Jul 23 2026

What Stalks The Deep by T Kingfisher

the title of what stalks the deep appears in white against an animal head on the coverAnd with this, I finish reading a very strong novella slate for this year’s Hugo Awards!

I actually haven’t read any of the other books in the Sworn Soldier series, a deficit I should rectify but definitely don’t have the time to at present. The Sworn Soldier of the series’ name is Alex Easton, a non-binary retired soldier from the fictional European country of Gallicia. In this novella, they and their aide de camp/best friend Angus have been asked to come to America to help a friend — and fellow survivor of the uncanny — figure out what’s happening in a West Virginia mine.

Since his misadventures with Easton in Ruravia, Dr James Denton has inherited a coal mine that his favorite cousin Oscar has undertaken the exploration of. Oscar has since gone missing, but not before sending a telegram asking for Denton not to come looking for him. Denton, ofc, has no intention of obeying, and rounds up some of the stoutest hearts he knows to come with him to investigate.

Easton swears that they’re not claustrophobic, but exploring the mine is the sort of thing that they have to keep challenging themself to do. As the party uncovers the place’s secrets, they’ll have to contend with cave-dwelling biological phenomena as well as threats from without… and within.

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Jul 22 2026

The Outermost Mouse by Lauren Wolk & Kristen Adam

I am having a lot of THOUGHTS about this book that have me trying to second guess my younger self, and it is a WEIRD experience.

This children’s picture book is about a little mouse who inhabits the Outermost House, a cottage on a section of beach that juts out into the sea, alongside the old man who lives there too. The place is beautiful, providing the little mouse with everything she needs, but it’s also in danger. Every day, the sea eats away at the shore, getting closer and closer. The little mouse decides that she has to do something to stop this encroachment and save her house from destruction.

My dilemma after reading this is that I can’t decide whether my younger self would have bought into the ending that Lauren Wolk gives us here. It is heroic and adventurous but also, I fear, deeply untrue in a way that I believe even my younger self would have recognized. Frankly, I am a little scarred as an adult from having read this, and console myself with the thought that in real life the little mouse would absolutely have just dug out a hole for herself in a less endangered inland area and lived the rest of her short and happy natural life out by the beach she so loved.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/07/22/the-outermost-mouse-by-lauren-wolk-kristen-adam/

Jul 21 2026

If We Cannot Go At The Speed Of Light by Kim Cho-yeop

translated from the original Korean by Anton Hur.

The only odd thing about this otherwise terrific collection of short stories, to me, is the fact that they led with the two weakest stories in the bunch instead of any of the strongest. Sure there are only seven stories in this collection, and perhaps other folks will have different opinions, but the leap in quality once you get past the first two is extraordinary.

Maybe I’m just jaded, but I spent the entirety of the opener, Symbiosis Theory, half-convinced that it was thinly-veiled Scientology propaganda. My brain kept popping up that one History Channel guy meme, only he was saying “Thetans!” instead of “Aliens!” (which I always hear in the same delivery as “The Aristocrats!”, lol.) The second story, Spectrum, is somewhat better but also feels like it relies too much on the idea of extraterrestrials being unknowable but super cool, so don’t ask too many questions about the story, just trust me, bro. And by me, ofc, I mean the author. Which, sure, why else would I be reading your book, but that trust comes with the trade-off that you’re about to tell me something interesting, which the first story wasn’t and the second one… well, at least it had promise.

Fortunately, things improve vastly once we get to the title story. If We Cannot Go At The Speed Of Light talks about the ways in which technology leaves people behind, and the choices we have to make in hopes of giving people a chance, however quixotic they may be. The Materiality Of Emotions is a weird but thoughtful little piece on the human propensity for literal objectification. Archival Loss has a woman attempting to access the uploaded personality of her mother, while Pilgrims talks about a young person who burns to understand why some people never return to their idyllic village. Finally, you have My Space Hero, where an astronaut-in-training learns the truth about the aunt she idolizes.

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Jul 20 2026

Adventure In The City Of Stories by Emma Otheguy

with wonderful illustrations by Poly Bernatene.

This sequel to Cousins In The Time Of Magic finds our three young protagonists Siggy, Camilla and Jorge heading back in time for an even more personal reason than in the first book. Camilla is already having a terrible day after being humiliated at her Florida school by the principal, for the crime of bringing in books in Spanish for her new friend Marisol. The books were sent home for being “about race”, which is essentially code for not centering mainstream white American culture.

To cheer her up, Jorge pulls out a book and some puppets he’d found while looking for the good snacks at their Tia Xia’s house. They decide to bring them over to Marisol’s but are waylaid by neighborhood bully Cooper Tumbor. The cousins flee into Tia Xia’s tinajon to hide from him but wind up having to set sail with a pursuing Siggy across the seas of time to 1930s New York City.

Turns out that the book and puppets are actually important artifacts created by the legendary librarian Pura Belpre. Tia Xia found them in the same way that she found the jeweled sword they’d returned in their last time travel adventure. Trouble is, these artifacts have recently gone missing from the New York Public Library, and if they’re not returned fast, Tia Xia could go to jail. As the kids try to figure out how to navigate the Great Depression, Tia Xia comes into the past, too. Will they be able to put the artifacts somewhere secure enough to be found almost a century in the future?

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Jul 19 2026

A Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi Vo

A Long and Speaking Silence, the seventh in Nghi Vo‘s Singing Hills cycle, takes Cleric Chih back to one of their first assignments as a chronicler, a gatherer of stories. On their way to the riverside city of Luntien a moment of inattention led to their being relieved of their purse and stipend, so as the story begins they are spending most of their time waiting tables in a restaurant. Dropped dishes, forgotten orders and a feeling of being underfoot both in the kitchen and among the other servers have them not feeling great about themselves or their job. The spring festival is coming soon, and more people are arriving in Lutien each day, so pressure at the restaurant is rising. All of that keeps Chih away from what they think of as their real task, collecting stories from people in the city that they can take back to the archives at the abbey in the Singing Hills.

A Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi Vo

Vo’s story has a tight focus, in both time and space. She keeps Chih in the center of everything, and the whole novella takes place in the week leading up to the spring festival. It’s not quite Aristotelian unity, but it’s close enough to move the novella along quickly and for the locations to become familiar. There is the restaurant, the family that runs it, and a couple of other fellow staff members. Then while collecting some data about river heights, Chih becomes involved in an incident where refugees on boats headed upriver overcome the harbormaster’s guards and head for a temple that is obligated to take in refugees. They are grateful for Chih’s assistance, though representatives of the city are less keen. Chih learns that there is war among the islands to the south of Lutien, and although the city is the tenth harbor up the river from the sea, still people come. Officially, Lutien welcomes the unfortunate, but in practice many would prefer to send the island people further inland, especially with festival visitors temporarily swelling the local population.

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Jul 18 2026

They Were Divided by Miklos Banffy

Having taken the first two volumes of his Transylvanian Trilogy to immerse readers in the sometimes glittering, sometimes earthy world of Hungarian aristocracy prior to the First World War, Milos Banffy brings his stories to their immutable end in They Were Divided. The concluding book was published in Hungarian in 1940, and there could hardly be a better way to ensure that this great work sank into obscurity for decades. The Hungarian language is not quite an isolate, but neither is it one of the major European languages that would give the trilogy a naturally larger audience. In 1940, Hungary was on far friendlier terms with the Axis powers than with the Western Allies. (The same was true about the USSR until the middle of the next year, of course.) After the war, a Communist government soon ruled in Budapest. Needless to say, a series of novels about the nobility written by a former foreign minister who had organized a royal coronation was not part of their cultural program. And so it was that that these novels languished for decades; they were first re-printed in Hungary in 1952, two years after Banffy’s death, and they were first translated into English in 1999. Translations into Spanish, French and German followed around 2010.

They Were Divided by Miklos Banffy

Banffy was writing about his people and the society of his early years. He writes with great sympathy for the individuals and a cold rage about their collective decisions. The two main figures of the trilogy are noble cousins Balint and Laszlo, both roughly of an age with Banffy. Like the author, Balint is heir to an ancient and distinguished Transylvanian family, landowners on a great scale, practitioners of noblesse oblige, occasional servants of the public good and observers of all the proper social forms. Balint’s father died when he was young, and his mother, Countess Roza, has run the estates for years with a steady hand. Balint himself spent some years in the diplomatic service of Austria-Hungary, and as the trilogy opens he is returning to his homeland to take a more active role in the family’s businesses and, in due course, to take up a seat in parliament to look after local and regional interests. His cousin Laszlo comes from an equally distinguished lineage but is orphaned at an early age. He is adopted by relatives who attend to his rearing and education, but they also do not ever let him forget their generosity in taking him in. Laszlo’s true passion is music, and he is both an excellent musician and a potentially groundbreaking composer. There are some parallels between Laszlo and Bela Bartok, whose ideas and compositions Banffy championed.

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Jul 17 2026

Tantalizing Tales — July 2026 — Part Three

Hello, dear readers! For this week’s column, we get to look both into the recent and slightly more distant pasts to come up with some terrific summer reads for you.

If you, too, are in the throes of Summerween (I mean, anything to distract from the real-life horrors on our doorsteps, especially if you’re living in an area affected by wildfire smoke as I am, even down here in Maryland) then you have to check out Kelly McWilliams’ new Young Adult thriller No One Leaves The Manor. It’s 1921 and four debutantes have been invited to Graystone Manor, the home of oil heiress Caroline Reginald Kane. She’s the last of her line and has given the girls a tempting offer: to compete for the prize of becoming her sole heir.

The four girls are vastly different. Vaughn was born for this life, and won’t let anyone or anything stop her, much less call her crazy when she’s just doing whatever needs to be done in order to fulfil her destiny. Birdie thinks she has a destiny of a different kind, and while she doesn’t even know exactly why she’s been invited, she does believe in divine providence. Dorothea is an accomplished thief and liar who’s come in search of any signs of the mother who disappeared at Graystone years earlier. And finally there’s pretty, underestimated Elspeth who can see things that others can’t, including hints of the malevolent force that doesn’t want them to leave the manor alive.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/07/17/tantalizing-tales-july-2026-part-three/

Jul 16 2026

A4 2B D6, Vol 1, Issue 1: People edited by Aaron Lim

I am high key obsessed with this inaugural magazine issue about roleplaying games in Malaysia. Aside from its decidedly and unapologetically local flavor, it provides a pretty terrific sampling of all the different kinds of RPGs currently being played in the country, from traditional tabletop games to story games, solo journaling games and more. Perhaps more crucially, this magazine shows how these games are being experienced by people whom you wouldn’t necessarily think of when you imagine the average gamer. It’s excellent representation that underscores the universality of the desire to play games of the imagination.

It’s also a terrific statement of community. I would’ve killed for this back when I was living in Kuala Lumpur, but the closest I got to RPGs back then was sitting in on a sole Dungeons & Dragons session and reading some books out of context (and attempting to clandestinely run Top Secret without the books for my seatmate when we were both bored in class.) I read a lot of comics and flopped a lot of cards — mostly Magic the Gathering, but a little Legend Of The Five Rings — but could never find an actual RPG group. This was also well before solo games became A Thing, because I would definitely have been all over those. The fact that this magazine exists now feels very vindicating to my past self, who is thrilled that there is finally a Malaysian community large enough to support a publication dedicated to RPGs.

Munkao’s cover perfectly encapsulates my teenage dreams, as a Malaysian schoolgirl leads a trio of fantasy characters in a determined march forward. There’s your typical high elf with a sword behind her, but the other two figures are distinctly more Southeast Asian-inspired, giving the viewer a pretty good idea of the content you’ll find inside.

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Jul 15 2026

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

The Summer War by Naomi NovikOoh, Naomi Novik, you crafty little devil of a writer, you!

I’m always so impressed when an author sets the reader up to intensely dislike a character, only for that same character to eventually and successfully capture our hearts later on. And I get it, there were a ton of mitigating factors for why our heroine Celia would curse her older brother Argent in such a breathtakingly awful way. She’s a kid, she doesn’t get what she’s saying, she doesn’t know it’s not just words… but still, the underlying cruelty made it really hard for me to want the best for her as this novella progresses.

So it’s nice that as she gets older, she also grows up. I loved how she forged a bond with her other brother Roric and how that would eventually come into play as their family was forced to reckon with the Summer War that their land had been engaging in for years. Essentially, Celia is the daughter of a hedge knight who fought his way to become a powerful landowner by beating back the fae Summerlings on their border. She and her brothers each have different mothers, all dead now, and as a child she adores Argent for being the handsome, chivalrous knight who’s always shown her nothing but affection.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/07/15/the-summer-war-by-naomi-novik/

Jul 14 2026

The Underwearwolf by Gideon Sterer & Charles Santoso

I have recently been informed that Summerween — the practice of celebrating Halloween in the summer — is an actual thing, so reading and reviewing this book in July is totally legit, lol.

Regardless of what time of year you encounter The Underwearwolf, I’m reasonably sure that you’ll be as charmed as I was by the premise. Our kid protagonist’s uncle, knowing his penchant for novelty underwear, sends him an unusual pair of briefs one birthday. As the day winds down, the kid decides to put on his brand new set of underpants, but notices that there’s a label attached, warning people against wearing them when the moon is full. The kid figures that the moon isn’t THAT full (lol,) so slips them on. Hilarious G-rated hijinks ensue.

If you have or have ever had young kids who love novelty underwear, you will absolutely understand this book. Heck, if you’ve ever had the satisfaction of slipping into underwear that you feel matches your personality, you will one hundred percent get this book. Clothing matters, not just in projecting a visual language but in building interior belief. Clothes can help you feel bolstered and prepared to take on the everyday battles of life, whether as a werewolf or some other kind of being, mythical or mundane.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/07/14/the-underwearwolf-by-gideon-sterer-charles-santoso/