Answer Hazy, Ask Again!

Will
by

Christine Bernard (Goodreads Author)

Yorick's review

Oct 09, 2019  ·  edit

liked it

bookshelves: audiobooks, fantasy, thriller

I was given a free Audible audiobook copy of this title for an honest review.

This book according to the stars, is pretty good. It reads like a Twilight Zone episode, and I really like Twilight Zone. Will, the title character finds a Magic Eight Ball in a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore/novelty shop. He buys it for nostalgic reasons and races out of the store because the clerk creeps him out.

At first it seems like a normal kids' toy, but soon, its answers start having more direct impact / connection with Will's world. After that, things get weird and ominous. It drew me into the story. Like watching a horror movie, I found myself thinking the equivalent of, "Don't open that door!"

It's an entertaining read. I can't really say more about the story without leaving spoilers. If you like stories that were in The Twilight Zone, you'll like this book. If you really don't know anything about The Twilight Zone, let me say that the book is mysterious, eerie, and is a look at what a normal person might do under unexplainable circumstances. You might not want to read it alone at night. Or maybe that's the best time for a shiver!

All Men of Genius

All Men of Genius by Lev A.C. Rosen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book stands on its own, but as you've no doubt read in other reviews / previews, it's also a mashup of Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest. Related to Oscar Wilde's personal issues, and the masquerade / hidden (sexual) identity in Twelfth Night, All Men... has alternate sexuality as plot points. None of it is "R" rated, I think, but perhaps a strong PG-13.

Readers with tenaciously held convictions regarding traditional sexuality may be more or less offended. Readers with less concern with those matters will not be bothered.

The story involves Violet Adams who wants to attend the premier science institution, Illyria College, where only men are accepted as students. She pretends to be her brother (the names of the character and the college are deliberate, not to say obvious allusions to 12th Night). All Men of Genius is not a pioneer after 12th Night using sexual disguise as a plot device. For example, in the first Alanna book in the series by Tamara Pierce, the plot point is exactly the same with all the complications involved for a teen girl trying to pass as a teen boy.

Along side the difficulties and confusions of Violet's progress in science academics is also the couples / mating "rituals" in an alternate Victorian England. This too, is well done. Like much of science fiction, it speaks to issues of today's culture through a lense of an alternate time.

The struggles involved in invention, discovering and fighting an elitist scientific club's plan to take over England and then the world provide page turning thrills. Many readers will finish quickly to appeaase their desire to discover "what happens next".

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A Riff on Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift wrote, "He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."
Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii. cited in Bartlett's Quotations.


I would say, "They are bold persons that first use e-readers in their 60s or 70s." In a way, I find the situation also analogous to walking--it seems simple and self-evident when one is doing it and has done it for a while, but the interplay of all the muscles and signals from the brain and the inner ear are quite daunting when one considers them as a list of things that need to happen in coordination. In e-reader land, the list of tasks to be accomplished at least once before they can start reading a book on the handheld machine can be annoying if not daunting.

Item 1. A person needs an online relationship (account) with the company that sponsors / subsidizes / sells the E-reader. If she doesn't have one, this is not necessarily "intuitive" to set up. And she still doesn't have any library ebooks yet.

Item 2. A person needs an "Adobe Digital Editions" I.D. and / or he has to register / authorize his e-reader with the email address from item 1 above. And he still doesn't have any library ebooks yet.

Item 3. A person needs to download and install on her computer and / or her e-reader Adobe Digital Editions, Overdrive Media Console, Blio reader app, or the OneClickDigital Media Manager. In the case of Adobe DE and Overdrive MC, she has to authorize those apps with the email address from items 1 and 2 above (which should be the same email address; I'm just saying...) And she still doesn't have any library ebooks yet.

Item 4a. A person needs to navigate the particular library ebook interface (another technical term) to choose a book, check it out and download it to the desktop, laptop, or e-reader.

Item 4b. Downloading the ebook may involved saving it to the desktop computer, laptop computer or the e-reader itself. If he downloads to one of the traditional computers, he will have to know how to move the ebooks to his ereader using his USB cable; if he downloads straight to his e-reader, he will have to be connected to wireless and know how to connect his ereader to that.

Providing that everything went smoothly without electronic or physical obstacles intervening, she may have a library ebook title now. Understandably, that's a lot of new stuff to get what one used to be able to just walk in the door and pull off the shelf. If you're are showing your father, grandmother, older friend or other relative how to navigate this process, be patient but not condescending. If it doesn't go smoothly at first, you may have to overcome something scary as oysters. Once they are reading on the machine, they should be happy as clams!