Category: Review

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

I skipped a good sixty or seventy pages of this book in the hope that jumping ahead would prevent me from pronouncing the Eight Deadly Words, but in the end it didn’t. As the copyright page tells any reader, “The novel What Makes Sammy Run? was originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1941. Copyright …

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The Three: A Novel by Sarah Lotz

I’ll be honest with you – I have no idea how this book ended up on my TBR list. But there it was on my Kindle in the pick-me-pick-ME section, and so I read it. There’s a lot of… well, lukewarm is the best word to describe the reviews I’ve come across for this book; …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/16/the-three-a-novel-by-sarah-lotz/

Sourcery by Terry Pratchett

The beginning of Sourcery is very good, and the end is very good, and I am trying to think of why the middle didn’t work for me as well as Equal Rites and Mort, the two Discworld books that immediately precede it in order of publication. Equal Rites showed some of the magical power that …

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Valour & Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal

Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal is the fourth of her Glamourist Histories series, following Shades of Milk & Honey, Glamour in Glass, and Without a Summer. The series crosses Regency romances with alternate (but not terribly alternate) history and a dash of domestic magic that may yet admit of industrial applications. The teaser …

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The Mallet of Loving Correction by John Scalzi

I find it impossible not to like John Scalzi’s public persona. He’s clever, thoughtful, straightforward, and sometimes delightfully wacky. I read Whatever, his blog, regularly, and have for years. I also liked the first collection of writings from it, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. Nevertheless, even though I breezed happily through the new collection, …

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Method 15/33 by Shannon Kirk

Product Details: Hardcover: 258 pages Reading Level: Age 18+ Publisher: Oceanview Publishing (May 5, 2015) ISBN-10: 1608091457 ISBN-13: 978-1608091454 Publisher’s Description: Imagine a helpless, pregnant 16-year-old who’s just been yanked from the serenity of her home and shoved into a dirty van. Kidnapped…Alone…Terrified. Now forget her… Picture instead a pregnant, 16-year-old, manipulative prodigy. She is …

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Midnight at the Pera Palace by Charles King

Where to start when writing about a city as vast and storied as Istanbul? In Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, Charles King takes an inflection point in the history of a city that is itself a key inflection between East and West. Or rather, he takes a period of hinges …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/25/midnight-at-the-pera-palace-by-charles-king/

What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton

Jo Walton answers the question posed by the title for a bit more than 100 books in this collection of brief reviews devoted to re-reading. As I read through, I enjoyed thinking of how the emphasis could fall on each of the words in the title, although the cover design clearly places it on the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/12/what-makes-this-book-so-great-by-jo-walton/

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

In the second Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic, Rincewind saves the Disc, not quite by accident but certainly not through great forethought and cunning action, either. The Disc appears to be hurtling toward a great red star in such a way that collision is imminent, and the only way to prevent the Disc’s annihilation is …

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The Whisper of the River by Ferrol Sams

The Whisper of the River follows Porter Osborne, Jr. to college in the city of Macon, Georgia, in the late 1930s. It also follows Run with the Horsemen, the first book of Ferrol Sams’ semi-autobiographical trilogy. Young Osborne, improbably known as Sambo, grew up as the only son of a planter in rural Georgia in …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/23/the-whisper-of-the-river-by-ferrol-sams/