Feb 08 2024

The Wandering Hour by Zack Loran Clark & Nick Eliopulos

I genuinely did not expect this first installment of the new middle grade horror series The Doomsday Archives to be quite as accomplished as it is but dang, what an impressive series debut!

New Rotterdam is one of those creepy coastal New England towns that definitely inspired H. P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth (OH! I wonder if Emrys’ name was chosen in tribute to one of the contemporary authors working hard to reframe the Cthulhu mythos without Lovecraft’s rampant racism and biases. That would be really neat!) The sun rarely shines in this foggy, perpetually overcast place, and people seem to go missing with a regularity alarming to outsiders. Folktales and legends abound, almost all of the creepy kind.

Befitting the 21st century, a wiki has sprung up to help keep track of all these stories, making them feel less hallowed and distant, and more creepypasta and — as a result — disturbingly immediate. Called The New Rotterdam Wiki Project, the wiki is written and administered mostly anonymously. Emrys Houtman is one of the contributors to this project, along with his best friend Hazel. The two met at summer camp, and Emrys was super thrilled when his mom got a job that relocated them to Hazel’s town. New Rotterdam is filthy with cryptids and other weirdness, both of which he and Hazel are obsessed with finding and recording. It helps, too, that they live in the same apartment building, along with Hazel’s other best friend, Serena.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/08/the-wandering-hour-by-zack-loran-clark-nick-eliopulos/

Feb 05 2024

Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir by Ai Weiwei, with Elettra Stamboulis & Gianluca Costantini

This gorgeous hardcover graphic memoir by celebrated artist Ai Weiwei is a must-have for his fans, and a must-read for anyone who cares about modern art and, particularly, its intersection with political protest.

For those unfamiliar, Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, sometime designer of architecture and longtime political dissident against the Communist government of China. His father Ai Qing was a famous poet who fell afoul of Mao Zedong and was forced into internal exile, living with his wife and young child in subsistence poverty on the fringes of the Gobi Desert. Despite their hard circumstances, Ai Qing did his best to instill history, folklore and a sense of justice into his only child, who would grow up to be the internationally acclaimed artist that he is today. Now Ai Weiwei has produced a book, illustrated by Gianluca Costantini, that loosely ties stories of the Chinese zodiac with important milestones of his own life.

To those not already familiar with Ai Weiwei’s life story, the chapters can feel a little disjointed: looking up his history certainly helped me process the vignettes and allusions better. Some of the chapters are more loosely tied to the zodiac than others, tho each strives to ground its connection in a brief but usually excellent explanation of the accompanying myth and characteristics. Tho perhaps I say that as someone familiar with the astrology: a friend with a better grounding in Ai Weiwei’s art but less knowledge of the eastern zodiac certainly had the exact opposite impression that I did (hi, Emily!)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/05/zodiac-a-graphic-memoir-by-ai-weiwei-with-elettra-stamboulis-gianluca-costantini/

Feb 01 2024

Drawing Deena by Hena Khan

So there are a lot of reasons why this book resonated with me and made me cry for younger me, but foremost among them was the very clear cut, if never fully named, eldest daughter syndrome our main character Deena suffers from. Idk if it’s even a thing in certain cultures, but the expectation she faces to pretend that everything is okay, to soothe her parents by pretending that their choices are her choices, really cut me to the bone.

It’s not a spoiler to say that Deena manages to overcome this. The 21st century, particularly in America, is much kinder to children with mental health issues than it was when I was growing up. Watching young Deena learn to take agency over her own mental health was inspiring, even for an old like me, but especially for an old who wants her kids to grow up without all the unnecessary mental anguish I went through at their age.

The story itself revolves around Deena Rahman, a middle schooler who loves art but who worries that her parents’ constant fighting over money will lead to their divorce. She’s also under pressure to keep her grades up while helping with her mom’s dress business. Her mom is something of a complainer, constantly moaning about the price of things, including Deena’s much needed dental care. Deena, unsurprisingly, takes this to heart, blaming herself for requiring a mouth guard and secretly wanting extra art classes. Her beloved younger brother, meanwhile, pretty much gets to ask her to do all sorts of chores for him but only reluctantly reciprocates (this is a common theme in Hena Khan’s books. I love that the main characters adore their kid brothers but I personally find these younger brother characters irritating.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/01/drawing-deena-by-hena-khan/

Jan 30 2024

What’s Wrong? by Erin Williams

subtitled Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine.

After a lifetime of anxiety and self-medication, Erin Williams realized that the American health system had failed her. At best, it focused on symptoms instead of attempting to treat her as an entire person, leaving her to suffer with chronic pain and, finally, to search for answers as to not only how to feel better physically but how to cope with the mental, emotional and spiritual despair that she was constantly told were merely aftereffects of her physical disease. If they were considered at all a source or contributor to her maladies, it was clearly because she was mistaken or, worse, making these symptoms up. If they couldn’t see the problem, the medical system insisted, then the problem couldn’t possibly be real.

One thing before I continue: while the back cover makes it very clear that this is an American healthcare issue, the contents do not. I understand why: the point of the author constantly saying “our” without specifying who “we” is makes the contents feel more immediately relevant to the reader. But anyone with experience of medicine in foreign countries — or at least the countries with decent medical systems like Malaysia, tho anywhere else feels truly exemplary compared to the hellscape that is American medicine with its demon master of for-profit health insurance — will feel immediately how alien and awful the treatment depicted here is. As someone who’s experienced both systems, I can attest to both the veracity of Ms Williams’ depiction, as well as the uniquely frustrating misery of being unable to access life-saving care because of paperwork and price-gouging when other countries somehow manage it just fine!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/30/whats-wrong-by-erin-williams/

Jan 29 2024

Diary Of A Confused Feminist by Kate Weston

You know you’re getting old when British YA diary novels are no longer compared to Sue Townsend’s or even Helen Fielding’s oeuvre.

For all that I am now an old, I thoroughly enjoyed this tale of Kat Evans, the fifteen year-old girl who wants to be a good feminist even as she worries about friendships, boys and school, roughly in that order. She and her two best friends, Millie and Sam, are determined to raise awareness about feminism at their secondary school. But when Millie and Sam both get boyfriends, while Kat’s own budding relationship with Hot Josh is thrown into jeopardy by mean girl Terrible Trudy, Kat fears not only that’s she’s being a bad feminist for her negative thoughts but also that her besties soon won’t have time for her any more. As Kat’s anxieties escalate, will she be able to overcome her concerns about being seen as a baby in order to reach out for the help she desperately needs?

This was a humorous yet realistically drawn look into the life of a typical young woman battling not only the pressures of everyday life in the 2020s, but also mental illness. I loved how matter-of-factly Kate Weston presents anxiety: she deftly shows how it’s not a life sentence but a completely manageable condition. Even without the mental health aspect, it’s great how she encourages teens (and older readers!) to aim for clear communications with friends and family. It’s so easy to stew in one’s own emotions and concerns, letting them build in pressure in your head, when support for most is so easy to find nowadays (as I recently discovered in my own personal life! But also I fully acknowledge how lucky I am to have sensible, supportive friends, new and old.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/29/diary-of-a-confused-feminist-by-kate-weston/

Jan 25 2024

Where The Body Was by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips & Jacob Phillips

Gosh, I wish every aspiring literary thriller author who’s planning on writing some heartfelt, wordy, incredibly dreary and often borderline racist tale of suburban scandals would just read this graphic novel and go ahead and reevaluate whether this manuscript they’re working on actually says anything that the Brubaker/Phillips crew hasn’t covered perfectly already.

My day job is the crime beat, and let me tell you, I have read so much junk masquerading as elevated prose applied to the suburban whodunnit that it makes me want to tear my hair out. Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place was the scandalous, trailblazing ur-text of this subgenre, but she definitely did not take it as seriously as some of the authors operating in the field today. Dear modern authors: it’s okay to write entertaining prose that doesn’t aspire to literary greatness via tortured text renderings of a person’s incredibly banal interior life. People grieve, we get it, but y’all writers need to give readers a reason to care about that person before we can care about their sadness. Because sadness? It isn’t unique. Last year was the shittiest year of my life and my grief bored even me, and I say that as someone who actually cares deeply about myself.

In all honesty, if I’d realized that this book was meant to be a suburban thriller, I’d have probably passed on it. I know Ed Brubaker as more of a heist/noir writer, so I was expecting more of that. The 80s setting, crosscut with modern day panels, fit the quasi-historical lens of his that I’m used to, so by the time I realized this was basically suburban shenanigans, I was already too hooked to try to flail away.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/25/where-the-body-was-by-ed-brubaker-sean-phillips-jacob-phillips/

Jan 23 2024

Here In Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton

A large part of me is glad that Tara Isabella Burton was not writing novels back when I was a teenager, because I would have made her books my entire life aesthetic.

Her three novels to date — Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and now Here In Avalon — revolve around women who are voraciously hungry for large lives lived on their own terms but who feel trapped, and so lash out emotionally, heedless of whomever around them gets hurt. These women are never the main character: that honor goes to the other woman who is, in turn, most trapped in their orbits, loving them and envying them and supporting them and perhaps ultimately destroying them. Usually these central women belong to an in-group that the main characters are curious about before falling headlong into. There is also usually creepiness and crime and most of all a regret for all that was lost in the final pages.

For all that, none of Ms Burton’s books feel same-y. For example, I love Janice Hallett, but was a little baffled at the use of the exact same moralistic framing device in the last three books of hers I’ve read (not including The Twyford Code, which I plan to get to reading and reviewing here #soon.) Ms Burton might use similar base archetypes but all her characters are so unique in their circumstances — even when the books call back to each other — that her stories always feel like they’re exploring new facets of her focus subjects. If there are, arguably, only two stories in all the history of the world, then hers continue the time-honored tradition of telling us new, heart-searching things about ourselves while working from a very particular base framework.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/23/here-in-avalon-by-tara-isabella-burton/

Jan 22 2024

You Wish by Jeff Victor

I somehow managed to persuade my 13 year-old to read this with me, and we were both incredibly delighted by this sweet, spunky tale of a young girl living in the middle of nowhere who discovers that magic really does exist in her life.

Ten year-old tomboy Avery helps her father run a gas station in the middle of a practically deserted desert valley. She has no friends because there are so few other people around, and none of them are her own age. When she’s not helping customers at the pumps, her main pastime is learning magic tricks, in hopes of injecting a little excitement into her humdrum existence. Her dad tries his best — he’s funny and sweet — but there’s really only so much you can do when you’re living out in isolation.

When Dad drives into town one day, leaving Avery in charge, she finds herself in need of a new lightbulb. Hoping to find one in his cluttered garage, she unearths instead an old-timey lantern. As she dusts it off, a brilliant blaze erupts from it, along with an adorable little monkey-cat hybrid named Gribblet (whom Jms and I immediately cooed over like he was a Pokemon.) Once Gribblet realizes who she is, he helps her embark on a journey that will not only show her that magic is real but that she herself is far more magical than she ever imagined.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/22/you-wish-by-jeff-victor/

Jan 19 2024

The Chemical Wedding by John Crowley

Or, more properly and to give the book its full era-appropriate title, The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz, A Romance in Eight Days, by Johann Valentin Andreae in a new version by John Crowley

The Chemical Wedding in a new version by John Crowley

Cheekily claimed as a special 400th anniversary edition, The Chemical Wedding is a new version of one of the founding Rosicrucian documents, an allegorical text from 1616 first published in German, purportedly by one Christian Rosencreutz, actually by a Lutheran pastor named Johann Valentin Andreae. This version, writes Crowley, is not a new translation. He based it on the original English translation from 1690 and a more modern one from 1887, plus some consultation with a new translation from 1991 and assistance from Andrés Paniagua, who checked Crowley’s versions “against original German printings.” (p. 23) The book itself is also a lovely object, even in the paperback edition that I have, put together with care by Small Beer Press. The size is just right, the margins are generous, the layout pleasing, the odd inscriptions from the original reproduced clearly for modern readers. It’s printed in two colors, with Crowley’s footnotes in a red that’s distinct from the main text yet very readable. The white pages and two colors of ink reproduce the alchemical importance of red, black and white that occur throughout the story, reflecting states of matter, stages of development, phases of the great Work of alchemy. Illustrations by Theo Fadel round out the presentation. There’s an emblem for each of the Days of the Romance, while other full-page illustrations depict scenes and concepts from the peculiar goings-on in preparation for the alchemical wedding.

Crowley claims that his “aim in producing this new version was simply to make this, one of the great outlandish stories in Western literature, accessible to readers in the context of no context.” (p. 14) That’s not, strictly speaking, true, as he adds a congenial introduction that supplies considerable context, along with footnotes throughout the text that illuminate details, point up contradictions, speculate about what the author might be up to, and generally provide context for any reader whose eyes drift down the page toward them. It’s possible read The Chemical Wedding in the context of no context, but it would be a lot more effort and a lot less rewarding.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/19/the-chemical-wedding-by-john-crowley/

Jan 18 2024

Life House by Pete Townshend, James Harvey, David Hine & Max Prentis

Ngl, reading this felt like what I imagine an acid trip would be like. I guess one good thing about it is that it made me want to listen to more of The Who’s music? Good thing this graphic novel is being released with an accompanying vinyl LP! (Link at the bottom, tho you can also snag this book on its own.)

Life House is based on a rock opera originally conceived by Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and principal songwriter of The Who, as the follow-up to their massive multimedia hit, Tommy. Alas, Life House as a rock opera was shelved due to practical constraints, tho it did serve as the inspiration for their globally bestselling album Who’s Next?. That album has now been remastered and the original script reshaped into the graphic novel format/package we have here.

I’ll be blunt: this is some weird shit. And that’s fine! I love weird shit. But it was also weird shit that was originally conceived in the 70s, and I think a lot of the cultural references just totally flew over my head. Anyway, in a dystopian future, an autocrat known as Jumbo Seven rules over England, the last nation left remaining after the rest annihilated themselves via nuclear warfare. The first Jumbo outlawed religion and music in her quest to save/control her people. The current Jumbo, seventh of her name, rules over a land where most of the citizens live in a sort of stasis called Grid Sleep (basically The Matrix, but without artificial intelligence using people as batteries.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/18/life-house-by-pete-townshend-james-harvey-david-hine-max-prentis/