Mini-Reviews 17: Again

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

My mom reviewed this, here. Go there for some actual thoughts on the book.

I honestly wouldn't have done even this utter placeholder of a mini-review normally. However, this (sad excuse for a) review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, classics, junior fiction, magical realism, rated E10+

Quaint Creatures by Andrew D. Meredith

This is a book about a veterinarian in what's basically a D&D world. It's quite fun and I wish it were a series so I could read more of it.

I think it balances the slice-of-life aspect with the plot quite well. That, however, is my personal opinion; other people might think it needs more plot or more slice-of-life.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. It could be a reasonably good videogame; I'd play it.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, fantasy, rated E10+, slice-of-life

The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray by E. Latimer

This book involves (posthumously) Dorian Gray, of The Picture of Dorian Gray fame. That would be a spoiler, but come on, the book's about spooky magic paintings and the protagonist's last name is Gray.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for scary scenes and {T15+ implied past homosexuality, thanks to the subject matter involving Oscar Wilde. It's pretty veiled, and if you didn't know about Wilde you probably wouldn't notice it, but it's there and it bugged me. It was also kind of sprung on you near the end, so I'd already read most of the book before I noticed.}

1 star. Honestly I probably should have quit reading it, but I wanted to know how it ended. It's rather a shame about the above-mentioned redactedness, because Bryony herself could have been quite a compelling protagonist.

Tags for this one: 1-star, magical realism, rated T15+

(Endnote: Zac Efron is in none of these books.)

"Phoenix" by S. F. Said

[Unmarked spoilers in the body of this post.] 

This is a book about a boy who has the power to violently explode. He is also racist toward aliens (though he does grow out of it) and apparently destined to save the galaxy from something called "the Wolf that Eats the Stars". It could have been good science fiction.

Unfortunately, whenever the author touched science, he got it wrong.

He doesn't seem to care that the signs of the zodiac do not correspond to individual stars. I can excuse his screwing around with what dark matter does because we don't know what it actually does (if it even exists), but I can't excuse his screwing around with what demons are like, even if none actually show up in-story. (Lucifer did not, in fact, bring free will. What Lucifer brought was slavery to sin, and you should never name a good guy after him, much less insinuate even remotely that he was any semblance of a good guy.)

(I have more to say about the whole "Lucifer gave humans free will" thing, which basically boils down to "NO HE ABSOLUTELY DID NOT." If Adam and Eve hadn't had free will, he wouldn't have been able to tempt them away from God at all, even for a bit. But he did tempt them, so they must have already had free will, so he didn't give it to them. [And really, what would be the point of God telling those two "don't eat from this tree" if they weren't able to do it anyway?]. All Lucifer brought humanity was sin, which is a manifestly terrible gift. And in order to fall away, he himself had to have free will in the first place, so it's not like he created it contrary to God's plan either. QED-ish; I can put all that into formal syllogisms if you want.)

Even if it were possible to make a device that collapsed stars into black holes, that wouldn't make a black hole big enough to eat the rest of the galaxy. When the device is used, the resultant black hole would have the exact same mass as the original star (conservation of mass strikes again), and thus its gravitational attraction on everything around it would be the same. Sure, that star's planets would have a bad time with their lack of sunlight, but they won't be inexorably dragged into the new black hole.

Also, throwing energy into a black hole is the second least helpful thing you could do to try to get rid of it (second only to throwing matter into the black hole). All you'll be doing is making the problem worse.

Still on the subject of the black-hole-making-device, I find it hard to believe that turning stars into black holes is a very efficient way of generating the energy necessary to power your giant energy barrier. Dyson spheres come to mind. Matter-antimatter reactors. Normal nuclear reactors. Harnessing the tremendous energy of the vacuum, if you want to get really crazy. Some sort of made-up energy-dense alien material you have to mine. But nooooooooo, we have to be all "humans are killing the stars aaaaaa."

(On that note, could we please have a war-with-aliens story where the humans are in the right in their anti-alien war? Like The War of the Worlds, but more modern. It's the same problem as dragons [elaborated a bit more here]; "fight the thing" makes a perfectly good story, and yet authors persist in talking to the thing or feeling bad about killing the thing or discovering we're actually the bad guys for attacking the thing. Yeesh.)

Oh, and convection! All the heat and energy thrown out by the main character violently exploding has to go somewhere, especially when he's unleashing his full power right next to all his friends. I find it difficult to believe they actually survive the climax of the book.

There's probably more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. It would have worked better as space fantasy, like D&D's Spelljammer setting, where you are fully justified in just making stuff up to fit your concepts (proper science fiction should at least pay a bit more than lip service to actual science, which this doesn't.)

The prose here is interspersed with surreal, fractal-y white-on-black lineart and equally surreal depictions of ancient godlike beings. The fractal-y lineart is sort of cool; the beings, not so much.

The book's message--it essentially boils down to "interpersonal connections are what make people matter"--is also somewhat dodgy theologically, but I don't have the energy and experience to do a real analysis of that.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for swearing and nudity (the main character's power to violently explode does not spare his clothes, and |a mostly offscreen strip search also happens|.) And also the above-mentioned Lucifer thing.

1 star. Would have gotten 3, but, again, the Lucifer thing.

(Endnote: The Dark Matter Bombs from this have an effect that sounds suspiciously similar to that of the M.D. Device / Little Doctor from the Ender's Game books.)

"Spooksville: The Cold People" by Christopher Pike

I never thought I'd find any children's light horror series that's lamer than Creepover, but here we are. At least Creepover's ghostwriters were actually, y'know, ghostwriters and had some grasp of how to write. Christopher Pike doesn't seem to, and his prose is so bad that I actually DNF'd the book.

Creepover is so bad it's kind of funny how bad it is. Spooksville went out the other end of that and is so bad it's just bad. As you know, Bob, using the "As you know, Bob" technique to introduce backstory or remind readers of events from previous books is generally a terrible idea. There are probably more quibbles I could have had with it had I read past the first chapter or so. 

I picked this up based on the cover blurb, and was not very disappointed. If someone wants to write one that has roughly the same plot but doesn't have Christopher Pike writing, go ahead, and I'll give you an imaginary box of donuts and some fake internet points.

Right before I DNF'd this, the characters decide to melt one of the giant ice cubes with spooky people inside. Never mind that A) they do this by building a fire without any regard for fire safety, B) I haven't managed to do the math for it (the internet is unhelpful) but that's about 56 cubic feet of ice they're melting with a single campfire so it would take eons, and C) there's a spooky person trapped in the ice, and freeing him (by melting the ice) would probably be a bad idea because then he would be free to be all spooky.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: Insufficient data for meaningful answer, since (again) I didn't read past the first chapter because I couldn't handle Christopher Pike's awful writing any longer.

1 star, unless the writing picked up drastically after the first chapter or so.

(Endnote: "The Cold People" is at once a title evocative of the bad prose in this book and a title that, on something better than this, would highlight a fairy-tale-gone-wrong aspect of the story. I mean, maybe it's supposed to do that for this too, but if so, it didn't work.)

Mini-Reviews 4: Never and Forever

The title is because the first three books in Cressida Crowell's Wizards of Once series all have ordinal-number-themed names (Wizards of Once, Twice Magic, and Knock Three Times) but the fourth one is called Never and Forever, which broke the chain. So when it came time to do the fourth mini-review collection, I named it this. There. Now you know.

 

Dead in the Water by Chris Lynch

This do be historical fiction, about a crewman on the U.S.S. Yorktown during World War II. We all know how well that ended. This dude |does survive, though|. 

The historical stuff is interspersed with baseball (because this was the 1940s and if you were in the States then everything was tangentially related to baseball) (please note that the previous statement is not entirely factually accurate) and a minor dealing-with-racism side plot (courtesy of the main character's friend, who gets hit with it a lot). (Also this paragraph is full of parentheses.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence and discussion of racism. Dead in the Water would make a reasonably good videogame in the right hands, although unless you let players change the story, it wouldn't have much replayability.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, airplanes, historical fiction, military, rated T, WWII

 

 

 

All Summer Long by Hope Larson

I didn't like this one. The art wasn't really good (for me, art quality is an important factor in how much I like a graphic novel; it's like use of language in a print book), and I didn't love the storyline either. Plus it did a |casual homosexuality mention|, which I strongly dislike. If you're going to have that in your book, be overt about it so I can avoid you.

Anyway, T15+ for sexual references. 1 star. Lame.

Tags for this one: 1-star, lame, manga/graphic novel, modern setting, rated T15+, school drama

 

 

 

Truesight by David Stahler Jr.

 

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king illegal. |But also king.|

Basically, this is science fiction about a community where everyone is genetically engineered to be blind. Because... well, honestly it feels quasi-religious, like one of those weird philosophical religion-but-not-really-but-still-kinda things.

Aaaaaaaand then one guy discovers he can see, that the genetic engineering failed on him, and everything goes to pieces.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for delayed-action creepiness. It would be pretty hard to make into a videogame, but it could be done.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, dystopian, rated E10+, science fiction

(Endnote: These have three very different covers. Dead in the Water is mostly realistic, All Summer Long is only vaguely evocative of the book, and Truesight... honestly looks almost like the cover of a horror movie.)

Mini-Reviews 2: This is getting out of hand, now there are two of them!

Yeah, I did more of these.

Emblem Island: Curse of the Night Witch by Alex Aster

Thiiiiiiiiiiiiis... wasn't super great. The author's bio at the end said she wanted to include a Latin American flavor, and I can definitely taste that. It's got all sorts of strange monsters and things, and it's interspersed with folktale-y bits that are like "So these two people fell in love but one of them was a jerkface, and then stuff happened, and that's why this kind of monster exists."

Don't have much else to say about it, which is why this is a mini-review.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for just general content level. It'd be decent as a videogame, because it's partially written like one. 

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, fantasy, rated E10+

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan

 

For having no plot, the first few chapters of this book are surprisingly engaging. I think its being written in the style of a memoir helps; the author (or at least her character) has a very conversational voice.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some sexual references, in terms a Regency/Victorian-era naturalist would use. Nothing explicit.

4 stars. This one is good. I liked it quite a lot.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, alternate-base fantasy, fantasy, rated T15+, series component

It Wasn't Me by Dana Alison Levy 

The cover of this is clearly meant to evoke One of Us is Lying (warning: link has spoilers), and I think it's essentially trying to be the middle-grade version of that. Except it forgot to take the content level down to match, so we're left with middle-schoolers being way too mature for their age.

I mean, seriously, these guys are like twelve! Not old enough for this. Ew.

 

I did like Alice the one who gave herself morbid makeup every day, though. She was the Jessica for this. (I know she's actually nothing like Jessica from the Mr. Terupt series; I'm using that term to mean the one character whose perspective I always like to read.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references {T15+ (mostly homosexuality getting mentioned)}, some swearing (I think), and... actually that's pretty much it.

Relatedly, 1 star. If you ever see me reading this again, that person is an impostor and doesn't read this blog.

(Endnote: I've never actually read One of Us is Lying, nor do I plan to. Its title is good, though, I'll give it that.)

"The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly" by Rebecca K. S. Ansari

This book was really good... for the first three quarters or so, after which it rapidly devolved into crappiness. What follows is my thoughts from the first three quarters, followed by the modified versions from after it all went to pieces.

I liked how the protagonist and deuteragonist had a completely platonic friendship, despite being a boy and a girl of about the same age.

This one was true through the whole book, actually.

I liked how there was an older teenager in a middle-grade fiction book who was actually nice and helpful, rather than being aloof or a jerkface.

Make that "reformed jerkface." Turns out backstory!Jonathon was... not great.

I liked how there wasn't really any objectionable content, just some offscreen violence.

nope.

I'm pretty sure the moral of the story is going to be something about nothing being terrible enough to quit existing over.

But insteeeaaad... badly-thought-out "as long as you forgive yourself it's fine" nonsense!

I'm excited to see what cunning plan the characters use to escape the mysterious extradimensional orphanage.

But insteeeaaad... badly-thought-out "as long as you forgive yourself it's fine" nonsense!

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+, because CAN. YOU. NOT.

 

Relatedly, 1 star. The In-Between was much better.

 

(Endnote: I probably wouldn't have reviewed this at all, except that I was looking forward to doing it back during the 3/4 that were good. So, here we are.)

"The Witch Boy" by Molly Knox Ostertag

I picked this one up because it's by the same person who wrote D&D Dungeon Club: Roll Call. It's not as good as that one, unfortunately. I feel like the Five Worlds guys could have done a better job of roughly the same storyline, but I am rather biased towards them.

So anyway! The thing is about a magic family where all of the girls can do magic and all of the boys can turn into animals. Except then one of the boys (here comes our main character) turns out to be crap at turning into animals, but he's fairly decent at magic (even though everyone keeps telling him he's playing with fire and refusing to teach him anything, which means his primary method of learning magic is just to ditch turning-into-animals practice and eavesdrop on his sisters' magic lessons).

Once we've got all that out of the way, the plot starts. During Try To Turn Into Animals: The Field Trip, a wild creepy monster appeared! It promptly kidnaps one of the main character's brothers, then vanishes again. Naturally, everyone panics. 

Also, there's stuff with the main character making friends with a normal, non-magical girl, who ends up helping in the final bossfight by |smacking the creepy(ish) monster in the face with a baseball bat|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for some scary imagery and people bleeding fairly badly after getting attacked. This book could make an interesting videogame in the right hands.

[EDIT: T15+, due to (again) {T15+ a character casually mentioning homosexuality as if it's just a normal thing.}. I'd hoped that was a one-time thing with the other book, but apparently not. Sorry, Ostertag, I'll be avoiding you from here on out.

I was going to rate this 2 stars simply for rubbing me wrong, but then I noticed the thing in the content warning tag above, so the rating got shunted down to 1 star.

(Endnote: The art in the kidnapping/abduction scene is pretty appropriately creepy, although when the monster actually fully appears it just kinda builds a bridge across the uncanny valley and stands in the middle of it. It looked a bit silly, is what I'm trying to say.)

"Riley's Ghost" by John David Anderson

DISAPPROVE.

I'm serious, this should be a YA book set in high school, not a middle-grade fiction book set in middle school. CONTENT, Mr. Anderson. You need to learn the difference between a middle-grade fiction level of content and a YA level of content.

Actually, come to think of it, I've never read a YA book with higher content levels than this. Closest I've come is Goodbye, Mr. Terupt. I... can't say I want to read YA fiction, if it's like this.

 

Now, the story wasn't terrible, once you strip away the lame parts. But it wasn't good enough for me to give it a better rating; I have a special dislike for books with content like this being stashed in the junior fiction section at the library. As I said at the top of the post, I DISAPPROVE.

So if you like mildly scary and tense ghost stories, and don't mind swearing and random sprinkles of T15+ content... go ahead, read it. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for swearing, mostly profanity, mostly by the main character. Also for some suggestive-ish content. Not a book I'll be rereading. Non est liber bonus. It's not a good book.

This book gets 1 star, joining only Time Cat and Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed in receiving that pointless trophy of shame.

(Endnote: It did name-check those Indian ghosts with the backwards feet, though.)

"Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed" by Madeline Roux

Don't bother.

I'm serious, just don't bother. You'd think the official product would be about on par with things like The Green Ember, but apparently not.

The crux of the problem is, I didn't care. This obviously-secretly-a-human girl? Nope, I have no opinion on whether or not she should get out alive, dead, with an arm cut off, driven insane, ANYTHING. Didn't care, couldn't have cared if I tried. Believe me, I did try.

And this right here is why I DNF'd this book and give it one star. Any of the main characters could die, and the status quo would be exactly the same without them   better, in some cases. Cooler people will prevail; I find it hard to imagine that a literal dragon would have trouble beating any of the villains (army of zombies? Incinerate.) Or the school's principal, a beholder; you can fly above whatever enemies and laser them to death.

 

My only theory as to why this happened is that the author tried to do your standard "ragtag band of misfits", but turned it up to 11 and had an uber-ragtag band of uber-misfits nobody would ever miss. It didn't help that three of the characters were jerks, three of them were whiny (I'll give the protagonist credit for that, she wasn't), and one of them just felt kind of flat. Really, all of them felt kind of flat, but that guy more than most.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T. It... would probably make a far better videogame than a book, but guess what? It's already a game. We call it Dungeons and Dragons, and it is waaaaaaaaaay more fun than this book was.

"Time Cat" by Lloyd Alexander

 First: disclaimer. I HATED THIS BOOK. Actually, I liked it fairly well up until the ending. But the ending ABSOLUTELY STANK. Also, I'm going to majorly spoil it, so don't read any further if you don't want that.

 

 

Now that we've got that out of our way, let's begin. The story starts when our main character, Jason, finds out his cat can talk. The premise of the book is that cats don't necessarily have nine lives, but they can visit nine lives. Accordingly, the book is divided into nine sections of two chapters each (except one, which has three chapters). Oh, and the cat is named Gareth. Who names their cat Gareth???

And then Jason and Gareth go on a rollicking adventure! Actually, they go on NINE rollicking adventures. I don't have much to say about any of them, really. They go to all sorts of places and times and do random stuff.

AND NOW, for the ending:

It was all a dream.

My first reaction upon reading that was "AaAAAaAARGH". "It was all a dream" is quite possibly my least favorite story ending ever. EVER. 

If this was a movie, I don't know how I would rate it. Probably PG.

And what rating did you think this book would get? Quite obviously, given the tone of the rest of my review, it's getting one star. This is what books get for having my least favorite ending in the history of bad book endings. (There are a few books who have managed to redeem themselves despite having "it was all a dream" as their ending, but not many in my eyes.)

Favorite lines: none. No really memorable lines.

Rating System

SO. In my Kiki's Delivery Service review (which you have hopefully read), I mentioned that I needed to give my rating system its own post. And ta-da! Here is a post for my book rating system.

    One Star.
Short description: Terrible.
Long description: For some reason, I really hated this book and may not even have finished it. That may be because the author just doesn't know what they're talking about, it's badly written, or I just plain hated the story (or ending). Or the characters constantly acted stupid. OR there could have been things in it that I won't mention here, because younger people might read this blog. If I DNF'd it, it's probably rated this.
Examples: Time Cat, Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed.

    Two Star.
Short description: Bad.
Long description: This book wasn't good. The characters might have been bad, it might have been about something I don't like, or WHATEVER. I just didn't like it.
Examples:  The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, That Hideous Strength (Space Trilogy book 3).

    Three Star.
Short description: Okay.
Long description: Either the book was boring, or it was just disappointing. Or I'm just biased because it's not what I thought.
Examples: Everything on a Waffle, The Curse of Ravenscourt.

    Four Star.
Short description: Good.
Long description: I liked the book. Pretty sure the majority of books I read will fall into this category. It had none of the problems of the above star counts.
Really, as I said in my The Green Ember review, a four-star rating just means "I liked it despite its faults".
Examples: The Green Ember, Minecraft: The Island.

    Five Star.
Short description: Amazing.
Long description: I really loved the book. Not many books get this rating, and getting a "5-star" tag is nothing short of a book recommendation.
Examples: Kiki's Delivery Service, The Adventurer's Guide to Successful Escapes.

Important note: Only posts from 2021+ have been rated with this new system, and I'm not going to go back and rate the earlier ones.