What I got was a muddled story that was hard to follow and unfeeling. A lowly Frenchman comes to England and notices a lady in the upper class. She has noble blood. He worms his way into an introduction with her under the guise of French nobility and a made up title. She is impressed with him until he is revealed to her as a mere "barber".

Yet he is not all that he seems to be -- as the story reveals much to the woman's regret ( after she learns the truth ).

I am glad this book was short, otherwise I probably would've ditched it after page 50... but I figured I was already almost half way through and stuck with it... It started to make sense near the end but there seemed to be about 35 pages of confusion occurring.

What is included -
Introduction by Anthony Daniels 3 pgs.
C1 Welcome to kalarba 26 pgs.
C2 The greed of olag greck 26 pgs
C3 The indobok pirates 26 pgs.
C4 The saga of c-3px 26 pgs.
C5 Battle of the brknaa 24 pgs.
C6 Short cut 26 pgs.
C7 Artoos day out 10 pgs.

C8 Countdown at hosk 26 pgs

This comic is nearly 200 pages. The inking is excellent for its day on high stock paper but by todays standards, I rate it a C- to C. The pencil-artwork is on the newspaper comic strip style for the most part. Artwork is therefore in the D to C range. The stories are cute but due to the lack of light saber fights, My son and I never finished reading all the stories together. It was a matter of him selecting a different comic containing more action for me to read with him. My son is also ADHD.

I think that this can be a fun read with your children, who can sit and focus, or like my 5 year old daughter, who just likes sitting with dad and reading. I originally bought these comics so that I had Graphic stories to read to the kids. This is a good one for younger children At 224 this is a large comic. Since Dark horse has had trouble producing comics with good binding I was concerned about this offering. The one I have is OK, but these were made in china, where the binding problems exist. The older ones made in Canada were OK.

It was fun to read some of these with my son. For most people I think they will consider these to be 2 to 3 stars in quality, I will round up to 3 since my son enjoyed them. completist.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

"Where to Choose" could have been as good as "One Must Wait", but all of the kinks were not worked out. Nevertheless, I think that the characters in this series are so appealing and have so much potential that, as a result of my enjoyment of the first book, "One Must Wait", I look forward to reading the third installment of this series.

Two Americans (a Black and a Mexican) share a dream that they make happen when they build Southern California's Jacaranda Estates. The duo firmly believes that Blacks and Mexicans could not only harmoniously live together but that the sharing and understanding of the diversity of the two cultures will lead to a warm and lasting friendship. For the next five decades, twenty-five Black and twenty-five Mexican families share the beautiful dream.

However, even Eden had a serpent enter. Jacaranda Estates is no exception to the reptile invasion as a gang takes over the playground, turning it into their headquarters. They terrorize the entire community. A resident Grayce Gibson asks her daughter to learn why the police are ignoring their plight?

A widow for over a year, Carole Ann is excited to leave Washington DC after successfully uncovering her spouse's killers. Almost from the moment she arrives at her mother's home, Carole Ann begins to investigate the situation, concluding that law enforcement officials are either ignoring or condoning the gang's cowering of the community. Even though she places herself in danger several times, Carole searches for the truth.

The second Carole Ann Gibson mystery is a better tale than its wonderful predecessor was. Carole Ann is a genuine character, who is comfortable being a Black woman even as she is well aware of racism and sexism. She is a role model of female empowerment, not fearing to fight injustice no matter the personal cost or danger. The execution of the who-done-it is brilliant and the portrayal of race relations between Mexican-Americans and African-Americans is stunningly informative. Penny Micklebury is a talent worth reading by fans interested in a wonderful female amateur sleuth, starring in a fabulous series.

Harriet Klausner

At that point, the plot took a rapid turn for the worse, and I found the ending infuriatingly unsatisfactory. It seems that our hero Ben ends up with a pretty crappy life - his friends all hate him (oh, except the one who commited suicide..) he lost his job and his credibility, he got shot in the shoulder..... sorry to wreck the plot, but these things must be told. Oh, he gets his girl though. Well break out the champagne.

I left this book feeling infuriated with the ending. I wasn't asking for a happily ever after, just a small glimmer of hope. Ah well, no more legal thrillers for me.

Unfortunately these days, writers send off a few chapters to the publishers and get a huge advance. After they get paid, they see the whole thing in an entirely different light to quote Groucho Marx in "Room Service". Often the end is NOT nearly as GOOD AS THE BEGINING! (Roger Zelazny was famous for starting books, getting advances and not finishing them).

Briefly, there IS a plot in Difference Engine! It's one of the most tantalizingly interesting (and frustrating) alternate history books I've ever read, as far as it goes.(did you know that 19th century English "dollymops" wore shoes with brass high-heels? presumeable to avoid round heels when walking the street??) BUT IT STOPS in the middle of the book, leaving plot lines and the ending completely unresolved. The authors just lost interest, introducing and blaming a shadowy character at the end who isn't really in the book at all.

Be forwarned.

In this novel Gibson teams up with Bruce Sterling, a brilliant sci-fi writer himself, to provide an amazing picture of Victorian England. Both writers are notable for their attention to detail, and their combined effort teems with thousands of minutiae from the period, not to mention large themes based on the Victorian preoccupation with such things as science, technology, exploration, and steam.

The novel belongs to a particular genre of science fiction called alternate history, where the writer answers the question, if such-and-such had happened (or never happened), what would the world be like now? The Difference Engine tries to imagine what the world would be like if the computer had been invented 100 years earlier. It is set in England in 1855. Sci-fi pundits have dubbed the novel "steampunk" because those who control the steam-driven computers control society.

The structure of the novel falls into three discreet, self-contained units all concerned with a case full of rare and valuable computer cards. In the first part, Sybil Gerard, a fallen woman, inherits the cards from her boyfriend, who was murdered for them. In the long middle section Edward "Leviathan" Mallory, a scientist famous for his discovery of the Brontosaurus, takes charge of them next. And in the conclusion Lawrence Oliphant, a gentleman detective with advanced syphillis, finally solves the mystery of their whereabouts.

Alternate history writers love to recast famous figures in altered roles. The writers have done just that with, for example, three of England's greatest romantic poets. Lord Byron has become prime minister, and Disraeli (the prime minister of the history books) a hack writer. Shelly is some sort of anarchist rebel and Keats has become a kinotropist, a specialist in a sort of gas-illuminated light show of computer designed images. Keats, also, seems to be the only one who knows what the cards signify.

Just to show how far the villains will go to get the computer cards and the power the cards represent, they devise a way to break down all of London's eco system as the city grinds to a halt and falls prey to looters, many of whom join the villains' rebellion: "The gloom of the day was truly extraordinary. It was scarcely noon, but the dome of St. Paul's was shrouded in filthy mist. Great rolling wads of oily fog hid the spires and the giant bannered adverts of Ludgate Hill. Fleet Street was a high-piled clattering chaos, all whip-cracking, steam-snorting, shouting. The women on the pavements crouched under soot-stained parasols and walked half-bent, and men and women alike clutched kerchiefs to their eyes and noses. Men and boys lugged family carpetbags and rubber-handled traveling-cases, their cheery straw boaters already speckled with detritus. A crowded excursion train chugged past on the spidery elevated track of the London, Chatham & Dover, its cloud of cindered exhaust hanging in the sullen air like a banner of filth."

Despite the raves from critics and all the wonderful detail, the novel sometimes dragged for me. As a lover of Victorian England (my graduate specialization), I perhaps should have liked it more, but I found the villain and some of the main characters, including Mallory, uninteresting. I wasn't convinced that things were much different in Gibson's and Sterlings's reality even with the addition of the computer, a noisy, mechanical, affair. The characters might as well have been fighting over an Egyptian mummy for all the difference the computer made. And the long center section with the inevitable Gibson pitched battle (I'm betting my money that Gibson wrote the middle part and Sterling wrote the bookends) didn't thrill me.

Lawrence Oliphant's genteel manners and shrewd detective work make him a fascinating character. The novel might have been more satisfying if he'd been the hero all the way through instead of just the last 100 pages. The experimental conclusion with various bits and pieces from personal journals, letters, advertisements, recordings, and popular songs attempts to tie everything up. But one never has the sense that the cards nor the computers were as important as the writers want us to believe. Did the cards really contain just a mathematical gambling system, as everyone seemed to think, or were they something more ominous and earthshaking? Keats comments that they were far more important than anyone would ever know but doesn't say why. They simply are never satisfactorily explained.