One no, one maybe, one wait until next week

Currently reading:  Copper Elephant, by Adam Rapp
Will not be discussing: The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (which I would recommend if you were interested in a book about the two most unhappy people in the world)
Will be discussing: Lucy by Laurence Gonzales

I will begin this post with a secret admission:  I love Michael Crichton (almost as much as I love Stephen King).  I love the bizarre scenarios and the pseudo-science and the fast pace and the ginormous length.  So Lucy had "in the tradition of Mary Shelley and Michael Crichton"  on the back and I said "yes, please.".

Bonobo researcher (Jenny), insurgents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, daring escape through the forest, detours to alert the british researcher who was never very friendly, researcher found dead, but his 14 year old daughter (Lucy) on the floor of their home with her arms around dead bonobo.  Jenny takes the daughter and returns to the US.....with Lucy, the 1/2 bonobo child.  [Now is the time for a long tangent about how terrible jacket copy is -- this would be a far cooler book if you did not know that Lucy was part bonobo....the reader should find out when Jenny finds out -- but instead we know from the jacket.  The long and tiring and yet really quite good David Grossman novel I dicussed earlier included a piece of information on the jacket that is not revealed until the halfway point of the book.  Part of my narcolepsy with the first part of the book is waiting to figure out how what I already know can be true.  Someone out there in the publishing world should do something about this.  And while you are at it do something about ridiculous movie previews (really you had to give the world's biggest hint in the preview for Never Let me Go that they are clones??]

Ok, where were we....in Chicago with Lucy and Jenny.  Lucy who has never lived anywhere but the jungle....the best parts of this book are the Mean Girls style high school scenes, minus the gossip, the plastics, and the mean girls.  Eventually all sorts of things happen and while you are never on the edge of your seat, you do want all to work out in the end.  And I am not sure that they do, because, sadly, the novel breaks down in the last 25 pages. 

So if I was giving scores I guess I would give this a 6.5 * -- good for a plane ride, but if you leave it on the seat next to you with 25 pages to go -- don't bother rushing back to find it.  (So a question to my reader(s): how do I put the little asterisk at my new rating system  with a footnote to explain how it will work?)

Update -- answer from comments: do it manually! 

So here is my scale  (all books listed on my bookroll are either 9s or 10s):

*   the scale coordinates with well-known authors clearly at each level (ha! so it is an entirely idiosyncratic scale!  The primary rule about this scale is that: it is my blog and I get to be as judgmental as I wish [iimbaigtbajaiw]

 1: offensive books that I hated, i.e. silly mommy war novels [it would be good to have an example, but I already said I hated it]
2: genres that annoy me -- fantasy (unless it doesn't), historical, steampunk
3: tedious boy books, i.e Philip Roth
4: entertaining books that other people push that I won't read: Swedish crime fiction
5: one step above entertaining books that other people push on me: Like Water for Elephants
6:  books that are needlessly depressing, or confusing, or sleep inducing, that nevertheless I finish:  I would put David Grossman's See Under Love here, but I never finished it....
7: The perfect airplane book sufficiently distracting to keep me from wondering how it is that a plane stays in flight: Ken Follett (thus violating rules 1 and 2!  Remember -- idiosyncratic)
8: Excellent books that maybe go off track; or books I should like better, but am too shallow to love:  Philip K. Dick and other sci fi written by males that does not fall into the offensive category, and yet this is a malleable category: Orson Scott Card -- love the books, yet so offensive....)
9: Books I want to teach and worry when students do not also love: Ursula Le Guin (minus the unreadable Always Coming Home) plus books I would not teach and yet re-read.
10:  Books I love love, i.e.Octavia Butler (except for Kindred)