Genuine Fraud by E Lockhart

Rating: WARTY!

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

I was thrilled to get a chance to read this because I've been a fan of this author (Emily Jenkins writing as E Lockhart) ever since I read The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks which I really loved. That bought her a lot of good grace from me, but my results with her after that haven't been wholly positive. I did not like The Boyfriend List, and I detested We were Liars so much that I was moved to write a parody song about it as part of my review. It was titled "Purple Prose" and was based on the Prince song, Purple Rain! On the other hand, I really liked Dramarama so she was batting a .500 going into this.

This novel started out great and had me really hooked on this intriguing young woman who was strong, wealthy, and evidently hiding out from someone. When she fears she's been discovered, she acts decisively and leaves town, ruthlessly dealing with a guy from the hotel who is trying to extort money from her. The problem is that then it went into what appeared to be terminal flashback mode which frankly pissed me off. I detest flashbacks because they bring the story to a screeching halt while we get an info-dump. Not a good writing plan.

All I was getting was this boring history, which seemed irrelevant to the story I'd been reading - like it was a completely different novel. It was intended to explicate the beginning of the novel, but all it did was spoil it, and it was really confusing to me until I read some other reviews of the story and then it became clear that the tale was being told backwards! Sorry, but no.

Not only was it backwards, it was tediously mundane, and it felt like the Chinese water torture: this story was determined to punish me and it was going to take a mind-numbingly long time to do it. If the flashback material had been as gripping a the first chapter, that would have at least been something but the canvas this author was painting here wasn't a picture - it was merely a coat of gesso aimed at priming the surface, and I was not prepared to watch this pallid coat of paint dry.

Worse, I thought I knew already what was going on. I'm usually hopeless at figuring that out in a mystery novel, but in this case it seemed so obvious even to me. The main character is this girl named Jule, and she had a friend named Imogen who appeared to have killed herself, but no body was found which as you know means that the person ain't dead - or someone switched places with the victim. I left it to other readers to figure out which case this was. As for me, I couldn't have cared less by this point, which was about 60% in. The story was very short, but I have better things to do with my time than put myself through this kind of writing.

From some of those reviews I read, I also discovered that this was essentially the same story as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. I haven't read that novel, so i can;t comment, and it's not relevant to me because I was judging this on its own merits - or in this case lack of same, but other reviewers seemed pretty adamant that if you've read Highsmith's novel, you really don't need to read this one.

What's relevant to me is whether a story moves me and keeps me interested, and this one failed. Like I said, I loved the opening chapter but after that, as soon as we began exploring the past, I lost interest because there was nothing in it to interest me that could remotely compare with the quality of the writing in that first chapter.

If the past had been at all revelatory or exciting, it might have been different, but it really was not. It was so predictable that it was tedious to read. There were no surprises. Worse, I went from liking the main character and admiring her smarts and pluck to detesting her as a complete idiot. I wish the author all the best, but I cannot recommend this one.

Boys Keep Swinging: A Memoir by Jake Shears

Rating: WARTY!

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

Jake Shears, aka Jason Sellards, is a founding member of Scissor Sisters and while I'm not a huge fan of the band, I do like some of their music, in particular, I Can't Decide (the third track on their second album, Ta-Dah), which I think is brilliant, and deliciously bitchy. I'm rather interested in how people go from an everyday life to a stage performer in a band, so I was initially interested to read this, but I found it to be a real disappointment. I read it to fifty percent, and then skimmed to about 70% and gave up on it after that.

The band part of this memoir doesn't appear until the halfway mark and it's very thin. That part of the story doesn't truly get underway until about 70% and even then it's not as interesting as I'd hoped. The first half is taken up with the author's childhood and his college days. This part was slightly depressing. He went through a lot and had a lot to put up with, but that said, there really was nothing here that scores of other men and women haven't had to face, particularly if they're in the LGBTQIA community, so this didn't bring anything new to the table.

What bothered me about this, apart from the author never really seeming to want for money!) was that he appeared to have learned nothing from these events, or if he did, he sure wasn't interested in sharing his insights and thoughts on the topic. This was one problem with the book - it read less like a diary even, than it did a daily planner, with a litany of events and people trotted out, yet none of it had any depth, resonance, introspection or observation.

I never felt like I really got to know the author. We were kept largely at arm's length (as indeed was his "best friend" Mary, it would seem), and learned of him only through what he obsessed on or what seemed important as measured by how much space and repetition he gave to it. Judged by that latter criterion, casual sex and partying are his greatest loves. This second-hand perspective delivered an impression of shallowness and inconstancy, as though we were reading about the natural history of a gadfly rather than a person's life. As the New York City portion of the story ever unfurled, things only deteriorated. It felt like the story became even more shallow.

He was there to pursue a degree, but even when he got it, he did nothing with it. Admittedly the job market wasn't great, but what was the point fo the college education? From what we're told here, he was far more interested in dressing up, dancing, partying, and picking up guys than ever he was in a career.

His musical forays happened pretty much by accident and in a very desultory way to begin with, like he couldn't be bothered unless it fell into his lap, as it actually did in effect - at least that's the impression he left. I know the author has no control over the blurb their book gets, but this blurb mentions "...a confusing and confining time in high school as his classmates bullied him and teachers showed little sympathy." That kind of thing is entirely inappropriate and all-too-common, but what the blurb doesn't mention is what the author tells us, about how he liked to dress out even though he hadn't yet come out. This must have attracted entirely the wrong kind of attention.

And if you think a person ought to be able to dress how they wish, then I completely agree with you, but we don't live in a perfect world. In the world we do inhabit, one populated with ignorant jackasses and moronic dicks, this freedom brings a price and that price is exactly what the author suffered: bullying and little sympathy. A bit more attention to the wisdom of certain modes of dress and certain behaviors might have saved him a lot of this hassle. But the real problem here is that he doesn't talk about this in any detail, or offer any thoughts or insights here any more than he does on any other such topic. Maybe how he behaved and dressed would have made no difference, but we'll never know because it's one more important discussion we don't get from the author; one more cogent observation we're denied.

The casual sex was rife and disturbing. At first we're told it was oral only, which isn't exactly safe sex, but then we're not told anything about it other than it happens - frequently, and with a variety of one night stands and some dating in between. There is nary a mention of safe sex even though AIDS is mentioned. Even here though, the topic is dealt with so cursorily that it was like the ongoing AIDs problem never really happened or if it did, it impinged very little on his life or on the life of anyone he knew. I didn't expect the author to keep harping on it (or on any other topics for that matter), but I did expect to feel something of the impact of it and how it was dealt with, and how he felt about it all, but again we;re denied that.

There's really no mention of disease concerns or risks from casual sex, and there ought to have been, even if the author never had any such problems himself. As it is, it looks like not only the author, but no one he knew ever had any issues. Maybe that was the case, but it's hard to believe. As it is, the author plays right into homophobic stereotypes of the gay community and that's never a good course to follow, especially from the pen of someone who liked to plow his own furrow, so to speak.

One issue with memoirs for me is: how can someone recall events and conversations with such clarity from years before? I know some people can, and I know some people conflate several events into one for the sake of brevity and moving the story along, and this is fine, but nowhere are we told whether these particular recollections are amalgamations, or if they happened word for word (or close enough), or if they're simply impressions with some dramatic license taken. It would have been nice had a word been said about that. There are some events which feel like they would leave an indelible impression such that recall, even if a bit vague, would be authentic, but most of what we're told here wasn't of that nature, so I have to wonder how reliable some of this is, and I guess I found out. More on this later.

Starting with New York, the name-dropping became so rife in this book that the din from it was a distraction from the actual story, and it seems to serve little purpose except for the author to say, "Hey, look at all these people I know!" It felt so pretentious, and there were so many repeated mentions of going to parties and spending the night with guys he just met that the whole thing quickly began to feel sickeningly self-indulgent, shallow, thoughtless, tedious, and even dangerous.

This shallowness really came to the fore when the events of 9/11 were related. He was in New York City when the planes hit the towers, but none of that seemed to make any impact on him, because all we got was a brief paragraph sandwiched in between a night he spent with three other guys and a complaint that because of the fall of the towers, it was hard to party in the city and parties had to move out to the suburbs! The author didn't specifically say that himself; someone else did, but his lack of any sort of commentary on that attitude appalled me.

The shallowness he displayed over this entire thing was sickening. He was living within a few blocks of the event and saw part of it happen from the roof of his apartment block, and this one short paragraph and a couple of mentions later was it. I didn't expect him to agonize over it and put ashes in his hair and rend his clothes or anything like that, but his mention of it was so fleeting and cursory that it seemed like it was just another party in a long line of parties he attended - or perhaps more accurately another hangover after one such party. It's almost like he said, "Oh well, that's that, let's get dressed for the next fancy dress party!" This really turned me off the author. Another such incident was the New York blackout. That turned out to be just another opportunity to party, pick up a guy he didn't even really like for a one-night-stand, and that was it. Even then we got more about that than we did about 9/11!

I was ready to quit reading this memoir at the halfway point, but I still had read nothing about the band as such, so I pressed on. It was right around this point that it looked like the forming of the band was about to get going, but even then the story about it was awfully thin and sketchy, lacking any depth or insights, and it was still riven with never-ending tales of casual sex and partying. The monotony of it all made me uncomfortably numb, and I started skipping everything that didn't touch directly on the band from then onward. It was this that I was interested in, and I honestly felt cheated out of it by this point.

In the end I simply gave up on it. I honestly did not care about this shallow life I was seeing stretch-out meaninglessly across screen after screen. I cared about the music and the band and the dynamic and the energy, and we got so little of that, and almost nothing about the other band members. In the end it was a Scissor Sister, in the singular, and it was disappointing because it seemed to suggest that the very thing he had been heading towards since page one meant so little to the author that he could barely bring himself to write about it.

It was around this time that I read, "I hadn't had a boyfriend since Dominick" and this was just a screen or two after he'd told us he was dating a guy named Mark. Was Mark a girlfriend then, or is dating someone not the same as having a boyfriend?! What this confirmed for me was how unreliable this book was: something I touched on earlier in this review. One of the many names dropped in the book was Amanda Lepore, and I read her memoir some time ago and found it to be just as shallow as this one was. I'm now really soured on celebrity memoirs! Maybe if Ana Matronic wrote one I might be tempted to read it, but other than that, I'm done with this kind of thing. I wish the Scissor Sisters all the best in their career, but I cannot in good faith recommend a book like this.

War Mother by Fred Van Lente

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This volume collects War Mother Vols 1-4 and 4001 AD: War Mother Vol 1. I felt the art was pretty decent except in the occasional back-busting pose the main character was put into for no other reason than to show off her curves. So once again we're back in an adolescent world of male-oriented comics created for males by males, and wherein women are depicted as unnaturally anorexic and preternaturally pneumatic. This story is supposedly set two thousand years into the future, but both mindset and technology are surprisingly unchanged from our present. Evolution, contrarily, seems to have sped-up beyond the bounds of what's reasonable into outrageously fantastical humanoids, all of which, as is typical in this kind of story, seem hostile.

Ana, the titular War Mother, with the emphasis on tit, is for reasons unexplained here, the Scavenger-in-Chief. She lives in a tribal "village" called the Grove, where they can pretty much provide everything for themselves except for technology which for some reason thay cannot master. This flies in the face of the comic's blurb which defines this village as the "last known repository of scientific knowledge." I saw no science here, just vague hints at growing food, which, in a place as lush as this one appeared to be, didn't seem to require much knowledge other than planting seeds and harvesting fruit! It's not like these guys fed millions! It was only a village after all.

War Mother goes on scavenger hunts for things they can use, repurpose, adapt, and trade. Why this technology is so needed goes largely unexplained. That was one big problem with this story: without any backstory, none of this made much sense. During these excursions, Ana often runs into hostiles which she has to despatch using her talking rifle. I never did get why the rifle talks. it was too gimicky for me - like one of those annoying little talking pets in children's cartoons. And why was the talking rifle male? Why even an electronic rifle in a world where electronics were evidently as much at a premium as they were prone to failing? Wouldn't an AK-47 be a better tool in a humid jungle?

The biggest problem though, was once again the main charcter who was far less like a real woman than like a male fantasy - the man-with-tits syndrome which isn't remotely appealing to me. Worse, the author seems to be conflating bad-ass with psychotic. War Mother's only tactic is to dispatch anyone she doesn't like including the leader of her village community who she kills remorselessly and without even much of a preamble.

I didn't really understand why this happened. Rather than try to work with him to resolve their dispute, she simply takes the male anger route and shoots him, and that was the end of that dispute. In doing this, she very effectively destroys the community, so how is she in any way heroic? How is she any better than the villains she takes down? I didn't see any difference. Certainly there was nothing to root for or admire in her.

I didn't see anything edifying or fulfilling here, and nothing truly enjoyable. If it had not been so short, I would have DNF'd it. I was hoping for a lot more than I expected, but I got a lot less than I feared. i cannot recommend this.

Your Creative Career by Anna Sabino

Rating: WARTY!

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

I am very skeptical of self-help books which is why I do not read them. I have read one or two in the past, and this one seemed like it might offer something different, but in the end what it offered was no different form a hundred other such books: at best it was simple common sense and at worst, misleading distractions. You cannot be creative if you're spending your time reading books like this when you should be creating things yourself instead of frittering time away on things others have created.

There's an apocryphal story about a writer who was giving a lecture, and many would be writers were present. The story may have happened or it may not. The author in question may have been Sinclair Lewis or they may not. The lecturer may have been drunk or not, but the story I heard is that he came out onto the stage and the first thing he asked was for a show of hands from anyone present who wanted to be a writer. Everyone raised their hand of course. The guy responded with, "Then why the hell aren't you writing?" And he wandered off the stage.

Like I said, this may be a true event or it may not, but there is a truth here, and it's in the message: you can't be writing that best-seller if you're off attending lectures on how to write best sellers, or if you're reading self-help books all the time when you could be working on your own project. For example, reading novels of the kind you might be interested in writing will be of much more help, but if all you're doing is reading and not writing your own, then you're wasting your valuable time.

The common theme of books of this nature is that the author is typically someone you've never heard of or read about. You don't get best-selling authors like David Baldacci, and John Grisham, or Dan Brown writing books about how to write best sellers, and the reason why they don't is because while they may well be able to write best sellers, they don't know how to teach others to write them. Plus they're too busy turning their ideas into finished novels!

It's not a magical power that can be passed on. You can take courses to learn how to write well, but you cannot be taught how to write a best-seller. You can only write one or fail to write one, and you can't even fail if you never write one. The same with musicians and artists, actors and movie-makers, and technology innovators and engineers. They know how to do it, but they cannot pass on their talent, or industry, or inspiration to others and have it magically work the same way for them. It doesn't work that way, sorry to say!

The only way to find out if you have it, is to do it! I know it's a big-business purveying self-help books, but you know what? I've never read a single one which has helped me, and more damningly, I've never read of any of these people who've had big success stories praising a self-help book for their success! They don't read these books because they're too busy pursuing their dream! What they do consistently emphasize is how hard they worked to achieve their aim and how diligently they kept chasing it.

Granted, this book does urge that, but it really doesn't offer a lot in the way of helping other than, as I mentioned, simply passing-on common sense. The problem is that if you're so lacking in common sense that you need to get tips on it from a book, then you're already in serious trouble. In the end, the only help you can count on is your own industry. It may be a cliché, but it's inspiration and perspiration that will get you there if it's going to happen for you, and there are no guarantees.

We always hear about the success stories: the ones where people have worked for their dream and got it, but we so rarely hear about those who worked just as hard pursing their dream, but who failed for whatever reason. If this books motivates people to motivate themselves, then that's a good thing, but I think it's wise to ask who really benefits most from books like these? Is it the people who write them or the people who read them?

One piece of advice offered for writers was: "Keeping score of the amount of words written or the time you spend writing will create an internal contest with yourself." This may work for some, but not for all. It doesn't work for me because it impedes my work and makes it seem like work. I don't want that! I'd rather just enjoy writing than become bogged down in, or worse, become disheartened or disillusioned by a scoring system. Scoring is boring! Worse, demanding 'x' amount of words or pages per day is not only soul-destroying, it's actually counter-productive to the very creativity this author is supposedly promoting!

There are some odd observations in the book. The first of these I noticed was when I read, "...usually we have to wait for months if not years before seeing our work published" but this completely overlooks this era of self-publishing through outlets such as Barnes and Noble's Nook press, Kobo, Lulu, Google Play, iBooks and others which has been going on for years. How the author could overlook such a roaring industry is a mystery and speaks of poor preparation.

I read in this book a lot of observations by and on people I've never heard of, including assorted quotes from these people. I am not one to take hints and tips from people I have no reason to trust when it comes to advice, especially when it's in the form of bon mots and pithy phrases which are more designed to show-off their originator than to offer concrete help. One of these asides was: "Peter Shankman flies more than 250,000 miles a year and does most of his writing in transit." I've never heard of this author, but whoever he is, that travel rate is getting on for 700 miles per day, so he really has no choice but to write in transit! Duhh!

This was in a section devoted to choosing the location for your creativity. It seemed focused on whether your desk was cluttered or clear, but you know what? Who cares? If you're working as a writer, then your focus needs to be on your writing, most typically on a computer screen, not on whether your desk is cluttered or clear! This seemed to me to be adding a distraction rather than helping to remove it. Ignore your environment focus on your work. If your environment intrudes, then include it in your work! I'm all for getting out and doing and seeing new things and meeting new people. You never know where your next idea will come from, but in the end a writer is someone who writes, an artist someone who paints, and so on, and it really shouldn't matter where you are or what surrounds you! Get focused on your art because in the end, it's all that matters when it comes to creativity.

There were some really oddball references too. One which particularly struck me was: "Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who worked from cafes at the turn of the 20th century." I have to wonder why these two are mentioned in this context, but not Jo Rowling. I have no idea where those two antique authors wrote, but it's legendary that Rowling, impoverished, wrote in a café in Edinburgh because it was warmer than her apartment. She did not let a cluttered table or a noisy street get in her way. Did this author not know that much about an author who is more successful and arguably better-known these days than either of the two she mentioned?

That wasn't the only such item. I read, "The times when an artist worked in solitude on his creations," His creations? Seriously?! She continued: "revealing them for the first time during a launch, have passed. Now the audience wants to be co-creators, co-actively giving input throughout the process." This could not be more wrong or more misleading. Unless you really are looking to share your work - and the credit and rewards, this is appallingly bad advice. Yes, there are people who put materials out there and work collaboratively, but this isn't the norm. Perhaps it will be in some distant future, but we are not there yet and personally I doubt we ever will be. I can't see a bunch of stage actors welcoming advice and interruptions for the audience! Steve Jobs certainly did not want people telling him how to do what he did!

I also read: ""Experiencing the creative process live, while it’s happening, is now the norm." I'm sorry but this is bullshit. Maybe in the narrow, blinkered world in which this author operates it is, but seriously, I doubt even that. You don't find fashion designers posting their work online! They're more secretive than ever the Soviet Union was during the cold war!

Writers I know, are not given to doing this although some do this experimentally. For most, writing is a solitary profession and for good reason. You start posting your ideas online and someone is going to steal them and race you to publication, so they can accuse you of stealing their idea when you finally publish! Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), ideas for stories are not copyright, only the finished work.

I'm not a fan of Stephen King, but he is one of the few really successful authors who have actually written a book about writing books (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)! I never read that, but when he experimentally started publishing his novel The Plant online that same year, in installments downloaded on the honor system (you voluntarily paid a dollar per chapter downloaded), the story quickly folded. Sales fell-off and he lost interest in it. He never did ask for fan input!

There's a difference between seeking crowd-sourced funding for a project say, or in getting some feedback on some generalized ideas on the one hand, and on the other, in quite literally sharing your work before it's ever properly established as your own, and thereby risking losing ownership and a chance at copyright. I think talk like this is dangerously misleading and risky, and if misunderstood or misapplied, is going to lead only to loss and misery as your stock of creativity is frittered and dissipated without you getting any reward: not even so much as recognition for it.

It was at this point that I gave up reading this as a bad job The title is Your Creative Career, but it felt to me like there was precious little emphasis on the creative (a trilogy of chapters at the start), and far too much on avarice and maximizing profits. There's nothing wrong with making money and being financially rewarded for your creativity, but first you have to have that creative resource up and running. You have to be credited with it before you can look for credit from backers. You can't make money on vaporware, empty promises and unfulfilled dreams.

I cannot recommend this book, because for me it failed to accomplish what it promised in its title, replacing an offer of creativity advice with nothing more than simple common-sense observations that anyone worth their salt already knows, and worse: wrong-headed advice and flashy, but ultimately empty quotes and catch-phrases from obscure people who may have been successful in their sphere or not, but even if they were, this doesn't mean their advice is worth the paper it's printed on.

Mitosis by Brandon Sanderson

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a free (as opposed to fee!) short story published as a filler between this author's Steelheart, and book two in The Reckoners series, called Firefight. The story features David, aka Steelslayer, one of The Reckoners - the people who fight against the Epics, which are the super-non-heroes. The problem with gaining super-powers in this world is that once you use them, you go bad. No one knows why. The only way to use them and stay good is to gift them to others who can use them in your name.

In this story there is a brief introduction with David and another reckoner buying hotdogs, which is rather boring. I don't get this obsession with hotdogs, so it was meaningless to me. The author should have put it in a prolog so I would have known to ignore it! LOL! David and his friend are heading to the city gates where people are screened as they come into the city. The main reason is to catch people who simply want to start a life of crime in the clunkily-named Newcago, but also so The Reckoners can catch Epics and Epic sympathizers who might be trying to sneak in. Why the Epics wouldn't simply come over the walls goes unexplained.

Anyway, David is suspicious of this one guy who comes in, and he soon discovers this guy can split himself just like 'Multiple Man' in X-Men: The Last Stand, but like Michael Keaton's character in Multiplicity, the more he clones himself, the dumber he becomes. This made no sense. Why would the cloning affect only his brain? Why would it not make his body weaker too? Or his heart? Fortunately for this rating, this was addressed.

Once the guy has split into many clones, he starts yelling the same message from different parts of the city - that he will shoot some passer-by if David doesn't show up. We're told the clones have to rejoin in order for their independent memories of what they did to be re-united, but when David shoots the first of these, all the others immediately come running. How did they know?

It turned out that David's information on the Mitosis - the cloning guy - was partly misinformation and in the end it was due to that, that he was saved. Like I said, short story, but not bad! I consider it a worthy read - and it's free, so what do you have to lose?! I'm currently reading book 2. I'll report on it when I'm done.

Sadia by Colleen Nelson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

The story is about displaced and immigrant Middle-East young Muslim girls in Canada. Sadia Ahmadi is fifteen years old. She and her family left Syria when her father got a teaching post at a University in Winnipeg, which is the capital city of Manitoba, a Canadian province. Winnipeg sits some seventy miles north of the North Dakota-Minnesota state line. It's cold up there at this time of year! it's 5° Fahrenheit, or minus fifteen Celsius as I write this! The average low in January is minus twenty one! Even in August it doesn't breach eighty (25°C), and it's down to the fifties (12°C) at night. Call me a wuss, but that's way too cold for me! You have to be tough to live in Canada!

By moving when they did, Sadia's family missed the Syrian civil war. Sadia has some mixed feelings about the move and her new homeland, but she gets a real education as to how lucky she is when Amira Nasser, a refugee, ends up at Sadia's school having left everything behind in Syria to escape the not-so-civil war. Now she's in a strange land with different customs and language and she's expected to integrate and learn. Sadia is assigned by her school (Laura Secord High School) to help her get up to speed. Laura Secord is (or was) a real person - a Canadian hero of the 1812 war.

But the story isn't about Amira; neither is it about Sadia's best friend Nazreen Hussani who originally hailed from Egypt. Instead, these two are rather employed to represent the trope angel and the devil sitting on Sadia's shoulders. Amira is very much a traditional Muslim girl. Nazreen is a rebel who removes her hijab and conservative clothing as soon as she gets to school, replacing them only before she leaves to head home. Sadia has issues with this and while she tries to maintain their friendship, she also feels increasing tension, dissent, and distance between herself and Nazreen. She feels pulled between these two extremes, yet tries to find her own path.

The thing which seems to erode the rough edges, and bring all these girls together is basketball. It is Sadia's passion. She has the chance to be on a co-ed team which enters a small tournament. Everything seems to be going great until the finals, when one of the teams objects to Sadia wearing what is a suitable outfit for a strict Muslim girl to play a sport in public, but which the opposing team finds objectionable, and which we're told is contrary to the official rules of the game.

On a point of order, it really isn't. The problem is that there is a slow turn-around time for professional publishing houses - a lag between the author finishing a novel and it being published. I don't know when the author wrote this or how long it was between her signing-off on the finished copy and the publishing date (which is this month) but as it happens, the rules in basketball got changed early last year in Canada to allow religious headwear (with certain restrictions), so I chose to assume that events in this novel took place before that date! Full disclosure here: the publisher, Dundurn, is the largest Canadian-owned publisher, and I am on their auto approved list on Net Galley, for which I am grateful since I tend to like what they publish.

Just as importantly, a young girl named Amina Mohamed of the Dakota Collegiate in Winnipeg came up with a design for headwear that meets both Muslim restrictions and basketball regulations. In the novel, it's Nazreen who comes up with this idea. There's no acknowledgement to Amina, so I'm wondering if this book was locked-down before that item got into the news. Perhaps in future editions, the author can acknowledge Amina Mohamed's accomplishment.

The story itself, though, was well-told and moving. It did bring to the fore the issues Muslims have when trying to live in Western society and stay true to their faith: the restrictions, the difficulties, the prejudices and the outright racism in some cases. I'm not religious at all, so some of these issues struck me as trivial, but that's certainly not how they feel to people who are invested in faith, so I let that go, but what did bother me is that there are deeper issues which the author did not explore. The most outrageous of these is the appalling gender bias that seems to go hand-in-hand with far too many organized religions (and not a few disorganized ones as well, for that matter).

If the purpose of covering a woman's body is to prevent inciting passions, then it seems to me to be doomed from the off, because when a woman is completely covered, doesn't that in a way inflame an embarrassing number of the male half of the population with curiosity and desire to know what's under there? Of course you could argue that no matter how a woman dresses, but this is actually the other half of this problem: while all the pressure is placed upon women to tone down their dress (whether it's Muslim dress or even western dress as it happens), none is placed upon men to tone down their behavior and it was this which the Quran addressed first!

The whole idea of covering a woman up isn't only an insult to the woman, it's also an insult to the men in its implicit assertion that they're so lacking in self-control that women need to be hidden under blankets lest their very appearance cause the men to become serial rapists. That whole idea is absurdist and wrong-headed to me and says far more about the men who promote these ideas than ever it does about the women who have suffered and continue to suffer under this oppressive and cruel patriarchal hegemony.

The Quran is quite explicit in terms of modesty, but this requirement did not so much address clothing as partition between the genders, and it does not apply solely to women! It applies to men, too, yet in this story, we find no issues raised over the boys, only over the girls. I thought this ought to have been delved into a little. What;s good for the goose is worth taking a gander!

Why must girls wear a head covering (which technically is a khimar, 'hijab' having a more general meaning) and not the boys? I think there is some mileage to be had there, especially when telling a story of this nature. On a related, but slightly different topic, one of the things Nazreen did in her little rebellion against conformity was to wear (when she did wear them!) very colorful Khumur (the plural of khimar).

Personally, I have no problem with what women wear (or don't wear!), it's their choice, but I can't help wonder how making a Khimar more attractive meets the stated purpose of the garment in the first place, which as I understand it, is to promote a modest appearance. Isn't it less modest to make yourself stand out? Indeed, in western society, wearing a Khimar in the first place is rare enough that it makes a woman stand out more than if she went bare-headed, so this seems to me to be in conflict with the whole purpose of a head covering if it's to detract from attention! That's all I'm going to say on that topic, although I certainly reserve the right to go into it in some future novel of mine!

On a minor technical issue, and prefacing this by saying that I'm not a basketball fan and I certainly don't pretend to be an expert on rules: as far as I know in regular play, once a basket is sunk, the ball goes to the other team! There's no rebound to be had and you certainly can't try to score again. So when we read that Jillian scored a trhee-pointer and then "Allan grabbed the rebound to shoot again" I had to ask: what rebound? There's no rebound from a sunk basket! And even if there were, you can't just grab the ball and shoot again! The possession devolves to the defending team. I'm thinking that the author was conflating regular play here with taking a free throw during which - if the ball rebounds - a player can grab it and take a shot. But like I said, it's a minor issue and we all manage to let a few of those get by if we're honest!

So in conclusion, the novel felt maybe a little young for high school, but then the students were only on the cusp of the high school experience, so perhaps I'm being too judgmental there. Or maybe just mental! I felt there were some issues with this as I've mentioned, more in the omission than the commission, but overall, the novel was a worthy read and I recommend it, especially for the intended age range.

The 53rd Card by Virginia Weiss

Headers.txt
Rating: WARTY!

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

I hate to end the year on a down note, but while this novel of good and evil, and of the supernatural, had some things to recommend it, after reading more than 400 pages I expected a much bigger reward than ever was delivered. At the end I felt relief that I was finally through it, but also resentment that the author had taken a portion of my life that I would never get back; I felt I'd wasted it reading this when I could have been enjoying something else in my reading list.

The novel was way too long. It needed some serious editing. I usually avoid books this long for precisely this reason: that it's not such a chunk of your valuable time to give up if the novel is short and it's bad, but when it's both bad and long, it's really irritating. It's even worse when it keeps teasing the reader with the promise of better things to come and never delivers. There was a phrase used in the novel which with some irony I think applied to the book as whole: ponderously clanking links! That's how it felt: like a series of short stories loosely connected rather than a coherent novel.

If the book feels like it's awful right from the off, I DNF it without even a pang of conscience because life is too short to waste on bad literature. The problem with this book was that it kept on promising something good was coming, yet in the end, nothing arrived. The ending itself was a horrible disappointment. It simply fizzled, like even the author herself had tired of this story and wanted over with just as much as I did. Some anally-retentive people will doubtlessly try to argue that it’s disingenuous to dump a book as unworthy without giving it a fair chance, but whenever I do give an “iffy” novel a fair chance, as I did here, I’m inevitably disappointed, so yes, I think you can ditch a novel guilt-free if it is not thrilling you. What’s the point of reading it otherwise? I think its a reader’s duty to DNF a bad read.

Some parts of the book were a joy, but as soon as I started to think maybe I would read a little more, it drifted back into tedium, and then I'd start to think about ditching it, but it would offer a promise of improvement. That's how the whole book went! I found myself skimming parts and thinking it was time to ditch the book; then I would find another interesting piece to read and it brought my hopes up again only to find them dashed again as the story dragged on without - quite literally - going anywhere except in circles. It was as bad as that book where you read through it only to find out at the end, that it was all a dream. And if you found the foregoing tedious to read through, then I achieved my aim and made you feel like I felt while I was reading this novel!

The story is of Emma Susanne Addison. She's close to being a shut-in, but not quite. This itself made little sense, because when she wanted to go somewhere, she had no real problem going there even if it was quite a way from her home, yet she was constantly whining about being scared of big open spaces, even as she lived right in the middle of the city.

This pseudo-phobia went back to a tragic incident with an unsavory uncle which took place not in the city, but in the woods by a river in winter. It would have made sense to me if she were afraid of older men, or afraid of the woods, or afraid of the winter, or afraid of the river, or afraid of ice, but she wasn't. She was inexplicably afraid of open spaces. In her case, this phobia made no sense. People's knee-jerk reaction when you say that is that phobias almost by definition don't make sense precisely because they are irrational, but even the most irrational phobia has rational roots. In this case it did not, and so I could never take it seriously.

Emma's life is beset by tragedy, but in the end you cannot help but feel she brings a lot of things on herself. I did not like her as a character. We're told in the blurb that Emma summons the devil one Christmas, but that portion was written so poorly that I missed it. I went on to the next section of the novel and started reading it like it was an entirely new story. I was thinking, “Wait, when did this happen?" and the truth was that it did not happen - not in the way the author thinks she told us it did. I went back and checked! It was like a whole section of the book was missing.

It was written so hazily that what the author thought she was telling us happened didn't actually feel like it happened at all from the reader's perspective; at least not to this reader. But the offshoot from this is that Emma is now somehow in some sort of preliminary bargaining with the devil - not actually a contract but at least a verbal agreement, yet this goes nowhere. And when I say the devil, I mean the big guy himself. We're constantly told that Emma is a special snowflake which is why he comes personally, but nowhere in the rest of the novel is there anything to explain why she is special or even to suggest that she is! She felt more like a spacial snowflake, and the personal attention made no sense.

What made even less sense is that there was another supernatural being involved - and this one was from Chinese mythology. I never did figure out what her purpose was because it was never explained, and this lack of clarity became even further muddied at the end especially when we had characters from other mythologies appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. It was like the author had some great ideas, but could never settle on a good set to include, and worse, tried to include them all, but could never quite figure out how to successfully integrate them.

The offshoot is that Emma develops super powers (yep, and there was a kitchen sink tossed in there, too)! Emma doesn’t go flying around with a cape, but she can choose outcomes and see them appear in the real world. Or can she? Maybe she was dreaming that too! I can’t tell you, because the author never told me! I kept reading on hoping it would l make sense, but it never did. I do not read prologues and epilogues. They’re antiquated affectations. Put the first in chapter one, the last in the last chapter, and be done with it for goodness sake! Quit with the self-importance and pretension. I skipped the prologue here as I always do, and I did not miss it as I never do. Thinking I had missed something at the end of the story I actually did skim the epilogue, but it contributed nothing. Hence my resentment.

There were other oddities such as the public library being open the day after Christmas. This seemed highly unlikely to me. I don't know. I don’t live in same city as Emma did, so maybe it is, but it sounded unlikely to me and it struck me more like the the author wasn’t properly thinking through what she was writing. This feeling was further enhanced when I read, ”Her hair is glorious, so black it’s almost blue….” That phrase has always struck me as utterly nonsensical. I expect it of typically clueless YA authors, but not of one who can actually write. I can see what an author is trying to say when they write an asinine phrase like this, but tripping yourself up in writing bad prose isn’t a good idea. Black with a sheen of blue or a hint of blue or a blue highlight works, but when something is really black? It’s black, period.

So, in short, I was truly disappointed in a book that initially sounded so promising. I wish the author all the best; she can write if she can learn to curb the meandering, and I think she has some great novels inside her, but this was not one of them, and I cannot in good faith recommend it.

Single Girl Problems by Andrea Bain

Rating: WARTY!

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

While this was an advance review copy I found a lot of errors in it. If it had been run through a spellchecker one more time before being submitted to Net Galley it would have fixed a lot of these, and presumably these will be fixed in the final copy, but as it was, it just came over as being sloppy and as having little regard for reviewers.

Errata (page numbers in this review are all from the Adobe Digital Editions copy):
p 23: "But regardless of our marital status, we aren’t any different from anyone else regardless." One too many regardlesses!
p 39: Cuckoo was misspelled as "cuckcoo"
p 46: "Things have changed completely, or better or worse" should read, "Things have changed completely, for better or for worse"
p 48: "...as we all wai to see who gets the ring." Should be "as we all wait to see who gets the ring."
p 97: "Even after getting caught men and ending the affair, men still miss the excitement of the affair." There's an extra 'men' in there which actually could be the theme of this book!
p103: "Someof us also" missing a space.
p128: "...and though we hadn’t talked about being exclusive, r, we were smitten" I don't know what that lone r represents! (In Dating Horror Story #11)
p131: "...won’t-settle-for-anything-less-tha n-a-great-guy you..." that space in 'than' is a problem for how the words fold at the end of the line. The line break should be at the dash, not in the middle of the word!
Since the author is Canadian, there were some British spellings of words such as favourite as opposed to the American 'favorite'. I did not class these as errors although some readers might.

Subtitled "Why Being Single Isn't a Problem to Be Solved", I thought this might be an important book and was definitely one I wanted to read because I've been making this same case in reviews of young adult books (and too many adult books) for years, chastising authors for stories that take the forty-minute TV show or the Hollywood movie route that the woman has to get her man or she's a failure. Given how rife this motif is in books and movies, I was rather surprised the author really didn't mention how pervasive this 'gotta get married' paradigm is there.

The thing is that I was predisposed to favor the book from the start, and I started out liking it for the good points being made and for the sense of humor:

I compare dating to sifting through a bin at a second-hand clothing store. You’ve gotta go through a lot of crap other people threw away before you find what you like, and even then you have to smell it, check it for stains, look at the stitching, and see if it even fits before you bring it home.

and

Have you ever gone grocery shopping without a list when you’re really hungry?

Amusing as it is, I'd add a caveat to that last one which is that if you can’t control your impulses with groceries then you sure don’t want to be trusting yourself in a relationship with a new man!

My favorable perspective rapidly deteriorated though when I started reading dating tips. The book, while claiming in the blurb "Andrea Bain takes the edge off being single and encourages women to never settle," seemed like it turned a complete 180°, and started pressing women to change their approach and get a date! Not that single women can't have dates without a view to getting married, but it felt like a betrayal of the premise. Of course this depends on how you view single in the "Single Girl"! Is it single as in not married, or single as in not dating? And why 'girl'? Why not woman, since this is really aimed at more mature women, not those who are just embarking upon dating as teens, for example.

I have to say here that the conversion to a Kindle format book was a disaster, and far too many publishers do this without even checking the end result especially when the intent is to get the review copy out to reviewers in several formats. Amazon's crappy Kindle app is a disaster unless the book is essentially stripped of all special formatting and submitted as little more than a dumbed-down student-essay RTF format effort.

I recommend to publishers not to issue books in Kindle format at all if they have anything in them like images, special formatting, or anything fancy at all, because Amazon will trash all of it. In the case of this book, every header had apparently random caps in the middle of the header. These, on closer inspection, were not random and seemed to affect only characters 'c', 'f', 'p', 's', 'w', and 'x'. Why? Ask Amazon! I don't know! Chapter 14 was an amusing example of this. After the chapter number, it read: "the C Word aS Far aS i’m ConCerned" I thought having all the C's capitalized was amusing given the chapter title!

It was not only the headers (and in the contents), but also in the first handful of words in the first line of text in each chapter, which in the PDF copy was also block caps, so the line starting chapter two, for example in the PDF read, "I DECIDED TO WRITE THIS BOOK IN HOPES of changing", but when you enter the Amazone, this becomes: "i deCided to Write thiS Book in hoPeS of changing."

It would be nice to say I hope these will be fixed in the published edition, but I have zero faith in Amazon beforfe which author must debased themselves and dumb-down their text to get decent results. Full disclosure: This is one of several reasons why why I no longer do business with Amazon of any kind, neither in terms of buying things from them, nor in publishing my own work with them. I'd honestly rather have no sales than associate with them any more.

This book had sidebars and insets, and these were thoroughly trashed by Amazon. The sidebars were actually inset into the text and looked fine in the PDF format in both Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) on my desktop computer, and in Bluefire Reader (BFR) on my iPad. They looked sweet there except for another issue regarding margins which I shall also go into shortly, and which is increasingly becoming a review factor with me - not that anyone seems to care about that issue, sorry to report! Anyway, the PDF format represents much more closely (although not precisely, curiously enough!) what the printed copy will look like, and it looked fine.

In the Kindle formatted book, the background to the inserts was on one screen, and the dark gray and therefore hard-to-read text that ought to have been superimposed on the background, was on a separate screen. Note that I have my phone set for white text on black background because it saves power, so I get a somewhat different and more informative perspective than I imagine many - if not most - people do when using the more usual black text on a white screen.

The small text inserts that ought to have appeared inset into the main text looked exactly like the main text except again they were a hard-to-read dark gray and appeared right in the middle of a sentence of the main text! The "Dating Horror Story" inserts ought to have been added between chapters, not in the middle of them. As it was, these suffered the same issues: separated from their background and in dark gray text.

The book cover was also sliced-up, so that instead of a complete cover announcing "SINGLE GIRL PROBLEMS" there were two slices one announcing 'SINGLE' and the other, 'GIRL'. Where 'PROBLEMS' went is a mystery only Amazon can answer! Again, this isn't on the author or the book content itself, so much as on Amazon's disdain and incompetence, so I'm not rating this book on these issues. I read most of it on the iPad so it was not a problem anyway.

However, with regard to the PDF formatting I do have a few words to say about white space. I know the library of Congress has its antiquated rules, and no one wants to read a book which has the text crammed into every corner (which begs the question: why read in Kindle format, right?! - joke!), but within certain boundaries of aesthetics, a publisher can make more of an effort to save trees if they're planning a long print run of a book, by slimming down margins (not profit margins, book margins, silly!) without affecting the look and appeal of the printed page.

In this particular book, on my desktop monitor in ADE, I had the page display at nine inches tall by six wide. I don't know if this is the actual format of the print copy, but it is a common one and since we're dealing with relative percentages, it really doesn't matter. At this size, the book's gutter and outside margins were one inch, and the bottom was 1.5, so let's call that one inch to allow room for a page number. The top was also one. The total page area was therefore 54 square inches while the printed area was closer to twenty-eight! That's about half the page which was blank. Plus the text lines were quite widely-spaced and in quite a large font, and it did not actually start with chapter one until page nineteen! (I routinely skip introductions; they're boring!)

Obviously readability and aesthetics need to play a fair part, so my only suggestion is that narrower margins, slightly narrower spacing between lines and/or a slightly smaller font, dropping the antiquated introduction, and have fewer filler pages up front could have easily shrunk this book to maybe two-thirds its size, saving maybe sixty pages per printed book! How many trees would that save? Trees are not disposable! And if you care nothing for trees, (then you're no friend of mine, but) please think of how much overhead can be saved by reducing a book size by one third!

But back to the book, which was the real problem for me. The chapter headers are these, FYI (cleaned up to remove random caps!):

1. Being single sucks
2. Changing the narrative
3. How not to talk to single people
4. Even Disney gets it
5. Why are you still single?
6. Is dating dead?
7. My love/hate relationship with online dating
8. Chasing your own tail
9. Settling is such an ugly word
10. Insecure much?
11. Sex: to do it or not to do it
12. Why do men cheat?
13. Fear of relationships
14. The C word
15. Single girl solutions
16. Revamped
17. The dating experiment
18. Where are all the good men hiding?
19. The whole kid thing
20. Handle your money honey
21. Single for the holidays
22. It’s not only the guys’ fault

Note that this is from an ARC, so the headers may change but this will give you an idea of what's covered. I was sorry not to see a 'Why do Women cheat?" header. Let's not pretend it doesn't happen! The introduction and conclusion I omitted from the above list, so that last title I listed was a guys' perspective, but it was so skimpy and so limited in perspective that it really wasn't of much value to women - plus it was written by a woman - the author, hence my comment about the perspective being narrow.

One item of unintentional humor which amused me was when the author wrote of her childhood interest in Disney princesses. She was making a good point here, but she said, "I loved watching Disney movies and I especially loved the Disney princesses. Snow White, Cinderella, Belle, Ariel, Rapunzel, Aurora...." I think it could have used a colon there before listing the princesses, but I agree with her point.

The amusing thing was that Rapunzel, in the form of Disney movie Tangled (which was actually a good movie, but not a patch on Frozen), did not come out until 2009 when the author was presumably in her thirties. Was she still wearing silk ribbons in her hair and frilly socks? This is no big deal, but this blog is about writing more than it is about reading, and this is a writing issue: about being careful how we flit from one idea to the next when writing without re-reading later what we wrote. I saw this kind of thing more than once.

While on the topic of being careful to keep track of what you're saying, sometimes the author is her own worst enemy. At one point (p21) I read, "...beautiful, sultry, sexually fluid woman, with a great pair of legs." I read this just three paragraphs before the start of Chapter 2 which is titled, "Changing the narrative." You don’t change the narrative by reducing a woman to being “beautiful, sultry...with a great pair of legs." That's entirely the wrong message to send and the author doesn't seem to get this.

It's like the manufacturers of breakfast cereal pushing sugar (which is what most breakfast cereal is) to children and then tarting it up with some OJ (more sugar) and toast (carbs which are converted to sugars) and saying "Part of this complete breakfast." Yeah it's complete if you're a humming bird and subsist entirely on sugar, but no child should start the day hopped up on that much sugar.

Employing that motif, there's nothing wrong at all with part of a woman being sugar, but for a healthy, complete relationship a partner needs more than that. There had better be fiber and protein and dairy (so to speak!), and those portions of the relationship are far more important than the sugar. Telling people they're not not by repeatedly pushing the sugary beauty drug at the expense of everything else is irresponsible, and worse it's counter-productive.

it's hypocritical, especially since later in Chapter two we read: And are relationships only for "pretty" people? Well yes, if that's how you routinely portray people, consistently listing 'beautiful' before 'smart' or 'educated' (the two are not the same although this author uses them interchangeably), and using 'beautiful' like it's a given or a requirement, and less than "beautiful" people need not apply. It's nauseating and it makes this author part of the problem, not part of a solution which is direly needed.

There is nothing wrong with a woman being and/or feeling attractive, not at all! No, the problem is in reducing her to that and only that, like she has nothing to offer except her looks. For example on page 105, I read, "They just couldn’t understand why their beautiful, smart daughter..." (again according to the list, beauty is what's most important).

In another instance, I read, "Not only does the dating pool shrink as a woman gets older, but she may find herself competing with twenty-somethings." (p136) This is why this author’s habit of describing every woman as beautiful is a serious mistake - it buys right into the youth and beauty pangloss which is not only a problem for older women who may have or may think they have lost that 'gloss', it's also a problem for younger women who find they have an impossible standard to live up to!

They don't airbrush out women's pores in "beauty" magazines for nothing. They also Photoshop® those women to make them look thinner, younger, and more hairless than they really are, and women are culturally brainwashed to buy into this impossible paradigm through billion-dollar cosmetics and weight loss con-trick industries which assault females from a very early age.

Hypocrisy was rife with this 'beauty' requirement where in men, 'beauty' is read as "six-foot tall" (or greater) in this book. At one point the author writes, "...needing a man to be six foot four should be negotiable unless you’re a six-foot glamazon yourself —and even then, ask yourself how important that is." (p44). I don't know what a 'glamazon' is - an Amazon isn't enough? Again with the beauty! But a few pages later we read, "A gorgeous six-foot-tall man caught my attention." (p57) and "I want a man who is six feet tall, with a muscular build, white teeth, a strong hairline," (p142).

So shorter men, the same height as the author maybe, who may have a very common male pattern baldness, and not be able to afford a purely cosmetic and therefore totally unnecessary professional Hollywood teeth whitening can go fuck themselves? How cruel is that? I read later, "...he wanted me to help three viewers navigate online dating...The viewers’ names were Brad, Suzan, and Carolina." Of the three, the only one she mentions the height of was Brad, and if he had been five feet six instead if six feet four, I’m guessing it would not have garnered a mention.

What's with the height? If these men had been the author's own height, five feet seven, would they no longer have been gorgeous? Routinely men are categorized in terms of height in this book, whereas women never are. Why? Are we not supposed to be treated equally when it comes to looks? Is the author such a child that she needs a father figure taller than her? I know in practice men get many byes where women are unjustly held accountable, but that does not mean an author of a book like this needs to buy into it and sell it in reverse! Again, the author is part of the problem, not the solution!

Being a part of the problem was evident in other things she wrote, too. At one point she mentioned a typical question she's asked by giving an example of it. She was asked, "Are you still single? What’s the problem?" Instead of tackling this at the source her reaction was: "I smiled politely and shrugged my shoulders." Then she complained, "But how dare she? From that moment on I lost all respect for her."

It's a pity she did not lose respect for herself for not addressing the insult right there! I can only hope she's changed her approach since that incident. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks didn’t change the conversation of black people being forced to ride at the back of the bus by giving up her seat and backing down. Admittedly she was simply tired and cranky that day, but that takes away nothing from her brave stance, and the paradigm shift she gave birth to when she refused to move! It's a pity the author didn't take a leaf from her book.

At one point the author says, "First, I love hosting reality shows." This was one thing which really turned me off taking her seriously, because there is nothing real about reality shows. They are completely artificial. They have only "beautiful" people in them for a start! Everyday people need not apply; you know the guys who are not six feet tall, with a muscular build, white teeth, and a strong hairline and the women who are not quote beautiful unquote? Worse even than this, is that the show's format is deliberately and purposefully set-up to maximize conflict: the more the better. If 'girls' can be induced to physically fight on the show, they become real celebrities.

These shows are utterly detestable. I know they're popular, but that only serves to sadden me in regarding how low people will sink for 'entertainment'. These so-called reality shows are actually the modern day equivalent of the old Roman gladiator fights. I'm not kidding. You have serious issues if you truly class these lowlife shows as entertainment and wallow in how far we've sunk as a society that this kind of trash is considered remotely normal. They're no better than the older Disney princess stories.

The hypocritical thing here is that the author appears to agree with me on the bachelor shows, but thinks it turns “beautiful, educated women into delusional, sobbing, catty little girls." Again with the beauty leading all other traits, including educated! This is part of the problem! And if they reduce women to girls, what does this say about the title of this book I'm reviewing here?!

Seriously though: educated? They may be academically educated, but that shouldn't be conflated with civilized, with having integrity, or with having any self-respect. If they were truly educated in the broadest of senses, they would never lower themselves to appear on a show which forces them to run around like so many bitches in heat after the "alpha male" whose credentials (beyond looks and/or status, and/or wealth) we learn nothing of. But then he's not the one being judged, is he?

Let's talk about how successful those shows are shall we? The author mentions this in passing, but the sorry truth is that, according to Just Jared dot com, out of 30 seasons (as of 2015) of both bachelor and bachelorette (seriously?), only six couples were still together. Not that a single one of us should be surprised by those lousy results from such an inexcusably pressurized and artificial situation. But the demonstrated fact remains that it's not reality, it's fiction!

And bachelorette? I guess that's marginally better than spinster, but what, the woman can't simply be a bachelor too - she has to be singled out for special treatment because she's a woman? She can't be an actor, she has to be an actress? She can't be an aviator she has to be an aviatrix? Screw that. Women should boycott that show based on the abusive title alone.

The genderism (I don't call it sexism because well, sex! It's too loaded a word) is rife in this book. In Dating Horror Story #2 I read, "He asked all the right questions, paid for our coffees and snacks." Excuse me? Are we equal now or not? The short answer to that is 'not' of course, but it will not improve matters if we perpetuate stereotypes that the guy always pays no matter who earns the most and no matter who asked who out on the date. Again, this is part of the problem! Later, I read the author whining, "What about paying for dinner? You’re not working, so how do you figure that part out?" It's never going to change with attitudes like this.

Why is it that we're supposed to be equal, but very few of us see anything wrong with the guy paying for everything, opening doors, sliding out chairs? It makes no sense whatsoever; it's like one party wants to have the cake and eat it, and the other party wants to treat the woman like a child. It's not romantic to infantilize a woman. I can't respect either of those antique perspectives.

Another example popped-up in Dating Horror story #10 where the woman described her date. "On the first date, he did everything right: opening doors, ordering my food and wine...." How exactly is treating you like a child doing everything right? The guy in this scenario had problems admittedly, but so did the woman with that attitude. The age of the Disney princess is long gone, sister.

In a book where the author counsels honesty, openness, and communication in relationships, where does this have a place: "Some of my personal favourites are not...pretending to be asleep to avoid having sex when you’re not in the mood." She's listing things she can get away with as a single person, and while I appreciated her completely down-to-earth approach and honesty in her list, it's hardly honest to fake a headache when you could simply say how you feel instead of outright lying to your partner. It's just wrong and if you find you're having to do that then you're in the wrong relationship, period.

The book starts out by proclaiming that it's a supportive work for woman who want to be single without the hassle of becoming pariahs, but towards the end it betrays this by offering dating advice. It felt like it started out wanting to be one kind of book, but turned into another. Worse than this for me, it seemed like it was solely-aimed at women who are well-paid professionals like the author! It really had nothing to say to working-class women, and the obsession with online dating websites was painful to read. Like this was the only way any woman can ever meet people to date! No! Neither did the book talk about women who were not into guys, but who might be interested in dating another woman. It's like the LGBTQIA community doesn't exist in this author's universe.

It doesn't help to read that "Talking to more people will lead to meeting more people" when it's actually the other way around, but it is the skewed perspective you get on life when that life is conducted purely electronically! Why not suggest avenues other than electronic ones? It's like the real world doesn't exist in this book, which is as sad as it is telling.

How about taking up a sport or a hobby? What about maybe going to online forums that are not about dating, but about things you're interested in? How daring is that?! Why not consider, god forbid, volunteering for some charity work or other, or taking an interest in your local government, school board, or something like that? What about community activism? Urban farming? Working with youth? Anything other than e-dating forums and sites?! There are lots of ways to meet people and it never hurts to have a support network, but the fact that this author mentions none of this is an indictment of the narrow and even selfish approach to this whole topic.

Nor did it have a thing to say about single moms, which was unforgivable. The author talks about the choice (or sadly, lack of choice) in having children, but offers no advice for single women who have children! That’s a cruel omission. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2016, out of about 12 million single parent families with children under the age of 18, more than 80% were headed by single mothers. A third of single moms are over forty. That's quite a chunk of the population to ignore.

This is when I realized that this book is, in the final analysis, a self-help book for the author and very few others - unless you happen to share her lifestyle and habits! She has no children so we don't need to consider women who do. She's a well-paid professional so we don't need to learn anything about about women who are not. She's not gay evidently, so let's not concern ourselves about women who are! She's a black Canadian woman, so we don't really need to worry ourselves with anyone who is not. It just felt so elitist that it was upsetting to me, and I'm not even female or single!

So in short, while I applaud the thought, it's the words that count, and they were all wrong. It started out great, but got badly lost somewhere along the way. I wish the author all the best and would probably enjoy reading a work of fiction were she to write one, but I cannot in good faith recommend a book which seems skimpy and thoughtless, and which flies in the face of too many sound principles, and which also ultimately fails to do what it set out to do.

Solomon's Ring by Mary Jennifer Payne

Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
"Smith flexes a well-toned bicep" Once again YA authors, it's biceps! Unless you do happen to be speaking about only one of the two upper attachments of this muscle: the long head or the short head. I favor the long head myself....

The twin motif in novels, especially young adult novels, has been way overdone, so if you want to venture into it as a writer, you need to offer something truly different or inventive and unfortunately, this novel offered neither. To be perfectly fair, this was volume two in a series, and I have not read volume one, but this seemed like it stood alone fairly well if you were willing to accept that there was baggage from the past that you were not directly party to. But every new relationship is like that, right?!

My problem with it was the writing which felt very amateur. There was nothing technically wrong with it in terms of spelling errors or poor grammar and so on, but it just did not tell the tale well at all, and some of the story seemed so poorly thought-out that it felt like reading indifferent fan fiction.

If you're going to call-up children to do a job that would normally be done by adults, you'd better have a more solid reason for it than simply "Oh she's a special snowflake" and then get all coy about why it's so, and in book two no less. It's just an insult to your reader's intellect, or did you plan on writing only for dumb readers? It's a good question to ask yourself as and author: who are you talking to? And do you really want to talk down to them?

The stakes are higher when the story is a fantasy, especially a religious one, because if you're calling on humans to do a job that a god cannot do and angels cannot handle, then you'd better have a good reason for that too! I know the Bible has countless instances of humans being called on to do a job which God can't handle, but that's a sign of really poor fiction, not of a well-written classic. Just to put it out there - that these kids are needed to fight demons - and offer nothing to support that contention is either empty plotting or the cowardice of hiding behind scores of other poor writers who've employed precisely the same blinkered plot.

The twins had been separated (in volume one) one of them being thought dead, but she was just in Hades evidently, although it's not called that here. Here it has a cutesy hipster term that I prefer to forget. Anyway, her sister discovered where she was and rescued her and now they're back together, but demons are walking the Earth! Or at least the town where they live.

There is a curfew and there are power outages, and these two sixteen-year-olds are so dumb that they let themselves get talked into staying out until dark, which is apparently (and for reasons unexplained at least in the part I read) when demons are loose. Why the demons can't walk during the day is unexplained of course because this novel cowers behind trope. You're expected to swallow all these dumb 'rules', like not crossing running water and being allergic to iron, and so on because it's always done that way! Why would an author strive for originality and to up their game when they can take the road most traveled like everyone else does?

The demons are hunting one of the twins because she's your predictable YA special snowflake although no-one, predictably, will tell her why, not even her angelic best friend, predictably named Raphael. This is one of those tedious stories with all kinds of unnecessary secrecy and poor plotting. If a city was in that bad of a shape, the national guard would have been called out, but no! Everything is going along 'normally' despite the dire crisis, the curfew, and the murders in the streets. This made no sense whatsoever.

It made no sense that one of the twins would be armed with a bamboo pole to fight demons. We're told that bullets cannot kill these demons, but this made no sense either given that the demons were occupying frail human bodies. Why would decapitation work? How do you decapitate with a blunt bamboo pole anyway?

Even were I willing to grant all of that, especially given that I'd not read book one, I can't overlook that it made no sense that the police would not find something highly suspicious in a young, rather frail-looking girl magically decapitating an attacker with a bamboo pole! It made less sense that they would simply nod their heads and say "Oh, okay!" when told the bamboo pole had disappeared. Police are not dumb. They know a lot more than you do, yet far too many authors treat them like they're clueless clowns. For all the faults that police do have, I can't respect an author who depicts all of them as idiots.

It was at the point where Raphael was being all mysterious and for absolutely no reason whatsoever that I could not stand to read another world of this book. There are people no doubt who will whine that you cannot gauge a book after reading only ten percent of it, but that is an outright lie. A book either does it for you from the off, or it doesn't; it's either smartly-written or it isn't. A novel is with worth reading or it's not, and this one simply was not. Life is far too short to waste it on a book that does not launch for you right from the beginning.

This one seemed dedicated to employing great leaps of faith as a substitute for thoughtful writing and solid plotting, and it relied on so much hand-waving to cover plot holes that I could feel a chill from it. To me, that's a sign that you should whack it with a bamboo pole. Intelligent readers deserves a lot better than this. Other readers deserve what they get.

Dream of the Butterfly Vol 1 by Richard Marazano

Rating: WORTHY!

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

Richard Marazano is a French writer and illustrator, and in this work he seems to have channeled Chinese mythology very heavily into a very lighthearted story about young girl who strays in a snowstorm from her valley to a nearby one in which is a village occupied by animals who seem very resentful of humans Actually, given how we treat animals I for one am not at all surprised by their attitude.

The girl is a very strong female character and I recommend this story for that to begin with, but it's much more than that. The story is very whimsical, and quirky even, I tend to run in the opposite direction when I read of a story being described as full of whimsy or with quirky characters, but this one nailed it perfectly.

The girl seems resigned to living in this town because no one will help her get back. She's boarded with a foster family of birds, and finds a job working in an energy factory - she has to change out the hamsters in their wheels when they become tired - but her lunches of packed worms, she could do without. She eventually learns she's not the only human child in town.

Because she is a human, Tutu is spied upon by the emperor through his rabbit secret service. The rabbits are adorably inept, but they are also actually helpful to Tutu when she gets lost or doesn't know which bus to catch. Known as yuè tù (moon rabbit) in China, the idea behind these is that while the Moon may look to us westerners like it's the face of a man in the Moon, many other cultures see it as a rabbit in the Moon, which is more intriguing to me.

If you look hard, you can see the long ears (Mare Foecunditatis and Mare Nectaris)stretching to the right, about half way down the Moon's right side, from the head (Mare Tranquilitatis where Apollo Eleven landed) to the left, and the body (Mare Serenitatis and Mare Imbrium below it on the left edge of the Moon's disk. Below that is the Oceanis Procellarum with the big back legs and a tail sticking out to the left. The rabbit appears to be sitting by a box or a bowl, (Mare Nubium), and some cultures see this as a mortar, in which the rabbit is grinding something using a pestle.

The emperor takes a great interest in Tutu and wants her to help him by catching a rare white butterfly, but she's not very impressed with him or the opera he writes. She's especially disrespectful of his surrogate robots which tend to break down when faced with Tutu's sarcasm.

This story was a delight through-and-through, and my only complaint was that this is volume one, so the story didn't end! Although that's really a good thing because if it had ended, there would be no more to look forward to! As it was, I could have kept on reading this for many more pages than there were, and I recommend it as a worthy read.

Drawing Cute with Katie Cook by Katie Cook

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This book is an awesome introduction to illustrating, aimed at younger children. And even adults for that matter who might want to get into the fun business of creating a cute children's book. I had never heard of Katie Cook, but despite looking barely older than a teen herself, she's a mature illustrator who has worked on a variety of projects for, for example, Marvel comics and on My Little Pony, so she's well-known in the business for her illustration skills.

She should also be known for her writing skills since she's also a writer and her comments throughout this book were hilarious and it was worth reading it just for those. The illustrations are really the cherry on top though, because in a handful of steps she shows how to create a bewildering variety of images of animals (would that be bewilderbeasts?), assorted inanimate objects, sports and hobbies, and food - which seems to be a special favorite of hers despite her trim figure. Maybe Cook isn't just a name?!

The steps are easy. As she says, if you can draw a potato, you can draw anything, and anything and everything populates these pages. The chapters cover Animals, Foodstuff, Hobbies and Sports, Holidays and Seasons, and Handy-Dandy Objects. There's getting on for a hundred thirty pages of illustration, and each page contains about two things to draw, including domestic and wild animals, flying and swimming animals, cute and scary animals, and even fantasy animals. And insects and arachnids are animals, remember, no matter how much you might want to dissociate yourself from that end of the family.

There are cakes and ice creams, teapots and milk cartons, pineapples and avocados. You'll like her grapes a bunch! When you see her apples you'll say "Core!" Drawing peppers will no doubt ring a bell. The broccoli looks very cubby, but it's with the sandwiches that you'll earn your bread. Okay, enough pun-ishment! There are also kayaks and racquets*, knitting and football, jigsaws and books - enough to keep you busy making variations on a theme until before long, you're launching into your own original drawings in short-order Cook style! (Okay, I lied about the puns).

I really liked this, the drawings are good and simple enough for anyone to follow and create your own. The results are very cute, just as the title promises. The supporting text is, well, supportive, and funny, and this book makes for a great gift! If there's one thing we really do need, it's a lot more talented illustrators, especially of cute, and from a diverse background. This book is a great way to encourage that and I recommend it.

*Isn't racquet a weird word? Seriously? Who would even think up a word like that? Just sayin'.

Rebecca Finds Happiness by Gina Harris, Hayley Anderson

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a short, sweet tale which I thoroughly enjoyed. It's about a young girl who can't seem to be happy no matter what. She has toys and candy, but nothing she tries, not even dancing seems to make her happy except for the very short term; then she meets and befriends Tara who seems to be happy no matter what. In emulating Tara, Rebecca finds a way to be happy herself.

I liked the story and the positive and useful message from Gina Harris. I liked the easy style of the colorful illustrations by Hayley Anderson. I felt this could have stood to have been longer, but it's fine as it is and sends a good message. The illustrations were rather small, even when viewed on an iPad in Bluefire Reader. I could enlarge them by spreading a thumb and forefinger over each image, but it felt like they ought to be maximized to begin with when viewed in large format. it was the same in Adobe Digital Editions, and on my phone it was so small it made reading rally hard. Just FYI!

Those quibbles aside, I liked this story and I recommend it.

Superb by David F Walker, Sheena C Howard, Ray Anthony Height, Alitha Martinez, Eric Battle

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I didn't like the first one I read in this series. Normally that would be the end of it, but I read a second one without realizing until the end that it was part of the same series, and I liked it. I also liked this one, probably more than any of the previous ones. The artwork was really good, the characters realistic (as comic book super heroes go!), interesting, motivated, and believable, and the writing was very good. I noted a strong female influence not only in the writing, but also in the art, and this can make a big difference to the overall look and feel of a comic.

I really like the way so called minorities are front and center. Minorities are actually the majority of people on the planet, yet they're so poorly served in comics, TV and movies that it's criminal. It was nice to see that balance being redressed without going overboard. It was also nice to see a character with Down Syndrome (aka trisomy 21) included as a major player. The relationship between him (Jonah, aka "Cosmosis"!) and Kayla (aka Amina). and the awesome Abbie, was choice. It really made the story shine for me.

Each individual graphic novel in this set is a sort of origin story, but its not your usual origin tale; it's more of a development story, which to me is more interesting, especially this one. All of the graphic novels I've read so far run in parallel, but there is no repetition. Each story advances the whole, and the only tiresome bit was the last bit which is the same in each comic. Of course you can skip this once you've read it the first time, and it does mean you can start with any comic in the group without having to worry that you missed something because you didn't start with the 'right one'.

In this story Kayla, already aware of her powers and that she's not the only one with them, is trying to keep a low profile, especially since her parents work for the corporation which is trying to capture, intern, and experiment upon those with such powers. Jonah is less retiring. He breaks into the corporate facility to finds out what they're up to, and he barely escapes with his life. Kayla protects him and this is how the two of them team up with Abbie, who is Jonah's friend. Unfortunately, Kayla's desire to live a normal life is seriously compromised, and that's all I'm going to say!

On the negative side, I have to say that this shtick with the powers-that-be coming down hard on the mutants is really reaching saturation point. Marvel has repeatedly done it with X-Men, Inhumans, and Gifted, and it's been done in other graphic novels unrelated to the DC and Marvel stables, including one I reviewed negatively recently. Frankly, it's starting to be boring. It would be nice to see something different.

In terms of this comic, it's hard at this point, despite having read several of them, to see how the foresight corporation got so much power that it can openly act as a paramilitary force and hunt down these people. That felt a little bit much, but maybe it will be explained. Or maybe I missed it in that first volume I read because I was so disappointed in it!

That quibble aside though, I really liked this graphic novel and I recommend it as a worthy read.