I’m at the point in my reading life with Aliette de Bodard where I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not her, it’s me. Ms de Bodard is widely acclaimed, and I just don’t get it. Yes, I have loved every single one of the premises of the stories I’ve read of hers, with possibly …
Category: Novella
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/14/fireheart-tiger-by-aliette-de-bodard-2/
Jul 10 2022
A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow
“Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, an way you slice it” says Zinnia Gray, first-person narrator of A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow. She adds, “Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.” (p. 2) And there’s the first catch, because Zinnia Gray is dying, victim of a rare genetic defect, most of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/10/a-spindle-splintered-by-alix-e-harrow/
Jul 06 2022
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I think Doug liked this one a lot more than I did. Lynesse Fourth Daughter is a princess who still believes in the old chivalric tales of courage and oaths. When the lands adjoining her mother’s Lanessite Empire are overrun by what the refugees refer to as demons, she chafes at the prevailing wisdom that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/06/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky-2/
Jun 21 2022
Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire
Across the Green Grass Fields is the first of Seanan McGuire‘s Wayward Children series that I have read that’s entirely waywardness, and I liked it that way. There’s no mention of Eleanor West’s Home, nor do any of the characters from the previous five novellas in the series appear. I didn’t miss them at all, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/21/across-the-green-grass-fields-by-seanan-mcguire/
Jun 20 2022
The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente
This is one of those books that I can appreciate, even if I don’t like it. And there’s a lot to like here, so maybe it’s just a me thing. I just… I feel like Cat Valente has a lot to process in terms of abuse and marriage, and that her issues spill out way …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/20/the-past-is-red-by-catherynne-m-valente/
Jun 12 2022
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Elder Race offers an extended meditation on Clarke’s Third Law, some thoughts on cultural contamination that are not new but are important to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s characters, all wrapped up in a fast-paced adventure of swords and sufficiently advanced technology. The novella is set on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humans during the first interstellar …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/12/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/
Jun 11 2022
Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard
Forbidden love between two princesses. Forbidden not because they are both women, but because they are princesses, and relations between their two states are tense and unequal. Thanh is a princess of Bình Hải, in the south, nominally superior to its northern neighbor but falling back in relative power because of the neighbor’s greater access …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/11/fireheart-tiger-by-aliette-de-bodard/
May 28 2022
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo
It isn’t true that the full title for When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain was originally meant to be When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain With Her Two Tiger Sisters and Considered Eating Cleric Chih but it could have been. Except that at that point it would have been politic to mention the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/28/when-the-tiger-came-down-the-mountain-by-nghi-vo/
Dec 04 2021
Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire
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
Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi
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/
Al Singh
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Professor X
Robert Maedgen
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The Shire