Dec 12 2021
I still struggle with a notion I first mentioned when writing about Heaney’s inaugural collection, Death of a Naturalist, the idea that with each collection of poetry I should take time to live with it, read through several times, maybe even commit bits to memory so as to have them always at the ready. I …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/12/station-island-by-seamus-heaney/
Dec 11 2021
It’s 1978. There is only one Star Wars movie, and it doesn’t have a subtitle or an episode number. Star Wars is still playing in some movie theaters, more than a year after its release. There are a ton of toys, and fans are busily imagining what their beloved characters were up to before and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/11/splinter-of-the-minds-eye-by-alan-dean-foster/
Dec 05 2021
“There was a dead girl in my aunt’s bakery.” There’s the first problem right away. Worst of all for the dead girl, of course, but a horrifying start to the day for Mona, the fourteen-year-old first-person narrator of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. Then things get worse. Not right away, of course; Mona partly …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/05/a-wizards-guide-to-defensive-baking-by-t-kingfisher/
Dec 04 2021
Because I had enjoyed Sumi so much as a character in Come Tumbling Down, I picked up Beneath the Sugar Sky, which I had somehow missed when it was a Hugo finalist in 2019, expecting to find more of her and of Confection, the Nonsense world where she found her proper home. That turned out …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/04/beneath-the-sugar-sky-by-seanan-mcguire/
Nov 28 2021
Like Doreen, I initially thought that Riot Baby was an imperative phrase, not a descriptive one. Instead of getting his characters to riot, Onyebuchi has them bide their time and keep absorbing the hits that life, in this particular instance life as working-class Black Americans, gives them. Those hits start early, and keep coming. Riot …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/28/riot-baby-by-tochi-onyebuchi-2/
Nov 27 2021
Sarah Gailey gets to have all the fun of writing a Western while avoiding all the cultural baggage of writing one in the twenty-first century by moving the story into a dystopian future in which the United States has broken down enough that towns are isolated and most travel is by horse or by foot, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/27/upright-women-wanted-by-sarah-gailey-2/
Nov 26 2021
Though it contains tales of considerable violence, The Empress of Salt and Fortune remains in my mind as an almost restful story. It’s set at a secluded compound near Lake Scarlet, a nearly perfectly round lake formed by a falling star, and named for a glow that sometimes appears at sunset, starting faintly and then …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/26/the-empress-of-salt-and-fortune-by-nghi-vo/
Nov 25 2021
Many things have transpired at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children since I read the debut novella, Every Heart a Doorway, but I did not feel lost at all. My thanks to Seanan McGuire for making subsequent installments of her series inviting even to people who do not hang on its every word. The Home …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/25/come-tumbling-down-by-seanan-mcguire/
Nov 21 2021
Who hasn’t wondered whether all those twists on the path through Ikea might not lead somewhere else entirely? In Nino Cipri’s Finna, the Ikea stand-in LitenVärld (it means “little world” in Swedish) has a recurring problem with wormholes opening within its stores and leading to LitenVärld analogues in parallel universes. Not that management tells anyone, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/21/finna-by-nino-cipri/
Nov 20 2021
Fittingly, if annoyingly, I have mislaid my copy of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, so this will have to be from memory, just like many of the stories that Sophy Roberts collects over the course of the book. The conceit of the story is that Roberts was spending most of a summer with a German …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/20/the-lost-pianos-of-siberia-by-sophy-roberts/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire