Aug 18 2026

Flame Con 2026!

On Sunday, I went to Flame Con! An annual convention in New York City, Flame Con is run by Geeks OUT, a nonprofit “dedicated to making the fan community more fun, inclusive and safe for geeks who are queer.”

With the focus on LGBTQ+ creators and fans, the fandoms range from anime to videogames, to podcasts, to ttrpgs, to a huge comics contingent, and prose books as well. I look forward to going every year. Each year of the con, Sunday is Youth Day, when anyone under 21 years old gets in free. This year I brought along my own kid and a friend of hers, and we all had a terrific time.

Emily's photo shows choral singers with the back of some audience members in the foreground

TRANScend performs at Flame Con 2026

After checking in and doing a quick orientation lap with the adolescents (where is the Quiet Lounge? Where are the bathrooms? What is the plan if you get separated?) I was thrilled to attend a performance by TRANScend, New York City’s trans and gender-nonconforming choir.

They performed a wide range of music, including a choral piece set to a Walt Whitman poem, a Casino pop song in Mandarin, the video game classic “Still Alive” from Portal, and closed with “The Parting Glass.” I was excited to see them in person because I have been following them on social media for a long time, and I hadn’t realized their members also arranged some of the pieces and played instruments for others. They are multitalented.

As usual, my interest is mostly in books, so after that performance I was paying attention to the library presence, the book signings, and the panel “Queering the Hero,” with luminaries from the superhero comics world.

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Aug 17 2026

Little Monsters by Máire Roche

Honestly, stick any Little Women retelling in front of me and I’m gonna read it. Ofc, it helps that this one has a super interesting modern twist too. Some of the changes from the original had me wondering whether this really needed to be tacked onto the LW framework but overall this was a compelling story about sisterhood, emotional health and the burden of responsibility, with cryptids thrown in for good measure!

The four original March sisters are still here but in this story they’re foster children being looked after by the sensible but two-job-juggling foster mom they call Marmee. Meg is fourteen and terrified of being split up from her sisters, who need her not only because they’re young girls in an often uncaring foster system but because they all have weird, monstrous traits that could get them all shunned or worse. Meg herself has claws and teeth that pop out at the most inopportune moments, usually in times of stress or heightened emotion. Which, given that she’s a teenager who’s taken on the burden of looking after three younger kids and who up till now has been doing whatever she can to please a rotating case of foster parents, is unfortunately often.

When Meg starts waking up covered in dirt with her claws and teeth out, whether in bed or in the forest outside of her Salem, Massachusetts home, she begins to worry. She’s always known she’s a sleepwalker, but could she now be doing much worse without being aware of it? Her anxieties worsen when she hears about the rumors of nearby attacks on livestock and property damage by some weird, strange beast that the townsfolk are becoming more and more determined to capture.

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Aug 15 2026

The Death of the Necromancer

Like its predecessor The Element of Fire, The Death of the Necromancer begins with a heist. Wells gives the first line to Madeline, an actress and singer who is rising in the theatrical world of Ile-Rien’s capital city, Vienne. She is also tightly entwined with a leading figure in the city’s criminal underworld. “The most nerve-racking commissions,” she thinks, “were the ones that required going in through the front door.” (p. 327; all page numbers are from the omnibus edition, The Book of Ile-Rien.) The man on her arm as they go in through the front door is Captain Reynard Morane, a former cavalry officer to whom some considerable scandal has become attached. He is not the underworld boss, but the two of them are in fact thick as thieves. The front door they are going through is that of Mondollot House, where the eponymous Duchess is giving a large winter ball. Their job, though it is not immediately apparent, is nothing so simple as liberating valuable jewels from the Duchess’ keeping; instead, they are to facilitate a far greater theft of gold bars from the lower levels of Mondollot House by temporarily bringing down some of its magical defenses.

The Book of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells

They are working on behalf of and in partnership with Nicholas Valiarde, aka the criminal mastermind Donatien. Nicholas is a descendant of an ancient and, it transpires, entirely disreputable noble family, though he himself grew up in poverty. When his mother died, he turned to petty thievery until he was rescued and taken in by a magician named Edouard Villard. Nicholas owes him everything, and so his improper conviction of and execution for necromancy — which takes place well before the novel begins — turns Nicholas’ life upside down. The heist that begins The Death of the Necromancer is part of an elaborate plan to bring justice to the man who was instrumental in Edouard’s framing.

The team carries off the heist, but there are oddities. Someone had been to Madeline’s goal before her and used a different method to circumvent the magical defenses of Mondollot House. Who? Why? Someone had also been in the lower cellars where Nicholas and the rest of the crew carried off a significant amount of gold bars. These others had either ignored the gold or not known about it, but they had plainly been looking for something. Had they found it? What was it? And who were they? They had also either left or unleashed a number of ghouls, leading to a narrow escape for Nicholas and company.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/15/the-death-of-the-necromancer/

Aug 14 2026

Tantalizing Tales — August 2026 — Part Two

Hello, dear readers! August has so far been less brutal for me than the past few months, and will hopefully keep going that way, knock on wood. I hope you’ve all been having a nice month of it, too!

First up of books we have to look forward to is the latest from the author of the stunning Salt Bones, set in California’s Salton Sea. In The Sleeping Sisters, Jennifer Givhan turns her attention instead to the dormant volcanic landscape outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to give us another searing tale of women willing to fight for and against their families, risking everything to save the ones they love.

Fortuna Miercoles thought that moving her family to a better life across the Rio Grande meant that she could also leave behind the ancestral curse that’s haunted her bloodline, ever since one of her foremothers crossed the desert with a cactus thorn splitting her throat. But her family’s legacy of violence is proving difficult to evade.

Detective Jeanette Palacio has spent decades trying to find justice for her murdered cousins, as well as for the other dead women whose ghosts continue to haunt her. When a serial killer long thought gone begins to terrorize Albuquerque once more, Jeanette is on the case, even as something in Fortuna begins to awaken. The discovery of a body in Fortuna’s backyard will force the two women’s paths to converge. They’ll have to decide how much they can trust each other in their desire to uncover the truth, while still fiercely protecting what they each value most.

Based on both true events and the urban legend of The Girl With The Green Ribbon, this is a fascinating, feral tale of murder and horror told through Ms Givhan’s poetic Chicana-Indigenous lens.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/14/tantalizing-tales-august-2026-part-two/

Aug 13 2026

Kestrel Takes Flight by Joy McCullough

I think the main thing I need to get over when reading books in verse is that the poetry is never going to grab me as art in and of itself. None of these poems stand alone, at least in my initial read of the book, but they all stand together beautifully to tell a coming-of-age tale at once spare in words yet surprisingly full in emotion.

Eleven year-old Kestrel is not happy when her mom wakes her up in the middle of the night and whisks her away for an airplane ride. Mom isn’t really the kind of adult who has her life together, so Kestrel is unsurprised that she has to be the responsible one, even as she’s contending with the unwelcome novelty of their journey. Kestrel’s never even been on a plane before but, like her namesake, she embraces flight.

What she doesn’t embrace is the unexpected departure from where she and her mom lived with her grandfather in San Diego. Mom says they’re going to be staying in Montana for the summer so that Mom can continue studying the dogs she’d been specializing in before her college career was cut short. Kestrel doesn’t understand why their leaving had to be so abrupt, or why she isn’t allowed to call Grandfather now. She doesn’t like all the changes to her normal routines, and she especially doesn’t like dogs, having had nothing but negative experiences with them growing up.

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Aug 12 2026

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

Gah, how is the second book in this series even better than the astonishing first?

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario is, granted, not a perfect book. There’s still a lot of information dumping — an almost inevitable part of the LitRPG genre — and some bits that verge on deus ex machina. It’s also unforgiving of people who haven’t come immediately from the first book, as I spent a lot of time going “who?!” in the first few pages alone. Granted, this might be a problem solely with the edition I read: later ones might have a Previously, On Dungeon Crawler Carl section? But goddamnit, Donut, this is still one of the best novels of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction I’ve ever read. It was so gripping, I finished it in less than 24 hours, laughing out loud and crying several times throughout.

Carl, Donut and Mongo have now descended to Level 3 of the televised dungeon that flattened Earth for the entertainment of billions of alien viewers. On this level, the player characters can switch their races and specialize in a class. Donut, ofc, has no interest in being anything but her perfect cat self. Mindful of the advice they received from a former player turned popular talk show host, the duo make other canny choices to help them survive further levels of the game.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/12/carls-doomsday-scenario-by-matt-dinniman/

Aug 11 2026

New and upcoming books by authors we love!

The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass, by Leslye Penelope, is out today! This August and September are both terrific months for hotly anticipated authors, with Daggerbound, T. Kingfisher’s sequel to Swordheart, coming out on August 25; Wickhills by Premee Mohamed coming out on September 8; and Velvet Knife continuing the Stevie Bell series by Maureen Johnson on September 29. Slide on into Fall with some fast-paced good times!

the cover of the inevitable undoing of zahara douglass by leslye penelope shows a person in silhoutte with the title in all capsI got excited about The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass just from the premise: a teenager sees her brilliant twin disappear into an unmarked car, and after that, no one in the world except her seems to remember her twin existed at all. Yes! That’s my jam.

It is late December in 1999 and people are worried about the Y2K bug. We follow scenes of Zahara, a professional ballet dancer now in her twenties, investigating her sister Annica’s disappearance; and those scenes are interspersed with transcripts of recorded messages from their dad who died when they were kids, computer journal and text game creations from Annica, email and forum posts, and recordings of security footage. These pieces of evidence all inform our read of what Zahara learns as she uncovers more of her family’s history. It’s a wild ride!

After reading and loving the book, I was thrilled to learn the author, Leslye Penelope has written a bunch of other stuff I now look forward to reading as well. She hadn’t been on my “hotly anticipated releases from authors we love” radar before, but she sure is now!

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Aug 10 2026

Camp Catastrophe (Dante N Ferno #2) by Brian Gordon

This Diary Of A Wimpy Kid-Inferno mashup is back, as our hapless middle school demon hero takes on a new challenge: sleepaway camp!

Now that Dante has a best friend, he’s willing to do practically anything to keep their relationship strong, including going to summer camp in the woods. Angelic Virgil insists that Camp Sulphur Springs is the absolute best, and is really looking forward to going back after having had to miss it the year before. Dante just wants to hang out with the first real friend he’s ever made. Fleeing his annoying siblings is just a bonus.

Camp Sulphur Springs turns out to be very different from what Dante expected tho. While the perpetually good-natured Virgil tries to make light of things, it’s obvious that the place has fallen into disrepair. The new sasquatch owners, Donny and Alma, are doing their best, and have hired the super-charismatic Wolf to lead the camper activities. Dante, ofc, instinctively hates the guy.

His animosity is only heightened by the amount of time and attention that both Virgil and Bea — Dante’s first ever female friend — are lavishing on the counselor. His supposed friends don’t even have time to help him practice the magic tricks that he wants to perform for the camp’s Talent Show. But when Dante finds Wolf acting suspiciously, will anyone believe him or will they all think he’s just being jealous?

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Aug 07 2026

Tantalizing Tales — August 2026 — Part One

Happy August everybody! The weather in Maryland is hot and humid and gross rn, but I have several delightful reads to help give you a break from the world outside.

So one of the weirder things about being a book critic of some popularity is that I often have books land on my desk that I don’t remember requesting. But that’s alright, and exactly why I have this column: to feature outliers that I can’t quite fit into my schedule but are of high interest to myself and hopefully to you too, dear reader.

Eli Raphael’s debut coming-of age novel Night Objects is one such book. I am an absolute sucker for a boarding school murder mystery, which is exactly what our heroine Lenny Winter finds herself in the middle of after unexpected tragedy lands her at Blanchard, an exclusive academy for the Pacific Northwest’s elite.

At the heart of Blanchard lies the Pascalianum Club, a secret society that boasts the membership of the school’s best and most notorious students and alumni. Lenny wants to find a place to belong, but the more she engages with the club, the more she realizes that its dark glamour feeds off of her own vulnerabilities. When murder befalls club and campus, Lenny will have to face up to where she’s come from and who she’s now become, and what she’s willing to risk in order to become who she truly wants to be.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/07/tantalizing-tales-august-2026-part-one/

Aug 06 2026

The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor & Tana Ford

I vastly overestimated the number of books I still had to read for the 2026 Hugo for Best Graphic Story, so this is the last and, dare I say, my favorite of the slate! Full ranking at the bottom, once I’m done discussing this utterly charming graphic novel that reimagines the life of Nnedi Okorafor’s beloved cat Peri.

Peri, despite the elegant and admittedly exotic appearance of his Oriental Shorthair breed, is not your ordinary Earth cat. His father came from Neptune, so he has the ability to engineer marvels, including a liminal space in which to craft items such as the spaceship he uses to race other cats amidst the stars. One of these cats is his nemesis — one of several, tbh, including hot sauce and a particularly annoying cat toy — but all thoughts of such are temporarily shelved when his family moves to Nigeria to research a book Nnedi is writing.

As with many cats in tropical countries, Peri soon becomes an indoor-outdoor pet, and quickly learns about local superstitions via the stray cats at the nearby market (I, for one, had no idea that Nigerians view cats with such suspicion!) When a threat arrives from outer space, however, Peri will have to unite more allies than just his new friends in order to protect humanity and the world from alien invasion.

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