Never Sniff a Gift Fish

 

By Patrick F. McManus

McManus was a humor writer for outdoor life, hunting and fishing magazines. His stories featured improbable predicaments and childhood tales and strange characters, including himself. Often hilarious and always amusing, reading his stories is trip, in more ways than one. 

The title story, Never Sniff a Gift Fish, features Pat's neighbor, Al Finley. While on a fishing trip with Pat and Pat's long time friend, Retch Sweeney, Finley tries to think up short epithets that feature sporting themes, among which is, of course, "Never sniff a gift fish." A few more are, "What the tourist terms a plague of insects, the fisherman calls a fine hatch."  "I have never met a fish I didn't like." "Even a fish stick once knew the glories of the deep."

List of the stories included:

• Blowing Smoke
• Poof—No Eyebrows!
• I Fish; Therefore, I Am
• Running on Empty
• The Cat and the Cat Burglar
• Salami on Rye and Hold the Wild Gobo
• Two-Man-Tent Fever
• Fish Poles, and Other Useful Terminology
• The Man Who Notices Things
• The Elk Trappers
• The Short Happy Life of Francis Cucumber
• The Arkansas Prank Hound
• Well, Excuuuuse Me!
• The Mountain Car
• The Christmas Hatchet
• The Night Grandma Shot Shorty
• The Kindest Cut of All
• The Bush Pilots
• Share and Share Alike
• Never Sniff a Gift Fish
• Backseats I Have Known
• Edgy Rider
• Strange Scenes and Eerie Events
• The Hunters' Workout Guide
• Temporary Measures
• The Fibricators
• The Family Camper's Dictionary
• The Big Match 

The Grasshopper Trap

 

By Patrick F. McManus

McManus was a humor writer for outdoor life, hunting and fishing magazines. His stories featured improbable predicaments and childhood tales and strange characters, including himself. Often hilarious and always amusing, reading his stories is trip, in more ways than one. 

The title story, The Grasshopper Trap, features one of his most iconic characters, Rancid Crabtree, grizzled old woodsman and idler. Desiring to acquire more bait for fishing, school age Pat and his friend Crazy Eddie Muldoon are on a fruitless hunt to catch grasshoppers. Eddie, who has an inventive mind, dreams up the grasshopper trap and Rancid, who also wants to do some trout fishing, thinks the idea just might work. And it might have, if Rancid had known his left hand from his right. 

List of the stories in The Grasshopper Trap:

• The Skunk Ladder
• How to Go Splat! 
• The Human Fuel Pump
• 'Twas a Dark and Dreary Night
• Trailer Trials
• The Grasshopper Trap
• Get Lost!
• Never Cry Snake!
• Metamorphosis and Other Outdoor Phenomena Wives Don't Understand
• The Swamp
• A Hunker Is Not a Squat
• Why Wives on Christmas Mourn
• The Hunting Lesson
• First Knife
• Nincompoopery and Other Group Terms
• Bad Company
• The Case of the Missed Deer
• Character Flaws
• Mean Tents
• Crick Ritual
• Hunting Camp Etiquette
• Stone Soup
• Gunrunning
• The Wager
• Letters From Camp
• Sweet Sweet Sixteen
• Down and Way Out in Brazil
• Strange Encounters of the Bird Kind
• The Outing
• I, the Hunted

Regency Buck

 

By Georgette Heyer

A Regency novel

After their father passed away, his nearly grown children, Judith and Peregrine, knew he had named the Fifth Earl of Worth as their guardian. Coming London to introduce themselves to high society, the two were expecting to find Lord Worth to be an elderly man, a contemporary of their father. But Lord Worth was not an elderly man at all. Indeed, he turned out to be the man who had accosted and stolen a kiss from Judith when he happened upon her as she was out taking a stroll unaccompanied. 

So things got off to a rough start in their relationship with their new guardian. And it didn't get any better due to Judith's desire to assert her independence and to her dislike of Worth. 

Judith and Peregrine are lucky to be very wealthy. Plus Judith and Peregrine are both good looking. So becoming a big hit in society is easy for them. And amazingly, young Lord Worth takes his role as their guardian seriously and his guidance and connections make their success assured. 

But wealth can be a magnet for bad people. And Peregrine becomes the target of someone who wants him dead. If he dies without an heir, his share of their inheritance would pass to his sister, Judith. So his death with really only benefit his sister. No one else would get their hands on it. Unless they were married to Judith! 

This is one of Heyer's novels that I just never liked as well as most of her romance novels. Judith is arrogant and Peregrine comes off as stupid. Lord Worth is even more arrogant than Judith is. Peregrine's only function in the story is to be the target for the killer. 

Heyer features some of the famous personages of Regency high society of the early 1800s including the Prince Regent, Beau Brummel, the Duke of Clarence and Lord William Alvanley, among others. She also describes the Brighton Pavilion in detail. I image she spent much time researching the time period and the people and places. 

Here is a review by Susan Holloway Scott on Austenprose.

More Than Gold

 

By Shirley Hailstock

Morgan had a rough start to life. Abandoned as a child, she lived on the streets, surviving as best she could. Fortunately, she was adopted by a kind social worker. Morgan turned out to have a talent for gymnastics and was good enough to make the Olympic team when she was nineteen. 

She is approached by US government agents who talk her into, while at the Olympics in Korea, breaking into a Korean prison and rescuing a prisoner, a man who will probably die in prison if not rescued. She does as asked but in consequence she lives her later life in hiding, fearful of assassins coming to kill her. Twelve years later, the assassins do track her down. Her only chance for survival is CIA agent Jack Temple.  

But Morgan and Jack Temple have history, going back to her time at the Olympics, where Jack was there to keep an eye on her, posing as the team swim coach. Morgan fell hard for him, but except for one exciting kiss, it never went anywhere. Having Jack suddenly back in her life sets off so many emotions, she isn't sure she wants him there, even though she needs his expertise to survive the killers on her trail. 

Well, this was a romance novel disguised as a thriller. Sure there are lots of dangerous and thrilling encounters but the main point is to get two lovers back together again. Which requires lots of sex. Which I skipped reading because sex scenes do not appeal to me. And besides the surfeit of sex, there are just so many hair-raising encounters, it began to be a bit tedious. And I never figured out why the Koreans wanted Morgan dead. Something to do with a wedding ring that she was given while in the Korean prison. Why didn't she just give it back to them?  Or give it to the CIA and let them deal with it? And Morgan: first she is this kick-ass woman who can deal with anything. And then she is a lost little girl who needs her big strong man to save her. Then she's back to being kick-ass woman tough enough to track down kidnapped Jack Temple and rescue him from the Koreans completely unaided. The story just left me confused.

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Awakening

 

By S.J. Bolton

Clara Benning is the local veterinarian. So when a plague of snakes descends upon the small town where she lives, the locals naturally turn to her for help. And help she can, having studied reptiles and snakes in the past. 

I did not know this, but apparently the British Isles do have a venomous snake species, the adder. So people understandably get upset when adders start showing up in their homes, among other less dangerous snakes. 

In the past, a local man of limited intellect was known for his obsession with snakes. But supposedly this man was in a medical facility and not in the area. People begin to suspect that maybe this man has returned to the village and is the one behind the sudden influx of snakes. Why he would be doing it may be tied to a fire at a church decades ago.

At first it is mostly just an annoying if a bit of a frightening nuisance. Then a deadly snake native from Papua New Guinea is found in the bed of a little baby. The whole village is looking to Clare for help not only to deal with the snakes but to track down whoever is sending dangerous snakes into the village.

*SPOILER* I liked this story a lot until the end when the killer turns out to be someone who was thought to be dead and buried for decades. I mean, how is the reader supposed to solve the mystery on their own when the author resurrects a corpse? But up to that point, I enjoyed it.  Clare has personal problems that make her an interesting detective mainly due to a childhood accident that left her with a nasty scar on her face. Which, for the most part, she is failing to deal with in a healthy manner. But she is smart, stubborn, daring and knowledgeable. And quite likeable. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Eye of the Monster

 

By Andre Norton

Ishkur is a planet that has an intelligent native population that, so far, has been welcoming to the humans who have arrived to set up trading posts and other small operations. They humans have been joined by group of Salarikans, cat-like fellow off-worlders anxious to exploit a newly discovered world. 

Rees Naper, a young man on the cusp of adulthood, lives at his uncle's mission. He came to live with the uncle after his father died. But he doesn't get along with his uncle. Once of the main sources of disagreement is Rees' assessment of the native Ishkurians. Rees doesn't trust these reptilians while the uncle refuses to admit they might be dangerous, even after they have received word that the natives are up to something and they are advised to leave the mission and come to safety at the spaceport, where transportation off Ishkur is available if needed.

Giving up on reasoning with his stubborn uncle, Rees heads off to his job and on the way he also comes across the young child of one of the local traders, Gordy. He lets Gordy tag along with him and arrives at his job only to find everyone missing and his boss' pet dog cruelly abused and tortured. He has to put the poor dog down. He realizes that the warnings his uncle decided to ignore have come true and that the native Ishkurians are on the rampage. He needs to get back to the mission but decides to stop at the Salarikan compound to warn them of the danger. But he is too late. He finds a scene of slaughter and only one survivor, a young Salarikan girl. All three of them head to the mission, but once again it is too late. The natives got there first and no human is left alive, including the uncle. 

Now Rees has to get himself and his two young charges to safety and away from a native population seems determined to eradicate every foreigner on their world. 

High adventure as the young hero struggles to respond to the dangers he now faces, a story meant to appeal, I think, to teenage boys. It was a good read, but we are never told what sparked the native rampage. Which was quite annoying. 

Daybreak 2250 A.D.

 

By Andre Norton

Fors was different. His most obvious difference was his silver white hair. But he had other differences that weren't so obvious, like his superior night vision. Too bad for Fors, mutants were not appreciated in his village, the descendants of the survivors of worldwide  nuclear war. 

Keeping human lineage pure was very important to these people, fearing the mutations that result from a poisoned world. So when Fors came of age, instead of stepping into the role of scout and explorer that he expected, he was ignored as if he did not exist. So he left, setting out to explore the world on his own and prove that he was just as worthy as anyone, accompanied by his cat companion, Lura.

His father, who died while out exploring, had a scrap of an old pre-war map that might lead to a ruined city. These urban areas were a source of materials and knowledge to the survivors of the catastrophe. But the cities were dangerous. They were the lairs of the Beast Things, dangerous half-human, half-beast mutants that killed everything that entered their domains. Fors' father may have even fallen victim to the Beast Things. But Fors is determined to follow the map his father left behind.

It is not long before Fors sees other people out in the world but he avoids for his own safety. It is also not long before he has an unfortunate encounter with a wild boar that results in a bad gash to his leg. The injury slows him down for a time, but soon he gets back on the trail, riding on a horse that has escaped from the Plainsmen, a nomadic tribe of cattle herders. 

His father's map does leads him to the city. It is full of fascinating treasures. And something else: the Beast Things. It is too dangerous to stay there. But before he can leave he finds one of the men he noticed on his travels laying in a deadfall trap, gravely injured. He helps the man out of the trap and in the process finds a true friend. Together, the two young men will explore the world, facing dangerous creatures and hostile humans and learning that maybe the old ways are not always the best ways. 

This was quite an action adventure, as Fors and his cat companion Lura and his new friend and fellow explorer Arskane go from catastrophe to catastrophe, from scrape to scrape, from battle to battle. For me, it was exhausting as these two guys struggle to survive all the dangers they encounter. I think maybe the book was really intended for a younger and male audience, not a tired old woman like me. It's not a bad read. Just not for me. 

Dork Covenant : The Collected Dork Tower, Volume 1

 

By John Kovalic

From Wikipedia: "Dork Tower is an online comic created, written and drawn by John Kovalic. It chronicles the lives of a group of geeks living in the fictional town of Mud Bay, Wisconsin. Mud Bay's design is strongly influenced by the author's home town of Madison, Wisconsin."

Here are a couple of comics from this really funny collection:

Sanctuary Sparrow

 

By Ellis Peters

Its 1140 CE in Britain. Liliwin is an itinerant entertainer. He juggles, dances, plays a rebec and sings, and is an acrobat. He was hired to entertain at a wedding reception but during his performance the guests got rowdy and jostled Liliwin, and a vase is broken. 

The matriarch of the family is a tightfisted old harridan and she refuses to pay Liliwin his full fee, deducting the cost of vase from his pay. This upsets Liliwin and words are exchanged and he leaves. But he comes back later, to speak to the father of the groom, asking to be paid, and is successful.  Liliwin leaves and goes to sleep in the fields since he cannot afford to pay for a room, being a very poor young man.

But the father is attacked soon after Liliwin was there. He gets bashed in the head and robbed, but doesn't see his attacker. The wedding party is still going on and the guests jump to the conclusion that Liliwin was the attacker and set forth in an angry mob to hunt him down. Liliwin hears them coming but manages to escape to the Abbey, where he claims sanctuary. The mob is forced to back off when the Abbot honors Liliwin's claim and give him sanctuary. Claiming sanctuary was an old custom where a person can reside within the safety of a church for about a month. So Liliwin can remain safely within the bounds of the church for forty days while the sheriff's men investigate the attack on Walter Aurifaber, the father of the groom. Of course, the one of the investigators is Brother Cadfael, member of the Abbey and well-known for his investigative skills and herbal concoctions.

Clearly Liliwin is innocent of the attack and the theft of Aurifaber's treasure. It doesn't take long to turn up another likely suspect, the man's own son, Daniel. Even though Daniel is the newlywed, he has lover, a beautiful and greedy young woman who is the wife of a much older man, an older man who often has to travel out of town on business. In order to keep her happy, both men ply her with gifts, the spouse, of course, not aware of Daniel's connection to his wife. The spouse can afford the gifts and trinkets she requires. But Daniel cannot. His tightfisted grandmother keeps control of the family finances and that means Daniel is chronically short of funds. Did his desperation to placate his lover drive him to attack and rob his own father? 

But then someone else turns up dead: a local busybody who was known to stick his pointy nose in other people's business. Was he killed because he knew too much? Or did he try to blackmail the wrong person? Brother Cadfael will root out the murderer and all the secrets too. 

This was an enjoyable read, with an interesting mystery that Cadfael figures out with his usual wit and compassion and his vast knowledge of plants and herbs. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Seeker

 

By Jack McDevitt

About 9000 years in the future, humans have spread throughout the galaxy. But back in the early days of spaceflight, a group of wealthy people put together an expedition to a new world, the location of which they kept secret, because they were disaffected with the state of society on Earth at the time. They left Earth and were never heard again.

So much time has passed that these early pioneers are dismissed as ancient myth. Their story has become a fantasy and no one really believes it was an actual event. 

Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath are famous treasure hunters, an occupation that has made them very wealthy. One day a woman brings a cup to them, a gift from her ex-boyfriend, that she believes may be valuable. And it is because it is over 9000 years old and may have been part of the table service of one of the spaceships that took the lost colonists to their secret world. 

Alex and Chase are now on the hunt for that ship and the lost world, not just for the riches it will bring them, but just to figure out what really happened to all those people and why they were never heard from again. But with a treasure this important and valuable, a soon as word leaks, others are going to want a piece of this fantastic pie. 

This was a pretty good story, if a bit too long. I thought his solution as to why the colonists vanished was really interesting and clever. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Adulthood Is A Myth

 

By Sarah Andersen

Sarah Andersen is a young artist who started posting comic strips online. She now has several collections of her comics available for purchase. Adulthood Is A Myth was her first book, published in 2016.

I came across her comics on Bored Panda. I didn't find out she had a book out until recently but since I enjoyed her comics on Bored Panda, I gladly bought a copy. And I really enjoyed it. 

Here are a couple comics from the book:

Chess With a Dragon

 

By David Gerrold

The galaxy is full of intelligent, space faring species. And now humans are one of those species. Being mammals, humans are looked down on by most of the other beings as insectoids and reptilians make up the majority of the intelligent creatures of the galaxy. 

New to the game, the humans start using the InterChange, which is a vast library filled with the combined knowledge of thousands of civilizations, downloading as much as they can, as quickly as they can. But they are brought up short when it is made clear to them that all that information is not free. In fact, humans have run up such a huge debt that it will be impossible to pay. For now the only way the debt can be paid is give all humankind into indentured servitude. Which, it turns out, is SOP among the civilizations of the galaxy. All the newbies are given access to the InterChange but are not informed, until it is too late, that it is not a free service. It is a pyramid of slavery, with the youngest races at the bottom and the oldest races at the top. 

But mammals haven't managed to survive in a galaxy filled with insectoids and reptilians without learning a few things. The humans turn to the Rh/attes, another mammalian species, for help because the Rh/attes work for the guys at the top, the Dragons. The Rh/attes have been part of this galaxy-wide game for a very long time. So with a few hints from the Rh/attes and their own ingenuity, the humans hope to beat the galaxy at its own game. 

This was quite the fun and crazy read. Less than 170 pages long, it was also a fast and easy read, although I was a bit lost in the first few chapters. Really enjoyable though. 

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Iron Cage

 

By Andre Norton

Jony's mother and father were captured by the Zhalan and carried off their home planet and into space, caged like livestock and powerless to resist the might of the giant captors. The father, Bron, was killed by the Zhalan and Jony's mom, Rutee, was left alone in her cage, where she gave birth to their son, Jony. The Zhalan used mind control to force their captives to do as they wanted them to. But both Rutee and Jony are able to resist the mind control and manage to escape the Zhalan slave ship when it is on a planet, gathering specimens to add to their cages. 

Rutee is heavily pregnant and begins to go into labor once she and Jony are free from the slave ship. The two humans are found by a local person who helps Rutee and cares for the two infants that soon arrive. The local is a large bearlike being who is the member of a small clan who take Rutee and Jony into their homes. 

Many years later, Rutee has since passed on and Jony, with the help of the clan, is taking care of his younger brother and sister, Geogee and Maba. Rutee has been exploring a the ruins of a city that was possibly settled by humans millennia ago. It is full of strange and dangerous tech. When the bear people find out he was in the ruins, they exile him from the clan, much to his distress. But when a space ship lands nearby and his siblings are taken into the ship, along with two of the bear people, it is up to Rutee to rescue them. This space ship is not one of the Zhalan slave ships and its crew is humans just like Rutee and they welcome him and the his two siblings. But Rutee is outraged when he finds his two bear friends, shackled and caged like animals and he turns against his human rescuers. 

This was quite an interesting story. Rutee makes a lot of mistakes, especially in his handling of his young brother and sister. But he tries to make amends for his errors and protect not only his siblings but the bear people to whom he owes everything.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Lord of Thunder

By Andre Norton

The sequel to The Beast Master. 

Hosteen Storm, former Beast Master for the military during the war against the Xik, has started to settle into his new holding on the planet, Arzor, when he is approached by two men wanting to hire him. They need to go into territory held by the indigenous natives, the Norbies. The Norbies are  not human and their technology is at a stone age level. Basically they are analogous to the native American tribes at the time of the European expansion to the Americas. The problem is two-fold, though. First, it is the hottest, driest time of the year, when it is dangerous to travel through the back country. Second, the area they want to enter is forbidden to non-Norbies and will create bad relations between the Norbies and non-Norbies, maybe even leading to war. 

Storm at first refuses to lead the two, explaining that it is just too dangerous. However, the one man is looking for his son, whose space ship has crashed in the forbidden zone and the man will not let anyone stop him from trying to rescue his son. And the other man, who works for the government, wants to gather intelligence on the activities of the Norbies in the forbidden zone, to see if the Norbie tribes are planning to start a war with the non-Norbie colonists.  

Storm agrees to serve as guide for the expedition, helped by his Norbie friends. But as they get closer to the forbidden area, Storm loses control of the expedition when the first man leaves on his own after drugging Storm and the others. Storm sets off after the man but he falls into the hands of a hostile cannibal tribe of Norbies. He manages to escape and he discovers that these Norbies are using some dangerous and unknown alien tech. But the true master of this technology turns out not to be one of the natives. The one the Norbies call the Lord of Thunder, who can call down lightning and fire from the heavens turns out to be a human man who has mastered the technology of the old ones, those mysterious beings whose purpose and origin are hidden in depths of time.

This was an OK read. To me, the Norbies are just too derivative of First Nations peoples of the Americas. It felt like the author couldn't be bothered to create a really different alien species with a stone age technology and so just basically made Native Americans with a couple of biological differences. Similar tribal structure, similar hunter/gatherer lifestyle, even similar religious beliefs and the use of drums in ceremonies, it was all just too familiar. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Whispers

 

By Lisa Jackson

Three sisters, born into wealth and privilege, come together one terrible night and concoct a story to cover up what really happened to the man one of them was engaged to marry, pleading ignorance of the events that led to his death.

All three sisters were emotionally scarred by the events of that night, so much so that the trauma still lingered many years later. Summoned home by their autocratic father after years away, they are informed by him that he has hired an investigator to discover the truth of what happened the night Harley Taggert was killed. The father has been contemplating a run for governor and he doesn't want any hidden scandals coming up to taint his run. He has long suspected that his three daughters were somehow connected to Harley's death. 

Confronted with this news brings back all the old memories of that night. Harley's fiancée was the middle daughter, Claire, and she was with Harley on his boat the night he died. She broke up with him that night when she realized that she was attracted to another boy. When Claire left Harley, he was alive and well. How he ended up dead came as a complete surprise to Claire. Her two sisters know more about the happenings of that night than they are willing to say. Claire agrees to go along with the story they have cooked up for her sisters' sakes. Claire was never told what really happened between Miranda and Paige, her sisters, and Harley, her ex-fiancé. Now, though, thanks to their father, all three sisters have to face up to what happened that tragic night. 

This was an OK read. However, if the sisters had just been honest with each other, Harley's killer might have been revealed a lot sooner. It didn't make a lot of sense that Miranda decided that Claire had to remain in the dark about the true events of that night. 

Also, the book is really long, a lot longer than it needed to be. I wish editors would cut a lot of the verbiage out of these novels that are much longer than needed to tell their story. Over 400 pages for what is basically a rather generic mystery story is too much. Do authors get paid by the word? Is that why novels have gotten longer and longer and longer?

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

The Smoke Ring

 

By Larry Niven

Sequel to The Integral Trees

First, a note about the "world" of the Smoke Ring. This is from Wikipedia, since it explains it much better than I could ever hope to. 

"The story occurs around the fictional neutron star Levoy's Star (abbreviated "Voy"). The gas giant Goldblatt's World (abbreviated "Gold") orbits this star just outside its Roche limit and therefore its gravity is insufficient to keep its atmosphere, which is pulled loose into an independent orbit around Voy and forms a ring that is known as a gas torus. The gas torus is huge—one million kilometers thick—but most of it is too thin to be habitable. The central part of the Gas Torus, where the air is thicker, is known as the Smoke Ring. The Smoke Ring supports a wide variety of life. No "ground" exists in the Smoke Ring; it consists entirely of sky. Furthermore, the Smoke Ring is in orbit and therefore in free fall: there is no "up" or "down"."

The settlers of Citizen Tree are unexpectedly introduced to tree logging when a logger vessel approaches their tree. The logging vessel is on fire and the settlers rush  to help the loggers battle the flames. Four people are rescued but one doesn't make it, too badly hurt in the explosion that caused the fire. 

The newcomers are welcomed and it is assumed they will become part of Citizen Tree's small community. But the settlers didn't know about the logging and the propulsion system used to pilot the logging vessel. Most of which is centered around equipment brought to the Smoke Ring five hundred years ago by their ancestors from Earth. As the newcomers tell of their life of harvesting the integral trees and of bringing the wood to be sold at the market at the Admiralty, the settlers are intrigued. The Admiralty uses technology that came from Earth and it has quite a large population of several thousand humans compared to most of the communities surviving in the Smoke Ring. 

But Citizen Tree has technology too. It has a Silver Suit and a CARM vehicle which stands for Cargo And Repair Module. The Silver Suit is an armored space suit. 

Due to their five hundred plus years inhabiting the Smoke Ring, which is a weightless environment, most human have become much taller and much thinner. So the average person cannot fit into one of the Silver Suits. But occasionally a throwback is born which they call dwarfs. The dwarf humans are of a size to comfortably wear the space suit. 

Sailing above the Smoke Ring is the Discipline, the ship that brought humans to the Smoke Ring. It is being piloted by a computer that goes by the name of Kendy and Kendy is in contact with a few of the people of Citizen's Tree. Kendy wants to help humans survive more successfully and so it encourages a small group of settlers to take the CARM and travel to the Admiralty. They will be accompanied by two of the tree loggers who are familiar with the life and customs of those who run the Admiralty. 

They will have adventures and learn many things and meet many people and as Kendy monitors from above, it comes to realize that they don't really need its help or guidance and are quite capable of figuring things out on their own.

This was a more enjoyable read than the first book, The Integral Trees, simply because it concentrates less on the science and more on the story. It's really an adventure story and a bit lighter in tone than the first book was. It's a strange weird place for humans to be living, the Smoke Ring. And it does strange weird things to human bodies as they gradually adapt to life in a weightless environment. Certainly well worth reading.

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

And That's My Final Offer!

 

By G.B. Trudeau

Doonesbury collection of daily newspaper strips from the 1970s.

I didn't enjoy this collection of cartoons as much as I have the others I have read. It's very political and too many of the strips are just talking heads. Like this:

Pretty boring. I actually started skipping the wordy ones.  Anyway, here are couple more strips from the collection:

Strong Poison

 

By Dorothy L. Sayers

Mystery writer Harriet Vane is on trial for murdering her ex-lover with arsenic, a poison she just happens to have been doing research about for a book she is working on. So she is quite knowledgeable about how to poison a person with arsenic. 

Lord Peter Wimsey, famous amateur detective, has been attending her trial and has fallen love with Harriet and has decided she must become his wife. When the jury cannot reach a decision, the trial is postponed until after the Christmas season, to resume in January. Which gives Wimsey time to do his own investigation into the murder with the goal of finding the real killer and freeing the woman he loves from prison. 

The victim was one Philip Boyes, who like Harriet was a writer, though not as successful as she was. Of course, his last movements were closely examined by the police investigators, with special attention paid to last things he ate and drank. His last meal was with a relative of his, Norman Urquhart. All the food and drink consumed at the meal were also consumed by other people, none of whom suffered any ill effects. However, Philip had stopped by Harriet's place to have a talk and had while there he consumed a cup of coffee. Thus the police concluded he must have been poisoned by Harriet. Now Wimsey has taken it upon himself to prove the police have arrested the wrong person.

This was an OK read. I thought it was kind of odd that Wimsey fell so hard for someone he had never actually met, beyond observing her in the courtroom. It just seemed so out of character for him, judging from what I know of him from previous books. Another problem I had was I already knew that people can build up resistance to arsenic by ingesting small amounts of it over a period of time. So it was pretty clear how the killer managed it. 

Another thing is that we really don't get to know Harriet very well or come to an understanding about what Wimsey finds so irresistible about her. It was certainly an abrupt introduction to an important new person in Wimsey's life. 

Best Friends Forever

 

By Jennifer Weiner

Young Addie Downs is lonely. She doesn't know how to make friends. She's kind of an outsider at school. Then a new family moves in across the street and that's how she meets the girl who will become her one and only and her best friend: Valerie Adler. Valerie is tall and thin and her mother doesn't pay much attention to her only child. 

Things are good until high school. Because Addie is overweight and Valerie has changed from being a gawky kid to graceful, attractive young woman. She becomes a cheerleader and forms new friendships and starts going to parties and school events. While Addie is still just an outsider and is becoming lonely again. Then Valerie is sexually assaulted by the star football player and she asks Addie not to tell anyone. But Addie doesn't listen and tells her parents. Which causes a big upset which is made even worse when Valerie denies it ever happened. 

Addie and Valerie go their separate ways. Valerie moves away but Addie stayed home and inherited her parents' house when they died. Addie gets her weight under control and even has a lover but when the high school reunion comes around, she doesn't attend. Too many bad memories and virtually no good memories of her time in high school. What she doesn't know is that Valerie did attend the reunion and she took revenge on the football player who had raped her back then. She left him naked and bleeding in the venue parking lot after she hit him with her car. Now she is at Addie's front door, begging her for help out of the fix she has gotten herself in.

This was an OK read. Addie is remarkably passive, annoyingly so. She lets people abuse her and take advantage and she never fights back. She lets Valerie back into her life and goes along with her whacky plan, which includes robbing a bank and running off together. I really didn't care much for either character.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Cotillion

 

By Georgette Heyer

Kitty always fancied her guardian's nephew, Jack Westruther. Handsome, athletic, charming, Jack was the epitome of a young girl's idea of a hero in the early 1800s.

Her guardian came up with the stupid idea of forcing one of his nephews into marrying Kitty by promising to leave his fortune to her. But if none of them came forward, she would be left penniless and his money would be left to some charity. Truth be told, he favored Jack as much as Kitty did but declared he wanted to treat all his nephews fairly. 

He has several nephews, including Jack, of course. But only three others could be possible suitors to Kitty other than Jack. There is Hugh, who is a member of the clergy. And Freddy, who is the only nephew who doesn't need their uncle's money as he has plenty of his own. There is Lord Dolpinton, a peer of a large Irish estate, which sounds pretty nice. But Dolphinton is mentally challenged and his estate is heavily encumbered with debt. All four have been invited to their uncle's estate to make their offers for Kitty. But the favorite of both Kitty and her guardian, Jack, refuses to show up, not liking to have his hand forced.

Of course Kitty and the old man are disappointed by Jack's failure to show. But Hugh, Dolphinton and Freddie all make their appearance. However Freddie did not know about the stipulations involving the old man's will and did not arrive intending to ask Kitty to marry him. As for Hugh and Dolphinton, Kitty has no romantic feelings for either man. Despite his lack of attendance, her heart is set on Jack. So she hatches a plot to get Jack's attention. If Jack will not come to Kitty, then Kitty will go to Jack. And she finagles Freddy into fake proposing and then getting her guardian to allow her to go to London with Freddy to be introduced to her "fiancé's" family. 

Kitty gets to go to London with Freddy. Which means pretty new clothes, stylish new hairdo, parties and fun and getting to know and form new friends. Some of these friends are not really the kind of people a young society maiden should be going around with. There's the beautiful Olivia, whose mother is willing to sell her daughter's maidenhood to the highest bidder. And there's Hannah, a plain speaking, working class woman who needs Kitty's help to free Dolphinton from the cruel clutches of his greedy, manipulative mother who has her sights set on acquiring Kitty as wife for her dim son. Kitty suddenly has a lot going on in her life after years spent on her guardian's quiet, rural estate. But the one thing missing is Jack who is keeping his distance, once again because he doesn't like having his hand forced and has easily seen through Kitty and Freddy's fake engagement. 

I guess the thing I liked best about this story is Freddy, who turns out to be a real gentleman with a kind and loving heart. He is always there to help Kitty whenever she needs him and doesn't try to squash her kind impulses and scold her for the mistakes she makes. Kitty wasn't all the that interesting to me and Jack barely makes an appearance in the story. I didn't really care about the Olivia story although I found the Dolphinton and Hannah story rather charming. 

It's an interesting story but I have never found it as entertaining as many of Heyer's other novels.

Here is a review by Alexa Adams on Austenprose.