More Books than Time

Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

Endurance: The Complete Series by A. C. Spahn

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I did not expect to like Endurance: The Complete Series based on the Amazon blurb: “A disrespected ship, exiled to lonely patrol in the dark corners of the solar system. A crew of screw-ups, written off by the entire fleet. They’re about to change everything.”

Doesn’t that sound awful? Just like so many other really really space opera wanna-be novels? Actually Endurance was pretty easy to read and I mostly enjoyed it. As with almost all space opera you have to breeze right past the obvious plot holes and go along for the ride, enjoy the book for what it is and not expect either a science treatise or great literature.

Endurance is the name of the space ship and the story is the complete series because author Spahn wrote this as a set of vignettes, more like television episodes, each focusing on one or two of the quirky characters and each more or less resolving the situation within the episode. The format works because there are ongoing plot points that tie the individual stories together.

Overall I liked Endurance. It is a very fast read – think two hours or so – and I was glad it was free via Book Bub. The humor is inherent in the story and the characters, not forced ha-ha stuff. The Kindle version has a preview for Enchantress Under Cover by the same author which looks quite different and possibly worth checking out.

3 Stars

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Dial G for Gravity (The Brent Bolster Mysteries Book 1) by Michael Campling

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Dial G for Gravity by Michael Campling, subtitled The Brent Bolster Mysteries Book 1, has great sounding plot and back story, but the writing and characterization don’t live up to the promise.  Let’s go to the good part first.

The plot idea is terrific:  Aliens are here peacefully.  The  Gloabons are die-hard bureaucrats (apparently the national mania) as well as die-hard anal probers.  It’s a little suspect whether they really are peaceful because their technology has pretty well wiped out ours and now we’re pretty dependent on them.  Plus there is yet another alien group with a taste for live humans – for supper.  There is plenty of serious stuff going on in the background.

The execution against this backdrop disappointed me.  The characters are mediocre, with hero Brent, a Galactic Investigator PI, a meld of all the PI tropes you’ve ever read.  The best character is the alien Rawlgeeb, a bureaucrat through and through, but good-hearted once the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.  He is the first clue that the supposedly benign Gloabons may be anything but; he greatly fears for his life when he makes a mistake abducting Brent for “sampling”, aka Probing.  Apparently Gloabons that make too many mistakes end up dead or exiled to nasty places.

The writing is supposed to be humorous, and had it been the book would have been more enjoyable.  A lot of other readers apparently liked this much more than I as several Amazon reviewers found the book funny and the characters well done.

The book had a great cover and this nifty of a plot background that kept me reading, thinking it would get better.  Unfortunately Dial G for Gravity never lived up to its premise.

2 Stars

You Are Dead. (Sign Here Please) by Andrew Stanek – Humorous Fantasy

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You Are Dead.  (Sign Here Please) by Andrew Stanek is a cute story of one man fighting the bureaucrats of existence.  You see, semi-hero Nathan Haynes gets killed by a serial murderer intent on increasing his score on the serial-murderer-hall-of-infamy, but when Nathan reaches the afterlife he discovers our entire existence is run by bureaucrats, and if he does not sign his Form 21B, Decenent Acknowledgement and Waiver of Liability he can’t really stay dead.  Since Nathan thinks the form might be a ploy to bilk him out of his house, he refuses.

The story is cute enough to entertain one on a brain-dead evening.  There are some funny bits, some attempts at political satire, some man-vs.-machine moments.  I liked the part where author Stanek (who has a degree in microbiology from Caltech) explains that molecular biology, cosmologists, and deep sea oceanography are all scams, jokes to get funding forever while publishing articles using science buzzword bingo.

You Are Dead has a beginning, middle and it ends, no cliffhanger.  (Although we do wonder how Nathan will dispose of the ever-higher pile of bodies in his back yard.)  I was surprised to see this is part of a series of now five books as the plot and running jokes about bureaucrats are a bit thin for that.

Don’t read You Are Dead looking for great character development, although our semi-hero Nathan does get a little less gullible and a little more clued-in after he dies three or four times.  You will root for him and cheer when he gets tricky.  The head bureaurocrat Director Fulcher is probably the most interesting character who does grow through the book as he develops a very strong desire for revenge and to personally trick Nathan into signing.

Don’t read You Are Dead looking for great writing or great comedy although it’s cute, funny enough to enjoy and written well enough to be easy and pleasant.  The author turns everything on its head, which is funny the first dozen times.  The town of Dead Donkey is a running farce that you can enjoy without searching for deeper meaning or political insights.

Do read You Are Dead. (Sign Here) if you enjoy ridiculous stories and want an easy book for that evening read after work.

3 Stars

The Galactic Peace Committee – Great Fun Read, Humor, Science Fiction

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I love this book.  I read it a few months ago and needed to re-read to write this review and once more loved the zany, off-the-wall plot and back story.  It probably says something about my low brow tastes, but I’m giving this 5 stars, just because it was much fun to read the third time as the second and the first.

The Galactic Peace Committee of the title is a cross between a bad joke, a con job and a deadly necessity.  You see, there are thousands of races throughout the galaxy, most love war and fighting far more than we humans do, and most will gladly go slaughter another race for the horrible crime of insulting their hats or preferring pizza to pancakes.   The Committee exists to keep the peace, more or less, or at least keep someone from engulfing the entire galaxy in war or, worst of all, annoying the Ancient Ones.

Ah yes, the Ancient Ones.  One race of Ancient Ones looks like cuddly teddy bears.  The space teddy bears were the first alien race to contact us when Earth developed faster than light travel, and the bears kindly put Pluto and a minor Saturn moon back together, then helped us get over the hump on a few technological travails.

Then the space teddy bears pulled the ultimate con.  They convinced a gullible humanity to accept the immense honor to run the Galactic Peace Committee, while they and the other Ancient Ones, extend their holidays on their favorite beach worlds and enjoyed more drinks with umbrellas in them.  We’re a bunch of optimists with good opinions of ourselves so it tkes a while for humanity to realize they had been had.  No one wants to be in charge of Galactic Peace!

That’s the back story.  Our hero, Jake, is a mid level diplomat on a space station who would like to be successful enough to survive until he can retire on a pension that is very generous, mostly because the Committee rarely has to pay them out.  Jake needs to keep the peace and uses every skill he has and all his patience to stop two interstellar wars.  How Jake works these miracles is the crux of the novel.

The Galactic Peace Committee pulls off the hat trick:  humor, plot with enough science-fiction-y events to feel like we’re reading space opera without all the operatic trappings, intriguing characters, and did I mention humor?  Unlike several wanna-be humorous novels this one uses the ridiculous specifics to contrast with the generally serious back story to make a very good, fun novel.

There are a few minor problems.

  • Jake has a few woe-is-me moments in the beginning that stopped just before they got tiresome.
  • The Galactic Peace Committee is more a novella than a novel.
  • Not sure I like the super robot idea.  In this novel author L. G. Estrella avoids relying on the robots to make everything magically work out (these are military/assassin/bodyguard robots), but he must feel the temptation to have Jake narrowly escape because his bodyguard saves him.

The only one of these problems is number 2.  I want more Galactic Peace!

5 Stars

Carpet Diem by Justin Lee Anderson: Averting the Apocalypse One Step at a Time

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I found Justin Lee Anderson on Hoopla Digital which recommended him as an author similar to Jodi Taylor, who writes the excellent Chronicles of St. Mary’s novels.  Sadly this novel, Carpet Diem, just misses.  Carpet Diem is meant to be a humorous take on “How We Averted the Apocalypse”, much like Good Omens or Tom Holt’s novels.  It has funny moments and the hero postpones the Apocalypse, but it isn’t overall a winner.

Characters

Writing a humorous book is hard work!  Authors need characters that carry the load, characters that we readers engage with, care about, people with senses of humor.  The whole time I read Carpet Diem I kept wondering why the book wasn’t better, and I think it is because the author created characters he thought were funny in themselves, and didn’t write dialogue or events that were funny.

None of the character was very interesting.  We have the drunken great aunt, the extraordinarily people-averse hero (because he has too-good a sense of smell), an angel or two, a demon or two, a few oddball, never explained magic characters, and assorted side kicks.  The only one with any personality is the hero, Simon, who must face his immense dislike of crowds (even tiny crowds, as in one or two people) to retrieve his carpet and gift it to the apocalyptic force of his choice.  Simon was moderately interesting.

Overall

I think part of the problem is the characters go through truly harrowing, deathly events that do not feel real.  Simon faces death and we readers just go along with the story, not really feeling any terror or anything more than a vague anxiety.  The story reads like a story, not like anything that characters or we readers experience.

Perhaps part of my negative feeling for Carpet Diem is that I felt gypped.  The story is not compelling and not the quality of Chronicles of St. Mary’s novels or Good Omens.  I expected something with plenty of plot, great characters and dialogue and funny moments in between terror.  Carpet Diem is not these things.

3 Stars

Stranger Magics by Ash Fitzsimmons – Not Quite Midsummer Nights Dream!

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Ash Fitzsimmons took the bare bones of The Midsummer Nights Dream and wrote a full novel with plenty of action and developed characters, some humor and yes, even some mistaken identities in Stranger Magics.

Quick Synopsis

Colin LeFee owns a bookstore in Rigby on the Atlantic coast, lives quietly except when helping Father Paul exorcise faeries who are having too much fun in our world.  (Some Fae get their jollies tormenting humans, others like to rape or just be obnoxious.)  The story opens with Colin kicking one of Oberon’s court out of town.  When Colin returns home he finds his neighbor Mrs. Cooper bringing a 16 year old girl to him.  The girl is terrified (and defiant, like most frightened people), denies she belongs in Rigby, wants to go home.  Colin investigates and discovers the girl is Olive, long lost daughter of his old flame Meggy, and a changeling, whom Titania kicked out.

You see, Titania is the queen of faerie, powerful, nasty and Colin’s Mommy Dearest.  Colin’s dad died about 700 years ago and was human, making Colin half fae.

Along the way we meet Oberon, several wizards both good and semi-good, Robin Goodfellow, Mab, a seminarian and the best character of all, Mrs. Cooper.

Characters

Fitzsimmons did a great job building Colin’s character.  He could have made Colin too good to be true, or a man tormented by his dual nature, but instead he took the harder path to make Colin a real person, someone who cares about others and about whom we care.  As Colin mentions, full-blooded fae cannot love and most don’t try; we can blame his human parent for the fact that Colin can care, does care about people in general and individuals in particular.  Colin takes his role as protector seriously; he protects us humans from other fae and if needed, from worse.

Colin suffers; he is smart, witty, perceptive.  He is also stupid.  Somehow he thought that spending a night with Meggy 16 years ago and leaving the next day was the honorable thing to do; Meggy of course did not share his opinion.

Olive was the least developed character.  She is a typical petulant teen, except now she is a faerie exile marooned here with a mom she denies, constrained from some magics, alone and hating every moment and person in her new American life.

Several of the other characters are well developed, Meggy, Slim/Rick the bartender/wizard artisan, Joey the seminarian, Toula the wizard, and my favorite, Mrs. Cooper.  Mrs. Cooper starts as your basic busybody old lady neighbor, yet somehow knows to bring Olive over to Colin (and who would bring a 16 year old girl to a 20-something guy for help instead of calling 911?), who calmly accepts the fae infestation and helps Colin defeat the attacking faeries by hitting them with her stainless steel teakettle.  She doesn’t say much and what she does say is tinged with kindness and humor. Fitzsimmons made excellent use of a could-have-been prototypical character for the story.

Overall

The writing style is good.  I enjoyed the flashbacks as Colin fills us in on his 700+ years in the human world and explains his antipathy to Titania.  I wasn’t real sure I liked the ending with Colin in his new role, but given the alternatives he faces and the fact that he literally has no good option that would not cause greater woes for himself and all of us humans, it makes sense.

I hope the author, who bills herself as an “unrepentant car singer” writes more, either with the same world or explores new territories.  I will certainly purchase more from her.

4 Stars

Wow! Humor at Its Best – P. G. Wodehouse on Hoopla

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There is no one like P. G. Wodehouse.  No one has his combination of humor, plot, characters and language.  Not to mention the fun of reading about house parties in old castles, valets and butlers, ocean trips across the Atlantic, girls on the make, dressing for dinner, mad coincidences, traveling on the train (leaving just ahead of a wrathful aunt).

Our old library had about 50 Wodehouse novels and I read every one and bought more and read those too.  For years it seemed as if Barnes & Noble or Amazon stocked the same 50 or 60 novels that everyone has – Jeeves and Wooster stories, a few trips to Blandings Castle, Galahad Threepwood and his buddy Uncle Fred – but neglected many of his less well-known stories.

I’m so glad to see Hoopla offers many of these novels that weren’t readily available.  I’m borrowing one a month for now, such a treat.  Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have many more Wodehouse masterpieces now.

The Gem Collector

Jimmy Pitt, once a distinguished safe cracker and jewel thief, now a distinguished rich baronet, is dining alone at the Savoy Hotel when he notices a young man at a nearby table who shows all the signs of not having his wallet.  Jimmy helps the fellow out.  This is how Jimmy meets Spencer Blunt, who just happens to be the son of Lady Jane Blunt, now married to Mr. McEachern, formerly a New York policeman.

Of course Lady Jane and her society don’t know that Mr. McEarchern was a policeman and believe his money came from Wall Street, which is only partially true, as he certainly got some bribes while on that exciting street.  McEarchern and Jimmy know each other (of course) and both know the other had been as crooked as could be, and both want to present reformed faces to the world.

Jimmy goes with Spencer to his mom’s and McEarchern’s home for an extended house party where he again meets Molly, McEarchern’s daughter.  As usual with Wodehouse we have assorted nasty characters, love interests and naturally, Spencer’s obnoxious aunt who owns a pearl collar supposedly worth 40,000 pounds, or $200,000 at the exchange rate of those days.  (This is roughly several million in today’s money.)

If you can see the plot thicken from here, then congratulations, you are a Wodehouse reader.

I thought The Gem Collector was a little more serious than some Wodehouse.  For example, Lady Jane is “drawn to Mr. McEarchern.  Whatever his faults, he had strength; and after her experience of married life with a weak man, Lady Jane had come to the conclusion that strength was the only male quality worth consideration.”  “She suspected no one.  She liked and trusted everybody, which was the reason why she was so popular, and so often taken in.”  McEarchern “had an excellent effect upon him (Spencer) but it had not been pleasant.”

Another character is a card shark who lives from house party to house party and preys on young men.

Both Jimmy and McEearchen are interesting people, as is Spike, Jimmy’s former sidekick now masquerading as his valet.  Will Jimmy restrain his love of fine jewels or will he once more give in and steal the pearls?  Will McEarchern manage to act the gentleman or will he get the horsewhip out for Jimmy?  Will Spike lose his accent?  (I wish.  Spike’s accent was the one negative in the story.)

5 Stars

A Damsel in Distress or No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

This is another romantic comedy with plenty of mistaken identities, meddlesome aunts and love triangles.  Our leading man, George Bevan, is an American playwright currently in London for his hit musical.  He meets Maud when she jumps in his taxi and things go sideways from there.

A Damsel in Distress is also a little bit more serious than most of Wodehouse’s books with all three romances a bit out of the ordinary.  Wodehouse shows real feelings with these characters.  People don’t spend the entire novel ducking aunts or getting clever or hiding behind the sofa; instead we see self-sacrifice and men risking social opprobrium to marry the ladies they love.

The story is still Wodehouse funny, but a bit less fluffy than the Jeeves stories.

Amazon offers A Damsel in Distress; currently the Kindle version is free.

4 Stars

Review: Under New Leadership – Intriguing Novella about an IRS Agent (Really)

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Writing coaches and English teachers all say to write what you know about.  New author Shawn Robert Smith is an accountant so he wrote about…yes, an IRS agent on jury duty.  If this sounds weird for a science fiction plot, then know his short story, Under New Leadership, works.

Smith built an intriguing back story that makes me want to learn more.  Why are there 10 new alien species all in the United States?  How come one (or more) are IRS agents?  How does that work?  I’m trying to visualize people from really far away and really strange backgrounds learning double entry bookkeeping, auditing, and taxation and coming up a bit short.

I took accounting classes years ago (so as to pass the CPA exam just in case I needed a career change) and can say that one must put a different hat on in order to think in accountant-ese.  Accountants measure stuff and record stuff and the biggest conflicts are on how to do it, not whether the thing being measured is worth doing in the first place.  Now we’ve aliens who fled to Earth and the US’s welcome worrying whether to double discount depreciation?  This is one new back story and it’s lots of fun.

Main character Jrulnik is blessed with super hearing and discovers a plot by criminal masterminds to pool their efforts for greater profit and less bloodshed.  He shows up for jury duty but gets bundled into a closet while the supposed jurors agree on new leadership for their cabal before freeing Jrulnik and blithely finding the defendant guilty.  All the way through Jrulnik wants to be a good citizen, worries about maintaining the honor of the IRS by performing his juror role with care.

We have lots of mysteries.  Who is the girl with purple eyes really?  Where did she come from?  How did we get 10 alien species all fleeing to Earth?  What are they fleeing from and did anyone nefarious follow them?  And last, how did the IRS survive and thrive in a world with aliens?  (Or is that another way of saying that death and taxes will be with us always?)

Such a simple plot.  And so much back story!  I look forward to reading the novels Smith will write set in this same world. Right now this story is free on Amazon and I recommend it.

4+ Stars

Dear County Agent Guy – Dairy Farmer Wisdom and Wit – Jerry Nelson

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Jerry Nelson says he got his start as a humor columnist when he sent a letter to the county agent asking for help removing cattails, ducks and tourists from his flooded field one wet North Dakota spring.  The agent suggested he try writing a column for farm magazines.  Jerry was successful and now with Dear County Agent Guy: Calf Pulling, Husband Training, and Other Curious Dispatches from a Midwestern Dairy Farmer we non farm magazine readers can enjoy the his work too.

Jerry Nelson writes simply and from himself and the result is a series of funny articles that read from the heart, not at all contrived.  His columns range from memories growing up, courting his wife, suggesting his wife’s obstetrician use a calf puller on the slow-to-arrive oldest child and thoughts about raising kids, thrift and farming.  I enjoyed them.

The columns are funny because Nelson finds humor in simple, every day things.  He is not mean nor contemptuous nor snide nor sarcastic.  There is a wide streak of potty humor with a couple stories about changing diapers, handling manure, not bathing and using the side of the barn as a convenient substitute for the indoor bathroom.  Even though I’m not crazy about potty humor the stories were in good fun and a couple of the jokes were pretty funny.

Nelson never preaches or comes across as advising people on how to run their lives, or to save money or to enjoy the outdoors and friends and family.  Nonetheless it’s obvious that these virtues are among the reasons he is happy and if anyone wants to emulate him, well, they got a few good suggestions.

Dear County Agent Guy will appeal to anyone who enjoys the outdoors, not just farmers.  Nelson explains the farming background with minimal detail, enough to clarify what he’s talking about but not so much that we readers feel we need to become dairy farmers to enjoy his work.

I received an advance copy through NetGalley in expectation of an honest review.  The E book could use some copy editing to clean up the format.  The overall writing needs little editing – for one thing these were taken from magazine columns and for another Nelson’s style is good and his sentences, spelling and such are already readable.

Overall I would give this 4 stars.

Renovating for Fun and Profit – Bricking It by Nick Spalding

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Have you ever built a house or done a major remodel?  Do you enjoy This Old House and similar house makeover shows?  Do you like a funny book?  Then get a copy of Bricking It by Nick Spalding and get ready to relive your shudders and that horrible feeling as the costs creep ever up.

Danny and Haley Daley inherited a derelict farmhouse deep in the Hampshire countryside from their grandmother.  (Their parents got cash.)  The house had woodworm, critters, critter droppings, mold, sagging walls and floors, an attic floor that’s so rotted Danny falls through, plus the to-be-expected damaged kitchen, bath, subsiding foundations, overgrown shrubbery, and so on.  Neither has any money or any home Do-It-Yourself skills.

But…  Haley found from the local realtor that the house would sell as-is for about 160,000 pounds or – get this – if renovated for about 600,000 pounds.  They could expect to pay about 160,000 pounds for the renovation work (and we who have been through this know that will inevitably increase), but they stand to make over 300,000 pounds when selling the house.  That’s a big amount, enough to make anyone reconsider.

They agree to proceed.  Bricking It is not This Old House or Rehab Addict in written form and it doesn’t cover all the work hammer nail by hammer nail.  Instead it touches on what Danny and Haley do and feel.  Some of the vignettes are pretty funny as when Danny burns a bunch of big green weeds in the back corner and gets high on the marijuana smoke; some are gross as when Danny has an internal emergency while up in the rafters; some are fun as when Haley realizes she is more concerned with her house than with the bomb disposal squad that’s removing the WW2 bomb in the yard.

Overall the book does a reasonable job on characterization, both Danny and Haley grow and manage to get out of nasty personal ruts.  Danny even discovers that a girl’s beautiful outside doesn’t make up for a boring inside!  Spalding does  good job on minor characters like Gerard who is filming this as part of a British home improvement show, Fred the contractor and of course Pat The Cow.

It does not capture the horrible feeling one gets when trapped in a sea of construction debris and debt; instead the characters and episodes are positive and the ending is a bit over the top.  I didn’t care for the coarse language and potty humor – there is plenty of ordinary humor in any building project that Spalding didn’t need a couple of the potty events – but discovering their grandmother had run a brothel for a few years was priceless.

Overall I’d give this 4 stars. Bricking It is easy to read and rather fun.  I didn’t enjoy it enough to look for more by Spalding but this was worth reading if you have a couple spare hours – and are considering whether to remodel or just tear it down and move.

I got a copy of Bricking It for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.