In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read Castle in the Air, Aunt Maria, A Sudden Wild Magic and Hexwood! Honestly, it was a big month. Those are some hefty ones, and I think Hexwood is among her very best. It’s a high bar! Castle …
Category: General
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/19/a-year-of-diana-wynne-jones-the-early-1990s/
Feb 07 2025
A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: The late 1980s!
In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read Howl’s Moving Castle, A Tale of Time City, The Lives of Christopher Chant and Wild Robert! It was fun to revisit Howl after the Ghibli film version became so popular, and Wild Robert was entirely new to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/07/a-year-of-diana-wynne-jones-the-late-1980s/
Nov 13 2024
Detective Beans & The Case of the Missing Hat by Li Chen
I am all about the comfort reads this week, and I’ll be blessed if I read anything as charming as this graphic novel is anytime soon! Detective Beans is a young cat obsessed with being a detective, even if that usually just takes the form of acting out his favorite movies for his mom and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/13/detective-beans-the-case-of-the-missing-hat-by-li-chen/
Oct 08 2024
Kill Shakespeare: First Folio by Anthony Del Col, Conor McCreery & Andy Belanger
Nothing screams “this was written by men” more than having Juliet Capulet (lately of Romeo & Juliet) assure Othello that he is not a villain. Lol, like hell. Iago may be just as much a bad guy as Othello, but Desdemona is still dead! Murdered for no reason! Even if she’d been cuckolding her husband …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/08/kill-shakespeare-first-folio-by-anthony-del-col-conor-mccreery-andy-belanger/
Dec 25 2022
Merry Christmas
Luke 2:1-14, Anglo-Saxon: Soþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto, þæt eall ymbehwyrft wære tomearcod. Þeos tomearcodnes wæs æryst geworden fram þam deman Syrige Cirino. And ealle hig eodon, and syndrige ferdon on hyra ceastre. Ða ferde Iosep fram Galilea of þære ceastre Nazareth on Iudeisce ceastre Dauides, seo is genemned …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/25/merry-christmas-2/
Dec 24 2022
That’s Dickens with a C and a K, the Well-Known English Author
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/24/thats-dickens-with-a-c-and-a-k-the-well-known-english-author-2/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/08/hugo-2022-chat/
Dec 05 2021
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
“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/
Jul 09 2021
The Wicked King (The Folk Of The Air #2) by Holly Black
Haha, what the hell, NetGalley only sent me the first three quarters of this novel for review? Good thing I looked up the next book in the series and realized from the blurb that I had no idea how the events described there led from this one, and so discovered that I was missing an …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/09/the-wicked-king-the-folk-of-the-air-2-by-holly-black/
Oct 28 2020
The Tech by Mark Ravine
One of my greatest joys as a book critic is finding little known indie/self-published debut novels and championing them for the world to read (see: James Roberts‘ Pardon Me, or anything by Unsung Stories but particularly Rym Kechacha’s Dark River.) As such, I’m always open to queries and will rarely turn anything down, schedule permitting. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/10/28/the-tech-by-mark-ravine/