Given all the hubbub surrounding this book, I found it quite disappointing. I admit that space opera is my favorite sub-genre, but I also enjoy the occasional "little" book, and really looked forward to reading this one.

This is a fantastic book, but falls into the "Speculative Fiction" category as upposed to traditional F&SF, which for me made it all the more endearing. It is a wonderful character and relationship study of mother and daughter. The charaterization is so authentic that these two women really come to life. Even down to the manorisms of the mother's smoking habit. The way she pauses to light each cigarette.

The mother is a famous archeologist who had little time for her daughters upbringing. Reluctantly her, now adult, daughter joins her on a dig of the Mayan ruins. Ghosts of the past, both the Mayans, and the mother and daughter, mix to bring the two women closer together.

One of the most unique aspects of this book is that the two women take turns telling the story, so that each chapter swithes back and forth between opposite view points.

After a long & fruitful life as an archeaologist, Liz Butler remembers that dig, long ago in the ruins of a Mayan city, when the shade of a long-dead priestess toppled her into a pool of twilight Mayan magic. This little adventure leapt off the best-seller shelf of a general store in a tiny town over a decade ago. One of those tourist racks, here this month & gone with the summer except that this one has some gristle, guts & a timely, riveting premise. Notwithstanding a fascinating heroine, hair-raising drama & suspenseful scenes. I'm glad to see it in reprint!

I bought this book even though I do not play baseball. The descriptions of basic weight training exercises are excellent. Also, there are a number of agility drills and medicine ball exercises for the upper body which would benefit athletes from other sports.

Complete training for baseball is a great book. It can change any persons life for the better if that person follows this book. Which is difficult. It almost expects that you have a full gym right in your basement. However if you do have a reachable full free-weight gym near to you this book can deeply help you. Also I would have liked the book more if it had a goal of how much weight should be lifted and how fast you should be. If those two things were added this would be the perfect book for anyone from 7-12 grades.

This book goes in depth with all areas of your game to help you reach your maximum ability and beyond in total body conditioning. I was pleased with each chapter and learned many new techniques and drills. There are many drills to chose from so you don't adapt to one training. I didn't know about this before and now I'm excited to set my futre in the right direction of conditioning. The book gives the games most effective secrets I didn't know about before and I now incorporate these secrets in preparing for the upcoming year. The book teaches the need to not just train hard, but smart. I can't tell you enough about how well thought out and written this book is. I believe this book goes beyond 5 star!

I am a fan of Tolkien's work, the Hobbit and the Rings trilogy. When I initially became aware of this book, I was a little skeptical that the author might be using Tolkiens great story as a crutch for a mediocre writing style. Despite my reservations, I picked it up.

And I was glad I did. This author definitely has her own style, which is solid and distinguishable from Tolkien's. The story does not run parallel to the Hobbit in all ways, which is good.

All in all, this is a good, fun read for sci-fi and fantasy enthusiasts alike.

The plot is, of course, The Hobbit In Space but the story is told in such a way that you never have the time, nor the desire, to sit back and dissect the similarities. Rather you'll find yourself half a page into a fabulous retelling of one of Bilbo's adventures when suddenly it hits you.

Murphy manages to assimilate the feel of good old-fashioned Space Operas with modern SF conventions and up-to-date science. I bought this book Sunday afternoon and finished it on Tuesday evening... it sweeps you along with norbits, wormholes, clones, pataphysicians and space pirates (!) and all-around good humoured adventure.

(As for the Max merriwell angle, I'd recommend checking out the author's website for a more coherent explanation than I could give)

Yes, there are some Hobbit-y tendencies in this book; Murphy is quite deliberate in her homage-- BUT as one of the afterwords points out, what the story really relies on is the same thing that Tolkein did-- the heroic quest myth wherein the inexperienced novice encounters adventure, learns to test him/her self, gets helped out by wider-adepts, grows & aquires wisdom, and then, with newly gained wisdom, helps his/her community grow & change....

The book is the perfect length for a night on the couch with hot tea and an afghan over your knees-- (something the story's hero would like as much as you, gentle reader).

I really grew to like Bailey-- and his companions in adventure (especially Fluffy). If you liked The Hobbit, Star Wars, the Narnia Books, Harry Potter, The Odyssey, The Robert Jordan "Wheel of Time" Series, King Arthur's tales, or *any* other "hero myth" at all, you should also like this book.

If you're planning a trip to northwest Montana, this is the book to buy! This became my bible planning my family's vacation, and included all the information I needed including accommodations, activities for kids, area events and recreation. The book includes a history of each area,which I found of special interest. It made planning my trip so easy to do...I highly recommend it!

Both my 3 year old & almost-6 year old enjoy this book (note present tense - it's in the "read frequently" pile). They think the idea of a pig with wings is pretty silly, but are perfectly willing to suspend belief to hear the story. They also seem to have grasped the message of "different can be good too". The illustrations are really charming - matching the story well (not always the case, & ALWAYS noticed by small children). It'd be nice if it came in a softbound version; we'd give it as a birthday gift.

I AM INTERESTED THE BOOKS

This is quite simply a terrible book.

First, it's written in language suitable to, and develops its themes at a level resembling, a child's book. However, it is not being marketed for ten-year-olds, as perhaps it should be, but for adults. (Not that I would recommend it to a ten-year-old either).

I don't quite understand what Murphy thinks she is doing with this Max/Mary Merriwell stuff. Whoever is supposed to have written this book, it isn't any good, and naming a character (Patrick Murphy) after herself is just plain weird.

The plot of Wild Angel is simply impossible. Without wishing to spoil it for anyone who still wants to read it, it involves impossibilities of biology and human physiology. Wolves do not adopt humans and small half-clothed children cannot survive Sierra Nevada winters, period. Granted one role of fantasy is to make us believe the impossible, but Murphy fails to convince me. The characters are shallow and scarcely developed to the point where I kept getting the various women mixed up, and as for the use of language, the Mark Twain quotes dragooned into chapter-heading duty were the only good writing to be found.

The book backs away shyly from any display of sex or violence, not to mention any serious exploration of themes of wilderness, civilization and so forth, which is why it seems like a badly written child's book to me. Clumsy "informative" paragraphs on wolves add to this impression.

It should come as no surprise by this point that I recommend skipping this book.

This is a decent light read. However, it didn't come off in my reading as homage to Tarzan, so much as a straight lifting of the plot. While it was somewhat refreshing to see Burroughs-type fiction done from the female perspective, unfortunately most of the Burroughs problems except for the male-dominance remain prevelant; most importantly the essential junvenility of a lot of the plot and perspective. If you basically like fiction written for teenaged boys, except for the strong sexism that such fiction tends to have, you'll probably enjoy this. If you've graduated to sterner fare, you probably won't get past the first half dozen chapters.

In side note though: There have been some fairly modern and well documented cases of feral children - not many to be sure, but enough to make it not completely impossible speculation to have such a child raised by wolves. The difficulty is that by the time such children were found and brought to civilization they were usually beyond the capability of learning true language, and were probably too young at the time they started living in the wild anyway, so there was no way to find out how they had survived.

For those of us who felt shut out because all the really great adventure novels were about men and boys, here's one for you! Pat Murphy does Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack London one better in this riveting adventure about a young girl raised by wolves in the gold country of California. And those male fans of Burroughs and London will find plenty to like here as well! The setting is beautifully rendered, the characters are warm and believable, and her history is impeccable. Despite all that, you'll like it anyway! This is an adventure novel with a heart!

I echo the sentiments of those reviewers who enjoyed reading this book. We see Nadya, living in a world of fear, loathing and intolerance for what is deemed unseemly and inexplicable, learning to live and thrive, both as a Woman and as a Wolf. In the process, she finds acceptance in a new life she is able to establish for herself out on the frontier.

The author provides vivid descriptions of the experiences Nadya faced in making the trek westward in the 1840s. You feel yourself being carried across an arid landscape on a rickety wagon and on through the snowy Rockies (facing all kinds of hazards and overcoming them) with Nadya, Elizabeth, and Jenny.

One touching scene in the book is when Nadya as a Wolf (having been spurned earlier in the day by Elizabeth, who has never felt right about her romantic attachment to Nadya) allows herself to be mated with a male Wolf. In that moment, you experience Nadya's joy at that moment of orgasmic release as she howls ecstatically to the skies.

For those readers seeking a werewolf novel full of gore and gratuitous violence, you won't find it here. But if you want to read a well-told tale about the life and experiences of a female werewolf in 19th century America, you've come to the right place.

The beginning of this novel is "soft," but well worth reading all the way through. I think the problem with the first fifty pages is it's hard to connect with the characters, but after that point, the problem was being able to disconnect from them. They are engaging and believable--and the story is a howl (not of laughter)...

Nadya is a young woman in the American mid-west 150 years ago. She is werewolf: one night during the full moon she changes into a wolf and lives wild for that night. She is isolated from her society, but not her family, and because of this, she is able to become who she really is in a trek that takes her to the west coast and a new life there.

Nadya is a wonderful book. It is the story of a young woman who happens to be a werewolf looking for love and herself. She explores animal/human and woman/man binaries. She approaches love openly, without defining herself as any sexuality. The book is full of wonderful imagery and strong characters such as Dmitri's school-teacher in Russia, to the young, wild girl Jenny, to the Indian chief and the settlers in the home Nadya finally finds. I would recomend this book to ages 14 and up for anyone struggling with who they are and what others would like them to be.