story, the more of these issues that build up, the harder it is to turn a blind eye to them.

That began with the book description, which was replete with the usual hyperbole. I know that this isn't usually on the author unless they self-publish, but it can cause problems for readers. At one point it said, "think Star Wars meets Doctor Who," and while I can get with the Doctor Who (despite Chris Chibnall), I can't stand Star Wars at all, so that was a negative for me. I'm not a fan of books that compare themselves to others, because I think it's unfair to the author, and it can have unintended consequences. Because of the Star Wars reference, I almost did not pick this up, but the premise intrigued me, even though I could not see for the life of me where the Doctor Who part came into it. Still can't!

For me, the base problem with this whole premise was that of reincarnating a "legendary commander." It made no sense that these aliens with advanced technology, and evidently under threat, would choose to wait a whole generation for a hybrid commander to grow from infancy and save them! Did they have no other commanders? Did the legendary commander have no deputies or sub-commanders who knew their tactics? Was the war put on hold until the commander could resume command? Worse than that, there's no logic in believing that even this person, the hybrid with the dead commander's DNA, would be anything remotely like the commander was - or anywhere near as canny, skilled, or gifted.

I mean, did the Beatles' children go on to become a world famous band? No! Did Einstein's children go on to become renowned theoretical physicists? No! Did Dwight Eisenhower's surviving son go on to become a legendary general? No! He did become a general, and probably a fine one, but no one's heard of him. Did Ted Bundy's daughter go on to become a serial killer? Hell no!

If the DNA of those children - 'pure', as it were - didn't lead them to emulate their parents, why would anyone think a hybrid child would do so? You are not your DNA in the sense of it dictating who or what you become. That's on you. And there's no way a person's memories can be transferred to another by hybridizing DNA. DNA isn't memory, so this premise was weak and frankly insulting. For me, this novel didn't make a good case for why this would work, or why anyone even thought it would. Still I was willing to let even that slide.

The first problem was with the aliens - and I mean apart from the clichés. The author seems to have decided to make them as diverse and wacky as possible with no regard to whether or not they're realistic. One of them has one eye, but the eye wraps around its head. I can't for the life of me see how an eye like that could have evolved or even work. The bad guys are of course cliché ugly, and have heads that look like skulls. It's a bit too much, so after having enjoyed the book initially, I began seriously struggling with it when the aliens arrived and the reading level seemed to dip precipitously.

The writing was a bit off at this point too. And I don't mean the use of 'itch' where 'scratch was meant. That was on Tina and people do talk like that, so no problem there. No I mean examples like, where after arriving aboard the mother-ship, Tina expresses a desire to be by herself for a while, but immediately they're taking her to an exam room (where the one-eyed alien awaits) and all thoughts of being alone are lost, and not even mentioned. It would have been nice to have Tina resent her 'me time' being purloined, or have the guy apologize for robbing her of it, but it was dropped like it had never arisen. Another oddity was that the alien spacecraft was called 'HMSS Indomitable' which is frankly ridiculous. What's with the 'HMSS' and why would aliens use a naming convention for their spacecraft that mirrors a usage on Earth for ocean-going vessels?

A really serious problem with the aliens is that they're not really alien. They seem like Americans who just look different from regular humans. It's quite glaring. They speak English and they use American colloquialisms. Now you could argue that they have some sort of universal translator, but the author doesn't specify that, or even have Tina question how they speak English, which makes her look a bit dumb, I'm sorry to report.

No, the biggest damning factor was that the patches on their uniforms have English phrases on them. How that works I do not know. At one point I read "Rachael looks at the winged-snake emblem on their left shoulder, which reads THE ROYAL FLEET on top, and WE GOT YOUR BACK on the bottom." Maybe they have a universal translator that translates speech from alien to English, but does it also translate words on shoulder patches? Does it also render colloquialisms? It was too much. Maybe this was the Doctor Who part?! I just got the feeling that the author hadn't really thought through the aliens, which seemed a bit hypocritical given the attention that was paid to appropriate interactions elsewhere.

Yes, gender-neutral pronoun, I'm looking at you! The fact is that using such pronouns has been shown to reduce mental bias favoring men. It also increases positive attitudes towards women and to the LGBTQIA community, so it's a good thing, but it stood out glaringly here, and made the aliens seem even more American. Every alien that Tina meets introduces themselves and gives their favored pronoun, but no explanation is given as to why aliens - I mean literal aliens from other planets - would have any conventions like the Americans do, let alone this particular one - which they all shared and which is relatively new here on Earth.

For example, the alien would say, "My name is Yatto the Monntha, and my pronoun is they." I respect that the author wants diversity and inclusiveness in this novel. That's all well and good, but what it feels like when it's done here is that instead of respecting it, it's being parodied. Every character introduces themselves like this (Tina doesn't respond in kind - at least not initially), and it quickly became an annoyance because this is not an alien thing, it's largely an American thing (at least so far).

Other people in other nations use it of course, but it's not the norm world-wide. Whether it should be or not is another issue, but that's not the point here. The point is that beneficial or not, not even everyone on Earth is as committed to this as many people in the US are, let alone alien races from distant planets, so it constantly reminded me that I was reading fiction written by an American author, rather than allowing me to immerse myself in this alien world. I couldn't imagine reading a trilogy of this kind of writing. I really couldn't.

I wish the author all the best in future endeavors, because there is some solid stuff here, but I can't get onboard with this particular one. I finally gave up reading at 20% because of something dumb that Rachael did, believe it or not. After Tina had been wringing her hands over Rachel leaving the craft, even though Tina knew it was best and didn't want to see her friend injured or killed, Rachael finally got to stay on the craft (as we all knew she would), but then she comes up with the idea that the aliens should recruit children from Earth to replace the original crew members who have been killed in the line of duty. Children! Because there are child geniuses. And Tina barely shrugs at this.

Believe it or not, there are adult geniuses on Earth: brilliant chemists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers and so on. There are also elite adult trained soldiers. Yet their idea is not to seek help from those mature and experienced people, but to recruit children and put their lives at risk. When we hear of child soldiers in the world, particularly in Africa, in the CAR or the DRC, we're up in arms about it, but here Tina is thinking this is a regrettable but brilliant idea of Rachael's? No. Just no!

I know this is a juvenile book and there are lots of such novels where children are put in harm's way for the sake of a good adventure, but the best written ones of those have some sort of rationale as to why it's the kids and not the adults. That didn't happen here - at least not to the point where I gave up reading. It was children all the way and no adult recruits were even considered, nor were any parental and guardian concerns as their children were contemplated being recruited! It was treated like these children were free for the plucking, more akin to: Yeah, we got brilliant kids, let's press-gang 'em!

I know this is 'only fiction' but I can't get with that kind of thoughtless writing. For all the political correctness shown elsewhere in the novel this seemed like a huge backward step, and I can't commend it as a worthy read. There were too many holes and too many things a reader has to let slide. It could have been a lot better and I was truly sorry it wasn't.

Wellybobbers Visit Tikka Tonga Lake by A Swan, Sarah-Leigh Wills

Rating: WARTY!

Written by Swan, and illustrated by Wills, this picture book aimed at young children was a serious disappointment. I got the impression that it had been designed as a print book and then tossed into the ebook world as an afterthought, and it didn't work. I had thought it might be amusing, being already familiar with what wellybobs are (for the uninitiated, it's a cute Brit name for wellington boots, aka galoshes).

I looked at this using Net Galley's PDF, and that was messed up. It looked like picture ebooks usually look like when viewed in a Kindle. The Amazon process is renowned in my experience for shredding, spindling, and julienning picture books - or anything that isn't plain vanilla text for that matter - and sure enough it turned this book into kindling as expected. How this became so bad, and yet no one seems to have noticed, is a mystery to me, but based on the two examples I saw, in two different formats, this book is a disaster. Maybe the print version looks sweet, but I don't get to see that.

The story is supposed to be about elves having an adventure helping a squirrel find a nut, but in the PDF version, I had to page through several blank pages to find any with an illustration, and when I got there, there was no text. None at all. Not anywhere after the introductory page. The images were also split between screens, and viewing them in landscape mode did nothing to improve upon this.

The Kindle version did have text, but the pictures were split between screens and the text did not match the picture it appeared next to. I paged through to about half-way and seeing no sign of improvement, I gave up on it. Yes, the text rhymes, but that's not all it takes to make an engaging story. The illustrations were okay, but nothing spectacular enough to make up for the poor presentation, so overall I was not at all impressed, and I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Super Humans by TM Franklin

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another firstie in a series, which I doubt I'll be reading since I'm not a series fan and this novel turned me off not because of the 'super powers' (read: psychic powers - there's no Captain Marvel or Superman here!), but because there was far too much YA girl with stars in her eyes for my taste. Had that been excluded, this would have been a better book, but when you have a nineteen or twenty year old behaving like a thirteen year old in front of a guy, I'm yelling, "Check please, I need to leave!"

It's not that I'm claiming there are no females (or males for that matter) who behave or react like this, but does it have to be de rigeur in most every YA novel? It's pathetic, and the worst part about it is that it robs your main charcter of her agency.

I completely lost faith in Chloe's ability to "man" up when the big danger arrives because she'd proven herself unyieldingly, perennially, and totally inept, immature, juvenile, weak and pathetic in every scene, and in most of those scenes, she's not concerned about her "super power" - which is just a form of clairvoyance, not what you'd normally consider a super power. Her obsession with Ethan seriously derails the story and robs it of it;s power.

This was supposed to be a story of two young women joining forces to defeat an evil, and that prospect is what really lured me in, but one of the womn doesn't even show up until midway through the novel - right at the point where I lost patince with it, tiring of this assinine and badly-written 'romance" between Chloe and Ethan.

What the story should have been about is Chloe learning to control her power with Etha thrown-in if you must, but once he showed up, the story became completely derailed and was no longer a slightly problematic but nonetheless interesting story. Instead it was almost entirely about the dumbass romance. This is really a Harlequin romance novel, not a sci-fi or super powers book.

The book is also a cheat because it does not have an ending. Being part of a series, it can only ever be a prologue and you have to buy more books to actually get a story. I don't do prologues, especially not rip-off ones like this one is, so I've been given to understand. The grand finale - the battle agaisnt the evil doesn't evne happen here. There have to be more books before you get to the end. To me this is a form of bait and switch. It's inexcusable and mercenary. It's really blackmail. "Hey, you took my book for free! In return I've kidnapped your finale. I won't release it until you buy more books!" I won't do that to my readers and I don't have much time for authors who do, which is why I get behind very very few series and almost no trilogies - especially YA trilogies.

This is also a story where for no rational reason, Chloe's powers start appearing more routinely the further we get into the novel. They grow, and the owner has to try and control them, but this came without any validity, and far too late. We're told that Chloe has had these powers all her life and they're just now sprouting big time and she's just now learning to handle them? It made no sense. It's liek those dumb-ass poltergeist stories where the evil spirit very kindly starts out treating vistors gently, playing with them, making them think they're imagining things, and slowly ramping up the ante until the finale. Why? Why would a demon or a poltergeist do this? Authors rarely offer any rationale for writing like this, and it makes no sense, which is one major reason why I have little time for horror stories.

The final problem here was that the writing itself writing wasn't always great. I read one review where the reviewer praised the quality of the writing and copy-editing, but I don't think he read very carefully. Either that or he knows not of what he speaks, because I found problems. I read at one point: "A font of true knowledge." Um, that should be 'fount'. I guess one could have a font, but it really doesn't work.

In another part, I read, "The more we listen to our intuition, the stronger it becomes. Trust in your power, act on it, and it will grow stronger" I doubt that the hard-working contributors to Wikipedia would appreciate that, which is claimed as a quote but is apparently an outright lie. The author claims it's taken from wikipedia (or more accurately has a character make that claim), but not only does it not sound like something the overseers there would allow an entry to get away with, it doesn't appear anywhere on the Wilkipedia entry for Intuition. I checked.

At another point I was surprised to learn from this author that English is not a language! I read:

Classes dragged interminably on Friday. Chloe struggled to pay attention during the review lecture in her English class, determined to do well on her test the following week. Spanish was easy, at least. Languages had always come easy for her.

All languages save for her native one apparently! Or maybe you think that her English class isn't really, at a fundamental level, teaching her to speak, understand, and appreciate good English?

I read later, "She'd yet to declare a major and her advisor was losing patience with her" Seriously? Because that always happens. Advisors hound and terrorize students. Yeah! A bit further on, I read in reference to Ethan, "Every time she looked at him now, flashes of the vision came to mind. It wasn't a good thing. Her heart pounded. Her palms sweated." What, is Chloe thirteen?

I'm sorry but the less-than-readable writing style, the goofs, and the fact that this isn't a complete story, all turned me off something I had initially looked forward to reading. I can't commend this. Instead, I condemn the poor writing and poor charcterizations as well as the bait and switch.

Prototype by Jason D Morrow

Rating: WARTY!

The premise for this story was a bit silly. It starts from the old trope that nuclear war has destroyed much of the world and the human population, and a century later nothing has apparently changed. We’re told that 'humanity' has been reduced to one surviving city which struck me as highly unlikely. No doubt that city is in North America, just north of Mexico and just south of Canada, since it always is in these stories despite the USA being a prime target in the event of nuclear war.

These people, the "Mainlanders" have food and water, and they have a wall that keeps out the "Outlanders" who for some reason want to keep attacking this city instead of getting on with their own lives on the rest of the planet! Why? Who knows. My question here is, if the mainlanders are 'humanity' what, exactly are the Outlanders? Inhumanity?!

But these attacks are why the Mainlanders build a prototype fighting robot which for reasons unexplained, they give emotions. Why? Who knows? I got the immediate impression that this author had not really thought this through. Instead he had cherry-picked ideas from sci-fi movies and TV shows that he then tossed together into a kind of kedgeree of a novel which really made no sense.

Why was the robot left in the desert a mile or more from its target, instead of at the point where it was of most use? If the people who built it could leave it there and leave supplies for it elsewhere close by the obtjective of the mission, why couldn't they themselves complete the mission? Was this merely a test?

If it was, then who were the real people the robot was killing? A knee-jerk response to this would be to ask, 'why not read on and find out'? but when the writing is this transparently bad, I have no wish to read on, and I sure as hell don't want to read a series that's written like this. The first volume is inevitably a prologue and I don't do prologues.

Besides, there were much more serious questions. Why did the robot, supposedly programmed as a military bot, not know better how to fight the 'outlander' soldiers who were chasing it? Why, when it pulled up information from memory, did it have to present the information to itself in front of its eyes - as a heads-up display instead of processing it internally? I read, "His vision allowed for information to display semi-transparent in front of him." Clearly the author was getting his ideas from movies, and bless him, he never imagined for a minute that a robot might function differently form a human.

The robot was suppsoed ot be a prototype fighter to save human lives and defend their life form the Outlanders (who no doubt all wore kilts! LOL! Seriously, outlanders and mainlanders? What dumb names. Besides, if the outlanders were wont to attack the city walls, why not just automate machine-guns to shoot them down as they attacked? Why the need for robots at all?

This novel was poorly written, unimaginative, and made no sense, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.