Apr 26 2026

Paladin’s Strength by T. Kingfisher

In the world of the White Rat, the gods call clergy and paladins to their service. Clergy are straightforward enough; they minister to the faithful, they administer the affairs of people and property affiliated with the deity, they perform the necessary rites, and so forth. Paladins are holy warriors for their faith; filled with the god’s energy, they smite the enemies of the faith. Paladins can enter a berserker state, fighting with superhuman strength and ignoring wounds as the god enters them and lends them power. Not all gods call paladins — the White Rat, for example, does not — but all paladins are called. The paladins of the Saint of Steel served happily and faithfully, right up until the day their god died.

Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher

Kingfisher gave more detail in Paladin’s Grace, the first of presently four novels that follow the lives of the seven surviving paladins of the Saint of Steel, as they try to rebuild their lives after they lost what gave them meaning and direction. Paladin’s Strength takes place several years after the death of the Saint, and follows a brief but indeterminate period after the events of Paladin’s Grace. It’s not strictly necessary to have read the previous book — this novel’s story is independent — but Kingfisher provides more background than in this one.

T. Kingfisher is a keen practitioner of the arresting first sentence, and Paladin’s Strength is no exception: “Clara stood outside a stranger’s tent, holding a naked sword in her hands.” (p. 1) To make a hilarious opening scene short, Clara if offering the sword to the leader of a small caravan who wish to pass through the lands of the Arral. A misunderstanding of local customs has already led to the caravan leader killing a young man. Now, peace is to be bought in a peculiar way. Because the young Arral lost his challenge, his family must offer the victor his sword and something of value from his household. Not to put too fine a point on it, that something is Clara, who is not Arral and can be offered without too much loss to the household. The leader, whose name is Istvhan (I pronounced it the Hungarian way, EESHT-vahn, because it spelled so close to István, the Hungarian version of Steven), does not want to take in Clara but is eventually persuaded that rejecting her would cause violent offense, and the caravan still has to pass through several days’ journey of Arral lands.

Along the way to agreement, Clara reveals that she is a nun, a lay sister of the Order of St. Ursa. Raiders recently sacked and burned her convent, and kidnapped the sisters who survived the fire. Clara had been kidnapped as well but got free. She was following them and working up ways to free the others when she ran afoul of the Arral, which in turn led to the novel’s opening scene.

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Apr 25 2026

The Element of Fire by Martha Wells

Come for the opening heist in a magician’s home, stay for the burgeoning civil war and Martha Wells’ willingness to keep changing the story. The Element of Fire was her first novel, originally published in 1993. (The current edition was revised in 2022, though her author’s note does not say anything about the extent of her revisions.) Ile-Rien is a kingdom in a moderately magical world; it still has castles and strongholds, though both magic and cannon can make short work of them. Guns are a new and not entirely reliable technology. None of that is immediately apparent.

Captain Thomas Boniface is leading a break-in at a sorcerer’s mansion, to rescue yet another sorcerer. Thomas, his lieutenant Gideon, and the various other Queen’s guards stationed outside the mansion have brought the new court magician, Dr Braun, with them, but he can offer little help.

“You can’t give us any hint of what we’re to find in there?” Thomas said … Braun’s expression was both distressed and obstinate. “He is too strong or … he might have the help of some creature of the Fay.”
“God protect us,” [a Queen’s guard] muttered, and uneasily studied the cloudy darkness above. (p. 6)

The Book of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells

That is another complication. There is not just Ile-Rien and its rival kingdoms, there is a whole other world of Faerie, a world that plays by its own rules but takes an interest in the mostly human world of Ile-Rien. In fact, the current young king has an older half-sister, product of an illicit liaison between the late king and the almost equally late Fay Queen of Air and Darkness. The human Dowager Queen, Ravenna, was always a force to be reckoned with; it was her prowess and leadership that saved the kingdom in a desperate war against one of its neighbors. She has effectively wielded power ever since, though she is generally careful to observe the forms so that her son Roland is seen to rule even if all the court knows who is really paramount.

Wells puts many more elements than just fire into the novel’s main action. The king’s favorite, his best friend since childhood, comes from an old family and would not mind supplanting Ravenna as the power behind the throne. Or perhaps more. There is an official church that has the structure of Christianity — cathedrals, monastic orders, bishops — without any specified content, except that in Ile-Rien the church tolerates magic whereas in the kingdom’s nearest enemy Bisra, it persecutes magic with great vigor. Both the sorcerer rescued in the opening sequence and his captor have recent ties to Bisra, ties that could lead to more danger for Ile-Rien. To make the situation even more volatile, Kade, the king’s illegitimate half-sister, appears in the midst of the court. Is she there to claim an inheritance? Is she there to make amends with Roland for abandoning him at a crucial childhood juncture? What does she have in mind? Even she is not sure. Thomas, as befits the Captain of the Queen’s guard, is the long-time lover of the Queen Dowager. He’s devoted, but he is also conscious that he is forever just a pawn on the board of royalty, the great families, and the magicians.

The raid turns out to have been the falling pebble that sets an avalanche in motion, and things get complicated fast, as the first dialogue between the royal princess of uncertain status and the Queen Dowager shows.

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Apr 24 2026

Tantalizing Tales — April 2026 — Part Four

April is almost over, dear readers, and we have so many delicious books to look forward to as the weather warms here in the Northern Hemisphere! First up is a globe-trotting delight, as the prolific Jesse Q Sutanto takes a break from her usual mysteries to explore what it feels like to start over again in your sixties.

The title protagonist of Ms Mebel Goes Back To The Chopping Block is looking forward to her husband’s retirement. Now they can spend their happy golden years lazing on the beaches of Santorini, or careening down the sand dunes of Dubai if they’re looking for something a little more exciting. All her plans are thrown into disarray, however, when her husband tells her that he’s leaving her for their personal chef.

Despite her dismay — good personal chefs are hard to find! — Mebel has a plan to win her husband back. If he wants a wife who can cook, then she can learn how to do that. She enrolls herself in what she thinks is a cooking school located in Paris, the most romantic city in the world. Unfortunately for her, she’s actually booked herself into a program located in a small village outside of Oxford. A further disappointment is the less than warm welcome she receives from several of her much younger classmates.

Mebel, however, hasn’t gotten as far as she has in life on looks alone. She befriends Gemma, the breakout star of the program, and slowly begins to learn not only how to cook, but how to imagine a life as more than just a pampered wife whose only aim is to accommodate her successful husband. Maybe, just maybe, Mebel can learn to be a success in her own right, too.

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Apr 23 2026

Was That Normal? by Alex Potts

Is it weird that I read this book and immediately assumed that the protagonist must have grown up with a super critical parent or guardian who absolutely failed him in preparing him for an autonomous life?

Lol, the irony there, ofc, being me asking if that’s weird, given the title of this book. And I suppose it isn’t “weird” per se more than it perhaps shows a slightly higher level of empathy than the average person might feel on being confronted with Philip’s story. Philip is in his forties and lives with Caroline, his perfectly lovely older landlady, in a coastal British town. He works from home and is thrilled to finally live in an area that he’s dreamed of for so long. He does not, however, seem to have any friends, and actively avoids Caroline’s company even tho her brand of affability extends more to inviting him out to socialize vs being actually intrusive about his personal life and daily activities. Mostly, Philip keeps to himself and spends his days overthinking everything, tho he does go for long walks in town and the surrounding countryside, appreciating both the views and the history of the place.

One day, he finally gives in and accepts Caroline’s invitation to go to a nearby music venue called The Quagmire. He doesn’t care for the band that’s playing but does find himself fascinated by their beautiful lead singer Gina. When he runs into her at his usual cafe, he thinks it must be fate. Sure enough, the two strike up a friendship, of sorts, as he struggles to get out of his own head. But disaster looms over the town, and over their fragile new relationship. Will introverted, anxious Philip get the happily ever after that he can’t help but pine for?

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Apr 22 2026

Hafsa’s Way by Aisha Saeed

Back when I was growing up in Malaysia, the private school I went to for a good part of my primary and secondary schooling essentially gave up on teaching after the General Certificate of Secondary Education exams, and organized fun extracurricular activities for us instead. One of these was trips to the nearby zoo, and when I say nearby, I mean a ten-minute walk or so. So reading a book about a young girl in a (sub)tropical climate who has a coming-of-age experience involving academics and a nearby zoo perhaps resonated with me more than it might with the average reader.

That said, this is the kind of book I could easily see finding an audience with any pre-teen desperate to be allowed to pursue their future without the weight of “but what will people say?!” holding them back, no matter where in the world they live (or how much access to elephants they may have, lol.) Hafsa Imtiaz lives in a village some hours’ drive away from Lahore. Her parents own and run the produce market, and her beloved elder sister Shabnam has married well, to a kind and handsome cardiologist in the capital city. Hafsa herself wants to be a doctor like Sohail, an ambition that her parents don’t exactly encourage. They’d be much happier if she’d just marry a doctor like her sister did, tho they’re not conservative enough to discourage her medical dreams altogether.

And so, secretly, Hafsa applies for a summer science camp program for girls at the prestigious Bukhari Academy in Lahore. Her favorite teacher Miss Sadia often speaks fondly of her experiences there, and Hafsa is determined to go. She’s excited when her application is accepted, but immediately balks when she sees the cost. Even if her parents would let her go live in a dorm unchaperoned, there’s no way they could fork out as much as the cost of a new motorcycle just for her summer experience.

Shabnam and Sohail come to the rescue. When they learn of Hafsa’s quandary, they offer not only to pay, but to have Hafsa stay with them so as to curtail any gossip in the village about her staying in a dorm. Hafsa’s parents reluctantly agree, in part because saying no could be seen as an insult to Sohail’s side of the family. Hafsa herself is thrilled, as not only will she be able to attend the pre-med camp of her dreams, she’ll also be able to spend some quality time with her sister again.

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Apr 21 2026

More Spring Speculative Fiction by Beloved Authors!

The Genie Game by Jordan Ifueko comes out today! It’s extremely exciting to have the start of a new middle grade series from this beloved author. Joining it this Spring, we also have The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale, a cozy new standalone from C.M. Waggoner, and A Long and Speaking Silence, a new installment in the Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo, which can be read in any order! All these authors are ones I watch for, and it feels fitting for Spring to have these fresh starts.

Three teens smile in a magical bubbly atmosphere on the cover of the genie game by Jordan IfuekoI love Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer books, which are YA, and maybe I loveThe Maid and the Crocodile, which takes place in the same world, even more? After those, I was interested to see Ifueko go younger in her audience, since it feels like a lot of YA authors I enjoy (including Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson and John Green) are trying out writing for grown-ups lately.

The Genie Game is indeed aimed at tweens and young teens, but it doesn’t pull any punches. It presents our loveable heroine in a corporate dystopia, her parents brainwashed by oligarchs. She gets sucked into indenture slavery, where she is forced to play a “game” granting wishes to magically fuel the three corporate entities that control her world. Many of the wishes are for small things that provide a bandaid over much larger problems the corporations themselves have created.

The Genie Game kind of reminds me of The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex in its tone, but Ifueko’s satire is more pointed. In that way it also kind of reminds me of Dungeon Crawler Carl for kids, with its enforced and dangerous gameplay under the auspices of an uncaring and extremely powerful entity.

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Apr 20 2026

Table Titans Club: Sneak Attack by Scott Kurtz

with beautiful colors by Steve Hamaker.

I’m ngl, I want to incorporate that Magic Mistletoe spell into my next character sheet, somehow, some way, lol.

I super loved the first Table Titans Club graphic novel but also have a terrible memory, so will freely admit that I spent a good portion of this novel feeling badly that I had no idea what the conflict was that had Kate and Alan so mad at each other as the book opens. I thought it was something I forgot from the last book, but turns out that it’s actually something that’s explained as this story progresses, phew!

Anyway, the Table Titans Club are all going to a role-playing summer camp. Val is, ofc, super excited but Kate is annoyed because she and Alan are, apparently, feuding to the point where she doesn’t even want to go to camp any more. Andrew and Darius more than make up for anyone’s lack of enthusiasm, as they and Val hope that the fun experience of summer camp will help everyone get over being mad at each other.

As the kids make new friends (and nemeses,) they share the joy of both tabletop and live-action role-playing with fellow campers. This doesn’t seem to thaw the ice between Kate and Alan, however. When Val unexpectedly sights a monster in the woods, will the experience rebond the entire group, or will it just expose how insurmountable the cracks are that have grown between them?

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Apr 19 2026

Chevengur by Andrey Platonov

Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

Once again, I have finished a Platonov novel and I am left with the question of where to even begin. Chevengur is horrifying, and hilarious. It is surreal, and realistic; it is a blistering attack on Bolshevism, and full of characters asserting the correctness of Lenin’s proclamations. It is full of yearning for communism and shows that no two characters agree on what communism is; characters in Chevengur insist that when the conditions are right communism is inevitable and spontaneous, and that communism can only happen through the most strenuous and continuous efforts of the vanguard of the proletariat. It is nonlinear, picaresque, and wouldn’t know what a character arc is if one hit it in the dialectic. Chevengur is brilliant and baffling, exciting and exhausting. As I wrote about The Foundation Pit, “This is a journey to another world, recognizably human, but seen through the veils of history, language, culture and the author’s own imagination to make it more distant than what is found in much of science fiction. … Platonov’s Soviet Russia of the 1920s is far, far more alien than Asimov’s New York millennia hence.”

Chevengur by Andrey Platonov

To begin before the beginning, Andrey Platonov was born in Russia in 1899, the son of a railway worker. His formal schooling was over at age 13, and he went to work. He was an ardent supporter of the revolution in 1917, and in the following year he had the opportunity to study electrical technology. At the beginning of the 1920s, he was a prolific full-time writer but by 1922 he abandoned writing and took up work in electrification and land reclamation in central Russia, in the region near Voronezh where he had grown up. He worked to make Soviet power visible and productive in these fertile but poor lands, leading work brigades that dug wells and ponds, drained swamps and brought electricity to rural areas. By 1926, Platonov had returned to writing, and by 1928 he had finished Chevengur. Soviet censorship forbade its publication; some excerpts were published in 1928 and 1929. No more of Chevengur was published in Platonov’s lifetime; complete publication in Russia was not permitted until Gorbachev’s years of glasnost and perestroika.

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Apr 18 2026

City of Oranges by Adam LeBor

City of Oranges, which was published in 2006, must have been a difficult book to write, even in the comparatively less fraught time of the early 2000s. Adam LeBor — whom I knew a little bit many years ago in Budapest, so I will refer to him as Adam — attempts an open-minded and honest reckoning with the history of the city of Jaffa from the early 20th century to the early 21st. Inevitably, the twenty years that have passed since the book’s publication have made it a piece of history as much as a record of history, but the years have not erased the book’s value. Given the large number of people Adam interviewed in their old age, many of them have passed on by now, making their recorded recollections all the more valuable.

City of Oranges by Adam LeBor

This is a book of people and personalities. As Adam writes in his introductory author’s note, “This book is based on hours of interviews with several generations of Jaffa families, their recollections of parents and grandparents and their memoirs, letters and personal archives, reaching back to the early twentieth century. These are their stories of their lives as they remember them. This is what they want to say, and the quotes of every interviewee have been checked back with them for accuracy.” (p. xxiii) Jaffa today is a part of the larger Tel Aviv conurbation. At the beginning of City of Oranges, it was very much the other way around. Jaffa was the political and cultural center of Palestine, which in the aftermath of the Great War was placed under a British mandate. “[Jaffa’s] oranges, especially the sweet and juicy Shamouti, were famed the world over and kept many thousands in gainful employment, including the Jewish traders who bought and sold the fruit.” (p. 2) Adam has consciously chosen to write a small-scale history, in which he can always focus on individuals. The larger currents of history are inescapable, and their ebb and flow are clearly visible in the personal stories he tell. One thing that the book really brings home is that the tides of history are never uniform; there are always exceptions; sometimes even within the same family, people will have different perspectives on the same events. Adam writes, “I hope the people featured in this book give a sense of [the Israeli-Arab conflict’s] complexity and its human dimension. They are Muslim, Christian and Jewish. They are middle class and working class. They are artisans and intellectuals, artists and businessmen. Some are left-wing, others right-wing. In short, human beings, in all their variety and contradictions.” (p. 3)

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Apr 17 2026

Tantalizing Tales — April 2026 — Part Three

Lol, just as I thought I was coming out of the woods, I’m back to being bedridden and canceling chamber orchestra rehearsals because I’m feverish, fatigued and, in a new development, achey at primarily my extremities instead of all over. Is that progress? I’m so tired, I don’t even know any more.

But I’ve been trying to distract myself with reading, as one does, and am super looking forward to two upcoming releases (as well as to finally finding the time to go over some books from 2025 that I still really want to get to!) First of the former category is Kat Cho’s Gods & Comics, which touches on multiple deeply relatable topics to me, a former teenage overachiever whose own creative pursuits often felt like they spilled over paracosmically into real life.

Grace Bak is seventeen, junior class vice president, and wholly determined to follow in the footsteps of her doctor parents. The debilitating panic attacks she occasionally suffers from are not part of the plan. Neither is the death of her beloved grandmother, who stepped in and helped keep their little family together after the death of Grace’s mom. Bereft of her support system, Grace finds solace in anonymously creating and publishing a webcomic called Sun God, based on the Korean folktales that her recently departed halmeoni used to tell her.

Her tale of the sun deity Haemosu and his beloved Yuhwa becoming accidentally trapped in the bodies of high schoolers goes unexpectedly viral. Even more surprising for Grace is Haemosu himself somehow taking corporeal form due to this newfound fandom. Bereft of his divine powers, he needs Grace’s help in order to get home. The more time they spend together, tho, the more reluctant Grace is to lose him. Complicating matters is the fact that her webcomic brought more than one god to the mortal realm, as Hae’s divine nemesis is hellbent on destroying the Sun God, no matter who stands in the way.

Also, that Take On Me-esque cover is just the best, 10/10, no notes!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/04/17/tantalizing-tales-april-2026-part-three/