Retief's War

 

By Keith Laumer

Retief, the super diplomat, is back again, saving a planet and its people from the ills of galactic civilization, from the greedy Groaci and the locals from themselves.

The Quopp are composed of many tribes, each tribe unique and quite different and with most tribes cheerfully dining on the members of other tribes. Quopp is a world rich in metals and the Quoppina evolved to be partially mechanical and partially organic. 

A newly discovered world, the Terrans were quick to set up an embassy on Quopp. The leader of the diplomatic mission, of which Retief is a member, is Ambassador Longspoon. Longspoon came up with the "bright" idea of turning Quopp's criminal class, the Voion tribe, into the police force. But one ambitious Voion, Ikk, gets himself appointed Prime Minister and decides he and his tribe will take over Quopp. In short order, the embassy is bombed and the members of the Terran delegation locked up. All except Retief, who slips away, determined, with the help of any of the locals he can convince to stand up to the Voion and with the help of some Terran settlers, to get to the bottom of Ikk's takeover.

Disguised as a Quoppina, Retief travels to the jungle countryside looking for allies and inspiring the local tribes into not fighting each other and instead fighting against Ikk's army of Voion. In the process, he discovers that the Groaci are involved and backing, advising and arming Ikk's troops, for their own greedy reasons.  

In addition to trying to fend off the start of a world war, Retief also has to rescue a group of women whose space ship was shot at in space and it crashed landed in the jungle. Among those women is one who, unknown to Retief, is someone he cares greatly about. But it's all just business as usual for Retief of the CDT!

This was an ok read. A lot of it is about the various conflicts and battles that Retief engineers and gets involved in. The most interesting thing is the variety of Quoppina, the intelligent beings of Quopp, who come in all sizes from tiny to gigantic and who have wheels instead of feet. Some of the Quoppina are like trucks, some are like bulldozers, some are like cargo planes and some have specialized nippers, cutters and manglers depending on their evolutionary niche in the world. 

What wasn't so interesting were the many fights and battles to wade through. I just skimmed the battle scenes. I don't care about the action, I don't need a play-by-play, I just care about the outcome. 

Still A Few Bugs In The System

 

By G.B. Trudeau

I think this was one of the first Doonesbury collections to be published back in the early 1970s. In it Mike Doonesbury is just a lad freshly launched into college life, probably still a virgin and striving to find a girl friend. 

Here we meet some of the recurring characters that featured in the strips, B.D. the jock; Mark Slackmeyer the rebel; Berne, the science nerd and Calvin, the black activist. 

Sample from the book:

For me, this was a visit back to the good old days, as I was a teen in the 1970s. I truly enjoyed revisiting that time as depicted in these strips. I probably like them better now than I did in my ignorant youth.

Dept. Of Speculation

 

By Jenny Offill

The story of a woman's search for love, getting married, having kids, getting tossed aside for someone younger but hanging on to her man in the end, probably.

It's told oddly. No names mentioned, not even her name. It's told in snippets with lots of blank spaces between the snippets. The copy I read had 177 pages but it has so many blank spaces I read it in less than two hours. The style really put me off at first and I started the book then stopped and left it sitting for several weeks. I did finally get around to it but I still didn't care for its anonymous style. It was an OK read, other than the annoying style, pretty much a typical depiction of a marriage. 

Here is a review by NPR.

Seek You : A Journey Through American Loneliness

 

By Kristen Radtke

Radtke takes a look at why people feel so isolated and lonely these days. She talks about her own struggle with loneliness and also looks at other professionals' thoughts about and studies of loneliness, including the negative effects it has on people and on society. And I also enjoyed the illustrations.

I picked this book up in the new book section of our local library. It was classified as fiction and I thought it was a graphical romance novel. OK, I was disappointed when I started to read it and bit angry at the library for misclassifying it. But I decided to keep on reading it and I quickly overcame my disappointment. It is a really worthy look at the way people are affected by loneliness and how, in the end, it just pushes us deeper and deeper into our isolation. It was interesting and surprising and I liked it. But I'm still not happy that the librarians decided it belonged in fiction. Just because it is a graphical essay? I suppose they had their reasons.

Go here for a review by NPR.

Kingdom of the Wicked

 

By Kerri Maniscalco

Emilia and her twin sister Vittoria are young witches, direct descendants of a goddess. They live with their parents and grandmother who run a small, popular restaurant. That they are witches is a secret they keep from everyone because the persecution of witches still continues among the local populace. 

Emilia and Vittoria are as close as most twins are. At least that is what Emilia always believed. But when she finds Vittoria's dead body and sees that her sister's heart has been ripped out, Emilia, in her effort to track down her sister's killer, discovers that Vittoria has been performing dark, dangerous magic, magic she was using to discover who has been murdering other young female witches in the area. Emilia takes up Vittoria's quest, vowing to find her sister's killer, no matter what it takes. And to do so, she calls forth a demon prince, Wrath, who she forces to help her in her quest for justice for Vittoria. It isn't long, though, before Emilia realizes that she is not the only one who has called forth demon princes and that the gates of Hell are weakening and all Hell is about to break loose.

This was an OK read. Prince Wrath turns out to be a pretty nice fellow, devastatingly handsome, of course. And Emilia, of course, finds herself attracted to him against her better judgment. But since this is a Young Adult novel, they most the two do is exchange a few kisses and have a naked, but chaste, bath together. 

The book ends on a cliffhanger designed to keep the reader coming back for the next book in the series. But I wasn't interested enough by this book to follow up with the next one in the series.

Here is a review by Kirkus.