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“In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson), but he could have said the same for insects too. Male insects will be following the scent of females, looking for a partner, but not every female is what she seems to be. It might look like the orchid is getting some unwanted attention in the video below, but it’s actually the bee that’s the victim. The orchid has released complex scents to fool the bee into thinking it’s meeting a female.

The post Sexual deception in orchids appeared first on OUPblog.

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It has been almost a year since I reviewed Velva Jean Learns to Fly by Jennifer Niven.  As you may recall, Velva Jean married at 16, learned to drive and at 18, drove from North Carolina to Nashville by herself, leaving her husband and hoping to a sing at the Grand Ol' Opry.  Talk about coming of age.

But then World War II began and VelvaJean found herself in the WASP Program (Women's Airforce Service Pilots.)  Now, in Becoming Clementine, it is June 16, 1944, Velva Jean is 21 and a seasoned pilot.  So seasoned that she has just become the first woman to fly a B-17 Flying Fortress across the Atlantic Ocean to Preswick Airfield, Scotland.  Proud of her accomplishment, she also has an ulterior motive for accepting this challenge - her beloved brother Johnny Clay, a paratrooper, hasn't been heard from since October 18, 1943 and Velva Jean is on a personal mission to find him.

As luck would have it, Preswick has been short of pilots since D-Day, less than two weeks earlier and Velva Jean decides getting to Europe would be the best way to find Johnny Clay, so she convinces all relevant authorities to let her copilot a mission to France.  On July 13, she gets orders to fly to Roun, dropping supplies and a team of OSS agents and returning immediately to base.

Naturally, over France, the plane is hit by enemy ground fire and badly damaged though still flying.  Then, when they finally find the place to make their drop, they realize it has been compromised by Germans.  In an attempt to avoid them and singing "My Darling Clementine" to keep herself calm, the plane nevertheless crashes. Velva Jean's flight crew is killed.  The team of five she was to drop does survive, but, angry and disgusted, they want to leave Velva Jean behind and try to find their own way.

Well, they may have wanted to leave Velva Jean, but she was a woman with a mission and a strong will.  Eventually, the survivors meet up with a member of the resistance and that begins their journey through occupied France with the aid of the Underground, eventually ending in Paris.  Through all this, Velva Jean finds herself more and more attracted to the leader of the OSS team, Émile Gravais and eventually this becomes a mutual attraction.

In Paris, Velva Jean is given a new identity, Clementine Roux, an American who married a Frenchman, unable to return to the US after the war began and her husband was killed.  Now, she is pulled into the mission Gravais and his team are to accomplish - rescuing an important agent code-named Swan being held in a woman's prison in Paris.

Velva Jean alias Clementine's new mission: get herself picked up and sent to the same prison.  Is that what happens?  No, it isn't.  And don't think for a moment she has forgotten about Johnny Clay.

One of the things I found very interesting in Becoming Clementine was how difficult it was for Velva Jean to embrace her new identity as Clementine Roux.  It is a testament to her strong sense of who she is that made Velva Jean want to keep surfacing, even in the face of danger.

I did feel that some of the technical bits about planes and things like that could have used some editing, mostly because I have no idea what I was reading about.  Confession: I thought skipping those bits but actually read on, all the while realizing that my fear of flying was getting the best of me and that some readers would find this fascinating.

Becoming Clementine has something for everyone: excitement, espionage, romance (but not much sex, none explicit), action, but it also has violence, lots of it and cursing, lots of that, so be warned.  It is a gritty, fact-paced novel but I felt it may still have the same level of YA appeal that Velva Jean Learns to Fly had even since it is still a coming of age story of sorts.  After all she had been through, it was hard to realize the Velva Jean is only 22 by the end of this novel.

And yes, there will be a fourth Velva Jean novel in autumn 2013.

This book is recommended for readers age 18+ and sophisticated teens with an interest in WWII
This book was received as an E-ARC through Net Galley

For another review of Becoming Clementine at So Much So Many So Few, followed by a wonderful interview with the author Jennifer Niven

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More than anything else in the world, Ida Mae Jones, 18, wants to fly, but she can't.  Not because she doesn't know how, oh no, Ida Mae knows how to fly.  Her father had taught her how to fly his crop dusting plande long ago.  She can't fly because she doesn't have a license and even though she did everything correctly during her flying test, the instructor refused to pass her on principle - she was a woman.  But then the US enters World War II and for Ida Mae there will be no more flying even without a license with gas rationing.

But a new flying possibility opens up in 1943, when her younger brother Abel brings home an ad for female pilots in the new WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilots) program headed up by Jackie Cochran.  Ida Mae gets very excited until she realizes two obstacles to joining the WASP program - she still doesn't have a license and she is black and the program was only open to white women.

Ida Mae was pretty determined, though.  For one thing, she was so fair that she could pass for white, though she had always chosen not to because it meant cutting herself off from friends and family completely.   As for her license, well, Ida Mae was lucky enough to be named after her father, Iden Mahé, so it was a simple matter of changing the name on his license and replacing his photo with one of her own.

And it worked - Ida Mae Jones was accepted into the WASP program in Sweetwater, Texas much to the chagrin of her mother at first.  But Ida Mae travels to Texas and begins her training.  And she discovers that passing is harder work than learning to fly all those big planes needed for war.  She also makes two close friends, Lily and Patsy, who never suspect anything about Ida Mae other than what she presents herself as and with whom she has lots of adventures and lots of fun while becoming a WASP (was irony in that sentence.)  But unfortunately passing also means that people talk freely in her presence and that includes their attitudes towards blacks.  And there is the intimation of a little romance with one of the pilots.

Much of the book focuses on Ida Mae's training and life in the WASP, but Smith gives the reader enough time with her family and friends from home to make us very sympathetic to what they must have felt when Ida Mae chose to turn her back on them in order to fly.  And by the same token, we really are made to understand what her choice cost Ida Mae herself.  And in the end we hare left asking the question if you deny who you truly, are can you be truly happy?  It is for the reader to decide after reading Flygirl.

Passing is not a very common theme in YA literature.  And in her Author's Notes, Smith writes that it is not known how many women in the WASPs may have passed for white in order to fly the way Ida Mae did.  There were certainly black woman like Bessie Coleman who were passionate about flying, but not many would be fair enough to pass and perhaps ever fewer would want to.  My heart went out to Ida Mae, she was such a sweet, likable character, but she clearly didn't realize what she was giving up.  Any my heart went out to her family and her best friend and supporter Jolene and what they lost with Ida Mae's decision.

Smith has written a story that will give the reader plenty of food for thought about what identity really is and can you successfully and satisfyingly alter who your are.  And as far as the WASP is concerned, she has done her job and carefully researched it so that Flygirl is an

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Okay, so I promised I'd fill you all in on the summer family reunion.
True to my word, I did not write this summer, but still the story wove in and out as our family gathered here in my creaky old house with old plumbing. They came from Berlin, Germany, from Santa Fe, from San Anselmo, from Tucson, from Texas. And as we gathered, events began to unfold.

We had a wasp invasion, right through the living room wall one memorable Sunday morning.
We had a major plumbing blow-out (tree roots in the pipes).
We had a record heat wave, 103 degrees, and no air-conditioning.

But we also had a great wedding reception, welcomed the newest baby, Anika Faith (see picture) and celebrated the first birthday of our Berlin baby Ceci, along with that of her Daddy, Michael, (my eldest son.) We had lots of late breakfasts on the deck, a trip to the zoo, lakeside swimming parties at my daughter Laura's home (oh hooray for that lake when the temp soared to 103).

And each day, no matter what the joy or catastrophe (usually some of each) I journalled, just a bit, before I went to bed. Just bits, but the story was weaving, in and out, flashes of character, bits of dialogue, scenes to remember, some dramatic, some funny.

Will these come into the new book I'm beginning? Maybe. But for sure they are woven now into the fabric of my life, part of the bigger Story. The story of family that undergirds everything else I write. I'll share next time some of the smaller bits, those colors and textures that stand out, the pieces of that bigger story.

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Recently, I blogged on the topic of my new, laid-back approach to dealing with garden pests.

There is one major exception to this tolerant view—the Japanese beetle.

My feud with this voracious plant assassin goes back to the year I first planted roses. My roses looked beautiful until about the Fourth of July, when the mature beetles erupted out of the ground. I’d walk out to the garden to find my flowers covered in beetles. They seemed to have a knack for picking out the most beautiful buds, the loveliest flowers in full-blown glory—and ruining them.

Not only that, those beetles were copulating on my roses, they were coupling up and having sex while they chomped my flowers to bits. They emitted pheromones, calling their comrades to join the fun. Talk about your multi-tasking. Meanwhile, their devilspawn offspring lurked under the turf, grazing on the roots of my grass.

I tried those Japanese beetle traps, and my neighbors thanked me, because they drew all the beetles to MY yard. I crawled around my yard with a teaspoon, seeding it with milky spore to kill the grubs. With no apparent effect. Apparently you have to also convince all your less-obsessive neighbors to crawl around on their lawns, too. Or offer to do the crawling for them.

I tried systemic insect controls, even though I don’t like using pesticides in my garden. The beetles treated it like a condiment. I looked up “Japanese beetle controls” online. Nematodes were described as providing “marginal” control, and the extension service bulletin noted that milky spore “may not be effective in Ohio and Kentucky.” Nobody promised me a beetle-free future.

Anyway, it was fun looking at the pictures of nematodes invading the bodies of Japanese beetle grubs and parasitic fly maggots boring their way into the thoraxes of the adults.

Or consider our friend, the Japanese wasp tiphia vernalis. “The female wasp digs into the soil, paralyzes a beetle grub by stinging, and then deposits an egg on the grub. When the egg hatches, the emerging wasp larva consumes the grub.” HAHAHAHAHA!

I’m not usually like this.

Now that I work at home, I’ve resorted to a marginally effective but completely organic and simple approach. When I take writing breaks, I walk out to the garden, pick off the beetles, and drop them into a jar of soapy water. I don’t know what it is about soapy water that kills them, but it’s fast-acting, whereas a beetle can swim around in a jar of plain water for a couple of days. (Trust me on this.)

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