Mar 02 2021
Such an excellent premise, such an underwhelming execution! Hetty Rhodes was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping other enslaved people escape slavery as she once had, using the magical abilities she was gifted with. Once the Civil War ended, she settled in Philadelphia with her husband and co-conductor Benjy Rhodes, but never gave up …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/02/the-conductors-murder-and-magic-1-by-nicole-glover/
Mar 01 2021
Set at the end of the 21st century, this sci-fi novel follows the stories of two sisters-in-law who will both prove pivotal in the fight against the terrorist organization known as the Machinehood. Eighty years from now, people are heavily reliant on technology and weak artificial intelligences (known as WAIs) to perform the most mundane …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/01/machinehood-by-s-b-divya/
Feb 27 2021
It’s kind of hilarious how the back cover of this volume calls it a reimagining of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea even as Marian Womack’s afterword candidly discusses how she doesn’t want to compare The Swimmers to what was for her a seminal text. And I can see for both arguments: the comparison is a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/27/the-swimmers-by-marian-womack/
Feb 25 2021
I first read this novella over two years ago, courtesy of the lovely people at Unsung Stories, one of the finest British independent purveyors of weird fiction today. I very much enjoyed it at the time, so when Titan Books told me they were publishing it for the first time in America, I leapt at …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/25/the-loosening-skin-by-aliya-whiteley-2/
Feb 23 2021
Hurray, Lizbeth Rose is finally on her way west! Unfortunately, she’s going after receiving news that her one-time partner Eli — or Prince Ilya Savarov to the rest of the denizens of the Holy Russian Empire — has been thrown into jail for reasons unknown. The news has been conveyed to her via a coded …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/23/the-russian-cage-gunnie-rose-3-by-charlaine-harris/
Feb 18 2021
The hallmark of a successful second novel in a series, I feel, is that you turn the pages even faster than you did the first one. While I very much enjoyed An Easy Death, the series debut, it did feel like a lot of time was spent introducing the alternate history 1930s milieu. With the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/18/a-longer-fall-gunnie-rose-2-by-charlaine-harris/
Feb 16 2021
Another lighthearted, if educational, look at animals and world conservation, told through the eyes of six children and their two adult mentors, the easily riled and super buff Dr Darwin and his long-suffering assistant Mr Smith. This volume opens with Taizen, the Sumatran kid who grew up in the wild, being dropped off to spend …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/16/x-venture-xplorers-2-clash-of-the-titans-by-slaium-meng-the-black-ink-team/
Feb 15 2021
Honestly, this reads like J. D. Salinger fanfic. But, y’know, I didn’t think I’d like Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year either, especially with its dreadful prologue, and I’ve since taken to evangelizing that excellent memoir and hoping the upcoming movie does it justice. Ashley Schumacher’s Amelia Unabridged shares a tendency towards gorgeous writing with Ms …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/15/amelia-unabridged-by-ashley-schumacher/
Feb 12 2021
I always vastly underestimate the amount of reading I need to do for work, but I did bet on the fact that I’d be able to catch up easily on Books 1 and 2 of the Gunnie Rose series ahead of the impending release of Book 3, due solely to the fact that Charlaine Harris …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/12/an-easy-death-gunnie-rose-1-by-charlaine-harris/
Feb 11 2021
The reading experience of this was really interesting to me: I spent maybe the first and last fifteen percent of the book deeply skeptical but was absolutely immersed in everything in between. The premise is simple, for a science fiction novel. Two best friends from college found a Silicon Valley startup after one of them …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/11/the-future-is-yours-by-dan-frey/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire