Book Review: Andy McBean and the War of the Worlds

Title: Andy McBean and the War of the Worlds

Author: Dale Kutzera

Date: 2014

Publisher  Salmon Bay

Quote: "Been'Tok often had an insufficiently positive attitude."

In H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Martians attacked Earth and killed lots of humans. The fictional story terrified people who heard it dramatized on radio. 

In Dale Kutzera's kid-friendly novel, Martians start to attack Earth, but their goal is not to kill humans, humans don't react by instantly trying to kill them, and there's an opportunity for communication. Specifically, Andy McBean, a middle-school-aged cancer survivor living in the Pacific Northwest and wishing he could move to a dry climate as he walks to and from school in the rain, and Been'Tok, a worker drone Martian who doesn't really like extracting all the water from every planet his people colonize. 

Been'Tok thinks Andy is treated specially because he's the supreme warrior of his race. He soon learns his mistake. Kutzera is careful to avoid the "little boy is smarter than all the adults on Earth" theme I've despised since early childhood. Andy turns to adults--his parents, friends' parents, the government officials who make contact when Andy and some other humans get into a military installation--for help and guidance, but he is the one with whom Been'Tok talked first. His insistence on peace gives Been'Tok and the other worker drones time to reflect on why they're doing all the dirty work for the  "Big Head" rulers of their society, anyway. 

Would Wells have approved of this child's story inspired by his novel for adults? I don't know. It's a nice long challenging read that will get middle school students through lots of study periods, which I remember as a plus point. 

New Book Review: The Forest Is Forever

Fair disclosure: I've been one of the beta readers of all of Priscilla Bird's books, as they were written and posted, chapter by chapter, at howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com. So it's not occurred to me to post reviews of them. So I searched for the Amazon page to recommend one of them to someone I know in real life. The Amazon page to buy The Forest Is Forever is messed up; the book was written in the US, for US readers, about a place in the US, but searches show only the pages to buy the British or Australian editions. Say what? When Americans want to publish things that may mention or allude to people who may not like what we say about them, e.g. novels in which characters have parents or spouses who are Bad Examples but we're not positive that we've made those parents or spouses different enough from our own, we have traditionally told our agents "Just publish it in England.' Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. But The Forest Is Forever is available in the US. You just have to search for the author, not the title. You can buy it at 

https://www.amazon.com/Forest-Forever-Collected-Ralph-Stories/dp/B0GP8SN6ZL/

--but oh well search engines are saying Amazon's server is down, intermittently, today anyway. If you search for "books priscilla bird" they show you books by other people called Priscilla and books about birds. And if you search Google for "priscilla bird book forest is forever," the algorithm, no doubt attracted by our using the same half of a screen name, will--as of this morning--put a Link Log in which I showed the terribly cute "The late Albert Einstein recommends PBird's books" graphic designed by e-friend LoneStar Neanderthal, in between links to buy the book in England and to buy it in Australia.

Well. If they're going to do that, and maybe Google has more respect for this blog now that our daily page views are growing, then I ought at least to post a full-sized review of The Forest Is Forever.

Title: The Forest Is Forever

Author: Priscilla Ann Bird

Date: 2026

Publisher: Amazon

Length: 486 pages

ISBN:  979-8248948628

This is the third volume of stories about a magical place in the Baker National Forest in Washington state. Humans, even the fictional ones in the book, can find the settlement where the wolves, pumas, ravens, Neanderthal Men, and only a few other Sasquatch (they spread out), and other living things recognize Ralph the Sasquatch as their king--but only if the Sasquatch let them. Harmless but alarming pranks deflect unwelcome humans. A few select humans like reporter Millie, Ranger Rick, and restless student Marge, become friends and, whether by keeping the settlement secret or writing about it in such a way that hardly anyone believes their stories, are allowed to visit the Sasquatch family often.

Sasquatch believers are divided on the question whether Sasquatch are more like giant humans or more like giant gorillas. They agree that the creatures, if they still exist, would be a separate species but don't agree on which genus that species would belong in. In these stories the Sasquatch are clearly more like humans.

Sasquatch believers also disagree about whether Sasquatch bodies have never been found because the creatures intentionally destroy bodies that might lead researchers to their dwelling places, or have the ability to disappear (and dispose of bodies) into alternate dimensions, or are demonic delusions that exist only to lead people astray. In these stories they have the ability to pop in and out of interdimensional portals, and other super-powers, and they are good though not perfect creatures. There are different tribes and clans of Sasquatch. Some, Ralph admits, may be hostile to humans. His clan are benign.

In fact, Ralph, his wife Ramona, and their son Twigg and daughter Cherry, are generally smarter and nicer than the average human. Stories about them often include solutions to human problems, though sometimes the Sasquatch family solve problems by using their super-powers.

In this book Twigg grows up, likes young females he knows he's not meant to marry, finds and marries his beshert, and moves out on his own. 

There's nothing else quite like this series. The general concept reminds me of Kipling's children's stories, but the perspective and philosophy, the author's voice, and the characters themselves are altogether different from Kipling's. If you like whimsical, goodhearted, very gentle short fiction, you'll like the Ralph Stories, and you'll want to collect them all.

Book Review: Murder on the Deck

Fair disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an advance review...which I failed to post on Friday because I didn't schedule enough reading time. Although it came through Book Funnel, this is a full-length book, with lots of possibilities and plot twists and cozy-mystery-solving fun. It went live over the weekend. You can buy it now.

Title: Murder on the Deck

Author: Avery Kent

Date: 2026

Quote: "This is the Oceanic Emerald's first Alaskan cruise."

Have you been on an Alaskan cruise, Gentle Readers? I never have, but Avery Kent has convinced me that it would have been fun. If you enjoy travelling you will want to see the sights the characters in this book are seeing while they're plotting, committing, and solving a murder. Apart from a scene in which a police detective called Brooks grills a suspect called Dunn, adding inappropriate music to my mental image of the scene, that's the worst thing about this book :-)

(Some mystery buffs think a murder mystery needs two bodies.  This one has two bodies found on the deck, but one's only stunned.)

Loretta Lafayette is taking the cruise with her friend Alistair, his niece Amy, Amy's friend Liam, and Chester the Chihuahua. Loretta is a confirmed amateur detective but she doesn't solve murders alone. She talks through the clues with her trusted friends. Though Alistair hopes for a peaceful cruise, after two other cruises on which Loretta found murders to solve, soon a man who's been easy for a lot of people to hate is found dead on the deck. Several of the people who had reasons to hate him turn out to be on the ship, and the cozy family group are soon playing Loretta's favorite game.

If you like traditional close-mouthed detectives, Loretta's technique may put you off. If you lose patience with complicated mystery novels because you don't want to memorize the details of who was where when, you'll love Loretta and her friends. I give the novel bonus points for having Chester make an important discovery...that does not solve the mystery.

This is a delightful detective novel, and if you like it, there are many more where it came from. Kent is the author of four other series, including the two other volumes (so far) about Loretta Lafayette.

New Book Review: A Cupcake to Die For

Title: A Cupcake to Die For

Author: Camilla Clove

Date: 2025

Quote: "The scream cut through the sea breeze just as I was about to take my first bite of Aunt Mira's lavender cupcake."

One of Aunt Mira's friends and customers has just been murdered with an overdose of medication. Jasmine, who just came back from the city to inherit an uncle's business, wants to prove her family and friends innocent. The mystery's not very hard to solve but, after all, this short story is only an introduction to a series of longer stories. 

The names of several characters and the bakery's specialties give this story a whiff of Middle Eastern flavor--Syrian? Lebanese?--but in one important way it strikes me as an American story. Jasmine is fairly young and single. In this book she meets a nice police officer who takes care of the murderer, but it's traditional that if there is a love interest in mystery novels it develops slowly...and in this one we're told that in the next volume Jasmine is going to meet another nice single man. How many eligible bachelors are going to be useful contacts for solving mysteries before Jasmine settles down with one of them? Remains to be seen.  

Book Review: Jake's Grumpy Cabin

Title: Jake's Grumpy Cabin

Author: Anna Christie

Date: 2023

Quote: ""Am I tickling you?" "More like tickling my funny bone!""

If you think romances are not to be taken seriously, you might like this one. Start with the title. A cabin can't be grumpy; only the people in it can be. They're not. Jake has avoided involvement with women after an early infatuation with a woman who cheated his family out of money, but he likes "Little Miss Summertime Tourist" from the minute he meets her on one of his infrequent trips into Talkeetna. In less time than it would take real-world acquaintances to form a clear memory of each other's names, he's thinking about "love" and she's ready to move into the cabin. It's a sweet romance because the story is short and breaks off before they're actually shacked or cabinned up together. 

Early in the story Emma confides to readers that she's always told students never to go from Point A to Point B with a stranger if Point A is "safe" but, looking at Jake, she's willing to go to Point C if he asks her. That's what this story is all about. The characters know, as the reader must know, that they've not found True Love yet. They are in love with love--more realistically, with their own hormones. Acting out the feelings, at this stage, is the way people used to get into altruistic marriages with people they soon realized they'd never really liked very much. Sometimes when they got to know one another they realized they'd ruined their lives. But this is strictly a fantasy. All we really see them doing is enjoying each other's appeal as a piece of exotica. For Jake being in town, even Talkeetna, is a novelty; for Emma being in Alaska is a novelty. In Alaska summer is a bit of a novelty. Swoon.

The unreality of this story is its charm. It wouldn't sell me a series but then, rare for a Book Funnel book, it's not trying to sell a series. It did tickle my funny bone. 

Book Review: Alaskan Dream

Title: The Alaskan Dream

Author: Lynn Eisenhauer

Date: 2023

Quote: "This short story is a companion piece to my novel Sea of Fate."

If it's meant to advertise the novel, it doesn't. This short e-book doesn't even work as a complete short story. It introduces a character's situation but all the character does is christen his new boat, and he doesn't even spend onstage time thinking about the name. The story about this man may be worth telling--he's given up hope of finding his wife and child, which in fiction often means he's about to find them--but the short story gives no indication of it.

If writers are going to send out short stories as e-books in hope of selling more copies of their full-length e-books, those short stories should have been published in a good literary magazine.

And the Book Funnel copy I received also had the type sizes fouled up. 

New Book Review: Second Chance Doctor

Title: Second Chance Doctor 

Author: Christi Sage

Date: 2023

Publisher: Christi Sage

Quote: "I remember everything; she remembers nothing."

At first glance this is just another sweet romance with a plot that seems particularly far-fetched, but I think this author may be telling us something she's observed about the real world, along with the "high school sweethearts meet again after fifteen years, are still single, fall in love again and live happily ever after" trope.

Part of the amnesiac character's problem seems out of date. It was baby-boomers who were officially named Catherine and called Cathy, who rejected the short form Cathy because there was always at least one other Cathy in every class at school. (In one of my classes there were two Cathies, or maybe Kathies, not closely related, who also had the same family name.) In different regional patterns of slang long words were abbreviated to either their beginnings or their ends; the dominant trend by the mid-1980s seemed to be for Cathies to want to be called Kate but one of my college classmates was a Ryn. But that's not a problem a girl the age of the heroine of this romance would have had; baby-boomers called daughters anything but Cathy, Or Debbie, Susan, Carol, Sharon, Karen, or Jennifer.

So this character has a more dramatic name and image problem. In defiance of fashion, she was named Catherine by long-lost parents and brought up by an abusive aunt who called her Cathy. Her high school sweetheart, who answers to Archer, Arch, or even Archie, called her Rin. When Rin's abusive aunt fell and threatened to tell people in their small town that Rin pushed her, Rin ran off to the city and promptly found an even more abusive boyfriend, the kind who was a "fiance" for years. Since he apparently has access to chloroform and doesn't hesitate to use it on people without their consent, it's just plausible that Rin might have genuine amnesia, a condition most reported during the years when chloroform was commonly used in hospitals. 

More recently reported, apparently true, amnesia stories have become a dominant theme at some "true crime" and "unsolved mystery" sites. For reasons unknown, they all seem to involve men, an abnormally high percentage of whom are truck drivers. Something to do with diesel fumes? Anyway, amnesia is rarely reported these days, and there's always been some doubt whether :psychogenic amnesia" really happened. Amnesia induced by brain trauma seems to be either less complete (people lose memories from only a short time) or more complete (some people go into comas). Christi Sage seems to be hinting in this novel, however, that the kind of amnesia that fascinated writers of detective and "thriller" stories in the 1930s was a genuine, specific drug reaction. This might be true. 

Anyway, this millennial-generation girl with this combination of baby-boomer and Greatest Generation problems picks a random name, Reina, and gets a part-time job, apparently an illegal job, and lives on junkfood in her car, apparently blocking all memories of who she really is. Then in a moment of post-traumatic stress she returns to the old home town and just happens to meet Archer, who just happens to have come back to the home place to get away from his stressful life as a doctor in Seattle.

So this lifelong victim wakes up in the home of her ex-boyfriend, feeling safe--and readers are asked to believe that she really is safe from any Inappropriate Involvement with dear old Archer. In real life I'd incline to believe that, since we're told that Rin's brain damage shows in enough other ways that a real man would be wary. What's hard to believe is that Archer would describe her brain-damaged behavior, not with clinical detachment, but with pure, idealistic, Christian love. (He's a Christian, and mentions it a few times in the novel, though he doesn't preach.) She stumbles around bumping into things--Archer took her home after she fell into a swimming pool and seemed unable to swim--and going into panics for no obvious reason. She would, in real life, evoke feelings of horror and revulsion in old friends.

It's a sweet romance, so we know that she'll recover enough memory and physical coordination to be accepted as sane by the end of the book. How her other problems are resolved is the only suspense the story can possibly have. Do true stories of amnesia ever end so well? In the 1930s some of them seemed to do; for all I know, this unlikely story might be based on facts, though those facts still seem more likely to have happened a hundred years ago than to happen now.

Book Review: Rivers of Gold

Title: Rivers of Gold

Author: Tracie Peterson

Publisher; Bethany House

Date: 2002

ISBN: 0-7642-2380-1

Length: 383 pages

Quote: “The woman gently urged, ‘You wake up. You no die.’”

Rivers of Gold is a romance.

In the smaller sense of the word, which is the one most often used today, a romance is a story in which two people “fall in love.” Though the details of their quarrelling and making up may teach readers something about interpersonal relationships, the main purpose of these stories is to remind people of the feeling of “falling in love,” and thus either help hard-working wives turn their attention back to their husbands, or distract teenagers from what they ought to be doing, depending on who is reading these stories. Since there is no doubt about the outcome of these stories, and little is going on besides the couple drawing closer together, many people say that, if “romances” are not positively pornographic, they’re boring.

In the larger and more classical sense of the word, however, a romance differs from a novel in that more goes on in a romance. A novel was originally supposed to be a realistic story in which things that really happened were fictionalized just enough to allow the author to reminisce (or speculate) frankly about people’s private thoughts and motives. A romance was supposed to be a fantastic story, usually set in faraway times and places the author and reader knew only in fantasy, often dealing with the adventures of royalty, superheroes, or arch-villains, sometimes featuring speculative elements like ghosts, supernatural beings, or time travel, and usually featuring adventures that were at least unlikely. The names of the genres were originally meant to suggest the difference; for English readers a novel was meant to be like a news story, a romance to suggest the exotic glamour of Italy. A “love story” is not even a necessary element in this type of romance, though the classics of “romantic” fiction, like Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queene, usually include more than one couple who will share adventures and be separated and be reunited before the end.

I mention this because what Tracie Peterson set out to do with her “Yukon Quest” series is a romance in the classical sense, dramatizing the broader-stage “romance” of the Yukon’s gold rush days with tales of the unlikely adventures, including love stories, that real people really had. Though Miranda, who almost froze and/or drowned in an icy river and is being urged to wake up in the opening scene, will fall in love with the scientist whose housekeeper wants her to sip spoonfuls of hot tea, we’ll read about their “romance” and the early days of their marriage along with the other adventures of their friends; the story’s not over when Miranda and Teddy take their vows. Babies will be born; toddlers’ lives will be in danger. A murderer will falsely accuse an innocent teenager and get the boy locked up until the others can prove who really killed their friend. What seem like fortunes in cheapened gold will be found and lost. Bethany House being a Christian publisher, somebody who has led a frivolous, unbelieving life will be led to profess faith in Christ. The story is fiction, and is meant to sound excitingly exotic and unlikely to us today, but it’s based on records of things that actually happened. Bethany House achieved fame with the Mandie books for children; though the setting is different this series is meant to appeal to adults who enjoyed the Mandie books.

What’s not to like? If you start here (volume three), although it’s easy to figure out that a Victorian Heroine is meeting her Rescuing Hero in the first scene, it takes a while to figure out who the other characters are and why we’re reading about them in the next several pages. It wouldn’t have been hard for Peterson to let Miranda’s happy dream, before she sips tea, include some reference to her friend Karen, or let Karen’s conversation with her husband include some reference to the certain death of their friend Miranda—but she doesn’t. Eventually, of course, all readers will catch up with the story, but I suspect I would have liked this book better if I’d started with volume one.

If the idea of a large multiethnic cast of people trying to bring the Gilded Age alive in the wilderness appeals to you, you may want the entire series. Here be steamships and washtubs, proper etiquette and concern about when the next shipment of canned fruit will arrive, passionate kisses followed by guilty soul-searching until proper Victorians can make up their minds to marry each other, sled dogs and claim jumpers, a kidnapping, a madly international celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday, couples living in love after the honeymoon is over, enough tender moments to remind you of your courting days if you’re a grandmother, and no details likely to raise a suspicious blush if you’re reading this book in the most boring class of your school day. People who like historical romances should enjoy every page.

Book Review: Blood of the North

Title: Blood of the North

Author: James B. Hendryx

Date: 1938

Publisher: Triangle/Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 278 pages

Quote: "Time'll come when Angus'll be wantin' a wife, mayhap." "Aye, an' Jean could go further an' fare worse."

James B. Hendryx wrote several of these cheap young-adult novels, apparently attempting to appeal to boys and girls at the same time. Blood of the North is a "Western" adventure story, although it's set in the Northwest rather than the Southwest, with fur traders instead of cowboys. It's also a romance. Young Angus Murchie, whose late lamented mother was "Indian," doesn't think he has a right to marry bonnie blue-eyed Jean McPherson--even though their elders think they'd make a perfect pair. Angus has to prove himself a storybook hero, brave, tough, woods-wise, and also able to out-trick a despicable developer in real estate law, before Jean can sweetly tell him that "the really great chiefs who were your mother's ancestors" will be a lot to live up to. Fade out with a kiss, as all romances of this period always do. To find out how Angus proves himself you have to read the book.

Novels like this one, forerunners of movies and TV shows, used to be regarded as a sort of vice--mentioned in some church rules right alongside dancing and gambling--and students used to be warned not to waste their eyesight reading them. It is therefore ironically appropriate that surviving copies are worth more now than they were when new.

Fair disclosure: I did not particularly care for the story. So what? I seldom do like novels. If "Rocky Mountain High" is your favorite song and Lake Louise is your favorite landscape, you probably would like this book for the landscapes alone. If you're interested in the history of the 1930s and 1940s, here is an authentic artifact of pop culture from that period. Or you might want it just because it's old enough by now to count as a decorative item.

 

(Removed from Blogjob...)

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Island Year

Author: Hazel Heckman

Date: 1972

Publisher: University of Washington Press

ISBN: 0-295-95171-0

Length: 247 pages plus index

Illustrations: drawings by Laurie Olin

Quote: "Seen from the air, the (approximately) six-by-three-mile chunk of real estate known as Anderson island resembles a wooded oasis surrounded by water."

Island Year consists of one year of nature notes from Anderson Island off the Pacific coast of the state of Washington. If you like reading the phenology posts on the blogs of those of us who post them, you'll probably enjoy Island Year. It's not meant to be read through for the plot like a novel; it's a collection of short, newspaper-column-or-blog-post-length descriptions of what Heckman saw.

And, of course, sometimes what she did about it. "His hand feet clamped precariously on the trough, a half-grown raccoon hung from the bathroom eave..Confused by my appearance, he let the basket go...and then swung like a plum bob in an effort to regain his balance. For a moment I was sure he would not make it and prepared to catch him..."

And what other people did about it. "The mail brought a packet from a stranger--a pale blue lapel pin in the shape of a raindrop, inscribed...I LOVE RAIN, symbol of the I Love Rain Society. 'To rainwash the world and keep Washington's image wet, to discourage crowds.'"

And, inevitably...even in May a favorite trail reminds Heckman of the mortality of people and the places they loved. "I think often of Bob and Nella...Bob is gone now, and Nella does not come any more. She prefers to remember the paths they took together...I hope those who come after me will feel, that the path should be left unchanged, that it is only ours for a time, that it belongs not to us but to all of the natural life that grows and dwells there--to the deer and the raccoons that daily negotiate the trail, to the hummingbird that comes to feed on the flowering currant, to the kingfisher and the pigeon guillemot that nest in the bank..."

According to the publisher, this book is a classic. You don't even have to buy a secondhand copy; they've reprinted it, and you can even preview the drawings here:

https://uwpressblog.com/2014/06/04/june-color-hazel-heckmans-island-year/

It's reasonably easy to find secondhand. $5 per copy + $5 per package, to either address in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, is probably not the best deal you'll find if you search the'Net. However, Hazel Heckman is apparently still alive (though not active on the Internet--she has a Facebook page, but it's blank) so Island Year is a Fair Trade Book: if you buy it here, we'll send $1 per copy to Heckman or a charity of her choice. If you buy four copies that can be mailed out in one package, Heckman or her charity will receive $4, even though you'll pay only $25.

(The tags were: Anderson Island, nature notes, Pacific Northwest,pigeon guillemot, raccoon,Washington state.)