Cool, Calm, and Contentious

 

By Merrill Markoe

A collection of twenty-one semi-autobiographical and mildly humorous short stories ranging through a wide variety of the author's life experiences.

Stories about dealing with a mother who was demanding and hyper-critical of her daughter, Merrill. Ones about the dogs Merrill has had in her life. Stories about her school days, stretching into her years in college. Stories about the men in her life, including the most famous one, David Letterman, who is very thinly disguised as Bobby. Stories about her early sexual experiences, including rape. A rafting trip, attending a Fetish Ball, drinking sixteen ounces of vodka like it was a refreshing glass of water. Advice on life, for instance, drawing on years of experience with her mother, how to spot and avoid narcissists and assholes. 

For the most part, I enjoyed all the stories. Some were real slices of life and some were actually quite funny. Really, the only one I kept nodding off to was "Celebrity Criminals and Criminal Celebrities: Celebrity 2.0." Probably because I am not much interested in celebrities.

I characterized the stories as semi-autobiographical because she includes stories where she and her dogs have involved conversations. I'm guessing that is just fantasy or she is bonkers. I personally think if dogs could talk, they would only talk about walks, food, critters, food, intruders, food, naps, food, going outside, food, coming back in, food and bedtime.

For another review, see Publishers Weekly.

"My Teenage Son's Goal in Life Is to Make Me Feel 3,500 Year Old"

 

By Dave Barry

A small collection of short, humorous observations from Barry on parenting based on personal experience. A fun, light, read for those times when you are in the mood for something amusing and easy.

A few excerpts:

"My son is going to parties where the boys dance with actual girls. This was unheard of when I was eleven, during the Eisenhower administration. Oh, sure, our parents sent us to ballroom-dancing class, but it would have been equally cost-effective for them to simply set fire to their money."

"The computer is a great teaching tool for young people. For example, my home computer has an educational program that enables you to control an entire simulated planet—its ecology, its technology, its weather, etc. My ten-year-old son and his friends use this program a lot, and we've all learned some important ecological lessons, the main one being never, ever put ten-year-old boys in charge of a planet ("Let's see what happens when you have volcanoes and nuclear war!")

"Parents: School is almost out, which means it's time to make those summer vacation plans, load up the family car, and take off, quickly, before the kids get home.

I am of course joshing. You should take the kids; there's nothing quite like putting the whole family into the car and hitting the open road, leaving your worries behind, driving mile after carefree mile, sometimes as many as three carefree miles before everybody hates everybody else and gunfire breaks out in the back seat."

Personal Demons

 

By Stacia Kane

Dr Megan Chase is a psychologist who has just started a new job as a radio personality of a call-in show who promises to slay her listeners personal demons. 

What she doesn't know is that her promise has upset the personal demons and she is on their hit list. Now she is seeing these little demons everywhere she goes and it is clear they are serious about making her pay for her promise to slay them. The thing is, these demons don't seem to be the smartest monsters, unable to understand that her threat is not an actual promise to kill anything.

But little personal demons is not the only demon suddenly appearing in her life. For she comes home one evening to find a handsome stranger waiting on her doorstep, anxious to speak to her. Grayson Dante has something he needs to tell her. That her life is in danger from the personal demons and that he, also a demon, is there to protect her.

Naturally she has her doubts. But he soon makes it clear that he is what he says he is. And events soon transpire that convince Megan that everything he has been saying is the truth and that the personal demons are coming for her.

This was an OK read. Although the idea that a demon is good-hearted didn't sit well with me. This modern tendency to remake the old monsters into the opposite of what they traditionally are is not one I agree with. Anyways, like I said, it was an OK read. 

The Last Thing He Said

 

By Laura Dave

Hannah had only been married to Owen for a year when he vanished, leaving behind a cryptic note that only said, "Protect her." Namely his teenage daughter, Bailey.

Bailey and her dad had been just the two of them for years. So it's not surprising that Bailey regarded Hannah as an unnecessary intruder in their life. But despite Bailey's gentle displeasure, Hannah keeps trying to build rapport with her husband's daughter.

But now he has disappeared. And Bailey has come home with a bag of money her father left in her school locker along with a note asking Bailey to help Hannah and do what she asks her to do. Not only that, but there is some kind of trouble at Owen's place of work. His boss was claiming advancement in new software that did not actually exist. A fraud that that will cost investors millions in losses and now the police are at Hannah's door, wanting to know where Owen is and suspecting her of being in the thick of it.

Hannah can't help but wonder if Owen is part of the funny business at his job. And she thinks she might be able to figure out where he has gone into hiding if she gets in touch with his family and friends. But as she and Bailey dig deeper into Owen's  past, she eventually figures out that Owen Michaels is not a real person. But why did he change his name and walk away from his past with only his daughter to tie him to it? Since Bailey only knows her dad as Owen Michaels, she can't shed any light on it. Except maybe somewhere is her childhood memories is the key to uncovering whatever happened in the past that led Owen Michaels to run away from his former life.

I really enjoyed this mystery story. Of course, as the reader, you have to expect that Owen is a bad dude and that he is involved in something really bad. At first it seemed like it has to do with his boss's shady business practices but as Hannah digs deeper it begins to look like Owen was hiding from something terrible in his past. The question is, was it something Owen did? Or was it something he witnessed? And will Hannah ever be reunited with her vanished husband?

Check out the review of the book by Kirkus.

The Collapsing Empire

 

By John Scalzi

First novel of the Interdependency trilogy. 

In the distant future, and cut off from our home planet of Earth, humans have scattered throughout space, mostly living in manmade habitats, but a few on actual planets. Why in habitats instead of on worlds? Because of the Flow. Because faster-than-light travel does not exist:

"The speed of light is not only a good idea, it's the law. You can't get to it; the closer you accelerate toward it, the more energy you need to keep going forward, and it's a horrible idea to go that fast anyway, since space is only mostly empty, and anything you collide with at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light is going to turn you fragile spaceship into explody chunks of metal. And it would still takes years, or decades, or centuries, for the wreckage of your spaceship to zoom past wherever it was you originally planned to go."

So instead there is the Flow, which is:

"...generally described to laypeople as the river of alternate space-time that makes faster-than-light travel across the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds . . . The Flow, accessible by 'shoals' created when the gravity of stars and planets interacts just right with the Flow, to allow ships to slip in and ride the current to another star.

[However] The Flow is not anything close to a river—it is a multi- dimensional brane-like metacosmological structure that intersects with local time-space in a topographically complex manner, influenced partially and chaotically but not primarily by gravity, in which the ships accessing it don't move in any traditional sense but merely take advantage of its vectoral nature, relative to local space-time, which, unbounded by our universe's laws regarding speed, velocity, and energy, give the appearance of faster-than-light travel to local observers.

 And even that  is a crap way of describing it..."

So that's the author's way of having reasonable travel times so he can tell a story about an empire of city states run by the great houses based on trade which makes for interdependency without which they cannot survive on their own. 

So it's a system that has worked for a very long time. But all good things must come to an end, I guess. And that time has come for the Interdependency. 

Some smart people have figured it out. As have some not quite so smart people. Unfortunately, the not quite so smart ones based their conclusions on faulty math. They think they have figured out where the new center of government is going to be and they are doing everything they can to make sure they are the one running things. 

Meanwhile, the actual governmental hub, a bit slower to get it than the other group, figure out that the other group is working under wrong conclusions. But the governmental group, being in a phase of transition and being a bit slow to act, is being attacked by the other guys, who are using chaos and terrorism to gain the upper hand.

So that's the story. It pretty much ends with the government people telling the ambitious people that they are operating under mistaken conclusions. And that humankind still has to cooperate in order to survive the coming catastrophe of changing of the Flow.

This was a pretty good story, not as boring as a lot of these, what I would call political novels, as many of them are (to me). I found I wasn't skipping a lot of pages, I only did that a couple of times. Which says a lot as I have a habit of just glancing through text that is too descriptive, too gross, too talky or has depictions of battles. Battles, I only care about the outcome, not the action. So a pretty good story. Not good enough for me to follow up with the rest of the trilogy though. The second book is The Consuming Fire followed by The Last Emperox.

Here a review by Kirkus Reviews.