The Elf Queen of Shannara

The Elf Queen of Shannara

Terry Brooks

Terry Brooks had a hit on his hands with the buddy buddy fantasy Sword and Sorcery novel Sword of Shannara and parleyed it into an ongoing succession of serial novels. I enjoyed the initial trilogy but after a while Malthus Theory of Diminishing Utility sets in. If nothing else this Audiobook addition to the fable should be good for insomnia.

Seems it occurs 500 years after Shea Omsford of the first novel in the series. The Elf Stones still live in the hands of a fairy or someone with elf blood.

Seems this is a good versus evil tale. And where does evil come from. It results from good people's bad choices.

The story turns into a journey of escape as Wren attempts to lead a group of protectors from their fortress home to freedom while beset by demons and other threatening creatures. The land is fraught withe dangerous terrain and an erupting volcano. One by one she loses members of her party before they finally reach shore and Tiger Ty the Roc Rider .

The entire series has been derivative of JRR Tolkien. The descriptive passages stretching out the narrative unnecessarily. The stress is eased by the knowledge that should Wren not make it there would be no need for the volumes that follow.

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Winnowed Wisdom

Winnowed Wisdom

Stephen Leacock

The average Canadian lives in Red Hat Saskatchewan stands 5 8 and weighs 139. It would seem he's put on some weight since 1926.

To learn the tone of Leacock's take on Shagsper remember that he wrote the sonnets before he died. And lest we get too high flown remember that the road to Stratford upon Avon in Ontario leads through Punkydoodle Corners, also Shakespeare and quite properly London on the Thames is to the South, Waterloo to the East, and None of It to the North.

Jest is made of Henry I-VIII plays. Given the dubious status of the present holder of that name Henry IX is in doubt.

Among my observations is the fact that back then people still crossed the pond on luxury liners so news was slow to spread. WW#2 soldiers got to cross on Cunard's Queens painted gunmetal grey to match the seas they crossed. None were ever hit.

Some of Leacock's humour is rather dated and facetious. It is interesting to see how some of his prognostications have turned out nearly a century later. All in all I like Gregory Clark's gentle humour better.

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UNASS

Situation Normal #1

UNASS

Chris Lowry

A Chris Lowry world is violent and Sci-Fi and this one is no exception. The aliens have superior weapons, the narrator is a cameraman who has had a weapon thrown into his hands. The outcome is left up in the air.

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Psalms: Prayers of the Heart

LifeGuide Bible Studies

Psalms: Prayers of the Heart

Eugene H. Peterson

Looking at the Psalms as prayer. This book is not a commentary on 12 Psalms but a collection of questions on each Psalm to guide a group's examination and discussion of each Psalm.

Would not be my first choice for a study of Psalms. The study uses the NIV version of the Bible. I do not like this translation.

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Cursed! Blood of the Donnellys

Cursed! Blood of the Donnellys: A Novel Based on a True Story

Keith Ross Leckie

This is a story of vigilante justice meted out when the law failed to protect citizens from feuding neighbours.

The massacre took place in 1880 and was written about in books I read published in 1954 and again in 1962. This latest account is four years old. Obviously none of the principals are still around to argue the facts.

People were killed here but when it comes to warfare truth is in the eye of the beholder and depends on who is telling the tale.

At the one third point in the novel the couple are on the run at sea in a tramp freighter having burned their bridges behind them.

After squatting on another's property the Donnellys enjoy 7 good years save for the death of young Vinnie in a stump clearing tragedy and Johannah produces 7 sons. With 2 months before the end of the 7-year term the owner shows up to claim the land the Donnelly's have worked so hard to clear and improve and the troubles begin at the half-way point in the book.

And the neighbours choose sides. The Protestants an obvious choice but Johannah's friendhip with a Protestant Doctor a bone of contention. Pity the poor old County Sheriff.

Little love lost here and only vigilante justice. Young John O'Connor gets to spit on the grave of the last member of the Peace Society.

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The Twisted Truth

The Twisted Truth

Ava Burrows

Wish I'd read the reviews first here. Were this a high school composition it would get a failing even a negative grade. The writer needs a remedial course in English Composition. Nothing less than a total rewrite would save this train wreck, it isn't worth an editor's time. How it rated 5 star ratings is beyond me. Worse yet the file causes Kindle to freeze.

The writing improves dramatically as the story continues. The fact that our dick uses floppy discs and has a computer slot to read them dates that piece. They stopped making them in 2011.

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Snow Fever - Mountain Adventures in New Zealand, Canada, France & Switzerland

Snow Fever - Mountain Adventures in New Zealand, Canada, France & Switzerland

Jack Moscrop

Author is a travel writer. Small collection of shorts concerning his ski holidays.

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A Good Man with a Dog: A Game Warden's 25 Years in the Maine Woods

A Good Man with a Dog: A Game Warden's 25 Years in the Maine Woods

Roger Guay, Kate Clark Flora, John Pruden (Narrator)

Here the ghost writer is acknowledged. I'm listening to an audiobook version. This game warden operated in Maine which abuts NB and PQ. I've driven from Houlton Maine to Bangor in the fall of the year and camped at a park in the Katahdin Wilderness. What we have to remember on my side of the border is that our wardens do everything these men do but do it unarmed. Expect an American would feel naked without his side-arm.

To most including young Roger poaching is a game, the crime is in getting caught. Three days in jail, a $1000.00 fine, and confiscation of your catch or meat and rifle or fishing gear is no minor matter.

What stands out when game wardens offer their services to other enforcement agencies is the compartmentalization of law enforcement in America and the failure to share information between agencies.

This is not a feel good story and certainly not for the squeamish. Yet another author critical of FEMA and it's ineptitude in New Orleans where Katrina served to exacerbate existing crime and corruption.

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His Small-Town Girl

Sutter's Hollow #1

His Small-Town Girl

Lacy Williams

I can identify with wanting to get away from confining small town claustrophobia. Cord joined the military to do so but comes home to settle his grandmother's affairs. He finds a dilapidated run-down ranch that's in debt to the local bank. Runs into former neighbours and acquaintances and has a waif on the run from her own troubles show up at his door.

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Salt-Water Moon

Mercer series

Salt-Water Moon

David Benson French

I intend to read the text but can claim to have seen the play performed live in the back yard of a heritage home in Trinity Newfoundland with the lad playing Jacob Mercer seated on a swing attached to a tree in that yard. Nothing could have made it more authentic. Seems the performance was June 13, 2010.

What I had not realized until I started reading the texts is that this play occurs 20 years before the first in the series in time when Mary and Jacob are their sons' age.

The author began a long tradition of Newfies leaving home for Toronto and making a career of writing about home and the immigrant experience. French was 11 when Newfoundland voted 51% to join Canada in 1949 a month before I was born.

The two plays that follow this one are not available in e-book form. 1949 and Soldier's Heart.

To the play. It's been nearly 14 years but I have a sense that the version I saw in Trinity was an adaptation. The basics:

The boy who left home to seek his fortune come back to woo the gal he left behind him. The fact her wedding to another man is pending added urgency to his mission. Having now read the two plays that are the after history we know he was successful. Alas his interactions with his own sons proved history repeating itself.

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Of the Fields, Lately

Mercer series

Of the Fields, Lately

David Benson French

This second of the plays begins 2 years later when Ben comes home from working in Saskatchewan for his Aunt Dot's funeral and learns his father has had a heart attack at 52. Ben is 20. Jacob loves his son but can't help himself but to be always nattering away at him. Dot's widowered husband Wiff complicates matters.

The play begins and ends with Ben turned directly to the audience.

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Leaving Home

Mercer series

Leaving Home

David Benson French

Jacob left school with a grade three education. His son Ben has just graduated from Grade 13 and is headed to university on a scholarship. Seventeen year old Billy is on the eve of his marriage to Kathy a Catholic whom he has gotten pregnant because he was too embarrassed to buy protection at the drug store. What elder son and father have in common is an Irish temperament. Billy's inlaws add to the fray. So, did the couple actually follow through on the wedding and start housekeeping with Ben as their tenant?

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Shaking Hands

Shaking Hands

Glenn McGoldrick

For whatever reason I had trouble getting Kindle to recognize this file however I tried which explains why I'd not read the book earlier and reviewed it and Goodreads only recently discovered it.

It is, of course, typical Dark Teaside noir.

Be sure your sins will find you out. Even if it's only your guilty conscience.

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Selling to the Goyim

After Dinner Conversation Short Story Series

Selling To The Goyim

After Dinner Conversation Short Story Series

J. Weintraub

Someone swallowed the thesaurus on this one. Buys into the stereotype of Jews as hucksters. Is it okay because the author is probably Jewish?

That a Jew would flog a book on holocaust denial just because it would sell smacks of selling one's soul to the devil.

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The Homecoming

The Homecoming

Dan Walsh

This is a reluctant hero kind of tale. Captain now Major Shawn Collins' Flying Fortress was shot down over Germany and manages to crash land it among beach dunes in occupied Holland saving his entire crew and getting them back to England the same day. At the same time his wife is killed on the home front in an automobile collision leaving his son in the reluctant care of the 7-yr-old boy's grandfather. There's a child care worker involved here. The grieving airman is sent home to a hero's welcome he's not sure he deserves and the less than willing recipient of a lot of attention. If you've watched Flags of Our Fathers you have an inkling of what he's up against. Or think John Basilone in The Pacific.

Shawn would just like to be left alone to grieve and bond with his motherless son but that is not to be his lot.

There's a great deal of name-dropping involved here. Shawn is from a suburb of Philadelphia. He takes Miss Thompson for Coffee at Wanamakers Department Store and later after meeting his PR Department guide, a newly minted Lt. who has never fired a gun he is casually taken for Dinner at the Waldorf, then a swank hotel next to Fennway Park where I expect he'll be throwing out the first pitch. Just a bit overwhelming for a small town boy.

Meanwhile back home Miss Thompson is learning how to be a Nanny or governess. There's a special place for Harry the train porter. The London Blitz gets mention including the dreaded Buzz Bombs. At some point an appointment with the White House for a Medal of Honour and for Katherine and Shawn an HEA that will make Patrick a happy boy. He may even get to pop THE QUESTION.

You'll have to read the book to see how it all came out.

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Red River by Borden Chase

Red River - Howard Hawks [1948 ]

Black and white. John Wayne 41, Montgomery Clift at 28. Tom Dunson and Matt Garth lead a Cattle Drove 1000 miles Texas to Missouri. Garth was the survivor of a raid that killed the other members of his wagon train and adopted by Dunson. As the drive begins he is a lithe young man.

From the Borden Chase book:

Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail

And even before the drive begins the contest between Matt Garth and the turncoat Cherry Valance is established. Who's the quickest draw must be established and the results are usually deadly.

I've yet to read the book but Hollywood likes happy endings and the movie has one. Johnny Boggs subsequent novel tells a different story.

If nine thousand cattle were driven down main street the after cleanup and the stink must have been massive. The little wood burning steam train shown in the movie would have taken years to transport that many cattle. Feeding that many cattle would have denuded the surrounding countryside but this was the movies.

The Book

Regret not reading it first. As expected Hollywood mashed the plot completely. A cattle drive with Texas Longhorns there was. River crossings, stampedes and death. And what remained of the crew made Abilene and found a railway. And a legend was born.

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The Marshal of Sentinel

The Marshal of Sentinel

Louis L'Amour

A short story I'm listening to in Dramatized Audio Format, an hour long. It all builds in tension as the marshal suspects a bank robbery is about to happen.

The marshal seems too soft spoken for the position he holds.

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Man Riding West

Man Riding West

Louis L'Amour, Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

Audiobook version. Two books by this name from this author. Being reluctant to fight doesn't make a man yaller, especially if he's a fast draw and doesn't want to get the rep that goes with the distinction. However riding with rustlers can get you branded as such and hung. What can we say.

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Cheyenne Challenge

The First Mountain Man #5

Cheyenne Challenge

William W. Johnstone, J. Rodney Turner (Narrator)

As wagon train after wagon train wends its way across the landscape Easterners set on leaving behind packed cities, poverty, taxes, and military service stream into the West invading native lands and threatening their livelihoods. While supplying employment to the mountain men who inhabit the wilds and know it best the influx of civilization threatens their way of life as well. And where there are hapless immigrants there are gangs more than willing to raid their wagons and murder the riders.

These books are violent and follow similar patterns. Piles of bodies litter the scene almost like a video game.

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Angels Flight

Harry Bosch #6

Angels Flight

Michael Connelly, Peter Giles (Narrator)

Harry and his team are called out to handle the murder of a prominent black civil rights lawyer hated by 100's of LA Cops. Dozens of other detectives were taken off the scene after Bosch arrived. He was assigned four IAD cops to assist including one he particularly hates. That at least half the force were prime suspects makes this particularly thankless.

Angels Flight is an LA funicular not unlike the one between the walled city of Quebec City and Lower Town. They consist of a railway of pedestrian cars. The one in LA two opposite moving cars which balance one another.

Two white cops going to inform a grieving black widow and her young adult son was not the smartest move especially since Bosch's two partners are both black.

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The Kill List

Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker #3

The Kill List

J.T. Sawyer

Mitch drops Dev off at the Durango Airport. The locations used in the novel really exist this being a mountainous region with deep canyons I've actually driven. The people involved with the capture, conviction, and incarceration of a crime lord's son are drugged and dropped into a canyon about to be flooded.

Included are

Mitch

Nicholas prosecuting attorney X

Dylan marshal X

Julie doctor X

Brian prison warden X

Lisa author who wrote about it X

Well it is called The Kill List

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Peak

If there weren't children named Dwezil, Moon Unit, River, Rainbow, Peak would seem far-fetched. I've had a subscription to Backpacker and some knowledge of rock climbing but Rock Rat is new to me.

Asked why a man would climb a mountain littered with the bodies of those who did not make it the answer given was, "Because it's there." Mountaineers are a strange confraternity. That a father would take his fourteen-year-old son to such a place.... You'll also rail at self-important officious functionaries everywhere.

Rarely does a book so capture my attention and I read it in one sitting but this is such a book. It's also eminently readable, action-packed, and well-edited.

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Born To Darkness

Born to Darkness is a genre bending book. Part horror, romance, sci-fi. A couple take tantric sex to the point that it blows electrical circuits for an entire block. People possess psychic powers that enable them to probe other's minds, project pain and mental distress, even move objects. Children are tortured.

As the story progresses we are treated with three romances.

At over 500 pages the storyline too often gets lost in too much detail. As with too many other books I've read since the age of computers began this book could have benefited greatly from the loss of about 200 pages.

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13 Reasons Why

The book takes the form of a 6-hour suicide note left on cassette tapes with commentary from one of the people who listen to them, or if you like a sod off from beyond the grave. Which begs the question as to why someone with that level of rationality and self-awareness went ahead with the act in the first place. This cry for help was pointless if the act succeeded. Did the individual intend to succeed or was her death an accident. Suspense builds as each side is completed and the listener still hasn't learned his part in the story.

For me school was a trial that had to be endured. For the most part I was an outside observer. My only activities were library and glee club where I excelled, and the occasional drama. I'm sure all the social interactions described here went on, one of my classmates showed up with a tooth broken in a fight, but I took no part in it. Hour-long bus rides on dusty, muddy, or ice-slicked roads added to the tedium coming and going. School dances were boring affairs I suffered. Graduation an exercise we marched through in advance of receiving our provincially marked grades. I stood first in my class, so I was an egghead.That teenagers have their own cars is still a revelation to me, that they get a new one for their 16th birthday....!

Reading the book has led to me to look up a classmate I haven't interacted with in 50 years. It has also made me think of all the people I have known who took their own lives whose acts I felt powerless to prevent.

---

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Ten Thousand Saints

Lack of education, unemployment, malnutrition, broken homes, depression, drug & alcohol addiction, early death.... The destiny of slum dwellers everywhere. The characters in this novel fit the pattern and no effort is made to pretty it up for us.

The action moves from a New Hampshire back woods town to the streets of New York City and up and down the New England Coast.

The mid point has the gang on a road trip as a rock band. An addendum 18 years later has Jude, the central character and the book's ostensible narrator back in his old neighbourhood that is remarkably gentrified since his teen years.

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Malice in Maggody

If you didn't know already the novel was set in the south, Arkansas, names like Jim Bob and Larry Joe would give it away. Fishing for catfish and a display of dried beef jerky beside the garage cash register seal the deal. The style is so ah shucks down home it makes Andy Griffith's Mayberry look like an urban metropolis. Since I've driven through Dildo, NFLD, I'll not question the placename Maggody.

The chief of police here is a woman. The turns of phrase contain gems like: "beanpole with acne", "booming threats that would scare the horns off the devil" . The behaviour of town council gives hicks a bad name, policing is strictly keystone cops. Inbreeding and family relationships interconnect all aspects of town life. Having attended Mississauga City Council meeting little would surprise me though I doubt back room bar meetings are broadcast on local cable in Maggody.

The Storyline switches from venue to venue, from sub-plot to sub-plot without warning or even a break in the text to indicate a change. The whole is so cornball as to seem laughable but one fears all too true to small-town life where speeding tickets fund city coffers.

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Something Like Summer

Will the Geeky Gay Kid get the Sexy Hunk Jock

Ben is gay and a non-athletic geek with above average intelligence. He has crushed on an unattainable jock he has seen out jogging in his neighbourhood. He is out and beyond notice in his clique in high school but will this jock notice him even were he a closeted gay? The premise behind this book is rather far-fetched and demands major suspension of disbelief to work.

Tim's parents are too typical of a wealthy couple who really didn't intend to have children but slipped. They give him everything including his good genes, his Camaro, but they do not give him themselves.

Ben's sister is a babblermouth. His parents are tolerant of his boyfriend sleeping over and even open about facilitating their relationship.

Out and proud geek teen and closeted jock. How do you expect this to go? But what happens when they meet up later in life?

This ends in a love triangle of the homoerotic kind. By the end I'd lost interest and was just glad it was over.

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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Above 25,000 ft the human body is dying which begs the question as to why anyone would want to risk climbing to such heights. Surprising is the fact that the climb begins in Equatorial heat amid a riot of blooming shrubs and wildflowers. There is an element of unreality about the entire enterprise. Amid an ancient people and Buddhist Monks adventure seekers flock to climb their holy mountain. More incongruous is the concept of an expedition that daunts professional climbers being offered as a tourist attraction. 

Eye-witness accounts have proven to be notoriously unreliable and the majority of the people on that mountain were suffering hallucinations from lack of oxygen. The author makes a considered effort to defend his version of the events. Whatever your assessment the book is well written and makes good reading. Risk takers fall victim to their gambles as did adventurers here, the author made it back to write his account. 

All the Galland Men by Don Stratton

Before the US became ostensibly the world’s police force it’s foreign policy was essentially isolationist. Then as now the military establishment was more than happy to profit from supplying the matériel of war but it took the events of December 7, 1941 to bring America into the war and another two years before a substantial force could be mobilized and trained. The USS Arizona remains sunk in Pearl Harbour a graveyard for the men who served aboard her whose bodies were never recovered and a memorial to their sacrifice. This memoir tells the story of one of the few men who survived and uses archival material, diaries and letters to fill in the details. It serves to make history personal. The man whose memories were here transcribed by a ghost writer was 94 at time of publication. Most veterans are reluctant to dredge up old wounds and traumas. We are indebted to this man for sharing his.

A Torch Against the Night

Book 2 of An Ember in the Ashes. A pair of lovers flee for their lives in a classic picaresque novel in which it is us against the world and the odds are stacked heavily against them. Reading Book One first is a definite prerequisite. That said this book is eminently readable and the action will carry the reader along.

Loyalties are divided and serving those you do not respect and with those you despise and know spy on you.... Invented profanity is still swearing, just not the words with which we have become all too familiar. The story is told in the third person alternate chapters from Laia, Helene, and Elias' point of view. Life here is violent, blood runs in the streets and rivers run red.

Although the central pair achieve a certain resolution the causes of their distress remain unsettled. Will there be a book 3 in which the coming wars are fought?

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A Place to Call Their Own

Two twenty-year-olds set off for the wilds of Kansas in hopes that they can live their lives as lovers in peace there. As the case of Matthew Shepherd proves too little in the lives of gay lovers has changed over the last century. Having survived the Civil War Frank and Gregory leave their less than accepting families behind braving bands of ruffians, marauding Indians, bad weather, prairie fire, and suspicious neighbours to carve out a life for themselves. The book is well-written and charts pioneer life and spirit. Although it is made clear this couple sleep together and exchange hugs and kisses the text does not describe their further love-making nor does it find it necessary to use profanity. Although novella in length it is a very satisfying read.

An Ember in the Ashes

A fantasy with a dark tone the setting is a training facility within a militaristic society where there is little empathy, slaves and trainees alike are cruelly punished, the penalty for desertion being flailed to death, lesser crimes lead to slaves being disfigured or losing hands. There are two central characters: Laia who enters the training camp as a slave to spy on its Commandant who is the unfeeling mother of the Elias, a reluctant trainee whose best friend Helene is the only other female in the camp. Elias encounters jealousy when he pays attention to the slave whose handler on the outside is red-haired Keenan described as shorter but muscular. Hence a potential for two love triangles.

By Gaslight

There are two sets of characters here and initially no clear sense of how their stories insect. One is centred around the famous William Pinkerton in search of a ghost in London; the other Adam Foole who operates on the other side of the law. Charlotte Rickett's name appears in both story-lines.

In over 700 pages in flashbacks the novel ranges over India, South Africa, America as well as Nineteenth Century England. No quotes are used to indicate dialogue. Although historical characters appear this is a work of fiction. Not certain what all the diversions add to the story but they certainly serve to draw out the storyline to epic proportions. There is enough material here for at least two books.

AT Wolf Ranvh

Mixes Cowboy, Murder Mystery Thriller, and Romance. As you'd expect the guy is tall, lean, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted; the woman beautiful and bewitching. Well-edited for the most part with the usual coital interactions and foreplay. 

Call me a nit-picker but Uncle Phillip is described as shackled behind his back, he could not have banged his fists on the table two pages later. Not a bad read though I find the crude language unnecessary. 

Fractured Hymns

I sense a play on words here. This is the third book by A. M. Arthur I've read and I've come to expect a good read any time I encounter her writing and this book is no exception. Ethanial has a large extended family and none of them are treated as stage props. Unlike so many M + M books the relationship between two men develops against the backdrop of a fully realized family setting.

Unfortunately another book that could have used just a tad more editing. The strings on a guitar that has not been played for a decade would be “dead” and need replacing. I have some problems with chronology, Ruth's illness, Ethan's service time, his work time in Pennsylvania. In chapter 12 mention is made of the kitchen downstairs. I thought Ethan was on the same level as the kitchen because of his cast.

Flipping for Him

This is a novella length take on a teenage bromance. Until this book set near Central Park in NYC I’d never heard of the sport of Parkour. This latest wrinkle in the genre has the protagonist’s friends and families tolerant of their being out and gay but the Japanese lad’s parents insist he date someone of his own ethnicity. There are a few missing words and grammatical errors but otherwise not a bad read. Some advanced petting but no genital manipulation or anal sex. 

Northwords

A collection of stories inspired by a trip to Torngat Mountains National Park in Northern Quebec. Some of the stories could use a bit more editing, all give each author’s take on the experience but I’d rather have a chance to view the film footage taken of the park while the group was there. 

The Black Stallion

A boy and his horse, a book, first in a series, written for children. Not as moralistic as Black Beauty and a happier ending than Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. Alec’s age is not indicated. The story involves a shipwreck at sea, survival on a desert island, rescue and arrival home. The horse is gentled and trained for the big race. Written for children, the plot lines here are simplistic. Equine sounds have been described as neighs, nickers, whickers, whinnies, even yodels, whistles are new to me. 

The Cowboy and the Pencil-Pusher

A bromance written about a ranch hand and a banker. Their first meal together epitomizes the contrast when the city slicker asks for the wine list: a red and a white from the local food mart, beer on tap: Bud and Bud Light. Like most of these tomes there is an implied happily ever after ending. The book could use just a tad more editing and the language used to describe the pair’s trysts is rather profane. At least it’s written by a male. 

Come What May

For all the wide-eyed seeming innocence and charitable values of the principals this is an M+M Romance and their sexual encounters are described in vivid clinical detail and the language is shall we say colourful even vulgar. I’m not sure all the profanity is necessary.

Gay literature seems to revolve around a few common themes. Coming of age as a gay man, age not restricted to teens, coming out to oneself, one’s parents, and the world at large; and finding mister right. The challenge in finding romance being trusting one’s gaydar not to approach someone truly straight, and dealing with a lover who’s still in the closet which raises issues of outing against someone’s will. And since the 1980ies HIV has added a sinister dimension to the issue. Gay relationships face all the challenges straight ones do plus the factor of two male egos. Gay marriage and church doctrine have been frought with dissension and schism. The law and medical practice has finally partly come to grips with modern morays but public opinion and society at large are slower to follow.

Barkskins

Annie Proulx has returned to Canada setting her tale initially in colonial Quebec prior to the defeat by James Wolfe. As in English Canada the virgin forest that once covered most of what is now Eastern North America is seen as oppressive and threatening and in need of conquering, being fought back to allow civilization to flourish. French Missionaries brought their old country diseases with them decimating the Native Populations of America. The French Signeurial system exploited indentured habitants. The despised corvé forced them to work on roads and civic projects.

We begin with a habitant, René who having survived his 3 year servitude takes up land and begins a family. About 80 pages in our focus switches from René to Duquet who engages in the fur trade after fleeing his Signeurial Servitude and then sails to France where he books passage to China.  Sixty pages later we switch back to René’s children who are Migmaw or Métis and the French Missionaries who try to convert them to European ways.

Proulx has a turn of phrase that takes some getting used to, not to mention the fact that she imitates the sintax used by the French and Migmaw in English.

As Howard Zinn, Harari, and even Prince Charles similarly explain the arrival of Europeans upset the hunter/gather lifestyle of indigenous peoples. Not only was that diet more varied and healthy, but it allowed the people to move about so that they not deplete any one area with the impact of their presence. By contrast agriculture required the forest be cleared and tied the colonists to a single plot of land and hung their fortunes on the success of a few crops. The indigenous people who were  supplanted had no concept of land ownership and were vulnerable to this invasion.

It gets worse, the European invaders considered the indigenous people less than human and when they resisted the incursion a bounty was put on their heads and troops interceded on behalf of the settlers to drive out or slaughter the “Indians’ on their ancestral lands.

The novel covers a broad sweep of history the characters we follow becoming lumber barons

operating in the white society to which they have become assimilated. The Duquets become Dukes and successive generations continue the lumber trade from the board room rather than as forest workers. The sweep continues to New Zealand embracing the Maori and their struggles with European incursions before returning to the Dukes in New England.



Summary

Annie Proulx’ Barkskins covers over three centuries of the timber industry in America in 736 pages. It begins with the habitants of Lower Canada fighting back the oppressive forest to eke out a living among the stumps and moves on to the forests of New England, Maine, Ohio, and the Michigan Peninsula with side-trips to places such as China, Brazil and New Zealand. It touches on Native issues for First Nations peoples once roamed the entire continent. Timber barons saw forests as limitless and felt no need to replenish the resource by replanting. Harvesting moved from chopping with an axe to hand saws to portable power saws. Finishing went from squaring logs to saw pits to gang saws driven by water wheels to whirling blades that cut thousands of board feet per day. Forest products were moved by rolling logs onto river ice hauled by oxen, steam driven “donkeys”, to rail lines and eventually logging trucks. Logging methods turned millions of acres of trees into stumps and shoulder high slash fueling monstrous conflagrations and eventually proving there was a limit to clear cutting. It takes half a century for a forest to regrow in favourable conditions. The men who chopped these trees were seen as expendable and logging remains a dangerous trade to this day though modern tree harvesters place a man inside a protected cab  sitting in front of a computer terminal where he identifies the tree species and the behemoth does the rest.

Raw statistics and history are one thing but it is in the cost in human lives, the machinations, and struggles of people to make a living that the real drama lies. The continent was opened up by the search for buck-toothed rodents the original tree harvesters whose pelts provided the felt for the fashionable millinery trade. The insatiable thirst for beaver pelts extirpated them from much of their former range. It was only later entrepreneurs saw the forests for the trees and the timber trade was born. Slash and burn tactics the world over yield farm land of only limited fertility denuding the land of forests, silting stream beds and fueling algae growth with agricultural run-off. Hunter-gather societies have been displaced by agriculturalists whose livelihood is tied to single crops at the whims of weather and stock exchanges. The lumber industry has found the limits of old growth forests and corporations now look to ever more remote and inaccessible stands  and fight with environmentalists over the last vestiges of virgin trees. First Nations struggle with the desire to protect Mother Earth and the desire to provide jobs for their people. What worth a tree if it can’t be cut?

Finally the book looks at the study of forest ecology and the attempt to reclaim what was lost.

If I have any complaint it is that the book is too long and tries to accomplish too much in one tome.

Spitfire Diary

A fighter pilot's experience in an English Squadron during WW#2. How did an English lad get married to a Swedish lass and end up in Austin Texas?

The explosion that ensued when a lit match was dropped into a crapper mistakenly cleansed with kero reminds me of the arrogant patient who ignored fasting protocols and had his bowel explode in the OR when a laser was fired up.

Despite dismal survival odds we get tales of men who lived to tell of ditchings at sea and planes that barrelled through forests at 200 miles an hour.

Life is never lived as vividly and intensely as it is when one is in constant danger of losing it. Little wonder in retrospect Veterans remember war experiences as the best and worst times of their lives and feel closer to the friends they made there than any in later life.

I could have used a glossary for all the acronyms used.  The excepts from the operational log parallel the author's diary. They tend to be dry and repetitious with occasional sparks of emotion thrown in dramatic for their rarity.

Once Upon a Cowboy

The Storyline is superior to the suggestive cover illustration though this is yet another Cowboy Romance. Noone would call this great literature but it’s an okay timewaster.

Combat Crew by John Comer

To quote, “There's the right way, the wrong way, and the army way.” Okay, airforce in this case but same diff. The crew we are following learned they were on active duty when they were awakened at 2:30 AM for their first mission. They had not had gunnery practice nor did they know where the guns for their plane were located and lacked key parts for those guns until mere minutes before take-off. If encountering flak made a mission count to a crew's credit they encountered flak, no questions asked. Know how to play the game.

In a squadron that had suffered 100% casualties there's more than enough tension to go round. This account is matter of fact, embellishment seems unnecessary. The writer is American but his tales of fire bombings reminds me of the furor that followed the Canadian mini-series that highlighted the career of Bomber Harris. If ethics and warfare belong in the same discussion can anything justify the firestorm that incinerated a city such as Dresden?

Possible Spoiler

If you’ve watched the movie Memphis Belle you know that crew members who survived 25 missions got a ticket home. The fact that we’re reading this airman’s account means he survived 25 missions. Being in a Flying Fortress at 28,000 ft in negative 80 conditions on oxygen sounds frightening enough without the added horror of enemy fighter cannons firing on one. Add the boredom of life in a Quonset hut in camp waiting between missions.

Recommended reading.

Unearthing Cole

This is a bromance set in a small town. A lot of text is devoted to describing the clearing of Cole’s parents home of decade of pack rats collection valuable and trashie piles. Novella length the story comes to an abrupt end. Abusive relationships exist between gay partners as illustrated here.

Virgins

A prequel in the Outlander Series, we meet Jamie Fraser just after the death of his Father and his flogging at the hands of Randall, in France with his future Brother-in-Law Ian serving as a mercenary in the French Army. To my knowledge 100 lashes with the cat of nine tails would have been a death sentence. Even did a man survive a severe flogging it seems to me that the muscles of his back would be maimed for life. The men do most of their swearing in French but the language and talk is as bawdy as you’d expect. 

The Perfect Family

The issue of the recognition of gay rights and marriage has caused deep division within church groups and many to question church dogma. The Old Testament rates the “sin” of homosexuality as deserving of punishment by stoning. Only in the last year the province of Alberta removed homosexuality from the list of psychological disorders and Ontario outlawed the practice of conversion therapy. The Law of the land and public opinion are often out of sinc making the act of “coming out” as gay an issue still fraught with emotional turmoil.

The present novel is a coming of age saga of one teen’s attempt to assert his true identity and the grief he suffered along with the consequences to family members. The implication being that the perfect family was less so when it came to offering him their support.

Grandma Lorenzo, Maggie’s mother is totally self-centred--her world revolves around her needs and beliefs to the extreme of driving away her eldest daughter. Jamie’s Brother Brian with whom he was formerly quite close is caught with the reactions of his peers to his brother’s coming out and what all this says about him. Jamie’s father Mike is a staunch Catholic, pillar of the church, caught between his strongly held beliefs and love of his son. Luc, Jamie’s lover is Brian’s team mate whose revelation divides the team. His parents are ultimate homophobes.

Religion has lead to many wars over the centuries both between nations and family members. When one feels one has God on one’s side it’s so easy to forget, “And the greatest of these is Love.”

Always a Cowboy by Linda Lael Miller

Second in the Carsons of Mustang Creek series centred on Drake, the second of three brothers. Luce Hale shows up in the opening pages studying wild horses on the ranch and given the Romance genre we can bet not all her stallions will have four legs. The story has a strong animal rights component and works in all the characters we met in the first opus.

You Remind Me of You

The pair portrayed in this collection are nuts. If you want a more PC term say mentally disturbed. One is a bulimic, the other an unsuccessful suicide. Why did I buy this self-published booklet? Probably due to a glowing review someone wrote.

The Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge

Yet another coming of age story about 16-year-old Billy who has moved to Tuscon to spend the summer with his gay uncle who has arranged for him to have a job on a racetrack so he can figure out whether he has the aptitude to become a vet. Short and bright he comes with certain self-confidence issues hardly helped when he faints in the heat after getting off the train.

The subject matter is rather mature for YA though we are spared the profanity that would obviously be the argot of a backstretch. We do get immersed in the jargon of horse racing and betting and confront HIV and teenage sex. Uncle Wes is the kind of friend every boy should have as a mentor.

Just Over the Mountain by Robin Carr

Only in a small town:

Will your regular order be plunked in front of you almost before you find your seat at your favourite spot in the local diner.

Will the local cop be the kid with whom you grew up playing hide and seek.

Will the whole town know your business even before you do.

Welcome to Grace Valley. If you find this lifestyle claustrophobic you can always move to the big city but first breath the clean mountain air and bask in the view.

Chris' 14-year-old twin sons are utterly selfish, self-centred and spoiled.

Second book of a trilogy in many ways this book is transitional. One issue that is strongly contested is that of the value of a woman’s work in the home. Hardly secondary is the issue of the sharing of duties that were once considered a housewife's when a wife has a profession outside the home.

Road Ends by Mary Lawson

Mary Lawson brings to life small town Ontario in much the same fashion as does Alice Munro.

Megan is the second child and only daughter in a large family of boys. It is taken for granted that she’ll remain home to support her Mother. When she announces at the Dinner table her intention to leave home at 21 her brothers are more interested in their stomachs and when the meal will be served than in her imminent departure and how it will affect their future.

The horde’s mother seems to make having babies her principal domestic accomplishment. The clan’s father, Edward, a banker, beyond planting the seed is a disinterested parent who does not even set at table with his brood to partake of meals. These parents are not overtly abusive but their neglect amounts to the same thing illustrating how bad parenting is a multi-generational syndrome.

The focus shifts between Edward, the father; Tom, the eldest whose best friend Rob, the minister’s son committed suicide; and Megan in London, England. Her descriptions of London bring back memories of my once in a lifetime BOAC London Show Tour. Standing outside a pub Dickens frequented, Picadilly Circus, Oxford St, London Cabs and Double Decker Buses. The Underground. Through talking about his mother’s diary and reading entire portions Edward takes the tale to three-generations.