Venice: A Color-Your-Own Travel Journal by Evie Carrick & Emma Taylor

I was very lucky as a child to be able to travel extensively, both with my parents and on my own in college. Venice was one of the places my parents brought me, and it still lives indelibly in my mind as one of the most romantic cities of the world.

So when I got the chance to review the latest in the Color-Your-Own-Travel Journal series, covering the wonders of The Floating City — oh, holy carp, is that why my #Dungeon23 variant was based on a waterborne city, at least in part? Ahem, I digress — I could not resist. Venice is one of my absolute favorite artistic inspirations. I’m currently working my way through a watercolor notebook inspired by the city, and found this to be the perfect colored pencil accompaniment.

That said, this book is by no means meant to teach you how to color. It is, however, a beautifully drawn tour of the sites of the city, covering both the main, historic attractions as well as more modern hidden gems. I remember the very touristy sites of San Marco as they’re described here, tho long, as an adult, to try out some of the splendid restaurants mentioned in this book too. Will I be able to make that dream a reality anytime soon? Lol, no, but a girl can imagine, abetted not only by the descriptions but also by the evocative line art and the tempting lined spaces across from each, inviting reflection and elaboration.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/10/venice-a-color-your-own-travel-journal-by-evie-carrick-emma-taylor/

The Case Of The Severed Alliance (Bad Machinery #10) by John Allison

I usually read a Bad Machinery book each Christmas, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it this past year. Book 10 is the very last book of the series, and I was not in the correct frame of mind to face the end of the stories featuring my favorite teen mystery solvers, not until last night when I was too sick to go spend time with my Arsenal family anyway. Missing their camaraderie, I needed some wit and suspense and good cheer, and found it in spades in The Case Of The Severed Alliance.

As anyone who’s been keeping up with the series knows, our two main characters (and cover stars here) Shauna and Charlotte had a massive falling out in Book 9. Honestly, I couldn’t face going into this book knowing that the former best friends were no longer on speaking terms, which was another reason I dragged my feet a bit. Plus, they’re all growing up! They’re fifteen and evolving into their adult forms! They’re not even my babies and I’m all verklempt!

Anyway, Charlotte (who is possibly my favorite fictional creation ever) is trying to find something to do to occupy her summer. Her mother is fixing up the house, making writing an impossibility, so a bored Charlotte decides to join the local newspaper in order to combine her love of writing with her gift for detecting. Her first task: to ferret out five stories. Interestingly, they all seem to lead to the topic of the on-going gentrification of Tackleford, who might be behind it and why.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/09/the-case-of-the-severed-alliance-bad-machinery-10-by-john-allison/

The Miraculous From The Material by Alan Lightman

subtitled: Understanding the Wonders of Nature

Ah, what a refreshing collection of essays for the intermediate scientist on the many wonderful things around us! I would say that it helps to have a knowledge of basic science before diving in, but if this book with its beautiful selection of photos and plainly stated appreciation for the beauty and magic of the everyday world encourages people to learn more about science, then so much the better!

Ofc, certain of the phenomena described here are easier to encounter than others. Birds and lightning are nearly worldwide occurrences, whereas Ha Long Bay and Yosemite Firefall are entirely site-specific. But Alan Lightman goes into the science behind all these wonders of nature with the same enthusiasm and appreciation for their beauty and ability to inspire. While he is certainly no believer in miracles, he does believe in the human experience of the miraculous, and is happy to explain the scientific processes behind these evocative experiences.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/08/the-miraculous-from-the-material-by-alan-lightman/

Fairy House Disaster by Tina Connolly & Norm Grock

a Choose Your Own Adventure book!

Can I say how much I love Chooseco’s Dragonlark series of CYOAs for younger kids, and especially the ones with female protagonists? I remember always wishing I had books like Fairy House Disaster as a kid, instead of having to pretend to be some dopey pre-teen boy making less than stellar choices. Ofc, my history with playing CYOA book usually involves making less than stellar choices — why do my attempts to gather information so I can make sensible solutions always wind up getting punished, lolsob? — but it’s nice to have the option of doing that as a girl instead of being constantly shoehorned into the role of average white boy.

Fairy House Disaster itself is about YOU, a young girl (or, generously, female-presenting person) excited to enter her town’s Annual Gingerbread Contest. The grand prize is an electric scooter that will really help you go places, but especially to the ice cream store in town. Unfortunately, a mean kid named Oscar is already determined to make things difficult for you. When another girl named Heidi offers to team up with you, do you accept or do you decide to investigate the strange sparkly lights near Oscar’s workstation?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/07/fairy-house-disaster-by-tina-connolly-norm-grock/

Beneath The Moon by Yoshi Yoshitani

I purchased (that’s right, I BOUGHT a book! Granted this was in 2023 and I’m only now getting around to reading it, lolsob) this beautiful collection of fairy tales, myths and divine stories because I deeply love Yoshi Yoshitani’s Tarot of the Divine, with which this book is inextricably linked. In order to illustrate the tarot deck, Yoshi meticulously researched folk tales from all over the world before matching them with the traditional Tarot imagery and creating Yoshi’s own extraordinary art to synthesize the two.

Given that this is the second year in a row that I’ve used Yoshi’s 12-Month Spread to kick off the year — with the TotD also being my deck of choice for the month of January, two years running, in addition to the deck I prefer to use for the 12-Month Spread when reading for friends — I felt that it was high time I finally dove into this book. And what a sumptuous treat it is, filled with seventy-eight abridged stories from all over the world! The tales are all condensed to a single page with a facing illustration. While each of the art pieces is from a card in the TotD, they’re not explicitly labeled as such, tho there is a brief reference to the Tarot in the introduction. I’m not entirely sure why this choice was made: I certainly spent more time trying to figure out which card each story represented than I really wanted to. Perhaps the editors wanted to keep the focus more on the folklore than on the symbolism — there is a separate TotD Handbook, after all, that I presume fills that purpose.

I was also a little confused by the way the entries were organized. Honestly, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for why any of the stories were arranged in the way that they were. I’m used to books like these being organized by geographical region or timeline or theme/category, none of which was apparent here. Tbh, I rather wished they’d been sorted by their order in the TotD deck.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/06/beneath-the-moon-by-yoshi-yoshitani/

Taking Stock of 2024

Well this is rather embarrassing. The best book I read in 2024 — They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy — is one that I have singularly failed to write about. I keep thinking that I will sit down and write about it stages until I have given the work its due, and hasn’t happened in the several months since I finished reading this amazing but little-known novel. Bánffy himself led quite a life. He came from one of the most distinguished families in Transylvania and rose to be Foreign Minister of Hungary between the two world wars. He organized the last coronation of a King of Hungary, in 1916. He championed the avant-garde music of Béla Bartók. During the Second World War, he tried to lead Hungary and Romania out of the Axis alliance, but negotiations foundered over which country would control Transylvania.

They Were Counted by Miklos Banffy

He also wrote plays, short stories and The Writing on the Wall a trilogy of historical novels set in Hungary in the last years before the Great War. They are in the grand tradition of nineteenth-century novels about people and society. Bánffy could keep company with the great Russian novelists, except that his work is practically unknown. The first volume of the trilogy was published in Hungary in 1934; the last in 1940 in the middle of the war. The works were first translated into English in 1999, and into German in 2012. I don’t know if they’ve been translated into any other major languages yet. I hope they eventually find an audience; They Were Counted is brilliant. Bánffy’s two main characters are young cousins, members of the Hungarian nobility. One would like to reform both his estates and national affairs more generally; he is pushed and pulled by entrenched interests as well as people who would go much further. The other is a talented composer and musician, but he can never quite get over being adopted, and plenty of the noble caste are willing to remind him of his status. Both young men struggle with love and prospects of marriage; they are also prone to some of the vices of their class. The book drew me into a lost world, filled with a large number of rounded characters whose joys and struggles are with me still. Maybe I will write more about it soon. Ish.

I read a baker’s dozen translations this past year, spread a bit more widely among languages than in recent years. The most common pair was Russian to English (The Road, Metro 2033, An Armenian Sketchbook, The Helmet of Horror), and those were disparate in their content: two from the middle of the 20th century by Vasily Grossman, some pulpy science fiction, and more strangeness from Viktor Pelevin, which is what I read him for. Hugo nominations led me to two works translated from Chinese to English; one was to my taste (Seeds of Mercury), the other very much was not (Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet). I read two books translated from Polish, one into English (The Issa Valley) and one into German (Die Welt hinter Dukla). All the others were singletons: from Hungarian (They Were Counted), from Swedish to German (Der Tod eines Bienenzüchters), from Korean (Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982), from French (The Way by Swann’s), and from Spanish to German (Landschaften nach der Schlacht). The three translations into German were all from the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s two sets of great novels of the 20th century. I’d disagree with the newspaper’s editors in that one of the three was great (Der Tod eines Bienenzüchters), one was fine (Die Welt hinter Dukla), and one left me skeptical about ever reading another of the author’s works (Landschaften nach der Schlacht). But the series keeps introducing me to authors I would probably never read otherwise, and that’s exactly what I want it to do. The best of the translated novels was They Were Counted, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Bánffy’s trilogy.

The only real re-reading I did in 2024 was Little, Big by John Crowley. While in Texas this summer, I bought a copy of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, which was published just in time for the book’s fortieth anniversary in 2021. It is a gorgeous example of the printer’s and bookmaker’s arts. The pages are smooth and strokeable; the art complements the text and is generously placed throughout the novel. The publishers have paid attention to a great many small details. I think that each of the novel’s six major sections begins a new signature of pages, so that the book opens very naturally at breaks in its story. The tale itself is every bit as deep and engrossing as I remember from several previous readings, though I had not visited in many years. I have not quite finished as 2024 comes to an end — 630 pages out of 736 — but Little, Big is not a book that needs hurrying. I did not read any full volumes of poetry this year. That happens sometimes. I read 37 books that were written by men; I read 25 books that were written by women; if any of the authors listed below are non-binary, I am happy to be corrected.

In good years for reading in German, about 10 percent of the books that I read are in that language. Last year that bumped up to eight, though 2022 was more typical with five, and though 2021 was a weird year for reading I also read five books in German that year. This past spring, though, I noticed that my interests — finally catching something I had meant to read for years, a recommendation about a Berlin book, a new Tintenherz adventure from Claudia Funke — had led me to read a book auf Deutsch each month so far in 2024. Could I keep up that pace for a full year? And thus an observation turned into a goal. The answer turned out to be yes, and I read 13 books in German (two in October), by far the most in at least 20 years. (Eine blaßblaue Frauenschrift, Marzahn Mon Amour, Die Farbe der Rache, Der Tod eines Bienenzüchters, Stille Zeile Sechs, Menschen im Hotel, Die Welt hinter Dukla, Das Konzert, Mein litauischer Führerschein, Die Physiker, Das Lied von der russischen Erde, Landschaften nach der Schlacht, Der Geliebte der Mutter)

It was a good exercise, on the whole. I read some books that I had intended to read for a long time. I dove back in to the Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s list of great novels of the 20th century. My speed increased, and I felt more at home reading in the language. The goal, combined with already owning so many books from the Süddeutsche sets, meant that I tried ten authors whose works were new to me, three of them translated from yet other languages: Polish, Spanish and Swedish. (Even at its best, my Polish was nowhere near good enough to read whole books.) But I probably won’t push to reach the same number in 2025. For one thing, the goal made me too conscious of finishing the books in a certain amount of time. For another, I found that I have a practical limit of about 300 pages in German per month, with rare exceptions. Twelve a year means I’m limiting myself to shorter works, and there are some longer books I’m looking forward to. Finally, reading is enjoyable. I don’t want to clutter it up with too many other concerns.

Best alternate history with a final scene that I’m still somewhat cranky about almost a year later: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. Most unsettlingly brilliant short-story collections: After the Apocalypse and Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen F. McHugh. Most astonishing example of the historian’s craft: Empire of Refugees by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky. Most furious book I read this year: either Stille Zeile Sechs by Monika Maron or Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo. Funniest book I read this year: Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Best Elizabethan-era adventure mysteries: A Famine of Horses and A Season of Knives by P.F. Chisholm.

Full list, roughly in order read, is under the fold with links to my reviews and other writing about the authors here at Frumious.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/04/taking-stock-of-2024/

The Maid And The Crocodile by Jordan Ifueko

I ADORE Jordan Ifueko, but when I first started reading this book back in August, I bounced off of it hard. It’s been a while since I read Ms Ifueko’s first book, the amazing and heartbreaking Raybearer, and while the follow-up Redemptor was also good, it felt oddly clinical in comparison. Very, very good, but nowhere near as flawlessly felt as its predecessor.

So I wasn’t sure whether this next novel in the Raybearer universe would hew more closely to the raw vulnerability of the first book or to the chilly beauty of the second. But I had a bigger problem to contend with upon cracking open The Maid And The Crocodile. As it’s been several years since I’ve read the main books of the series, I found myself completely flummoxed by the expectations this book had of me regarding the setting. While the narrative is immersive, for the first 15% or so of the novel, I struggled to remember the importance of the terms and people being casually mentioned. When the rest of my work reading threatened to overwhelm me, I set this novel aside till I had less deadline pressure and more time to just enjoy the unfolding story.

And enjoy it I did! With publishing taking the last two weeks of the year off, I finally had a chance to dive back into this novel, and oh how I loved it! Ms Ifueko takes the story of a young woman beset with both disadvantages and disability, and turns it into a ferocious romantasy of finding your power in community, and dignity in claiming both your rights and rightful rewards. This is not a book about being saved by a fairy godmother or by a prince. This is a book about questioning the system that makes it necessary for the underprivileged to be rescued at all, instead of being given the tools to forge their own fulfilling destinies.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/03/the-maid-and-the-crocodile-by-jordan-ifueko/

Looking Back On 2024

Happy New Year, readers! Hopefully, 2025 is an even better year for all of us than 2024 was, tho I know I speak more from optimism than from any actual expectation.

Gosh, I’m such a bummer already, lol. This is partly due to the fact that, according to Goodreads, I read 336 books in 2024. Dear readers, this is too much! No wonder my brain feels like it’s oozing out of my ears half of the time! I also read approximately 86,600 pages, a new record in both pages and books. Honestly? Yuck.

Perhaps ironically, I felt that I was less productive in my reading this year, probably because my goalposts kept shifting, asking more and more of me. This is absolutely my own fault: even tho I learned to better say no this past year, and to start offering excerpts and recaps when I just can’t fit books into my review schedule, I still said yes to far too many books. Some of this stems from economic uncertainty and the bullshit that is gig culture. The more I work, the more I get paid (allegedly,) but when I’m primarily paid in free books, that just makes me feel guilty about not reading, even tho I demonstrably read and wrote more in 2024 than in years past. As I type, I’m trying to cast away the guilt about still working my way through books from November in my calendar, nevermind that I’ve populated almost every single work day since June with a post here (along with a weekly cooking column plus 2-3 reviews per week over at CriminalElement.com.)

I need to slow down. That’s going to be one of my mantras going into 2025, that and reading more books because they tickle my fancy and not because they’re in my coverage spreadsheet. Tho even as I say that, I have 157 books I’ve committed to already for next year, and the thirty or so I still need to wrap up from the end of 2024 [insert maniacal laughter here.]

But that’s not the point of today’s post! Today, I’m going to talk about the eleven books that published in 2024 that I most enjoyed reading over the course of the last twelve months. These are books that made me laugh, cry and gasp with astonishment, in chronological order of publication:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/02/looking-back-on-2024/

Tantalizing Tales — December 2024 — Part Two

Hello, readers! I decided to keep my final 2024 recap of books on my TBR pile for the very last day of the year instead of trying to shoehorn it into last Friday’s slot. Mostly, I needed the time off from writing and publishing. It has been a very busy year filled with a tremendous amount of books, and I desperately needed a mini-vacation given the sheer amount I’ve been reviewing and recapping recently. I’ll do an annual retrospective once the year turns: I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t consider things over till they’re over, and there might still be time for me to finish another short book or two before I write and post my reading recap on January 2nd, lol.

First up of books I wish I’d had time to read this year is Krystal Sutherland’s The Invocations! A serial killer is on the loose in modern-day London. All of the victims, who are being murdered with increasing brutality, have two things in common: they are women, and they have invocations carved into their skin—tattoos that mark them as witches.

Jude Wolf is the miserably cursed daughter of a billionaire. She made a deal with a demon that went horribly wrong, and her soul has been turning necrotic slowly and very painfully ever since. Now that she’s unwillingly glimpsed what lies beyond the veil, she’s desperate to find someone to undo the damage she’s done to herself.

Zara Jones was a straight-A student bound for Oxford until the sister who was her best friend in the entire world was violently murdered. Despite Zara’s lack of belief in magic, she throws herself into the study of necromancy in a desperate effort to bring her sister back. If only she could find a powerful witch to help her navigate this task…

Enter Emer Byrne, an orphaned witch and cursewriter from a long lineage of powerful witches. When she was a child, Emer witnessed her coven – her mother, sisters, cousins, aunts – massacred by witch hunters. Ever since, such she’s dedicated her life to helping women in desperate situations gain power through invocations, in exchange for a piece of their souls.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/31/tantalizing-tales-december-2024-part-two/

Darkly by Marisha Pessl

You know how sometimes you have an author whose first work you encountered was so life-altering that you’re down for whatever they write after, no matter the quality of the subsequent output? Marisha Pessl is one of those authors for me.

I fell in love hard with Special Topics In Calamity Physics, which was a brilliant look at a young girl leading a peripatetic life in the wake of her mercurial professor father, trying to fit in at a new high school during senior year and stumbling into a murder investigation in the process. Ms Pessl’s next two books, Night Film and Neverworld Wake, were both fine. Night Film was very self-consciously adult (and commensurately ponderous) and Neverworld Wake felt like a capitulation to the marketing schisms that demanded that any novel with a teenage protagonist had to be classified as Young Adult. Darkly, at least, feels more comfortable as a YA novel, tho perhaps I have just adjusted my expectations downwards in regard to this author.

Gosh, this review isn’t meant to be bitchy, I just want eccentric, brilliant books closer to STiCP than to your average YA mystery, and I’m starting to get a little impatient!

Anyway, Darkly tells the tale of Dia Gannon, a teenage outcast who essentially runs the antique store ostensibly staffed by her flighty mother and the elderly assistants who might as well be related to her by blood. When she learns that the estate of legendary game-maker Louisiana Veda is holding a worldwide search for interns, she’s desperate to go but also scared of leaving her little family behind.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/30/darkly-by-marisha-pessl/