Just Pardon My French - Jinx Schwartz

    2016; 216 pages.  Book 8 (out of 14) in the “Hetta Coffey” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Women’s Fiction; Humorous Cozy; Beach Novel.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    Hetta Coffey is going to France!  And since it’s a business trip, she’s traveling there on someone else’s dime. 

 

    Her job is simple – just provide security for some equipment and documents that her former employer is transferring over there.  That’s a sweet deal for her.

 

    But it gets even sweeter.  Her boyfriend, Jenks, will be meeting her when she lands in Paris, and they then will go on a several-weeks-long romantic vacation!  Maybe even travel down to the Mediterranean coast and partake of the joys of the French Riviera!  Surely nothing can spoil such an idyllic journey.

 

    Wanna bet?

 

What’s To Like...

    Just Pardon My French is my third Hetta Coffey book; the other two are reviewed here and here.  Those books were set along the Pacific coast of Mexico and the US, so France is a nice change-of-place.  Since I’m a Francophile, this was a real treat.

 

    It should come as no surprise that those French Riviera plans quickly go awry.  Jenks gets called away on business, but that allows Hetta’s friends, Jan and Po Thang, to fly over to keep her company.  The former is Hetta’s principal partner in hijinks, the latter is her lovable Golden Retriever.

 

    Hetta and company decide to rent a boat and go canal-cruising in southern France, which apparently is a popular recreation.  They make the acquaintances of a variety of fellow travelers who, besides the locals, include Hetta’s ex-lover, Jean Luc (whom she finds she still has feelings for); a single and newly-rich American girl, Rhonda; Rhonda's incredibly handsome and incredibly built boatmate, Rousel; and a pair of feathered fraternizers, Odette and Siegfried.

 

    The reader gets to learn lots of French phrases as Hetta practices her rusty French (she went to school in Paris 20 years or so ago), including a couple French cuss phrases, and some of their pejoratives for foreigners.  I also learned that the Michelin Man, that anthropomorphic guy made of stacked white tires, has a name: Bibendum.

 

        The book cover calls Just Pardon My French a mystery, but that’s a misnomer; it’s really in the Women’s Fiction genre.  Hetta and Jan spend most of their time discussing Rousel’s gold-digging designs on Rhonda, and Rhonda’s blissful blindness to his conniving.  The ending resolves those suspicions about Rousel, but in a manner that doesn't entail much excitement or plot twists.  Oh well, at least the love triangle of Jean-Luc, Jenks, and/Hetta gets cleared up.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Fulgurous (adj.) : flashing like or resembling lightning.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 1,525 ratings and 991 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.37*/5, based on 1,579 ratings and 160 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Jan sat in front with Jean Luc, and I was just a little annoyed that she seemed drawn, like flies to a warm turd, to his charismatic personality and heart-melting French accent.  Okay, so I admit DooRah is hard not to be mesmerized by, but then, so is a cobra.  He was, unlike Jenks, who would be back soon, thank goodness, a rat capable of epic treachery.  (loc. 3645)

 

    “He was about to launch the French cherche la femme defense.  It really means that he got in trouble trying to impress me and is a convoluted way of saying if a man has a problem, there must be a woman involved.  We can thank Alexandre Dumas for coming up with that one.”

    “Men! They try to justify their bad behavior with semantics.”

    “So do we.”  (loc. 4309)

 

Kindle Details…

    Just Pardon My French sells for $3.99 at Amazon right now.  The first 12 books in the series are all priced $3.99, with the two most-recent books a dollar more.  Alternatively, you can get bundles of Books 1-5 and 6-10 for $9.99 apiece.

 

“As my grandma used to say, let’s tip over the outhouse and see what stinks.”  (loc. 2277)

    There are a couple of things to quibble about.  This is a piece of cozy fiction, but there is a small amount of cussing.  I counted 16 “hells” in the first 25% of the book, and later on there was one “SOB” and one “damned”.

 

    There are a few distracting typos, although some of them are only apparent if you’ve studied French, and include: Lemans/Le Mans; tout de suit/suite; on-lookers/onlookers; by-standers/bystanders; and Trébes/Trebés/Trebes.

 

    The bigger issue is with the storytelling itself.  As mentioned, the plotline is in need of some adventures, and there were a couple missed opportunities to infuse some excitement into things.  Hetta is guarding a shipment of sensitive information, but nobody tries to hijack it.  Jenks is called away on a top-secret security crisis, but it never impacts the main storyline.  It turns out Jean Luc does have ulterior motives for romancing Rhonda, but they're rather tame.

 

    Still, I enjoyed Just Pardon My French, even if I’m not the target audience.  There’s lots of self-deprecating, witty dialogue between Hetta and Jan, and that’s a Jinx Schwartz forte.  The storyline may not have much in the way of thrills-&-spills, but that doesn’t mean it’s boring.  And if you don't mind a bit of lighthearted Romance to be present in the books you read, you’ll love following the various pairings here.

 

    7 Stars.  Read this series when you’re in the mood for a Travelogue Tale (the descriptions of the canal cruise were great), or a Women’s Fiction story (see the Wikipedia page about this genre), not when you’re in the mood for a whodunit Mystery.  You will not be disappointed.

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes - Neil Gaiman

   2018; 236 pages.  Volume 1 (out of 11) in the “Sandman – 30^th Anniversary Edition” series.  Full Title: Sandman Volume One: Preludes & Nocturnes.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Graphic Novel; Horror; Dark Fantasy.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite contemporary authors.  I first became acquainted with his work 16 years ago via his collaboration with Terry Pratchett in the fascinating novel, Good Omens.  Within a year-plus I’d also read his solo efforts, American Gods and Anansi Boys, both of which I consider to be masterpieces.

 

    I’ve read most of his solo novels since then, with only The Graveyard Book still on my TBR shelf.  But over the last 10 years he seems to have slowed down in his writing of full-length novels.

 

    Then I heard about his series called The Sandman.  “Aha!”, thought I, “Neil Gaiman has turned to putting out graphic novels!  Awesome!”

 

    Actually, the first volumes of his Sandman comics came out slightly before his first novels.

 

What’s To Like...

    According to Wikipedia, there were 75 issues in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic book series.  Preludes and Nocturnes is a 2018 re-release of the first eight comic book issues, comprised of

    1.) Sleep of the Just  (loc. 11)

    2.) Imperfect Hosts  (loc. 53)

    3.) Dream a Little Dream of Me  (loc. 77)

    4.) A Hope in Hell  (loc. 103)

    5.) Passengers  (loc. 128)

    6.) 24 Hours  (loc. 154)

    7.) Sound and Fury  (loc. 180)

    8.) The Sound of Her Wings  (loc. 205)

 

    Our protagonist goes by several names in the series, including Morpheus, the King of Dreams, Dream, and the titular Sandman.  At one point he is caught and imprisoned by a mortal who mistakenly thinks he’s captured the King of Death, which confused the daylights out of me.  The character "Death" does finally show up in the final book, and is an equally interesting character.

 

    Each of the eight books has its own storyline.  Needless to say, our hero escapes his prison early on, but is in a weakened condition and without several of his important artifacts: a pouch, a helm, and a ruby.  The overall storyline chronicles Dream’s efforts to retrieve those items.  Along the way, Neil Gaiman weaves in mythological references (such as the Hecateae), Reality “Slam Contests”, and a couple cameo appearances by other comic book stars.

 

    I read the e-book version of Preludes & Nocturnes, which is usually a clunky way to read a graphic novel.  But Kindle starts you out with a couple of tips for navigating the images on each page, and once I got the hang of things, I was amazed how smoothly things went.  Scrolling is ultra-slick, and the artwork, lettering, and storytelling are all incredible.

 

    Since this is a compilation of eight comic books, there is no discrete “ending”.  Book 8 does stop at a logical point in the saga, with a lot of the plot threads being explained and cleared up, and the stage being set for the next 67 installments in the series.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 5,823 ratings and 368 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.24*/5, based on 254,869 ratings and 8,898 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “Do you know what dreams are made of, Rosemary Kelly?”

    “Made of?  They’re just dreams.”

    “No.  They aren’t.  People think dreams aren’t real because they aren’t made of matter, of particles.  Dreams are real.  But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

    “The ruby seems to turn them into matter.  It forces them to translate themselves into forms we can recognize in this world.

    “It also controls dreams in their raw state.  Your dreams.  Anybody’s dreams.”  (loc. 144)

 

    “You could have called me, you know.”

    “I didn’t want to worry you.”

    “I don’t believe it.  Let me tell you something, Dream.  And I’m only going to say this once, so you’d better pay attention.

    “You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane!  An infantile, pathetic specimen!  Feeling all sorry for yourself because your little game is over, and you haven’t got the—the balls to go and find a new one!”  (loc. 214)

 

“Mother? They took my dreams away from me!”  (loc. 62)

    There’s nothing major to gripe about in Preludes & Nocturnes.  There is some cussing (10 instances in the first 25%), and a smidgen of sex and nudity, albeit those are done in a non-pornographic way.

 

    The Table of Contents either doesn’t work or is non-existent.  You can’t highlight text, but that’s because the whole e-book is scanned images of the pages from the comic books, and that's a small price to pay for the marvelous artwork and lettering.  And like any e-book consisting solely of images, this was a memory-hog on my Kindle.  Amazon lists it as eating up 811,037 KB of space.

 

    My biggest beef concerns the plethora of reissues of this series.  These include trade paperbacks, deluxe editions, 30^th Anniversary editions, Absolute Editions, annotated editions, and an Omnibus edition, all of which divide up those 75 issues in different proportions.  So even though my “Kindle 30^th Volume 1” was Issues 1-8, my “Full-Sized Paperback Volumes 2 and 3” are Issues 21-37 and Issues 38-56.   Do I hunt down something containing Issues 9-20 for the sake of completeness, or just shine it on and skip to the volumes/issues I already have? 

 

    These are all quibbles.  I’m not a big reader of Graphic Novels, yet Preludes & Nocturnes was a real treat for me, both from a storyline and an artistic angle.  Somehow, someway, Neil Gaiman is capable of adding a “Wow Factor” to any project he undertakes.

 

    9½ Stars.

What If? 2 - Randall Munroe

   2022; 334 pages.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the “What If?” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Humorous Science; Physics; XKCD; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    A few questions that might cross your mind some night when it’s 3 AM in the morning and you can’t sleep:

 

    01. What would happen if the Solar System was filled with soup out to Jupiter?

 

    06. How many pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair to the height of Australia’s Q1 skyscraper?

 

    38.  Could a person eat a whole cloud?

 

    56. What if you decided to walk from Austin, Texas, to New York City, but every step you take takes you back 30 days?

 

    64. What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?

 

    What?  You say you’d love to know the answers to these, but don’t want to suffer from insomnia while trying to figure them out?  Then pick up Randall Munroe’s new book, What If? 2.

 

What’s To Like...

    What If? 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Randall Munroe’s fantastic 2014 best-seller What If?.  I’ve read it, loved it, and it is reviewed here.  Randall Munroe is also the creator of the comic strip XKCD, which caters to the geek audience, of which I am a part.

 

    What If? 2 contains discussions of 64 mind-boggling questions like those shown above, plus five sections of “Short Answers” and three sections labeled “Weird and Worrying”.  There’s also a list, aptly titled “Things You Should Not Do”, that gets periodically updated throughout the book based on some of the questions, which advises you not to do things such as: pump ammonia into your abdomen, eat meat from rabid animals, and perform your own laser eye surgery.  There are numerous as well [citation needed] inserts; they are hilarious.

 

    ANAICT, the questions come from letters written by fans to the author, and he even lists the inquirers at the start of each discussion.  His answers to the 64 main questions average about 5 pages each, but each one contains several witty drawings in “XKCD style”, so the five pages are actually quick reads.

 

    I loved the innovative ways the author used to give valid answers to the absurdly-conceived questions.  For instance, how would you approach a problem such as “If house dust comprises up to 80 percent dead skin, how many people worth of skin does a person consume in a lifetime?” (Question 45).  Randall Munroe doesn’t pretend that he already knows the answers to such queries, and frequently mentions the experts he consulted.

 

    As anticipated, What If? 2 is also a trivia buff’s delight.  It was fun to see our summers here in Phoenix get duly cited for their incredible heat.  I smiled because I’d already read about the importance of Lagrange Points, but I admit I’d never heard of the “glass beaches of Vladisvostok”.  Google-image them, the photos are amazing.

 

    FWIW, I read What If? 2 in segments of 15-30 minutes, which is also how I read books of poetry.  I’m sure it’s possible to read all 334 pages in one sitting, but if I did that, the questions-&-answers would all start to blur together after a while. 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 2,189 ratings and 146 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.40*/5, based on 6,714 ratings and 816 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    The 39,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide sell something like 18 billion hamburger patties per year, for an average of 1,250 burgers per restaurant per day.  Those 1,250 burgers contain about 600,000 calories, which means that each T.rex only needs about 80 hamburgers per day to survive, and one McDonald’s could support more than a dozen tyrannosaurs on hamburgers alone.

    If you live in New York and you see a T.rex, don’t worry.  You don’t have to choose a friend to sacrifice; just order 80 burgers instead.

    And then if the T.rex goes for your friend, anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers.  (pg. 39)

 

    The average kid produces about half a liter of saliva per day, according to the paper “Estimation of the Total Saliva Produced Per Day in Five-Year-Old Children,” which I like to imagine was mailed to the Archives of Oral Biology in a slightly sticky, dripping envelope.

    A 5-year-old probably produces proportionally less saliva than a larger adult.  On the other hand, I’m not comfortable betting that anyone produces more drool than a little kid, so let’s be conservative and use the paper’s figure.  (…)

    At the rate of 500 ml per day from the paper, it would take you about a year to fill a typical bathtub.  (pg. 263)

 

In other words, your aquarium could be destroyed by whale farts.  (pg. 148)

    I didn’t find many nits to pick with What If? 2.  As expected, there's no cussing in it, let alone any “adult situations” either implied or explicit.

 

    About the worst I can think of is that, if you aren’t science-oriented, some of the calculations used to determine the answers in the book may seem a bit “physics-y”.  I’m a chemist by trade, but if you saw my GPAs for the high school and college physics classes I took (especially the ones that incorporated calculus into the lessons), you’d understand why I am a bit thin-skinned when it comes to reading bunches of discussions involving physics.

 

    To be fair, Randall Munroe usually warns the reader when a calculation he uses is complicated and asks us to just trust the answer.  That may sound like a dose of risky blind faith, but rest assured, there will be readers of this book who are physics majors, who will double-check the calculations used, and will be ecstatically vociferous if they catch a flaw.

 

    What If? 2 was an enlightening and entertaining read for me, from the beginning through the end.  You’ll learn a lot, and have a fun time while doing so.  This may motivate me to read Randall Munroe’s companion book How To, in the not-too-distant future.

 

    9½ Stars.  For the record, Question 64 listed above comes from the first line of a nursery song that can be found multiple times on YouTube, including one version by Barney the Dinosaur.  I’d never heard of it.  I must be getting old.

You Are A Ghost (Sign Here Please) - Andrew Stanek

   2016; 209 pages.  New Author? : No.  Full Title: You Are A Ghost (Sign Here Please): The Hotly Unanticipated Sequel.  Book 2 (out of 7) in the “You Are Dead” series.  Genres : Humorous Fantasy; Satire.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It’s time for Round Two in the epic confrontation between the lately departed Nathan Haynes and the embodiment of the Afterworld bureaucracy, Director Fulcher.  Round One was won by Nathan, who used the clever ploy of refusing to sign Form 21-B, thereby turning down the usual offer of eternal existence in the hereafter.  You can read all about that confrontation here.

 

    This time around Director Fulcher has come up with a strategic counter-loophole.  He might have to keep sending Nathan back to our world, but that doesn’t mean he has to supply our hero with a flesh-and-blood body.

 

    Nathan will be forced to be a ghost instead.  Nobody will be able to see him; he won’t be able to reach out and touch anything; and pretty soon Nathan will be on his knees, begging to be allowed to take up eternal residency in the Afterlife.

 

    Prepare to die, Nathan Haynes!  Oops, you’ve already done that.

 

What’s To Like...

    As its subtitle notes, You Are A Ghost (Sign Here Please) is the second book in Andrew Stanek’s hilarious “You Are Dead” series.  Nathan Haynes once again stymies the entire Hereafter hierarchy by asking deep questions such as “Why?” and “What If?”, but this time he has to do it while learning to be a ghost, which takes some getting used to.

 

    The settings for this story are the same as before: just the Hereafter, and Dead Donkey, Nevada.  Most of the secondary characters are also repeats: Director Fulcher, Brian, Travis, and Questor Delroy, but there are some faces as well, including Fulcher’s boss, Overdirector Powell; Lord Wesley Benediktus, and the amazing co-pilot, Rex.

 

    Nathan only dies twice here in YAAG(SHP), although one is a repeat from the previous book: dying due to a stroke, while also being mauled by a badger, while also being crushed by a bathtub.  What are the odds??

    I enjoyed learning about the equiclops (which is often mistaken for a horse), as well as a bunch of useful phrases in "faux-French".  There were some neat trivia tidbits along the way, such as the interrobang (so aptly named), the Voynich manuscript (Wiki it), and the mysterious arrow in the FedEx logo (once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it). 

 

    The ending is ridiculous and over-the-top, which is entirely appropriate for a book of this genre.  It could’ve had a bit more tension built into it, but that was true in the first book as well.  Things close with a short teaser for the Book 3 in the series, You Are Doomed (Sign Here Please), which I have on my Kindle.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 370 ratings and 92 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01/5 based on 308 ratings and 29 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “It’s just all so depressing,” Ern continued.  “All I do is kill, kill, kill and I’m really not paid enough.  If you chip in an extra twenty dollars, I’ll kill you.”

    Now Nathan was getting seriously annoyed.  He sat back down heavily in one of his less green chairs and crossed his arms.

    “I’m not going to pay you anything to kill me.”

    Ern shrugged his shoulders and holstered his pistol.

    “Fine,” he said.  “Then I won’t do it.  Stay alive.  See if I care.  Oh, but please do me a favor, and if anyone asks, say you’ve been killed.  That will make things much easier for me in the future.”  (loc. 134)

 

    “Do you have a moment to talk about atheism?” she asked him brightly.

    “No,” Brian said.  “I am chasing a very dumb ghost who is probably getting himself lost at this very moment.”

    “Particularly Cynical Atheism has the power to change your life,” the woman insisted.  “Did you know that existence is a slow, absurd, and meaningless march from the cradle to the grave?”

    “Of course I know that, I’m a bureaucrat,” Brian said, and shoved the flier back into the woman’s hands.  (loc. 1252)

 

Kindle Details…

    You Are A Ghost (Sign Here Please) sells for $0.99 at Amazon, the same price as for all the other books in the series, and indeed, just about all of Andrew Stanek’s e-books, other than his Felix Green Mysteries series, which are priced at $2.99 apiece.   From time to time, he has been known to discount some of his books to free.

 

“You have been beaten by a braindead ghost with a pelican.  Unacceptable.”  (loc. 3429)

    I couldn’t find much to quibble about in You Are A Ghost (Sign Here Please).  The writing is admirably clean: just seven cusswords in the entire book (six ‘damns’ and one ‘hell’) and one drug reference, to amphetamines.

 

    The storytelling is both ludicrous and straightforward, but if you’re reading these books in order (and why wouldn’t you, since they’re all identically priced?), you already know this since Book One is in the same style of writing.

 

    As with most indie-author books, there are a couple of typos, including principle/principal and by in large/by and large.  But I was impressed by just how few of these errors were present.

    A bigger quibble was that I didn't see much progression in the overarching storyline.  I’m now getting the feeling that that might be true for the whole series: seven episodes with minor variations of the same plotline.  Sort of like the classic sitcom Bewitched, where the plot each week was just mother-in-law Endora turning Darrin into some kind of animal.

 

    But hey, I loved watching Bewitched, and all those similar episodes kept me entertained because the witty dialogue and madcap antics had me laughing whole way through.  That’s how I feel about YAAG(SHP).  The humor is zany and it’s my kind of silliness, the characters are likable (even the baddies), and Andrew Stanek’s views on things like bureaucracy, religion, and badgers-with-attitudes were both thought-provoking and entertaining.

 

    7 Stars.  Add one star if you think Bewitched was a great TV show.

Axiom's End - Lindsay Ellis

   2020; 372 pages.  Book 1 (out of 2) in the “Noumena” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : First Contact Sci-Fi; Alien Invasion Sci-Fi.   Overall Rating: 7*/10.

 

    It isn’t easy being the daughter of a wacko conspiracy theorist.  Especially when said conspiracy nut abandoned his wife and children to devote his full time to promoting those wacko conspiracy theories.

 

    But Cora Sabino, the wacko's daughter, is coping.  She’s changed her last name as an act of defiance, and frankly doesn’t care if she never sees her father, Nils Ortega, again.

 

    Nils is telling everyone who'll listen that aliens from outer space have visited us, liked our planet, and decided to stay a while.  He says the government has tried communicating with them, but so far those ETs either cannot or choose not to respond.  Nils claims to have a copy of a top-secret government memo in his hands detailing this, but hasn’t said how he got his hands on it.

 

    Cora just tunes out all the hoopla.  As long as Nils leaves her and the rest of the family out of his farce, she’s content.  But hey, what’s that she just spotted outside in the dark?  No, it isn’t Nils.  And happily, it doesn’t look like some sort of CIA agent either.

 

    You know, it kinda sorta looks like an alien.

 

What’s To Like...

    Axiom’s End is Lindsay Ellis’s debut novel, where we get to gasp along with Cora when she unexpectedly meets up with an ET dubbed “Ampersand”.   That’s not a spoiler since the Amazon blurb tells you this is a First Contact Science Fiction novel.  Ampersand is on a mission, and there are forces, both terrestrial and otherwise, who are out to stop him.  Or her.  Or it.  Whatever.

 

    The story's pacing is good.  The first challenge in any human-ET partnership must be to figure out what makes the other one tick, and that naturally takes time.  Cora discovers that a.) at least some parts of Nils’s conspiracy claims are true, b.) that others in her family have had dealings with ETs, and c.) that a government relocation program dubbed ROSA, which stands for Refugee Organizational and Settlement Agency, is not dealing with political refugees from places like Iran or Ethiopia.

 

    The aliens (yes, there’s more than one of them) do not have the ability to speak out loud, and for the most part, do not understand any terrestrial languages.  I was impressed with the way Lindsay Ellis handles this; it was really easy to keep track of when a human was speaking, when an alien was telecommunicating, and when either of them were just cogitating.

 

    The music references were plentiful and included such newer acts as Neko Case, Fergie, Panic! At The Disco, Avril Lavigne, My Chemical Romance, and Ani DiFranco.  A few groups like Pink Floyd, Nickelback, and the Beatles were thrown in for geezers like me.  It was neat to learn about “The Great Filter” theory, which addresses the issue of: why, if there are so many stars, planets, and galaxies out there, do we see zero evidence of intelligent life anywhere?

 

    The ending is okay, but straightforward and without any twists.  As things built towards it, I really couldn’t think of any other plausible way to wrap things up.  There is a sequel, Truth of the Divine, but I haven’t picked it up it yet.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Chyron (n.) : an electronically generated caption superimposed on a television or movie screen.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 4,181 ratings and 488 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.73*/5, based on 21,093 ratings and 3,407 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “I saw this sliver of white from over the hedge across the street, and I assumed my mind was playing tricks on me.  But then I saw it again in the living room, and I didn’t stick around to get a look at it.”

    Bard sucked on the inside of his lips, considering.  “How do you know it wasn’t a white person?  Like a white human person?”

    “I don’t mean white as in a race; I mean white as in the color white.”

    “White’s not a color.”

    Why did it have to be Bard? Cora lamented.  Why does Luciana need to surround herself with such pedants?  (pg. 55)

 

    “Were it my choice, for that reason alone, I would have sought another planet.  I do not know why they chose to seek asylum on a war-torn planet populated by seven billion flesh-eaters.”

    She looked around, feeling like she was missing something.  “You mean . . . us?”

    “You do eat flesh,” he said.  “You did it in front of me.  Yesterday.”

    It took her a moment to realize he was referring to the burger she’d gotten at In-N-Out just outside of Sacramento.  “That’s . . . beef,” she said gently.  (pg. 102)

 

Black olives.  The answer to the eternal quandary of what if one were to combine snails and old tires into a foodstuff.  (pg. 97)

    There are some nits to pick.  There’s a fair number of cusswords—12 of them in the first 10% of the book—and in a broad variety, including a couple of f-bombs.  I wouldn’t call that excessive, nor did it distract from the story itself, but those who like their sci-fi “clean” may be turned off.

 

    There were a few typos, such as “tooth brushing” instead of “toothbrushing”, and “ill advised” instead of “ill-advised”.  I tend to forgive these in self-published books, but I was reading the hardcover version, put out by St. Martin’s Press, a publishing company large enough to have its own Wikipedia page.  The proofreaders must’ve been having a bad day that day.

 

    The main issue, which has been noted by other reviewers, is with the writing style.  I won’t call it “weak”; but it felt clunky at times.  Some of the metaphors felt forced, ditto for a couple of “rule of threes” usages.  Google it.

 

    But hey, let’s cut a bit of slack here.  As a debut novel, Axiom’s End is an above-average effort, and I’m sure even Shakespeare’s first manuscript was rough around the edges.  It may not be the most polished sci-fi book I’ve ever read, but it still kept my interest.

 

    7 Stars.  One last shout-out, this time to the use of “lorem ipsum” in the story.  Anyone who is familiar with the esoteric language from which this phrase is derived, will smile when they come across it here in Axiom's End.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed - Eric H. Cline

   2021; 189 pages.  Book 6 (out of 2) in the “Turning Points in Ancient History” series.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Archaeology; Ancient History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 8*/10.

 

    From the Author’s Preface to the Revised and Updated Edition:

 

    “…1177 BC was a pivotal moment in the history of civilization—a turning point for the ancient world.  By that time, the Bronze Age in the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East had lasted nearly two thousand years, from approximately 3000 BC to just after 1200 BC.

 

    When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, most of the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from what is now Italy to Afghanistan and from Turkey down to Egypt.

 

    Large empires and small kingdoms, which had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly, from the Mycenaeans and Minoans to the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitannians, Cypriots, Canaanites, and even Egyptians.”  (loc. 138)

 

    That’s as good of a way to introduce this book as any.

 

What’s To Like...

    1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed is detailed examination of the events taking place, for the most part in the eastern Mediterranean Sea area from the 15^th century BCE through the 12^th century BCE as the local powers make the unsettling transition from the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age.

 

    Eric H. Cline gives the reader a close look at the archaeological findings that have been reported over the past 50 years or so, and I was amazed at just how much new and surprising discoveries that entailed.  Admittedly, it helps that when I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up, and here I especially liked the way the author shows how archaeologists can reconstruct the ancient history of a site just from what kind of relics were, and were not, found there.

 

    I was impressed with the approach that Eric H. Cline used to present the material.  Each of the first four chapters covers a discrete century—which kingdoms were the most powerful at the time, which were the most civilized, and most importantly, who was doing commercial trading with whom.  It was fascinating to watch various kingdoms rise and fall and, thanks to translatable cuneiform messages carved into clay tablets, discover the wide variety of goods that were being imported and exported around the region.

 

    After Chapter 4 chronicles the collapse of a bunch of local powers in the decades around 1177 BCE, Chapter 5 takes a look at who or what might have caused all that destruction.  Historically, a group that Egyptians records enigmatically dub “The Sea People”, has been given most of the blame, but based on recent archaeological reports, Eric H. Cline opines that it’s overly simplistic to attribute just one cause to all the mayhem.

 

    In Chapter 6, he offers as a conclusion that a “Complexity Theory” is a better answer, which in short proposes that when a bunch of kingdoms are interconnected militarily, culturally, and economically, when one of them collapses, all the others are in danger of falling as well.  Things close with a short Epilogue, wherein the author suggests that there are lessons about "interconnectivity" that might apply to our present-day world as well.

 

    1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a short, but slow-yet-interesting read.  The text ends at page 189, but the Amazon blurb says it’s 290 pages in length due to the extras in the back: Acknowledgments (pg. 189), Dramatis Personae (pg. 191), Notes (pg. 197), Works Cited (pg. 223), and Index (pg. 267).  The book is written in what I call “scholarly style”, which some reviewers found to be wordy and dry, but I liked it.  Pleasantly and unsurprisingly, there are no cusswords or adult situations in the text.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 1,041 ratings and 103 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.72*/5, based on 7,893 ratings and 1,033 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Steatopygous (adj.) : having a fleshy abdomen and massive—usually protruding—thighs and buttocks.

 

Excerpts...

    One tablet, for instance, is concerned with the ice that Zimri-Lim was using in his summer drinks, which included wine, beer, and fermented barley-based drinks flavored with either pomegranate juice or licorice-like aniseed. (...)

    (T)he use of ice in drinks was not new to the region, even though one king had to remind his son to have servants wash and clean the ice before actually putting it in the drinks.  “Make them collect the ice!” he said.  “Let them wash it free of twigs and dung and dirt.”  (loc. 563)

 

    We are told at one point that a Hittite king named Mursili I, grandson and successor of the above-named Hattusili I, marched his army all the way to Mesopotamia, a journey of over one thousand miles, and attacked the city of Babylon in 1595 BC, burning it to the ground and ending the two-hundred-year-old dynasty made famous by Hammurabi “the Law-Giver.”  Then, instead of occupying the city, he simply turned the Hittite army around and headed for home, thus effectively conducting the longest drive-by shooting in history.  (loc. 890)

 

“If anyone bites off the nose of a free person, he shall pay 40 shekels of silver.”  (loc. 890)

    My quibbles with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed are minor.  The book’s title is a bit misleading: the Bronze Age civilization didn’t collapse within a single year, even the author admits that.  The Sea People may have greatly weakened the Egyptian Empire to where a dynasty change occurred, but Egypt as an empire didn’t cease to exist for another millennium.

 

    The ending was anticlimactic.  Yes, a bunch of traditional powers in the area were replaced, but most of those took place gradually, and there was no common cause.  Indeed, the mysterious Sea People may well have been a large but ragtag bunch, fleeing some other collapsed local kingdom, and just looking for a new place to put down roots.  Eric H. Cline offers many possibilities for things that contributed to the regional upheaval—earthquakes, internal rebellion, external invaders, decentralization, private merchants, disease, and climate change in the form of drought and famine—but there is no conclusive evidence as to which combination of those factors helped collapse which segment of civilization.

 

    That’s not to say this wasn’t a good read.  Most people, including me, know next to nothing about the Eastern Mediterranean civilization in 1500-1100 BCE, so I learned a lot from reading this.  And as a wannabe archaeologist, I was astounded at how much one can learn from digging up a site where there is the presence of weapons in the ruins (or absence thereof), the presence of bodies beneath collapsed walls (or absence thereof), the presence of pottery shards (or absence thereof), and the presence of burned-out buildings (or just the royal and government buildings destroyed).

    Bottom Line: If you read 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed to find out why that year was such a disaster for so many people in the Eastern Mesopotamian region, you'll probably be disappointed.  But if you read it to learn more about that area from 1600 BCE to 1100 BCE, you'll find it to be a fascinating book.  I did.

 

    8 Stars.  1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is the first book in a 2-book series titled “Turning Points in Ancient History”.  You’d think those two tomes would be labeled “Books 1 and 2”, but they’re not.  This one is actually Book 6, and the other one, titled Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty, is Book 9.  Either counting is not the long suit of those who created this series, or else there are a bunch of authors who are delinquent in getting their manuscripts to the publisher.