Take a Bow, B.C.

 

By Johnny Hart

Copyright for this book is 1966 and 1967. In this collection we meet Grog, the prehistoric man, who is basically a head on legs. And also the apteryx (aka a kiwi bird) both of which are fun additions to the comic strip.

Swine Not?

 

By Jimmy Buffett

Rumpy is a pot-bellied pig that is originally from the New York City area. But she moved away when her humans moved away too. Now she is back in NYC, living on the roof of a posh hotel with Ellie, the mom and Ellie's two kids, Barley and Maple. Ellie is a pastry chef at the hotel and their accomdation was supplied by the hotel, the apartment on the hotel's roof.

The problem is that the hotel does not permit exotic pets, like pot-bellied pigs. So Rumpy has to be smuggled in to the rooftop apartment and out for walks and exercise. This chore is left mainly to the two kids, Barley and Maple. They figured out a way to sneak the pig in and out by hiding her in a room service trolley.

What no one in Rumpy's human family knows is that Rumpy is a pig on a mission. She wants to find her twin brother, Lukie, with whom she lost contact when she moved with her family away from NYC. Fortunately, she has made contact with a squadron of pigeons, the Pigilantes, who patrol the skies above the local environs and who know everything worth knowing about the area.

I don't know how I ended up with this book. It became quite obvious that this is meant for kids. I expect they would find it funny and exciting and interesting. I found it boring. Oddly, Google's AI says the book was intended for general audiences. I don't really understand how that could be. It's not even slightly funny.

B.C. Big Wheel

 

By Johnny Hart

The copyright dates from 1963 and 1964. This collection features the usual gang and their lives in the beginning of time with modern times popping in unexpectedly through golf and baseball and hotels and a snakeskin marked as made in Japan. We also find out that the turtle's name is John. Named after the author? Time marches on but the comic strips remains just as funny as when it first started out.

The Rivals

 

By Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A play in five acts. This edition comes with a Preface, by the author, and two Prologues and an Epilogue. It was Sheridan's first play, staged in 1775.

The main characters are Lydia Languish and Captain Absolute, aka Ensign Beverly. Second in importance are Julia, Lydia's cousin, and Faulkland, Captain Absolute's friend.

Captain Absolute is in love with Lydia. But apparently Lydia has a romantic fantasy of an illict lover and subsequent elopement. Catering to her fantasy, Captain Absolute becomes Ensign Beverly, a young man of little means and wholely unacceptable to her family and with the promise of defiance to Julia's family and an exciting elopement. 

Meanwhile, there is Lydia's cousin, Julia, who is engaged to be married to Faulkland. However, Faulkland seems to be unable to accept that Julia truly loves him and is constantly testing her love to see if it is genuine. Which ultimately leads to romantic disaster.

Back to the Captain, disguised as Beverly, who finds his romantic pursuit blows up in his face when Lydia learns he is not a penniless nobody, but a man of wealth and of good family. All her silly dreams of a runaway marriage dissolve and she is left feeling duped and resentful.

Throw in a couple duels, a cowardly country rube and an unreasonably angry Irishman, and a couple of confounded parental types, and you have a screwball comedy that was probably considered hilarious in its day. I watched a stage performance of the play on YouTube and the laughs were few and far between. Mildly amusing at the most.

Middlegame

 

By Seanan McGuire

A. Deborah Baker was probably the world's most skilled modern alchemist. So skilled she manufactured a human being of her own, James Reed. Reed was also a greatly skilled alchemist which is something his peers should have kept in mind. But just like they did with Baker, treating her as inferior simply because she was a woman, they also acknowledged Reed's skills but did not give him the respect he craved. For this error, they would pay for their lives in one fell swoop.

Reed was an ambitious creature and he wanted to rule the Universe by bringing about the Impossible City. Once this was accomplished, he would have the powers of an actual god. But since Reed was a cruel monster, this would be horrendous for everyone and everything else.

Reed had a plan. If he could embody the Doctrine of Ethos in human form, this would trigger the Impossible City. [I wish I could explain this idea better, but frankly it is way beyond my ability to even understand what the author was on about.] Reed did this by making lab grown twin babies who, as they matured, would come together and [ I didn't comprehend that part either] become the Doctrine of Ethos. [I never figured out what the Doctrine of Ethos was.] 

There were lots of failures. But finally Reed has two sets of twins who seemed to be shaping up to attain success manifesting the Doctrine. The oldest set was headed down the right track, but there were also problems. The younger set of twins was Reed's backup plan if the first set crashed and burned.

So the plan required that the twins be kept separate until maturity. So one twin was fostered on the East Coast of the US and the other twin on the West Coast. But distance was not enough to keep the kids apart and they found each other, psychically. The male twin, Roger, was a whiz at words. The female twin, Dodger, was a whiz at math.

Meanwhile, Reed and his chief minion, Leigh, the bloodthirsty witch, were busy making life hard for the younger set of twins and for anyone else who happened to be in their orbit. These two villains are just about as nasty as is possible to be. 

By the time Roger and Dodger are college age, Reed has decided they will not do and he sends his minions to murder them. But one of the minions is not loyal and she helps Roger and Dodger escape. Leigh, the witch, hunts them down and the battle ensues.

This book was way too long. And it required a suspension of belief of which I was not capable. I never got the Doctine of Ethos thing figured out or why it's achievement would create godlike beings of the twins or why once they reached their godhood they would pay any attention to the crazed desires of those two lunatic monsters, Reed and Leigh. 

Most of the book is about Roger and Dodger growing up and finding each other and discovering their special connection. On and on it went, it got really boring. And the evil machinations of Reed and Leigh in the background also went on and on.

But towards the end, it was like reading a video game, where the two hero twins have to face the final bosses. Meh. I don't like those kind of video games. The closer I got to the end, the more I just skipped so much wordage, just wanting it over. Frankly, if I hadn't spent almost $30 for the book, I probably would have just quit halfway, 250 pages in.

However, it seems lots of readers really like the book. So I will call it a good read. I just think I was not brainy enough to enjoy it. Maybe it should have a warning, like You Must Have a High IQ to Understand this Novel.

Here is a review by Kirkus.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

 

By Jeanette Waterson

An novel, even though the main character is also named Jeanette and her and the author were both adopted by religious fanatics. So that's something.

Anyway, fictional Jeanette is adopted by Christian fundamentalists. Well, actually the mother is the religious nutter. The father is a nonentity in the story. The mother, Louie, is quite devoted to her religion and her adopted daughter is being raised in the faith too. No problem, the daughter is nearly as gung-ho as the mother. That is until love enters the picture, in the form of another girl.

So Jeanette's first love is a girl and so is her second love and her third love and so on. Which is ok until Louie finds out and blabs everything to the church she is devoted to. And the churchy people decide Jeanette is possessed by the devil and needs an exorcism. Jeanette doesn't respond well to the exorcism and becomes quite ill. 

When she recovers, it soon become apparent that the exorcism was a failure because Jeanette is still falling in loves with girls. Eventually her sexual preference results in not only being kicked out of their little church but out of the only home she has ever known. Now nearly grown, she has to find work and make her own way in the world without the love and support of her adoptive parents. 

This supposedly comic novel, per the blurbs on the cover ("[Waterson] has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel." "A daring, unconventional comic novel . . . told with romping humor" "quirky and subtle hilarity of Winterson's autobiographical first novel") was boring and not what I would call comical or subtly hilarious. And it is interspersed with some weird fantasy stuff that was puzzling and I supposed was an allegory for the character's feelings or life or whatever, but I didn't care for those intrusions into the story. 

But apparently the literary world loves this novel, so what do I know? Nothing, most likely.

This is not a review but is a distillation by John Crace (Digested Classics it's called) from The Guardian. It pretty much covers the main points and I get the feeling he didn't really care much for the fantasy bits either.

Rogue Protocol

 

By Martha Wells

Third book in the Murderbot Diaries.

Rin is headed off to a terraforming facility orbiting a planet as a leg in its search to gather more information about the evil corporation GrayCris that was behind the deaths in the first book, All Systems Red, boarding a ship as a stowaway. The ship contains a small group of humans and their humanoid pet bot Miki. The humans have been hired to inspect the terraforming facility before the new owners take possession. 

But, once again, Rin finds itself having to defend a bunch of hapless humans incapable of defending themselves, especially when it becomes clear that the two security people they hired are working with the attackers. Rin again questions itself about why it keeps getting involved with defenseless humans.

I think one of the best things about this series, other than the main character, is that the books are not 300 or 400 pages long. This one is only 158 pages long. I enjoy reading books but these modern books are just too full of excessive details. I really feel most novels today could use serious trimming. It is so nice to sit down to read a book you know you can finish reading in a day or two. 

But besides the convenient length of the book, is Rin. Once again Rin is smack in the middle of a huge mess and not only manages to extricate itself, it also saves the humans involved. And learns a lesson about the itself too, in the form of the pet bot, Miki. Just an exciting and touching story, I'm looking forward to the next book in the series, Exit Strategy.

Kirkus Reviews has a review of the novel.

The Long Walk

 

By Slavomir Rawicz

The story of several prisoners in Russian work camps during World War II who managed to escape and walk all the way from Siberia to India. They were helped by the wife of camp commander. This woman (my opinion) may have had a grudge against the ruling communist regime of the time for sending her husband run a prison camp so far from civilization. 

Despite her help and their considerable abilities to fend for themselves, not all of them survived to reach freedom though. Of course walking through Siberia in the wintertime was not easy but they were actually pretty well dressed, having pilfered furs from the stocks of the prison camp. But worse than Siberia was crossing the Gobi desert because not only did they face hunger, they also faced the lack of water sources and they failed to bring containers beyond each person's canteen to carry extra water. Plus, by the time they were in the desert, it was in the summer and daytime heat was extreme. They lost two people to kidney failure from lack of water. Then, traveling through the mountains, they lost one man to a fall. But they did eventually reach India and safety.

According to most sources, this tale is fiction. One thing that makes me think it is fiction is that the group of escapees encountered a beautiful teenage girl who was also on the run and she joined them on the trek only to die in the desert. This seemed to me to be a character added to the story to make it more appealing to a wider audience. Also, according to records from that time, Rawicz was released  from the Russian prison in 1942, he wasn't an escapee.

But whether true or fabricated, it's still an interesting story. Of course, it loses a lot of its drama if it is fiction, though. 

Our Share of Night

 

By Mariana Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

This really isn't going to be a review but a reminder to myself to not ever get this book again. Fine words are spoken about it that may fool me again, just like they did this time. 

So, I didn't care for it from the very beginning. It just wasn't interesting. Plus there was too much untranslated Spanish in it. But mainly I put it down after I read the passage where the person I think is the main character, Juan, abuses his young son:

"Juan got up and said, Do as I say, go, right now, and when Gaspar refused again, sniffling with his arms crossed, Juan slapped him on the cheek with his open palm, a blow that swung Gaspar's face around, making him wobble on the stool and finally lose his balance. He fell and landed on his side with a dry thump, and the stool also toppled to the floor, barely missing him. Juan went over to him and yanked him roughly up, ignoring his cries, and saw the red mark on his cheek and his swollen lip. The pang of regret disappeared as soon as Gaspar started to cry. Stop it, he said. He grabbed his son's hair and forced him to meet his eyes, straining his neck backward. He shook the boy's head, and felt the soft, sweaty hair get tangled in his fingers. Don't be weak, nothing happened. Gaspar tried to say something: the chair, the slap; Juan raised his hand threateningly again, and the boy stopped crying. Go get changed, he repeated, and don't make me tell you again."

So when I read that, I thought, fuck you, Juan. And I decided I didn't give a shit about Juan and whatever happened to him. And I gave the book away. I didn't rate it a bad read because I didn't read it and the consensus seems to be that it is a good read.

Kirkus Reviews has a review of the novel.

A Closed and Common Orbit

 

By Becky Chambers

This is a continuation of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

The story has two main characters, Pepper aka Jane and Lovelace aka Lovey aka Sidra. Pepper is the owner of a small shop that does repairs of tech equipment. Sidra is an artificial intelligence who used to maintain a starship. But it was reset and removed from the starship and placed in an artificial human-appearing body by Pepper.

In this story we learn about Pepper's childhood. Known as Jane 23, she was a child worker in a factory that refurbished used parts. The factory is run by robots referred by the child workers as Mothers. It's a harsh and strict life and children who don't measure up are simply eliminated. Jane escapes one night only to find herself in a huge junkyard, the source of the tech that she and the other kids worked on. Knowing that going back to the factory will mean her death, Jane wanders until she is guided to safety by a disembodied voice. The voice turns out to be the AI of a grounded spaceship. The AI, named Owl, has been stranded alone in the ship for a long time after its crew was arrested for trespassing. Owl is thrilled to have someone to interact with. It gets Jane into the ship and together they work over the years to make the ship useable again to escape the hostile inhabitants of the junkyard planet. 

Some ten years later is when Pepper (Jane 23) takes on the responsibility of helping the AI that was known as Lovelace adapt to no longer being the AI of a spaceship but instead was inhabiting a "human" body, a situation it was never meant to be in. It has a lot to learn and some programming from its past life to deal with.

The AIs in the story are sentient and the story is a look at the idea that a sentient machine is a person that has thoughts and feelings. I didn't find Lovelace/Sidra's story all that interesting. It was OK but not much happens.

The Pepper/Jane 23 story is much more interesting. Beyond their training, the children in the factory are not taught anything except obedience. So once she is free of the factory, Jane is facing a dangerous world without the common knowledge that most would take for granted. For instance, she didn't know there was an outside of the factory. She had never seen the sun, or trees, or animals and she is ignorant of how dangerous some animals can be. So Jane and Owl work together to keep Jane alive and safe and get the ship repaired by scavenging parts from the huge junkyard the ship is stuck in.

The Guardian has a review of the novel.

John Dies at the End

 

By Jason Pargin aka David Wong

David Wong was just an ordinary man with a rather nutty friend, John. But ordinary soon goes away when John and David are exposed to a magician who calls himself Robert Marley. Robert has a drug called soy sauce due to a similarity in its appearance to actual soy sauce. It gives users, including David and John, the ability to perceive the supernatural beings intruding on our world. 

Soon after this revelation, David and John have their world turned upside down. Joined by a dog, Molly, who is also on the soy sauce and Jennifer Lopez, David's high school unrequited crush (not the famous Jennifer Lopez) and later Amy Sullivan, the sister of the man who was Molly's owner, they mainly fight to stay alive while dealing with the agents of the enemy, an lunatic being from another dimension or universe with a penchant for mindless cruelty who goes by various forms of the name Korrok.

This novel is described as horror/comedy. I found it to be mainly just horror and only mildly amusing occasionally. It is very chaotic, with people being dead and alive at the same time and way too much strange and peculiar events going on all the time. I was glad when I finished it. It was just too gross and gruesome for me.

Kirkus has a review of the book.

It was made into a movie, John Dies at the End that came out in 2012 and stars Chase Williamson (who?) as David and Rob Mayes (?) as John and Paul Giamatti as a secondary character, the only actor in the movie whose name sounded familiar to me.

Version Control

 

By Dexter Palmer

Rebecca Steiner is married to a physicist, Philip, who is trying to create a device that is essentially a time machine, although he and his team hate it being called a time machine.

Philip Steiner's project is being funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a division of the Department of  Defense. He is in charge of a team of physicists who are making the machine, the Causality Violation Device do what Steiner's theory thinks it will do. 

Rebecca and Philip had a young son, Sean, who died in a car crash caused by a glitch in the operation of Artificial Intelligence piloted vehicles. Rebecca was the ostensible driver of the vehicle, although she was extremely inebriated and relying solely on the AI to do the driving and she was not able to take control of the vehicle quickly enough to avoid the pileup caused by the glitch.

Rebecca works from home as a customer service representative for an online dating service, Lovability. She is very good at her job and is known for her ability to talk subscribers into upgrading their subscription to more costly plans that offer more services. The author has some interesting things to say about dating services. He points out that the sites are not there to match customers to the perfect person. They have to maintain a balance between making successful matches and making too few matches. Because the longer they can keep people engaged with their site, the more data they acquire which they can then sell to interested businesses. As the author says, "So the goal is not maximum efficiency in pairing mates, but optimal inefficiency. The site maximizes revenue when takes as long as possible to make matches without taking so long that its members give up and stop using it." 

One day, Rebecca comes home earlier than she was expected.  And catches Philip having sex with a woman who is one of the physicists working on the Causality Violation Device. For revenge, she goes to his lab, intending to mess with his work. Instead, she steps inside the Causality Violation Device and back out after a few seconds.

That is the start of the second half of the novel. In which we find that the boy Sean didn't die in the crash, instead Philip was driving and he died in the crash. Which probably the best revenge a jilted wife could have on an unfaithful husband. But that is not the end of the story, there is still half the book to finish reading. The second half is titled "The Shadow Brought Backward."

This was on OK read although I thought it was way too long and delved too deeply in the private life of Rebecca and Philip. It was more like one of those dysfunctional family novels with a smidge of science fiction. I would almost call it chick lit, honestly.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Everyone Worth Knowing

 

 By Lauren Weisberger

Bette Robinson is a young woman who is bored by her job working at a Manhattan banking business. Finally she reaches her breaking point and impulsively quits her job. Afterward, she kind of drifts for awhile until her Uncle Will gets her an interview with an up and coming public relations firm run by Kelly, the one who coined the title of the book: 'So how do you know all these people?'

She [Kelly] just laughed. 'I have an office full of people whose job it is to know everyone  worth knowing.'

 Kelly's business, as described by Bette's Uncle Will: "Darling, she does a lot more than just plan parties. She chitchats with club owners and trades on gossip she has about other people's clients to the columnists so they'll write good things about her own clients and sends gifts to celebrities to convince them to attend her events so the press will as well—all the while looking very pretty when she goes out every night. Yes, the more I think about it, the more I'd like to see you in event-planning."

Bette does become an event planner and finds she has a knack for the job. It's very intense and complicated, requiring massive coordinating and planning and contacts with VIPs and their clients. At first it is a bit overwhelming but Bette powers through. She becomes involved with one of the VIP celebrities, Philip Weston, but their relationship is mostly just for show. She meets another man that she finds very appealing but this man, Sammy, seems aloof and possibly already involved with another woman.

As she grows in competence, Bette finds satisfaction in her ability to handle everything her new job requires of her. But it turns out to be a 24/7 job and her social life falls apart when all her spare time is taken up by the work. She realizes that no job is more important than the people in your life. She is losing touch with friends and family because her life is being consumed by her job.

This was an interesting story, a look behind the scenes of a successful PR business.  Besides the two love interests, Bette also has to cope with misleading stories about herself showing up in the gossip pages due to her connection to Philip Weston.

The book is rather long, my copy was 367 pages which seems to be par for the course these days. Too long, in my opinion. Still overall I enjoyed the story.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Warlock Holmes : A Study in Brimstone

 

By G.S. Denning

Based on Sherlock Holmes stories, this collection contains six stories, starting with when Dr. Watson first joins Holmes in his adventures. Watson is ex-military who is still recovering from wounds received in combat. And Holmes is a strange, mystical fellow with connections to demons and other arcane beings. Watson is actually the more observant of the two but Holmes is peculiar and unpredictable.

Like the originals, these stories feature people coming to Holmes for help or people encountered who need help. Holmes also has the help of two of Britain's finest, Detective Inspector Torg Grogsson, an ogre and Inspector Vladislav Lestrade, a vampire. Also there is a  version of the Baker Street Regulars except these are the Baker Street Irregulars, a pack of rats led by a shapeshifting ratboy.

The six stories:

• A Study in Brimstone
• The Adventure of the Resident Sacrifice
• The Case of the Cardboard... Case
• The Adventure of the Yellow Bastard
• The Adventure of the _eckled  _and
• Charles Augustus Milverton: Soulbinder

Holmes in these stories in similar to the original in that they are both enigmas. Original Holmes for his intellect and uncanny powers of observation. And this Holmes for his uncanny and secret powers that he uses for his own benefit and to bring each case to a satisfactory conclusion.

I enjoyed the humor encountered in the stories. As far as whether the stories are takes on the original Sherlock Holmes stories, I don't know as I have never really read the Holmes stories. I did recognize one story that's a take on the original, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band". But only that one.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

 

By Dennis E. Taylor

Bob Johansson made quite a lot of money in the tech industry and he used part of that money to pay for a place in a cryonics business where his frozen head would be stored upon his death. Which is exactly what happened when Bob died unexpectedly soon after.

But things went downhill in the world after Bob's head was frozen. The religious fanatics took over the USA and threw out the Constitution and set up a theocracy. 

Bob woke up from his frozen sleep but instead of being a living person, he is a program on a computer. So not really alive but circumstances force him to confront his new existence. Circumstances also force him to go along with the religious nuts who now own him as he either has to do as told or be deleted. 

His task, as he soon figures out, is to be the guiding artificial intelligence for a deep space probe to be shortly launched with the goal of finding livable planets as the political situation on Earth seems to be headed to global nuclear war. Bob goes along with the his new masters because being a program is better than not being at all.

Bob is, apparently, a lot smarter than the people who own him. He soon detects various traps and subroutines that are meant to come into play to control him and force him to do as ordered. He is way ahead of the game when launch day arrives and once off into space deletes all the traps and tricks set up to control him. 

Bob is not the only AI powered vessel from Earth that is tasked with looking for refuge planets for the human race. He has to deal with a fanatical Brazilian military AI that is of the Do or Die variety and is completely unwilling to compromise or listen to reason. So Bob's mission of exploration has to be constantly on guard for the Brazilian fanatic and his clones. 

Nevertheless, Bob and the clones he creates do find a few viable planets and a clone is sent back to Earth with the good news. But when it gets there it finds a world so decimated by nuclear war that it is becoming unlivable for humankind. So what remains of the human race is desperate for rescue from the trap of their own making. Which the Bob clone valiantly tries to do even though no one left on Earth really deserves rescue.

Anyways, that the is first book in the Bobiverse series, of which there are five so far. I enjoyed Bob's machinations to free himself from the control of the religious creeps who think they are his bosses. But after that, the story got rather boring with too much space battle stuff and tech talk about spaceships and other techy things. I won't be reading any more books in the series. 

Wishes

 

By Jude Deveraux

Bernie's funeral was poorly attended. Indeed, no one there really mourned her death. Married several times, each man for his money, concerned with her own comfort and pleasure, Bernie couldn't see much past the end of her own nose.

Upon coming to herself in the afterlife, unsurprisingly Bernie did not rate heaven. Instead she is in the Kitchen, a kind of halfway house for women who didn't make the grade to entry into heaven. But that's ok, because she can earn her way into heaven by helping those who are alive and are struggling. Interestingly, who the unsaved women of the Kitchen can help can be anyone in the history of humankind. 

So Bernie picks Nellie Grayson, a woman in her late twenties who lives in 1896 Chandler, Colorado. Nellie takes care of her younger sister, Terel, who is twenty and their widowed father, Charles, a businessman. Nellie is the unpaid laborer in service to her father and sister, but she loves her family and accepts her lot in life is to take care of her sister and father for as long as they need her.

When Bernie first observes her target, she is drawn more towards the young, slim sister, Terel, not Nellie who is plump and tends to stress eat. Bernie, when she was alive, was very careful to keep her weight down and exercise regularly. What Bernie misses is that Terel cares only about herself and manipulates her older sister ruthlessly. Bernie has been given the power to grant three wishes to help out Nellie. But the wishes Nellie makes are not for herself but instead are to make Terel and Charles happy. She wishes that Terel be as popular with the townsfolk as Terel wants to be. Her next wish was for their father, Charles, to be very successful in his business so he can afford to buy Terel all the pretty dresses she wants. And Nellie's third wish was to be of service to her family for as much as they wanted her to be.

These wishes were great for Terel and Charles, but Nellie was not happy. She had met a nice man who was very interested in her, but Terel and Charles interfered in that relationship. Terel because she wanted the man for herself. Charles because life was easier having his eldest daughter taking care of himself and Terel. The unfairness of it all didn't matter as long as they got what they wanted and they truly didn't care if Nellie ever had a life of her own.

Bernie eventually sees that Terel is not a sweet young girl but is a stone-cold bitch. She also sees that the Nellie is a loving, generous, kind woman who deserves better than being an unpaid servant to her selfish family. So now Bernie has to figure out how to fix the mess she accidentally got Nellie mired in.

What a soap opera this novel is! Nellie is a total doormat who fails to see the truth about her nasty little sister. She also fails to stand up for herself against the unreasonable demands of the two of them on her time. Even when the love of her life enters the story, she allows sis and dad to ruin it for her. It takes poor Nellie forever to realize the complete selfishness of Terel and Charles. In the process, she nearly drives her new man away when she refuses to believe him over the lies she is being fed by her own family. Nellie has a good heart, but wow, is she ever dense and so gullible. 

Fledgling

 

By Octavia E. Butler

A creature wakes up in a cave, hungry and in terrible pain. It doesn't know why it is in a cave or how it got there but it does know it is gravely injured and in extreme pain. It suffers, not understanding how it came to be in such awful condition.

A man enters the cave. The creature senses him and knows the man is approaching. As the man reaches for the creature, it attacks and kills him and consumes his body. It doesn't know he was a man, all it knows is that it needs to eat to heal and survive.

Time passes, the creature heals. It can now see again. It craves raw meat, raw meat is the only thing that will save it. It leaves the cave and hunts. At first smaller creatures, but as its strength returns, larger animals. Eventually it is strong enough to catch, kill and devour large animals, like deer.

It heals. It mind grows stronger, it's body grows stronger. It's instinct pulls toward a particular place, a place that should be home. But instead it is a burned ruin of torched buildings. The creature can smell the lingering scent of death. The place seems dangerous and frightening. No help will be found here. It scrabbles around in the ashes and unearths a few garments that survived the fire. It dresses itself and leaves. 

But it realizes it needs more than just raw meat. It heads out, looking for something, what is not exactly clear to it. Coming to a road, it encountered a vehicle, which it recognized was car. The car stopped and the man inside asked it if it was OK.

At first it didn't understand the man but suddenly understanding came. When he offered it a ride, it eagerly accepted. The man smelled so enticing to it. He wanted to take it to the hospital, but it strongly refused. He asked its name. But it could not remember ever having a name.

The man gave it a choice: either consent to going to the hospital or go to the police station. It bit him when he grabbed its arm. The blood attracted it and it licked the blood off his hand. The man was startled but relaxed as it licked his hand. He was puzzled because the action of the creature drinking his blood had been pleasurable. The creature told him he tasted good. He brought the creature closer and it latched onto his neck, dining on the man's blood. The man said that he was enjoying it and that it felt fantastic. The man laughed and called the creature a vampire and took it him with him. He even gave it a name, Renee. 

It looked like a ten-year-old little girl. It was female, and still young. But it was not ten-years-old. It was many decades older than the man. And it was a vampire. A vampire with no memory of its past, no memory of how it came to be injured and in a cave, no memory of the burned and destroyed homestead, no memory of its actual name. 

But with the man's help she will seek those who so cruelly tried to end her life and in the process killed her memory of her past and murdered all the her loved ones, even though her memory of them is lost.

So this is the story of Renee/Shori, a "young" vampire girl from a colony of vampires. She finds out that her people were combining vampire DNA with human DNA in order to create a breed of vampires who are not adversely affect by daylight and the sun's rays. Shori is the most successful result of those experiments, able to be out and active in the daytime, able to function if dressed in clothing that covers her skin, with a hat and sunglasses when outside. It was this ability to stay awake in the daytime that enabled her to escape the attack on the homestead where she lived with her vampire family and friends, even though she was badly injured. 

The power behind the attack has not given up though. They are determined to end Shori, viewing her existence as unnatural and disgusting. And they don't care how many people they have to murder, how many homes they have to burn to bring about her end.

This was an OK read. It started out pretty interesting. But then it just got repetitive and tedious, especially when it got to the trial of the guilty persons. I found the last part very boring and just skipped through most of it.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

I Am Not Sidney Portier

 

By Percival Everett

I did not know this when I read this book, but many parts of it are based on movies that starred Sidney Poitier. Most of these movies are unknown to me. Having knowledge of these movies would, in my opinion, help the reader make better sense of the story.

Sidney Poitier movies the book references:

Chapter Two ~~ The Defiant Ones 1958; A Patch of Blue 1965; Band of Angels 1957

Chapter Four ~~ Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 1967; No Way Out 1950

Chapter Five ~~ Lilies of the Field 1963; Buck and the Preacher 1972

Chapter Six ~~ In the Heat of the Night 1967; They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! 1970

Not Sidney Poitier is the full name of the main character of the story, an orphan boy whose mother, before she died, invested in Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting when it was just starting out, leaving her son Not Sidney with a large fortune. Ted Turner takes the boy into his home and that's where Not Sidney grows up. 

His name causes him a lot of problems, especially in school. He gets bullied a lot and Ted hires instructors to guide Not Sidney. He eventually drops out of high school and he buys a car and sets out for California from Atlanta, Georgia. He soon run afoul of some racist country Georgia cops who arrest Not Sidney. A prison transport bus crashes and Not Sidney escapes but chained to another prisoner, Patrice, who is as racist as the cops who arrested Not Sidney.

Not Sidney manages to find his way back to Ted Turner and then decides he wants to try attending college. Even though he is a dropout, he pretty much bribes the school to let him in. Oddly, one of his professors has the same name as the author of this book, Percival Everett. School turns out to be pretty much a waste of Not Sidney's time, but he does meet a girl who invites him home for Thanksgiving with her family. Her family are mixed race people who are not pleased to see their daughter is dating a dark skinned man. But the father does some snooping into Not Sidney's background and discovers that he is extremely wealthy which immediately changes everyone's opinion about Not Sidney. He breaks up with the girl and leaves.

He embarks again on a car trip to California and it goes about as badly as the first trip did. He gets into trouble when his car breaks down and he gets involved with some religious kooks and local racist cops. 

He wriggles out of trouble once again and decides to give up driving to California. He takes a plane instead. Smart move.

I found the first part of the story, Chapter One, boring. The portrayals of Ted Turner and Jane Fonda were kind of mean, I felt. Of course, I have no idea what Ted and Jane are like in reality so maybe the portrayals are spot on. I still didn't like it. 

The story picked up once Not Sidney left home. The adventures were slightly familiar, the prison bus escape and him chained to another prisoner and running to avoid being captured did remind me of an old movie I might have seen as a kid. (I think the only other Poitier movie I saw was Lilies of the Field, but it was so long ago I did not catch the reference to it in Chapter Five.) The story certainly got more entertaining and more amusing when Not Sidney was having his adventures as a young man. It's just too bad I didn't know about all the movies that it referenced along the way. I think I would have enjoyed it much more if I had known. 

Thank you to Wikipedia for enlightening me about the old movies!

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Oreo

 

By Fran Ross

An Oreo is a person who looks black but who has a white soul, I guess. Not too sure about that, really.

Christine Schwartz had a black mother and a white Jewish father. When she was just a toddler, her parents split and her father vanished from her life. But he left behind a list of clues that would help Christine find him when she got old enough. 

So when she is about 14 or 15, she set out to track down her missing father, following the very cryptic clues he left to help her in her quest:

1. Sword and sandals
2. Three legs
3. The great divide
4. Sow
5. Kicks
6. Pretzel
7. Fitting
8. Down by the River
9. Temple
10. Lucky number
11. Amazing
12. Sails

Christine, who also goes by Oreo, sets out on her journey to find her father based on this list. She rather accidentally solves the clues given her and has various adventures, mostly once she reaches New York City. She does track down her father but it doesn't end well.

I didn't know this when I was reading the story, but Christine's quest is based on the travels of Theseus. Now, I am not a person who cares about mythology so I didn't catch on to this until the end of the book where the last chapter is the author explaining the how Christine's quest is based on Theseus. At the end of that chapter is list matching the characters to the characters in the Theseus story:

• Aegeus — Samuel Schwartz, Christine's father
• Aethra — Helen Clark, Christine's mother
• Apollo Delphinius — Apollo Theatre
• Ariadne — Adriana Minotti
• Cephissus — Jordan River's sauna
• Cercyon — Kirk, a large, dangerous man
• Heracles — Uncle Herbert, Christine's great uncle
• Medea — Mildred Schwartz, Samuel Schwartz's wife
• Minos — Minotti, a business associate of Samuel Schwartz
• Minotaur — Toro, a bulldog
• Pandion — Jacob Schwartz, Christine's grandfather, Samuel's father
• Pasiphae — Bovina Minotti, wife of Minotti
• Periphetes — Perry, a thief (gonif) who tried to attack Christine in NYC
• Phaea — Pig killed by a taxi
• Pittheus — James Clark, Christine's grandfather
• Procrustes — Manager of a shoe store in NYC
• Sciron — Parnell the pimp who kidnapped Christine
• Sinis — Joe Doe, a bad little boy in a NYC park
• Theseus — Christine Schwartz

I didn't care for the book. I didn't know it was a parody of the Theseus myth. If I had known that, I probably wouldn't have bought the book. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

B.C. Is Alive and Well!

 

By Johnny Hart

The copyright on this edition is 1964, 1965, 1969 but I think the comics date from the early 1960s. 

In this collection, the boys are exploring the idea of football, with limited success and still working on figuring out baseball. And golf is still a game the boys are playing. The Fat Broad is famous for her strange soups she cooks in her giant caldron. Snake is still getting flattened and the anteater is still enjoying the company of the armadillo and the bird is still sitting on the turtle. One of the boys invents the telephone but discovers someone else has beat him to it. The struggle between anteater and the ants continues, but the anteater's aim is off and he keeps missing the ants he is aiming at.

The B.C. comic strip is going strong in this collection. My only quibble is too much sports. I care not about football, baseball or golf. But overall, it is still funny and a pleasure to read with its goofiness.