May 13 2022
Das Haus an der Moskwa, known in English as The House on the Embankment and with the original title Дом на набережной, poses a question that it doesn’t really answer, or at least not directly. On a hot August day in 1972 Vadim Glebow has traveled out to a distant corner of Moscow to get …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/13/das-haus-an-der-moskwa-by-yuri-trifonov/
May 12 2022
Oh gosh, I didn’t expect this to end on such a cliffhanger! I also didn’t expect this kind of visual design from a book aimed squarely at middle school kids. It’s seriously delightful, a clever mix of mid-century modern with the more expected kids’ doodles on graph paper. The illustrations throughout are entirely suited to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/12/f-a-r-t-top-secret-no-kids-allowed-by-peter-bakalian/
May 11 2022
The latest installment of this cute, kid-friendly comics series picks up soon after the events of the last book. Which, wow, came out two years ago! Time certainly flies! Interestingly, I feel that Art Baltazar’s style for this book has grown to take on a subtly more sophisticated cast in the intervening years. The art …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/11/gillbert-4-the-island-of-the-orange-turtles-by-art-baltazar/
May 10 2022
I wanted to make it a point to finally be able to cover Cathy Yardley’s adorable romance novel Love, Comment, Subscribe for Asian American Pacific Islander Month, so here we are! The first book in the Ponto Beach Reunion series focuses on two former classmates, uptight Lily Wang and goofy Tobin Bui. Back in their …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/10/love-comment-subscribe-ponto-beach-reunion-1-by-cathy-yardley/
May 08 2022
Butler to the World begins with an American academic paying a visit to Oliver Bullough. Leading up to the publication of Moneyland, and even more since, Bullough has been writing about financial corruption, and particularly the ways that advanced, rule-of-law democracies have been helping corrupt rich people around the world keep and protect their ill-gotten …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/08/butler-to-the-world-by-oliver-bullough/
May 07 2022
I came to Heisser Sommer prepared not to like it. A book by a male author in his forties, looking back on his glorious youth twenty years previous. That Timm chose not to use quotation marks for characters’ speech added to my annoyance. Worse, it’s set in the overexposed late 1960s, featuring a male protagonist …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/07/heisser-sommer-by-uwe-timm/
May 06 2022
It would have worked, too! As the back cover of Meddling Kids says, in 1977 the Blyton Summer Detective Club unmasked the Sleepy Lake monster, a low-life fortune hunter who put on a funny suit to scare people away while he searched the grounds of the Deboën mansion for the gold hoard that was rumored …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/06/meddling-kids-by-edgar-cantero/
May 05 2022
God, what a depressing book. And I don’t say that as a bad thing necessarily, tho I certainly wouldn’t recommend this for anyone in need of an emotional pick-me-up. And while this is a decidedly sad volume — what self-respecting book covering the often needless extinction of entire species wouldn’t be? — it also carries …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/05/atlas-of-extinct-animals-by-radek-maly-illustrated-by-jiri-grbavcic-pavel-dvorsky/
May 04 2022
To be perfectly honest, I’m a little peeved that The Suicide Squad wasn’t nominated this year. It was by far the best superhero movie of 2021, even before launching the excellent Peacemaker series. Given what won last year’s award tho, I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised that my tastes differ so greatly from the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/04/hugo-awards-2022-best-dramatic-presentation-long-form-nominees/
May 03 2022
By reading the Murderbot series all out of order (2-5-6-1-3, with 4 lined up to read soon) I’ve not experienced its coming to terms with its freedom or its engagement with other non-humans as a story of continuous progress. On the other hand, knowing a bit more about where Murderbot is headed — including its …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/03/rogue-protocol-by-martha-wells/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire