Aug 24 2026

Swing! by James Yang

With US Open fever getting underway, what better time to look at a delightfully retro kids’ book about tennis star Arthur Ashe — namesake of the main arena at the world’s largest tennis stadium — and the very personal effect he had on at least one family in the 1970s.

Our unnamed protagonist loves tennis and especially Arthur Ashe, who has a one-handed backhand just like her dad does. She and her dad love both playing and watching tennis together. But sometimes, our heroine has a bad day on the court, and her brain starts bouncing up and down like a tennis ball that she can’t get under control. And sometimes she has a bad day at school, with her schoolmate Timmy bugging her — the only Asian person there — for attention in increasingly irritating ways.

When Dad suggests that they take a break during a particularly frustrating passage of tennis, our heroine asks if she can get glasses like Arthur Ashe too. As they try on several pairs at the store, Dad tells her about all the ways in which Arthur Ashe is a hero, both on and off the court. Soon, she’s reconsidering her approach to both tennis and Timmy, and discovering the power of both courtesy and self-control.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/24/swing-by-james-yang/

Aug 22 2026

A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

I picked up A Parish Chronicle because I had never read anything by Halldór Laxness, and this looked short enough to be a low-investment place to start. Mission accomplished, then, for the publisher Vintage Classics, who issued the book as part of their “Brief Encounters” series, which they flag as “Short books. Timeless stories.” Other authors in the series include Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, J.G. Ballard, Roberto Bolaño, Mikhail Bulgakov and Italo Calvino, and that’s just from the first three letters of the alphabet. The works chosen for these authors are also not the obvious ones, by and large. It’s nice to be in the target audience: people who might like to take a flyer on a big literary name without committing to one of the major works. Joyce but not Ulysses; Toni Morrison but not Beloved (though that one is fewer than 400 pages); Melville but not Moby-Dick. Thus with Laxness, I didn’t have to dive in at the deep end with 500+ pages of Independent People; I could sample the 112 page of A Parish Chronicle.

A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

The parish in question is Mosfell, which Laxness portrays as an out of the way place in western Iceland, somewhat on the way from Reykjavik to the northern coast. It may have been such in the mid-1800s when the bulk of A Parish Chronicle takes place, but in fact it is all of 12 kilometers east of the capital. Travellers occasionally pass through, bringing news of weather and sheep from other places, those two topics being the main items of interest in and around Mosfell. The locality was the site of the burial mound belonging to Egill Skallagrímsson, a saga poet. When Christianity came to the country, his remains were exhumed and brought to a church. Whether his bones — reputed to be inhumanly large — are still located somewhere in or near the church is difficult to say.

If you look at Mosfell now, you would think that the church had been there on the hill, its steeple silhouetted against the clouds, since ancient times. This, however, is not the case. Again and again this church disappeared from the hill. Over and over, it was thoroughly erased from the pages of history and omitted from the laws of God and man, failed to appear in written documents, was neglected in oral tradition. (p. 2)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/22/a-parish-chronicle-by-halldor-laxness/

Aug 21 2026

Tantalizing Tales — August 2026 — Part Three

This was a weird day to start the English Premier League season, but Arsenal are top of the league, y’all! My internal calendar is all messed up now, lol. But we have some great books for you this week, including an upcoming thriller (also) set in London and written by one of my favorite podcasters — which is saying a lot because I have a really hard time concentrating on podcasts!

Jonathan Sims of The Magnus Archives is back to terrify readers with his latest novel, The Burn Line. London is suffering through the hottest summer on record when five travelers on the Tube are trapped deep underground one morning. These five people unwittingly become witnesses to something so profoundly disturbing that when they manage to return to their ordinary lives, they can’t remember exactly what it was they saw. All they know is that it was monstrous… and hungry.

But ordinary life isn’t as comfortably normal as they’d been used to. Each of them keeps losing time, and friends abruptly go missing. Something, it seems, is stalking them from the shadows. The five will have to reunite in order to figure out what’s happening to them and its connection to what they saw that day on the train, before something horrific can emerge from below to swallow the whole world.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/21/tantalizing-tales-august-2026-part-three/

Aug 20 2026

Mister Magic: The Graphic Novel by Kiersten White

adapted for the format by Scott Peterson, and illustrated by wife and husband duo Veronica and Andy Fish.

Y’all, when I tell you that I ugly cried my way through the end of this graphic novel, I super mean it. I had to sit back on the couch and take several deep breaths in order to fully recover from that ending. And I’ll be the first to tell you that it isn’t a perfect book — I still have lots of Questions! — but it is an astonishingly moving graphic novel adaptation that talks about some really important subjects, including what we owe not only to our children but to all children.

The premise is this: thirty-ish years ago, there was a kid’s TV show called Mister Magic. Countless kids would tune in to watch the magical adventures of six youngsters, none older than ten, who were known as the Circle Of Friends. The child actors enjoyed colorful, imaginative adventures under the benevolent eye of the title character, who taught them how to be good children.

But an on-set accident abruptly shut down production of the show. With seemingly no footage surviving, the show became almost an urban legend, even as numerous fans swore that they’d watched it religiously. A new podcast, however, claims not only to have brought the cast members back together for interviews but that a new iteration of the show is finally on the horizon.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/20/mister-magic-the-graphic-novel-by-kiersten-white/

Aug 19 2026

America’s Founding Myths by Christy Mihaly & Marta Sevilla

subtitled …And What REALLY Happened.

Forgive me for saying this in an incredibly brainrotted manner, but I highkenuinely feel that this book should be in every library accessible to American children. Preferably in physical format, for even as an adult, I did not have an easy time navigating the digital version. Regardless, this slender volume is so smart and informative, and vivid in its illustrations and design, that it definitely deserves to be widely available to young readers.

In this book, Christy Mihaly tackles some common myths about the United States of America’s early days. From the idea that the original colonists settled on uninhabited lands to the misconception that the unamended Constitution affirmed that all people should have basic equal rights, Ms Mihaly quietly dismantles all sorts of common fallacies about the USA’s beginnings. Not only does she present the multifaceted truth, she also examines how some of these fables came to be, whether it’s John Smith lying about his relationship to the far more famous Pocahontas for clout or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow taking a lot of poetic license when depicting Paul Revere’s ride (tho admittedly for far more high-minded reasons.) A lot of these untruths aren’t malicious, but the more widespread they become, the more likely their listeners are to believe tales of romance and heroism that are far removed from what actually happened. People love stories and we love mythologies, and many of us especially love black and white, hero vs villain narratives. Ms Mihaly gently corrects the record while acknowledging that her carefully researched and presented book might make a lot of readers uncomfortable in its commitment to the far less romantic truth.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/19/americas-founding-myths-by-christy-mihaly-marta-sevilla/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/18/flame-con-2026/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/17/little-monsters-by-maire-roche/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/08/13/kestrel-takes-flight-by-joy-mccullough/